Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: You are live.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Thank you very much. Welcome back, everyone, to the joint meeting of the House General and Housing Committee and the Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing and General Affairs. The testimony today is focused on the federal government and the impact of federal cuts.

[Nancy Owens (President, Evernorth)]: You just go

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: out and let Alison know that we are starting?

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: Thank

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: you. It's focusing on the impact of federal cuts, and we had, first we heard from our representatives of the federal delegation, then we heard from updates from basically state agencies as they were affected, and now in Vermont, we rely very heavily on non profit housing providers to talk to, to fill a lot of gaps and carry out a lot of state programs on the local level. And so, we have five representatives to talk well, four, and then one more from Let's Build Homes to talk to us. So, our first witness is going to be Nancy Owen, President of EverNorth. Nancy, we have about half an hour for all of these witnesses. I'm sorry to be a little heavy handed, but I'm trying to make sure that everyone has a chance to speak. So take it away.

[Nancy Owens (President, Evernorth)]: Okay, thank you. Thank you for having us. Thanks for the opportunity to share what's going on. EverNorth is a nonprofit that works in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. We have two big roles in housing. One is we're a tax credit syndicator raising capital from investors who are purchasing low income housing tax credits. That's a program more and talk to you a little bit about it. I have a couple other things to add on that piece. The other is then Vermont is we're a real estate developer and we co develop and co own properties with a lot of the other nonprofits in the state. We currently have 10 projects that are under construction with two ninety apartments from West Brattleboro to St. Johnsbury and another two fifty five homes under construction.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Nancy, am I right? I'm just trying to confirm. My impression is that if a local nonprofit housing developer has a project, chances are you're involved, either as a syndicator or an adviser or some other way.

[Nancy Owens (President, Evernorth)]: Yeah. In the low the field of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, because our partners in the state do so much other work outside of that particular program. They're doing all kinds of other housing, home ownership and smaller rentals and some special needs housing. But on the Low Income Housing Tax Credit side, which is the multifamily, EverNorth is involved in 70% to 90% of the projects, either as an investor or as a co developer. Yeah.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Thank you. Yeah.

[Nancy Owens (President, Evernorth)]: So we have a breadth and we work, as I said, across three states. So we see other things happening. And I just would say So my comments are gonna focus on the federal impacts too, credit housing, the low income housing tax credit problems, and especially in that development phase, because my colleagues who are here are gonna maybe talk more about operationally and from the portfolio. Real estate developers hate uncertainty, and that's the kind of period that we're in right now. We know how to manage risk. We know how to calculate risk and do things, but when there's uncertainty, that's very different. And that's the environment we're in that makes things very hard. One, folks have already talked a lot about the Section eight and this impact on housing. I just want to give you a very specific example to kind of ground you in that story about what the purpose of the Section eight project based vouchers are and how they impact our ability to build. Again, I'm on the development side, so build new homes. So we are in the process in the predevelopment side of building homes in Hinesburg, Riggs Meadow. It's proposed 36 units of housing. It has most of its funding in place, and it's scheduled to start construction in April 2026. That project, when we conceived of it and got it approved, included 12 project based vouchers, so a contract for 12 vouchers. That contract gives us really the ability to finance more of the project through debt. And so we have a contract that's twenty years long that gives us a rent that we know that we're going to achieve. And so with that revenue that we're earning under the contract, we can borrow more money. In this instance, you look at just like a 6% interest rate on a mortgage and a twenty year term, we could borrow $2,850,000 with the project based voucher. Without the vouchers in place, the rents are going to fall, we won't have as much revenue, and we can only borrow $2,000,000 So we just lost $850,000 of permanent financing from a private source, from a bank or someone that's contributing to that total development cost.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: That's a great addition.

[Nancy Owens (President, Evernorth)]: So Gus just wanted to ground you into the numbers. So when we have a gap like that, we have to find a solution. We have to figure out how to do that. And some of those solutions, you can't always cut costs all the way to that solution. You have to find new resources to fill that gap, maybe some better terms, better financing, some other things that we're going to do. But that's going to take us time to figure that out. Will we be on schedule to start that construction in April or not? What do we have to give up in order to get that building built? And sometimes projects can't ever get to that financeable stage. The developer might have to put their own equity capital in. Somehow that gap has to be filled. So that's a big problem on the capital side. I think you've already heard some testimony that the other side is that without that project based voucher, we're not housing people exiting from homelessness. We're not housing people at the lowest income because now we can't subsidize the difference between what that person earns and what the maximum rent is allowed. So we're losing that opportunity to have some of the people that we have been housing. But project based vouchers really can unlock an entire capital stack. They can make the difference between getting to that closing table and starting construction and not. This comes to this question of leverage, which we talk about a lot when we're here talking about why the state is funding affordable housing, we have three sources, right? We have private capital with the equity capital, we have the federal funds we've been talking about, and then we have the state gap financing that flows through the Vermont Housing Conservation Board or programs at VHFA or at the state agency. And that gap financing is essential to unlock the federal credits. Mara mentioned the 4% credit and the growth, that opportunity, my opinion, the real problem with that, or the problem why we might not be able to use that new opportunity is that there's not enough gap financing to get us to close the gap, to get to a fully financed 4% deal.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Okay, so that Yeah, because we've been hearing testimony today that the tax credit Well, the tax credits emerged from Congress in better shape, a bit But what you're saying is, yeah, but you need vouchers, you need state gap financing.

[Nancy Owens (President, Evernorth)]: It can't

[Miro Weinberger (Let's Build Homes)]: be filled entirely by private

[Nancy Owens (President, Evernorth)]: financing. There's always a leverage that's needed. And what you're saying is there, you're worried that the bill won't have the gas financing to use the tax credits. Well, for the 4% credit, for sure, because as Maura noted, that's a smaller credit subsidy. And so the difference in needs is greater. The 9% credit, the gap financing is still there and is still required from the state. Just to give you an idea, Bay Ridge, which was a property that Gus put up on the screen, has 94 homes. It's a mix of rental housing and homeownership developed in Shelburne, just opened, beautiful new property. That the state, through the kinds of dollars that you appropriate provided 15% of the financing. About 40%, I don't know, I don't have all the numbers in front of me, but a good portion, 45%, 50% was from private equity, and then the balance was the federal funds. So the state is bringing dollars to the table, and it is leveraging this private capital. And frankly, if we, as a tax credit syndicator, so wearing a slightly different hat, EverNorth has raised, and spent $140,000,000 in Vermont over the last four years in private capital from investors. That, we overall, we raised, I think, about $470,000,000 for the three states, and about a third of it has come to Vermont. But investors can only invest if the projects are here. Investors can only invest if we're getting to the closing table with a tax free transaction. And we can't get to the closing table without state support and project based vouchers. So that's trying to simplify the message, but No,

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: that was a great illustration.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Nancy, the gap financing, what you're talking about is all the sources of state BHCB and other sources of whatever it is that allows entities,

[Nancy Owens (President, Evernorth)]: downtown credits,

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: to put

[Nancy Owens (President, Evernorth)]: BHCB funding. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the good news is that we did get this increase in the 9% credit. That is good news. There were other changes in the tax bill that The bill that passed this spring. And so that's helpful. The other thing is Fannie Mae, who Maura noted is the biggest investor in the country, Fannie and Freddie Mac, got an increase. They're allowed to invest more of their capital, twice as much capital as they had previously, and they're an investor of ours. And so that's good news. They're coming into our next fund at a higher amount. They're investing $15,000,000 in our next fund, so that's terrific. The other thing I would just say that got approved in that bill, that's important and not a housing related exactly, but was the New Market Tax Credit program, another federal program that we use was made permanent. And so that's good news. That's a program that is used to finance community development and manufacturing. And we've done a lot of investments across Vermont in projects that have included housing like the Putnam Block down in Bennington and the Brooks House in Brattleboro, as well as groups like YMCA, the King Street Center, Trauma Technology and Weidmann. So, it's a really great program, and we're glad that it's been made a permanent program of the federal government. The bad news side of that is with the shutdown, the agency that operates that program is the CDFI. They were on the verge of making the latest awards. Evernorth is waiting to hear of, we'll get an award to continue. And we you know, there's no answer because the government is shut down, And they've also riffed their staff as of mid December. So we don't know what that's gonna happen. I wanna know what else? One other just, other impacts on the federal shutdown Our delays, we haven't seen any delays to projects in development in Vermont, but I am aware we have, I think eight closings between now and the end of the year across the three states. And two of them outside of Vermont are held up because they're waiting for contracts from the federal government, USDA RD, in order to get to closing and to transfer. And they have to sign off on that, and so those projects are delayed. But I have not seen any of that kind of delay here. The other, I have to mention uncertainty, and one of the things that we're seeing is the tariffs, and that those have fluctuated all over the place, whether the country, the material, the percent amount. And that kind of uncertainty causes costs to rise because the contractor has got to protect themselves against that and mitigate against that. But just as one example, we had an elevator installation recently on a project that's under construction, and there was a $17,000 tariff tagged onto that. At another project, just a month or two earlier, general contractor, same type of elevator, the tariff on it was $6,000 The numbers are just changing all the time. We don't know what the tariffs will be. So that's kind of uncertainty. It makes things challenging. Thank

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: you. We are just about out. Thank you very much, Nancy.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: Yeah, thank you. Questions?

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Thank you. Michael Wonte, Director of Community Relations from Champlain Housing Trust. And, Fritz, are you going to join?

[Michael Monte (Champlain Housing Trust)]: I'm just

[Chris Donnelly (Director of Community Relations, Champlain Housing Trust)]: going to lead off and do a quick introduction. Okay. Chris Donnelly with the Champlain Housing Trust. Michael would give the bulk of our remarks, but what we talked about is getting more into the impacts on the people that we serve, not just some of the development that you've been hearing about the people that we serve, and then some other external risks that we're facing or preparing for. With that, I'll just turn it over to Michael.

[Michael Monte (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Thanks. So thank you to the committee for this time. I'm assuming you can hear me okay?

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Yes, we can.

[Michael Monte (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Excellent, great.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: We can even see you.

[Michael Monte (Champlain Housing Trust)]: That was the scary part, but thank you. I appreciate it. So both Gus and Nancy talked about our ribbon cutting at Shelburne, and that was great, 68 apartments, 26 homes. That resource really was, as Nancy talked about, really leveraged by federal resources. 17 different sources of funding, state resources to a very small percentage of the overall funding. So those loss of federal resources really are gonna have an impact overall on the sort of the level of development that we could occur. We have not 200 or so apartments that are recently completed or nearing completion or soon under construction, all of them leveraging quite a few resources with federal resources. And I think again, with important funding to all of it. I do wanna say that we do, of the 94 apartments that we leased up last year, more than one in four went to people who are homeless. We now house over 500 people who are formerly homeless. So we continue on that path and continue to support the development of shelters throughout the state. But all of this work doesn't happen without federal resources. Now the leverage though, again, by significant state and local resources. There will be broad impacts on our development without a doubt. Right now we are riding the wave, I think of the last two or three years. And really the short term issue of loss of vouchers is one thing, but we really are planning and thinking about six months, nine months, one year from now, and how we can move this level of development that we have been doing with the federal resources that might be missing and the state resources that have continued to be needed. Cuts and home for CDBG and other programs will have an impact. And the pullback on energy funds in the middle of all that last year really had an impact. I would just want to shout out again to, like as everybody has, to Vermont State Housing Authority. The plan to address the retraction of vouchers is great. Nearly half of our residents, actually more than that, rely on vouchers. Many of them are working. So out of the $30.38000000 that we receive in rent receivables, about $12,000,000 come from vouchers. And so we are both supporting homeless folks, those 500 folks who come in, many of them maybe who move on to working. We're both supporting homeless folks coming into our portfolio and the need for vouchers for that, but also the fact that many of the people who are in our housing are working, not quite making enough and need the voucher really to help them sort of make that payment. We are thankful for the lawmakers on working on SNAP and LIHEAP. These are critical resources for low income people of homeowners. Immediately when we heard about the SNAP program ending, we met a few weeks ago, we met again yesterday thinking about what was gonna be impacting our tenants. Thirty three percent of our tenants, according to our survey, feel food insecurity. Tenants right now are choosing between whether they eat or pay rent. We know that, what I could tell you is that in a few months we're gonna see if there's an impact on us as an organization in terms of rent receivables. We're gonna do the best we can. We continue to provide resources to our tenants in terms of food security opportunities where they might be able to replace the SNAP benefits in short term. We also run a couple of food shelves ourselves. Another is healthcare and the impact on our tenants in terms of that, in terms of higher cost of healthcare is really, really impactful. And again, most of our tenants, a decent number of our tenants feel that physical health is good or excellent, but the other half needs support and need those resources. I'm aware of the time that you have, let me just say this, every time there's an ice raid somewhere in the state, our contractors find themselves slowing down in terms of the work that they need to do. And we find people walking, not really showing up or we're concerned about it. Most of the workers, there's a mix of workers, but I could tell you that as proud son of an immigrant family, I know and we know that immigrants who come legally to The US work hard, but they're scared. And ICE raids really have had an impact on slowing down construction and concern about construction of our contractors in terms of that impact. That's nothing that you can replace, but I did wanna put it out there that that is something that's important. Thank you for your support. Appreciate it.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Thank you, Michael. Questions from committee. Michael, I I do wanna ask you to repeat a statistic. Did you say 12,000,000 of 38,000,000 total? Are that is that your monthly rent receipts?

[Michael Monte (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Oh, gosh. Jesus. No. Yearly.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Yearly. I was saying. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's a third. Yeah.

[Michael Monte (Champlain Housing Trust)]: It's a decent amount. Yeah. Yeah. Now, again, half of our half of our tenants, more than half of our tenants, and I'll get you the real the specific dollar amounts, and I'm using round numbers. More than half of our tenants use vouchers. Some only use a couple $100, you know, few $100 to get by. Some who are homeless really need a lot of support and they might only have $200.300 dollars to actually pay in. And so that difference is really significantly higher. We have that, I can have that breakdown. We've taken a look at the breakdown. When the federal government was talking about eliminating vouchers, we began immediately to assess, well, what does that mean? What do we have to do? How do we fix that? We couldn't fix it. Really frankly, couldn't fix it. The only choice was to come to you and say, we're gonna need to figure out how to replace that program because it's so impactful on Vermonters. But we were able to sort of do an assessment of those values and can provide you with more detail as time goes on.

[Chris Donnelly (Director of Community Relations, Champlain Housing Trust)]: I'll just add that in our portfolio, we have over 200 shelter beds or motel rooms, people that are experiencing homelessness. They are not moving out of those rooms or out of the shelters without a voucher. That's being funded by the state, much of it. And so we're gonna continue to use our money that way instead of the permanent solution. So

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: in other words, the vouchers the central tool.

[Michael Monte (Champlain Housing Trust)]: They're stepping stone for folks who are homeless to become permanently housed. They are a stop gap and a support for people who are working, who perhaps can't really make the difference, even in our housing where they're working a very minimum wage job and or they're just starting out, you know, in a new a new a new job. They're not making enough, and they're getting a little bit of support. It's really that range. We have people, of course, who are so who are disabled or in Social Security who are getting vouchers. That's an important part of who we serve as well. Right? So

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: Right. And that's why it's so key to VHIP so that we tie all these. I mean,

[Michael Monte (Champlain Housing Trust)]: it's key pieces. Absolutely. All of our programs are using rely on some level of rent now a good majority of our folks pay their rent, they're working, they're workforce housing, and so that is also true. So it's really a wide range and a mix, and it's not just one or the other, but I think if we really wanna get to a point where we're solving and resolving issues around homelessness, we're not gonna be able to do that just without some voucher program assisting us. Have to support to the vouchers.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: They are clearly key to the ramp out of homelessness.

[Michael Monte (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Absolutely, key. Happy to come back and chat more, send more information.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: I have a feeling we'll be seeing you again.

[Michael Monte (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Okay. Sorry it

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Thank couldn't be you very much.

[Michael Monte (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Sure.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: So our next witness is Angie Harmon, and Angie is Executive Director of Downstreet Housing, which as I understand it is a growing organization.

[Angie Harbin (Executive Director, Downstreet Housing & Community Development)]: We are growing, yes. So as Mark mentioned, Angie Harbin, Executive Director of Downstreet Housing and Community Development. For those of you who might not be familiar with Downstreet, we serve Orange, Washington, and Memorial Counties. We create permanently affordable homes, a full array of homeownership services, housing based supportive services. And this year, we started operating a Homewood Services hotel. I've got about thirteen minutes of comments, and I'm going to get down to five minutes. Fortunately, I think you've heard a lot of what I have to say from other speakers. I am going to lean into the importance of rent subsidies, just so critical to the work that we do. So when the Housing Finance Agency put out their most recent housing needs assessment, we started going through that. Like, who are we serving? What do they need? What are the rents that we need to be shooting for to meet the housing needs in this group? So in that three county area, there's 13,000 renters. Down streets income range serves 80% of those individuals. And when you I kind of bucketed that 80% into four or five categories. So there's that first category, under $20,000 a year. These are fixed income folks that absolutely need a subsidy to have safe, stable housing. And then you have category two, you're hitting that $20,000 to $35,000 a year. You still got fixed income folks in that mix, but you also have your minimum wage full time worker, that's $28,000 a year. So you definitely have full time incomes in that group. And affordable rents for that minimum wage full time worker is $700 a month. Downstreet has like 10 700 a month rentals in our entire portfolio. And we're the affordable housing provider for this area. So we know that in reality, a lot of folks are paying a lot more. Some may manage without that rental subsidy, but for families, these are the tough choices. This is when you hear about the kiddos showing up at school without enough to eat. They're choosing rent over all of the other basic needs that they need to meet. So right now, we're at 30% to 40% of our renters. The next two categories get into that back bone of our local workforce. So category three, dollars 35,000 to $50,000 a year. We did an analysis of all of the 16,000 jobs that are currently in need right now. 50% of them are in this range. It's that 35,000 to $50,000 a year. This is who we need to house. These are who we need to the people we need working in Central Vermont. So again, this is 16% to 22% of renters. They can afford rents from about $8.75 to $12.50 a month. Now we're moving into $8.75 to $12.50 a month.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Who are these people? Not on 45,000 feet. What like, kinda like what's their job to occupy? Here's for example.

[Angie Harbin (Executive Director, Downstreet Housing & Community Development)]: Yeah. 35 to $50,000 a year. We're looking at a lot of our service workers. And this is above minimum wage. Our childcare providers, hospitality. We're still in that lower end of full time work. And this is where you find a lot of your single moms with a couple of kiddos trying to figure things out. This is a really hard place to be. And so, yep, so when we define affordable rent as 30% of a household's gross income, technically these groups can afford $8.75 to $12.50 a month, which is really tough. And your chances of finding rents at $8.75 to $12.50 a month, almost zero. And then we're moving on to, and this is hard when you think about affordable housing, this is our core group. This next group, 50,000 to $75,000 This a is when we're targeting our affordable rates. We're hitting this income group. So these are our teachers, trades people, our health care workers. These are maybe the dual income households. Our solid middle income households and they can afford technically rents from $12.50 to $18.75 a month. Last year, downstreet created, we started construction on 69 new homes. Our two bedroom rents in that group were right around $1,500 a month. That means this is the only group out of the four that we've just talked about that can afford a two bedroom affordable rent in Central Vermont. And this group we've just discussed that 75% of all renters in Orange, Washington and the loyal counties. So this group all needs affordable housing. And over half of them need a rent subsidy to truly afford that affordable housing. Talking about those 69 units that we started construction on, 28 of them, so that's 40% of the total unit count, had project based subsidies associated with them. We were sure that we were kind of mimicking the 30 to 40% of folks in our region that need project based rent subsidies in order to afford their housing. So this is a big deal, right? Next year,

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: if this I'm stopping you just because this is very helpful, I wanna to make sure we're clear. You outlined four groups. One was the

[Chris Donnelly (Director of Community Relations, Champlain Housing Trust)]: people who are

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: on fixed incomes of less than 20,000. Second is 20,000 to 35,000 minimum wage from full time, and the third was 30,000 to 50,000. Now, when you say those first three are what percentage of your total, or was it the first two? You had a percentage of your total.

[Angie Harbin (Executive Director, Downstreet Housing & Community Development)]: The first two is about 30 to 40%, and those are folks who absolutely are not affording rent without a subsidy. And then your next group, these are your full time workers. Most of them actually qualify for a subsidy. They're not likely to access them necessarily, but they do qualify. And affordable housing is very, very hard to come by. Fourth group, they can afford affordable housing. So we've finally hit that.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: But the third group is about, like, what percent?

[Unidentified committee member]: 15 to 20%.

[Angie Harbin (Executive Director, Downstreet Housing & Community Development)]: 15 to 20? 16 to 22% of renters is that third group in our three county area. So we're just talking about Central Vermont.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Vermont. So the balance is this group four, which is what percentage?

[Angie Harbin (Executive Director, Downstreet Housing & Community Development)]: 16 to 22%, so combined these four groups get 75% of all renters. Yeah. In these three counties.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: Yeah. I mean, just remember, everybody, that an average renter earns, like, $17 an hour with an income of about 36,000 a year. And to afford a two bedroom apartment in fair market rent, you have to be earning $29.75 an hour. There is the discrepancy that we are challenged with.

[Angie Harbin (Executive Director, Downstreet Housing & Community Development)]: This is the point that we're trying to make. And if we don't have those subsidies, we don't have affordable rents, The 69 units we started construction on, we've got 40% of those with subsidies. That's great. Next year, stars align and by stars I mean funding, we'll start construction on another 78 units. That's really great. We were planning on 27 of those having rent subsidies, either through the Vermont State Housing Authority, the Barrie Housing Authority, or its continuum of care. We're not sure any of those are going to be available, which means we're creating housing for that kind of third, fourth, and there's a fifth group even that we hit with the rents that we provide, but we're missing half our renters.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: But I would just like

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: to put a pin on it for our committees that We have two pieces here, what it costs and what people can afford. And we have to address both. And if we don't address how they can afford it, we're remiss. A 100%.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Thank

[Angie Harbin (Executive Director, Downstreet Housing & Community Development)]: you. And that's the 10,000 renters. So this is the 75%. That's 10,000 of the renters. They need below market rents. 5,000 of those right now in Central Vermont are paying above 30% of their income for rent. 2,000 are paying over 50% of their incomes for rent. So people are really, really struggling. And then Michael did a really great job of talking about that impact on our housing operations, our operations as an organization. Like Michael, where about 50% of our revenue is coming from actually, percent of our tenants are using Section eight vouchers or some sort of rent subsidy to cover their rent. It's about 41% of our revenue. If we don't have that, we're jeopardizing not just the stability of these individuals, but the stability of our housing and our operations as an organization. I know we're all talking about SNAP benefits right now. I'm having COVID flashbacks. Like every day I'm updating something to figure out what's going on, I cannot imagine what that feels like if you're the person who needs some food and you're not sure what's happening from day to day about those resources.

[Unidentified speaker]: I know you have some really, really difficult choices. Oh, go ahead. I hate to ask this,

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: but I can't help myself. 41% of your revenue is coming from Section eight. Some sort of housing subsidy. Some sort of of housing or similar subsidy. What would your organization look like without it?

[Angie Harbin (Executive Director, Downstreet Housing & Community Development)]: I should say rental revenues, specifically. That would be rental revenues. It's a much lower amount than what our actual organizational operating budget are as we keep those somewhat separate. So I think what our organization would look like if we lost those rental subsidies was all of our energy and efforts going into figuring out what we're doing with folks who are living in our housing and how we're keeping housing projects above board. We're not doing anything else. I mean, we're then at that point we were talking about VHIP earlier. That's not a project we're investing a ton of time in or a ton of effort or resources because we are really going to have to focus what our core mission is, is making sure all of these folks stay housed. Jeopardizing that is a big piece. And it also jeopardizes housing for all of the folks who don't have subsidies because they afford to operate the housing that they're living in. That's the maintenance, that's the safe, stable, affordable housing that is our mission. What

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: happens to a project? Let's say a project was built because of the commitment of a certain number of Section eight vouchers, so it's built and then Section eight vouchers go away. I'd like to think that well, how is that unwind?

[Angie Harbin (Executive Director, Downstreet Housing & Community Development)]: I don't know. What did Michael say? We looked at it and we tried to figure out what to do, and then we realized there's nothing we can do, and we were gonna have to come to you. We have houses. We have projects that are a 100% subsidized. I mean, everybody who's living in the project has subsidized rents. If suddenly that was gone, we have very little in the way of operating funds.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Mr. Chair, if

[Michael Monte (Champlain Housing Trust)]: I could just jump in. Stress test it.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Of course.

[Michael Monte (Champlain Housing Trust)]: There's no solution. We really came up with, I mean, really there isn't. We looked at the, when the idea of the voucher program disappearing, we looked at it and we said, oh my God. And once we knew that it was actually gonna be funded at 90% or 95%, we said, okay, that's better than losing everything, and we'll see what happens. And that's what we're facing really right now in terms of the pullback, but this is better than a complete elimination of the program. It's a little bit like you'd knock your head against the wall and then you stopped, oh, this feels great, but worst could that could, we avoided the worst that can happen at this point. So that's really, I think that's where we're at.

[Angie Harbin (Executive Director, Downstreet Housing & Community Development)]: And that 90% number puts every single one of DownStreet's projects underwater. Like if we just reduced 90% of subsidies, our margins are so thin across the board, that we cannot, manage that going forward.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: And if a project is underwater, it means you're not paying the private debt.

[Angie Harbin (Executive Director, Downstreet Housing & Community Development)]: Best case scenario, we just stop paying private debt, sure.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: And then we can rent

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: And out the private

[Angie Harbin (Executive Director, Downstreet Housing & Community Development)]: then, of course, the mortgagee can come in and take the unit if they want. Well, Nancy can talk too, too, what that looks like about our ability to continue to develop.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: No one would lend to you,

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: no one would pay our Megan, yes, I think so. Saw him. Mero. Mero's here. He's here. He's here. Good job, Megan. And Angie,

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: you have a dedicated person who deals with Because obviously this is our biggest bang for our financial buck.

[Angie Harbin (Executive Director, Downstreet Housing & Community Development)]: Yes. We have in our homeownership department, we have a single person who oversees all VHIP operations and then with other homeownership staff. You say you're

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: not investing in it, you do have a person who's Right now, we

[Angie Harbin (Executive Director, Downstreet Housing & Community Development)]: are 100 invested in that. That's operating fully. It's just if we have to start reallocating resources, we're picking and choosing. Right, got it.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: That's why we've been saying that the cascading effect of a lot of federal funding means that a lot of function the state relies on these nonprofit providers to carry out state programs like VHIP, and if they are struggling to that degree, it impairs their ability to administrative, to function

[Angie Harbin (Executive Director, Downstreet Housing & Community Development)]: administratively And in that we're nowhere close to that right now, I want to be clear.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: We are facing a situation of a government shutdown, which if it went beyond January 1, we've had a lot of challenges. Polite way Such a challenge is what a word. Any questions, Angie?

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: Thank you, everybody. Thank you for your partnership. And this is just on housing, think of our partnerships on mental health, on disabilities, food.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: So we heard three, we heard from EverNorth, which is operating statewide, and then we heard from Chris and Angie and Michael, who operate individual housing providers at a regional, and our last witness is Mira Weinberger, who's been working on this effort which has become known as Led Fair Homes. Murrow, as you know, this is a hearing on the effect of what's going on federally, and share your thoughts with us.

[Miro Weinberger (Let's Build Homes)]: Great, thank you, Chair Mihaly. I really appreciate you inviting Les Feld Homes to come in and weigh in this morning. In a lot of ways, feel like this effort, as you just called it, of Let's Build Homes started with you less than a year ago when, just after our launch, you had us in to speak to the House General Committee. Just want to quickly say, Let's Build Homes has come a long way as an organization since that. We now are an incorporated five zero one(four) organization. We have three people working for the organization and we are really seeking to we really appreciate you inviting me in and hope you will think of us, whatever housing issues are up for discussion, that we'd be one of the groups that come in and share the perspective on how to ensure that we are making progress with firmly affordable housing and the overall supply of homes to the state, which is at such an acute shortage and very problematic state right now. I agree with your recent op ed, Chairwahaleh, that we are just at the beginning of that work. We have a long way to go with it, and we are trying to build this organization to be around for the long haul and be a partner with you, just as you have partners on environmental issues and historic preservation issues and conservation issues. Let's Build Home which Wants to be there as you, over the long term, work to solve our housing shortage. We understand how painful the topic is that you're dealing with today and the human toll that the Section eight and other federal actions are already having and threatened to have even more acutely in the months ahead and years ahead. And we certainly, just as last year, our new coalition supported work that you took on in the Budget Adjustment Act and then the final budget to ensure that we continue to make strong public investments in permanently affordable housing. We're going to support strong action in that direction again, and appreciate you pulling in this early work to be trying to figure that out collectively. Another way to mitigate this pain, not on quite the timetable of a lot of discussions this morning, but on the medium and longer term, is to meet the state housing targets that you set and have been put out there in the law now and dramatically expand the supply of homes of all shapes and sizes for all of our neighbors. It is the shortage of homes, the acute shortage of homes, and the cutthroat competition for the homes that do exist that is resulting in the kind of impacts we just heard about from Angie, where now we're finding ourselves in a situation that even middle class households are needing subsidy to be able to compete in the current market. And the way to address that is to get our state subsidy and investment right. And it is also to stay focused on the supply expanding interventions that the state can make in this upcoming session. So I do just want to briefly say, I think you should feel very good about the work you did on that with the creation of the CHIP program last spring. I've been all over the state this summer talking to communities throughout the state and at the Vermont Development Conference last week, and there is an enormous amount of enthusiasm and interest in that program. I think you are going to see as soon as that program opens in January, because of the hard work that Betsy and your colleagues that served on that committee through the summer did, I think there's going to be a high interest in that program as soon as it opens in January. And I think that is going to be a way for Vermont to that is going to give Vermont a tool for charting its own future, even as the federal government becomes a less reliable partner. We are working on additional ideas for you that will add to that ability for Vermont to really chart its own course. Certainly more work needs to be done to make good on the promise of Act 181 and the Home Act, those landmark pieces of legislation, we're living with them now, we're getting into them, I think it's going to be important to make updates and clarifications and maybe some expansions of what you did with that work to get that regulatory reform to work. We are also looking at other states who have financial tools that Vermont does not have today to ensure that even as the federal government pulls back, even as there's a broader slowdown in the market, even though even when we're at this point in the business cycle where banks are expanding their equity requirements and where debt is more expensive. As we're dealing with these new headwinds from the tariffs, that we can keep making progress with this new consensus that we want more homes, that we have housing targets we wanna meet. We think there's tools like a state housing acceleration fund that can use other parts of the state's strength that are not tied to subsidy, but are tied to the state's strong balance sheet, the state's ability to take some risk sharing, and state's access to low cost debt that will be new tools in the arsenal for the safety key making progress. So that's my big picture message here. I don't have all these details worked out. We are working hard with them and we will have proposals from us very soon, but that's sort of where we're at.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Great. Questions?

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: I'm just curious, Maro. I'm very excited. The guidelines are to have guidelines on target timeline to get those done. Betsy's done a great job, and that subcommittee's done a terrific job. As they hit, what's Let's Build Homes doing to help think how we help our smaller towns navigate these? And I think that's going to be a key piece for you guys could be because you're all I mean, so many of you are so embedded with municipal understanding of municipal needs. That is going be a big piece of what we're going to need to help people on. I think that would be if we would look to

[Miro Weinberger (Let's Build Homes)]: you for Totally agree. I think there is good news coming out of that BEPSI process that I think they kind of took your legislative mandate to draft rules that should be usable by a much broader range of municipalities than what the prior TIFF program was usable for. They have worked to make sure that rural communities, that the types of costs that only come up in a rural setting like community septic and community water are eligible to be used by CHIP projects. They have worked to keep the things like the buck forecast clear, straightforward, pretty well how will be And

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: the common good, public good broad.

[Miro Weinberger (Let's Build Homes)]: Exactly. In terms of the health. Great news is happening, I think, out there organically in that I know the league of cities and towns is working very hard to provide that technical advice. I know because you allowed technical assistance to be an allowable cost under that, the private sector is stepping up to be able to fill there. Think you're right, let's build homes. Here's where I think we can provide maybe where we're seeing our niche and helping this move forward is on the municipal side and being able to work with communities as they're trying to make a decision to go forward with this or not. Want to be a resource for that kind of select board level decision making and making sure that local housing groups are aware of these decisions and engaging them.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: Even helping form housing commissions in small towns.

[Miro Weinberger (Let's Build Homes)]: Exactly. So I think it's pretty exciting the way people are stepping up to fill that gap and we'll keep watching it. There may be a need for, I don't know, there's some talk out there that maybe some additional capacity for

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: this program in one way

[Miro Weinberger (Let's Build Homes)]: or another might be helpful, but I think what you've done already has launched it in a really good way.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: That'll evolve, I think. Yeah. Thanks.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: I think I'd be really interested in seeing your state housing acceleration fund idea. Great. Just so you know, although the session doesn't start until January, our deadline for putting bills requests in is December 1. Yes. And as a practical matter, I viewed November as our key time to really try to concretize our agenda for the coming year. So the sooner, the better.

[Miro Weinberger (Let's Build Homes)]: Understood, and we are aware of the advance of time here and working On hard to

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: that, we should speak after this because some of us are working on a permanent source of funding for state housing support. That's what I think one of our key challenges this year is to find that additional money.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: One other question I have, you've been privy to, because you've been sitting here, a lot of the testimony that we've had today has really been on how fundamentally disruptive it would be to our providing counseling to a very substantial part of the middle class of Vermont, if we lose the Section VIII vouchers. The Section VIII vouchers, we've received testimony, we lose them every year, it's been a downward trend, and we lose them because for complex budgeting reasons at the federal level, But every year it's sort of 500 less, I mean, I'm using round numbers. And one way out of that for us is to leverage federal money by putting state money in indirectly. Let's Bill Holmes has been focused, as you said, on the middle and longer term. And one of the things I would like you to think about is whether you want to be an advocate for that kind of state spending now, because it's such an unusual situation. I realize that every nonprofit has to avoid mission creep and stay focused, and so do we, I guess, but I'm just raising that issue for you to Okay, appreciate that.

[Miro Weinberger (Let's Build Homes)]: And then I want to reiterate, our mission statement is explicitly to support the creation of more homes of all shapes and sizes for all of our neighbors. And certainly, that includes and is always going to include public investment in permanently affordable housing. I do think it always was a frustrating thing for me as mayor to know that we were not able to fully leverage the federal resources that were out there with some of these vouchers, the support because of the wraparound supportive services. It was enough we tried to crack. It was very difficult to crack. I take your point, and if we can play a productive role in helping make sure that we're fully utilizing those resources, we'll talk to our colleagues and we certainly will be there cheering on this effort. If there's something we can do to really help get it done, we definitely look at that hard and try to do that.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Great. Thank you very much.

[Miro Weinberger (Let's Build Homes)]: Okay, thank you.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: So we actually managed to

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: You were a great timekeeper, look at me.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Well, people, I'm sure, will enjoy getting out a little early, but I would like to ask members of the committee, if it's Emily's body, get your face on, Emily.

[Rep. Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member, House General & Housing Committee)]: All right.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: I wanted to use some of this time, and not that I feel like we have to use every second, but to ask committee members to let you know a little bit about what we've been working on during the summer and the fall, and sort of issues that people have raised that are out there and that I think are going to come at us during the session and to hear from you priorities that you have. I guess what I'll do is I'll run through a list of quickly, a list of issues without really annotating them, because they do all know what they are, just to explain them enough. So one issue we have is landlord tenant, something we didn't take up last year. A member of this committee, a distinguished member has a bill on the wall, and there's another bill on our wall, and I know there are other bills in the Senate that are coming along, and the chair of the Senate Committee who is with us today has taken a strong interest in this, and so we may see action in that area. It's my fond hope that we can address this in a balanced way that addresses both the needs of landlords and the needs of tenants. An unbalanced bill probably won't go anywhere, so we'll see what we can do. Abandoned homes, there are two approaches to that. One involves a creation of a land trust. That's a report coming to us after the session, '26, so that's not with us right now, but we are looking at the idea of streamlining fact sales for homes that are abandoned. Literally nobody, the owner is out of state or, you know, nobody's living in them, they're falling apart, and they're not paying their taxes. Looking at ways to get those into private homes through tax sales that are appropriate. Manufactured homes, Gail is working very hard and has been all summer on the whole manufactured home situation. It's a crazy kind of wild west area where there isn't a lot of uniformity, and we've been in discussions with bankers, their lawyers, talking to lenders, looking at what we can do to make it easier to buy and to maintain mobile homes. I think it's quite there's sort of there's what you think of as manufactured home communities in community parks, which we call, we often say mobile home parks, but the point is they're not mobile. But there is also a broader range of manufactured homes, and the interesting thing about manufactured homes is they are the, unfortunately, they are the only form of home that we see in Vermont, which the average Vermonter could afford without subsidies. Literally the only form. So it's something worth looking at and we'll be thinking about that.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: And even they are becoming way above, unaffordable to the crowd Angie just talked about.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Yeah, they're getting $200 to get into a mobile home. So then there's the whole issue of rural finance. This is a PEP project I know to Tom, and we came away feeling last year that CHIPS was a really good step forward, but that even with a lot of technical assistance, it's pretty complicated. And that we would like to see whether there are other things that we can do to make financing projects in rural areas that are 10 units or less easier. That's in its infancy, I don't know how far along that will be, but we'll see. Tom, I will be briefing you on what I know so far. Appeals. You remember last year, as part of our bill, we addressed the appeals issue in this House. We addressed the standing issue, and we came up with a standing approach that would make it, we felt, a little harder just to throw in a challenge to a project that had no basis. The whole appeals issue was punted to the Land Use Review Board, and they have a report due, thanks to us, not in next year, but due on the fifteenth of this month, And I believe they are more or less on time. We've seen that report and it's pretty good, but it needs it's gonna need legislation and work, and it will deal with the issue of where appeals are tried and how they are tried and what the standard of review is, all in order to try to shorten the time frame from what is now like very often three hundred days for a housing appeal to a much shorter one. Emily?

[Rep. Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member, House General & Housing Committee)]: Oh, I just wanted to talk about appeals for a second. Should I say it now? Yeah. Alright. So, I want to make it very clear that I personally am I am not comfortable leaving the session without addressing this. We have got to work on this. I last session, CHIP and appeals were top priority in in the legislative work that I was, you know, happy with. And so I am hoping that both bodies will take this up and we will look at the report and really make sure that this is a priority. I think it's very important.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: I happen to agree. I think that this is an area, it's coming at us rightly so.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: I I don't think there's any way, Emily, we're leaving without Yeah. Hopefully finishing this work on on mute.

[Rep. Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member, House General & Housing Committee)]: May thank you.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: I I just don't see it happening. I mean, I think everyone everyone wants us to come into agreement on that.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: And I think that the Land Use Review Board work is good,

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: and it's a great launching point for It's a terrific launching point, and that's what we needed, because that's why we gave it to them to do the work. They're the professionals, they're full time now.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: So I think the steps there, I've been communication with our leadership in the house on this. We're going to receive the report, we have to reduce it to a draft bill, then we will have quite possibly joint hearings

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: on Oh, we'll definitely have joint hearings. And

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: it's a little complicated in the House because it involves three committees very actively. Us, environment,

[Unidentified committee member]: but also judiciary. I'll just jump in and just say that I attended a really important panel on substance use and all the activity in our state to try to support folks and the providers that are working with that population. And one of the things that jumped out at me was that recovery housing is such a massive challenge. And appeals has a lot to do with the challenge of standing up recovery housing in our state. And so I think that there might even be opportunities to work with municipalities who have these little pots of money from the opiate settlement funds as well to stand up in a create because those dollars have to be used in a new and creative way. They can't just be added to the work and services that are already on the books. And so I think that that's an area where I think we should engage the league of the cities and towns folks to help the towns not sit on that money or use it improperly or, God forbid, waste it on something that doesn't actually help. And I think recovery housing is a great area for that, too. It's also,

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: it's implicated by landlord as well.

[Unidentified committee member]: But a lot of it is also just, yes, right, it is. It is implicated. And that was what some service providers who are often themselves, the population that has benefited from the services. That's what they discussed. They discussed the issue of being able to build, set up, or transition a building to be used for recovery housing, or also what happens when there's activity from tenants that puts the rest of the tenants at risk. And so that lands into the landlord. So we want to keep people safe, we want to keep people housed.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: Have some additions to your list.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Okay, another area which is one where I'm not sure what we'll be doing, but I think there'll be something there is the whole short term rental question. And this is not an easy area.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: Oh, as opposed to all the other ones?

[Miro Weinberger (Let's Build Homes)]: All Not easy.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: It's an area where there isn't consensus, because I think the reason there isn't consensus is because there are such important regional differences in approach, need, attitude, etcetera. There is an all day, I spoke at length with the league and there is an all day meeting on this subject sponsored by the league. On Saturday, I will attend it trying to figure out. I don't know where the consensus will lie. Last year, as you remember, we did propose that there be additional local taxing authority that didn't make it through ways and means, but I will be revisiting it. I just have two others, and then I think you should add yours. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As you can see, it's not like we have nothing to do. And one of the issues that's come up is housing for developmentally disabled.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: We're working on it. Our task force, we're reviewing to next week.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Week, the task force that was set up, you know, we ask these task forces to do something and then they do it, and it's really a problem. We

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: have a draft

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: report that we're reviewing them out. So we have a report coming and that will become an issue. We asked, as you may remember, we like I said, be careful what you wish for. We asked Matt Chapman and others in ANR to tell us how they could really streamline the whole program. Brownfields. Brownfields program. My favorite. And guess what? He just sent us

[Nancy Owens (President, Evernorth)]: a report.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: He just sent seven page

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: report. Thanks. We're looking at that.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: No, it's exciting.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Gail, yes.

[Rep. Gayle Pezzo (Member, House General & Housing Committee)]: Hi. So Gus had put up a a map, and on it, it showed two developments of mobile home communities. How would I be able to get that information of where they were built? One was in Chittenden County. I he he flipped the to the next screen, so I wasn't really sure where the other one was. I

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: just email I just would email him, Gail. I just email him or Polly, and they'll tell you.

[Rep. Gayle Pezzo (Member, House General & Housing Committee)]: Thank you.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: They'll give you more detail. But also, everything that happened today is right on the website, right? All the testimony is on our website, so the map is there, but you can just email Gus for more detail. Yeah. Thank you. And finally, an issue that's out there is what I would call enhanced well, it's not a housing, I'll just mention it. More and more, towns are trying to think of ways they can work with other towns to buy expensive material, you know, buy things and to do things.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: I mean, schools are working on that too.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Well, that's the both sides. There is something, it's two paragraphs long in the law that allows towns to collaborate, both inter municipal agreements, and it needs work. And I don't know whether I'm going to A number of towns have talked to me about it, and I don't know whether I'm going to end up throwing a bill on that.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: Puff Ops is sort of dealing with regional cooperation, mutual aid. I mean, there are a lot of ways we need to regionalize not just our schools, but our services as well, which are inequitably sprinkled. Right.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: I just mentioned that because it's of interest to me I shouldn't have, because it's not going to come to us. It would come to Gov. Emily, okay.

[Angie Harbin (Executive Director, Downstreet Housing & Community Development)]: Yes. No, I was just saying support.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: Yeah. Yeah. I like that.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: With Gail And Gail, is your hand still up or did you just not take it down? You're muted, Gail.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: I it's a legacy hand. A legacy hand. Oh my god. That's frightening

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: thought. Madam chair, do you have others?

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: Any other Well, there are two other things. I mean, I think first and foremost, I think many of us are working really hard on trying to find a permanent source of funding for housing. Have the VHCB money, but we do not have enough. That all that COVID money is now being spent, we need to find a serious source of funding for affordable housing in this state. And that's one. And then the other thing I think we need to continue work on is the off-site construction. It's kind of a subcategory of manufactured homes, but it's an important piece, I think, of both economic development for us. Modular home, you mean modular like Off-site construction, modular home pieces. Yeah, putting it all together. And that is slightly separate from manufactured homes, opportunity as well as it's not always cheaper, but it certainly could speed things up. What else did I have? Chip cleanup, VHIP into the base, these are all just housing things. I really wanna make sure we get the VHIP program anchored into the base. We're gonna be doing some chip cleanup as those guidelines come to us and we get to review them. I'd love to get rid of the veggie. Oh, that's an economic development thing. Yeah, Short term rentals. Think and yeah. I think you have kicked them all that we have talked about.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Just gonna say those. Wanna repeat what you said to me earlier?

[Unidentified committee member]: Well, I mean, it's abundantly clear that the Human Rights Commission is going to need our support in many ways. I heard from representative Christie that the number of cases between August and today is 400 times what they had last year.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: On housing? Altogether. In general.

[Unidentified committee member]: Oh, okay. But also, another piece of that is their fair housing support, which they are no longer going to be taking in money from HUD for because that has been fully cut. So we need to be mindful of that when we consider HRCs budget for this upcoming year. Yeah.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: And we will have to remember everybody, we have to have a budget letter. And this year's budget is going to be a very, very difficult budget because every time we have to do something like support and should, LIHEAP, or SNAP, or anything else, well that's just that much less money that's available. Other members, yes, Ashley.

[Rep. Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: I think we'd be remiss if, like Rob Krausner had said, we cannot leave without talking about and kind of coming up with better solutions to appeals, but we'd be remiss to not talk about permitting and zoning in that sense, just the duplicative nature of permitting, what that means for our developers who are going through the same applications and just paying that fee over and over and over again for the same information. So I think it's kind of a broader conversation that, as we know, rarely comes to this committee, but I just don't think we can let that happen this coming session. Think, again, we have to have that, you know, whether it's three committees, both house and senate, I I think we really need to establish that it's something that is expected for these conversations.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: One of the things, just so committee members understand, Tom, raise your hand up.

[Rep. Thomas "Tom" Charlton (Member, House General & Housing Committee)]: Yeah. I don't know how to push the button, so I don't They're just analog. I wanna echo, senator Clarkson's, comment on off-site manufacturing. We did do a study looking at this and never followed it up. Yeah. We need to follow that up so we don't throw that money out the window. But also that represents, a potential savings for rural communities in the sense that an order of, we don't have a number yet, but say two dozen of the same unit can be can bring the cost down, and that can be passed on to rural communities that need one or two of those units. So I agree we need to allow communities to collaborate, but also to continue to follow-up on that. I also think that we need to look we need to really drill down on why it is so much more expensive to produce a unit of housing when state and federal funds get involved. Because my concern is we're spending a lot of money via housing on other things. And it looks like we're investing a lot in housing, but in some cases, we're covering the cost of additional administrative burdens and other legitimate concerns, other code compliance and certifications that drive up the price when we're involved. And because this is a crisis and not an inconvenience, we may need to make some adjustments temporarily so that the dollar goes further faster.

[Chris Donnelly (Director of Community Relations, Champlain Housing Trust)]: Yeah. Good point.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Emily, your hand is up, Emily.

[Rep. Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member, House General & Housing Committee)]: It's not a legacy hand. It's just me wanting to take up more space. Yeah, So, I agree with all these points. And also, as Marill mentioned and some others that there may be some act 21 cleanup too, so just keeping space for that. Yeah. And then the final thing which I don't know if it's going to be a bill but we had talked about and I've talked to to Cam about this about just a briefing about HOA related things. I've been working this fall collecting some different data from different parts of the state around HOA and I know that that was a discussion. Again, it's not like people are gonna die if we don't discuss it. You know, it's not of urgency but after crossover or after other times, I think there's time when we could kinda have a briefing on on we haven't talked about that in many many years And so there's some issues in my part of the state at least, and I've talked to my senators about it. So I would like to just have that still. I do have a bill on the wall as a vessel, but anyway.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: Emily, thanks, because we heard testimony about some of the HOA the Home Ownership Association, just for all these acronyms, association's needs, and it's clear we need to do some some work on that. And I think there's a lot of interest in some of the senate members of our committee working on that.

[Rep. Emilie Krasnow (Ranking Member, House General & Housing Committee)]: Fabulous. I just so happen two of them are are my senators. Maybe So

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: it's question. Just have

[Unidentified committee member]: a question and that is, are the issues that you outlined the only issues regarding housing that we're going to be taking up?

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: No, no, I didn't mean that as an exclusive list. It's the stuff that has come to me from people that need work that I've been working on. I think, for example, what Emily was just talking about, it's been on our wall. We have a short term rental bill on our wall. It's just one approach. I think other issues, that's why I want to hear from them.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: Yeah, other housing issues, I think we're focusing on housing today, but I think we're going to have to, this is an amazing list, and we have five months to accomplish them. So we're gonna have to figure out how to prioritize within that. But what are your other thoughts? Because I

[Unidentified committee member]: think No, have many other thoughts. I just wanted clarification. No,

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: I'm just taking advantage of the fact that we're all convened a little early and before the craziness of the start of the session, but just think about these issues. One of the issues that we struggle, excuse me, I struggled with an issue last term, which was my first one as a chair, which is that every time we look at a housing issue, some other committee is involved. Fact, I went to the Health and Human Services hearing that they had last week just because I didn't understand any of this stuff. You know, all the stuff about Section eight and the subsidies and all of that was not part of, it's kind of not an area that I really fully understood. And in fact, I've talked to Teresa, the chair of the Human Services Committee, about coming in and just doing a morning with us and talking. The problem is, procedurally, we cannot have dual or triple referrals in the House. It's not like a bill can be referred simultaneously to two committees. So, it can be sequential, or we can hold joint hearings, etc, but I just wanted to tell you, I've been talking to leadership, I'm really committed to working together with other committees, like judiciary ways and means environment, to try to make sure that we can work together and get bills out of here.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: And even the Senate. You're speaking to them too.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Well, I'm just talking about the House, I'll let you talk

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: Yeah, but think given how little time we have and how much we want to accomplish, we're gonna have to really work together, cooperate in a much more cooperative mode. Which we've started.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Yes, Senator Clarkson and I are in continuous contact. I mean, we talk, I'd say once a week, we're talking, trying to figure out some of these issues. So, last thoughts by committee members? We're six minutes over, but only six minutes. Another housing priority, I

[Unidentified committee member]: just have a few thoughts. Those are some underlying principles in which we may think about working, and the things that concern us as we look at a lot of this incredible detail. And the words that I would add, among others, would first and foremost is time. We often don't consider time as important as a lot of the things that we actually do and what costs us money. You look at one of the projects that came on very early on, on the screen, was a project that was done to build housing, I believe, in Shelburne. How many years did it take to go through a permit process in order to get that done? Every time we do that, it adds cost by the virtue of inflation and other kinds, as well as the regulatory process that we put things through. That should be underlying our thoughts. The second should be accountability. When things don't work right, we need a clear method of accountability to determine first, is it not working as it should be, and who's responsible for it, and what do we need to change in order to move it along? We don't do that very well in the system that we have right now. We should talk about leanness. You take a look at the money aspect of housing, and the number of organizations involved in order to do that is staggering. We ought to think about that. Because it's something that has existed here for years, doesn't mean it's a sacred cow that we can't slaughter if we need to, if it's keeping us from doing what we need to do. That's enough. I have a number of other words, but those I think are the most important ones. And above all, time. Time is it really is money, and time is not getting things done. And that's where I see us being tied up consistently and not responding appropriately.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Time, accountability, and leanness. Those are his mantras. Right.

[Unidentified committee member]: I love them by heart.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs)]: And we need to address them. Mean, and I think that in know, the timepiece that is certainly, I think well, hopefully, appeals will do. I know, I think we're working on that timepiece.

[Unidentified committee member]: Process. You invariably see projects that are in the approval process, but have to go through various stages of people, whether it be an ANR and others to approve it. And it has to typically go in a sequential fashion. And when you get to the next to the last step, that person, because there's only one person who does it, goes on vacation for two weeks and everything stops. That's what happens.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Think that's why my own feeling is why there's a consensus that we need to do something about how the appeals process works. And I think we do need to do something about the permit process. And the permit process, some of it has to do with the local level, but some of it is the state. And I personally was pleased that the Governor has created an internal committee at a high level to work on processes of state permitting because I think that's what it takes. It's really gonna take an examination of how

[Michael Monte (Champlain Housing Trust)]: we Also, goes to

[Unidentified committee member]: the underlying issue of accountability. And accountability takes along with it measurement, that we should be able to measure how these projects are proceeding and to identify the roadblocks that are occurring on an ongoing basis that have an effect on this. We don't have a good measure of holding people and organizations accountable. Thank you.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: Other members of the committee? Well, I'm delighted that we were able to get together. Thank you very much. I think it's safe to say we are adjourned until we reconvene in January, and we

[Rep. Ashley Bartley (Vice Chair, House General & Housing Committee)]: are