Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Marc Mihaly]: Welcome back, everyone. This is the General and Housing Committee of the House, and today is still Tuesday, January 6, and what we're doing now is, as I mentioned earlier, we're holding hearings, which will probably go into next week, will definitely go into next week, in which we're asking a great variety of people to address the legislative environment. What is working that we have done? What is not working that we have done? And what direction should we think about going in? And to do that without regard to whether we're talking about housing finance or regulation or whatever the scheme is, we want to sort of start off the session by casting the net widely. And our first, we started off with wedge counsel giving us kind of an overview of what we've done, mainly the Home Act, Act 181, and our work last year, Act 69. Meanwhile, all kinds of other things have been happening. So our first witness this afternoon after alleged counsel is Mike Pichek. So Mike, our treasurer, take it away.

[Mike Pieciak]: Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chair, thanks for the committee for having me. Happy to answer any of your questions. I had sort of some prepared testimony in a slide deck I just wanted to run through. And obviously the committee is very familiar with the reasons for the housing shortage and the high cost of housing that we had, but just wanted to walk through sort of my way that I think about it and think about why we're having this problem and how we need to address it. And then talk about specific program in the treasurer's office that we expanded in 2023 to support more housing in Vermont. So, over the last, let's call it five years, we did have a huge shortage of housing being driven by demand mostly. We have seen population growth consistently. We did see a spike in population growth during and following the pandemic. Over time, our household sizes in Vermont have gone down, closer to three at one point, now closer to two. So even if we didn't have population growth, our demand for housing has gone up because the way that we live, we have less intergenerational living, we have less roommates, we get married later, we get divorced more often, all of those reasons that require more housing. And then we also have some of the oldest housing stock in the country. So even as we're building new housing, it's not always a net positive because we are losing housing to dilapidation and other reasons for it coming offline. And then of course, term rentals also feed into that too, taking housing stock offline. So that has all sort of created this demand. And the point I wanted to make is there are places that deal with that demand well, and they have good, what's called housing elasticity. When the demand goes up, when the prices go up, they build more housing so that prices stabilize. Then there are other places that don't have good housing elasticity. So the demand goes up, the housing supply doesn't grow, and the prices go up, and then people are shut out of housing where they're paying a lot for their housing, and that is us. On the next slide, there's just some examples of the housing elasticity places like California that maybe are in the very extreme example, strict zoning, but then they also have strict land scarcity, not a lot of places to build. We have some of that in Vermont, we're very mountainous state and there's some places that are limited in terms of where we can build, but Vermont that similarly has a pretty low elasticity, our prices are increasing

[Ashley Bartley]: as per

[Mike Pieciak]: supply, but there are other examples to look at like Texas and Florida and Georgia, where the housing supply is keeping up with the demand and the pricing is not going up as dramatically, it's stable and in some cases in some specific metropolitan areas, there are examples of pricing actually going down because they've built sufficient number of housing units in their communities. So when I think of the housing challenge and what is the lens I think of it through, I think it really just has three primary factors. What policies can we do in Vermont that address the speed of construction? And what policies in Vermont can we do to address the cost of construction? And when I think of the speed of construction, I say that because we need the housing now. We're in a dramatic shortage. It's our number one economic issue. I think it's also our number one social issue. It's holding back the full potential of the Vermont economy. You talk to business owners that want to expand, but they cannot hire employees because those employees can't find housing. You think about the connection between increased rates of homelessness and low vacancy rates and high median rents, it's a very direct connection. The inability to execute on housing first policies with mental health, with addiction, because they don't have somewhere to get somebody stable, it's hard to execute on that. And even the rising cost of healthcare really have to do with the shortage housing across the board. So that speed of construction is important, because the issue is right here and right now, so we need housing as fast as we can get it. But it's also a cost thing, it plays into the other issue. The slower we build housing, the more expensive it's going to become because prices are going up both labor and supply. But then the cost of construction is a big thing that we have to focus on too, because the less expensive we build the housing, the more we can build, the further it goes in terms of the number of units that we can create. But also, we can get the cost of housing down. There are a number of projects that are being subsidized now, both by our office and through other means of subsidization, because they don't work unless they get that subsidy, they don't pencil out. It costs too much to build it relative to what you can get for it after it's built, whether that's a single family home that is being built for 600,000 but sells for 500,000, it doesn't make sense, it doesn't pencil out, or a multifamily home that's being built for $10,000,000 that costs, let's say, 200,000 to be able to pay on the financing, but the rents are only getting collected $180,000 so there's a gap. Well, that's why these subsidies are so critical right now is because it's so expensive to build and that would not be built but for a lot of the subsidies that are coming from the state of Vermont. So we can provide thoughts on both of those but I think that's the lens when I think of what are the policy solutions, those are the things I try to tackle speed of construction and cost of construction. In terms of the program I wanted to talk about in our office that we've been focused heavily on since I became treasurer of the 10% Vermont program, this has been around for a number of years, but we did really focus on it in 2023 and expand it and direct it toward housing. But generally when you look at this chart, what this program is, our office manages the cash on hand that the state has through short term investments. So this is money that's been collected through taxes, money that's come in from federal funds, all the various funds that are in the state of Vermont's bank account, but have not yet been spent. Maybe they've been appropriated, but they haven't yet been spent, or maybe we've collected them and they haven't yet been appropriated, but there's money in our account waiting to be spent. Now, before the pandemic, if you look on the next slide, we had maybe about $250,000,000 sitting in the state's bank account on average, sometimes it would be $500,000,000 sometimes would be $100,000,000 But during the pandemic and now post pandemic, that number has ballooned up to $1,500,000,000 even just close to $2,000,000,000 throughout the year. Has a low cash point. We have about $1,500,000,000 So that's a huge magnitude of growth. So the 10% Vermont program allows the treasurer's office to invest up to 10% of that cash in economic development. Otherwise, we keep it in our bank account, we get interest from the bank, we put it in short term treasuries, we get interest that way, we try to earn money on that money. In this case, the 10%, we said, well, let's expand it because we have a bigger base now, so we could expand it by about $100,000,000 in the amount of the impact. And then we said we want to really focus on housing because there's just no better investment we could make, in my opinion, in Vermont and in our office than supporting the creation of more housing. But then the other thing that we did, which I think was critical here because this program, we really tried to focus on that cost of construction, that would make it less expensive. So we are offering below market interest rates. You can see the duration amounts there. If it's a really short loan, it's a 1% interest rate. For builders, developers, yeah, exactly right. The one thing about this program is we don't generally make any direct loans to a developer to builder, we find an intermediary like the Vermont Housing Finance Authority, VIDA, like a credit union or a bank that is faced with sponsoring the project, and then we lend to them. It gives us better risk protection. Because the one thing we can't afford here is not to get paid back, we can afford to provide a lower rate and maybe understand that we're getting a longer term economic benefit by doing so, but we have to get the money paid back, this money is money that has been accounted for your budget making process. These interest rates are the state's interest rates to the lending institution or the lending institutions interest rate to the This is us to the intermediary. So we do regulate or negotiate is a better word. What they can add as an administrative fee to the ultimate developer. Generally, don't want to see it higher than 2.5% added on, but the HFA for example is 1.5%. There's others that we've lent to that are as low as 1%. So, we want to obviously account for the cost of the administration of the loan, the risk that they're taking because they're guaranteeing paying us back. But we don't want it to be obviously absorbent. We want it to be a low cost to the actual developer. But even with these rates, if they're adding on, let's even just take the twenty year number of 2.5%, even if they're adding on the top number of 5%, it's still number basis points below the market rate right now.

[Marc Mihaly]: How do they guarantee?

[Mike Pieciak]: Us, yeah, so VHFA is a good example. A majority of our investment of our $100,000,000 plus investment went to the HFA. So, they have guarantees in a portfolio for their 20 or 30 projects that they're investing in with our money, but then they're guaranteeing their balance sheet basically to the treasurer's office for the full amount of the loan. So, when I think of it that way, I think not only does the individual investment need to not pan out into the housing investment, maybe it doesn't get built or it doesn't get built halfway through or they don't collect as much rent, it gets foreclosed upon, but there's still some underlying asset there and there's still some sort of security agreement between the project and BHFA, but then BHFA is also guaranteeing us from their balance sheet regardless of how that project pans When you're making an investment, can't, there's no way you can have zero risk, but there is a pretty low risk here.

[Marc Mihaly]: Is the 100,000,000, is that a total so that at any given point you can only have, well, know, either $100,000,000 or less in outstanding loan?

[Mike Pieciak]: So we have a 100,000,000 or so committed, we just announced that we're doing another about 25,000,000. Above 1,000,000. Above 100,000,000, so that would bring it to about 125,000,000. If you think about 10%, that would mean that that's 10% of 1,250,000,000.00. Now, just mentioned we have today as of this morning, point 5,000,000,000 our banking system. So, we've been conservative with this approach and this number, we have the authority to do up to 10%. We want to meet this moment and do as much lending as we think is prudent, but the cash has never been this high before. So, we know that we have a projection and analysis that will taper down and flatten out, but we could, we want to, we're wrong by magnitude, we just want to be able to have some friction there.

[Marc Mihaly]: Because this money, whether it's five years, four years, or twenty years, it's basically not liquid.

[Mike Pieciak]: This money is not liquid.

[Marc Mihaly]: It's not liquid. In other words, I'm just making sure everybody understands, the state needs a certain amount of money that you can just slosh in and slosh out, investing in short term treasuries or something similar.

[Mike Pieciak]: Exactly right. So most of our money is well, not a lot of our money, hundreds of millions of dollars, is just simply in our state bank account with Citibank or TD Bank. Obviously, we have ready access to that. Others are in short term treasuries, thirty day, sixty day, ninety day duration laddered. They readily available. We're really liquid, we have a lot of cash, we're in a good position following the pandemic. And this is a relatively small portion of that that we lock up. And honestly, it's not, when you're at 10%, it's hard to foresee a circumstance where you need to liquidate these investments, but we wanna obviously be careful. And if that ever happened, could always do short term lending to cover your bills instead of liquidate these investments. Right, yeah.

[Marc Mihaly]: Go ahead. There a set aside,

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I'll call it, for manufactured home, like Maine has?

[Mike Pieciak]: Yeah, so we have worked with manufactured home communities as part of this program. I think there are three different communities that we've been invested with. Okay. They're usually parks that have gone cooperative and then they have significant infrastructure needs and they've either already financed those infrastructure needs, but the high interest rates that they have are making it hard for the tenants to pay that.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Is that cooperative or non profit?

[Mike Pieciak]: Yeah, exactly. Basically resident owned. Like Tri Park and Brattleboro is a big one that we've invested in. They had a pretty significant infrastructure investment and then they moved some of their lots out of the flood zone. Then And they also have a bridge replacement that's pretty significant. So that's something that would have been hard for the co op to finance themselves.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: But that was basically because of the flooding.

[Mike Pieciak]: Yeah, exactly.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So is there any kind of copper that is not necessarily for an emergency as flooding?

[Mike Pieciak]: Yeah, well that was, I mean, even though it was because of the flooding, it was sort of long term preventative. They were moving some of the lots to higher ground basically. They could

[Unidentified Committee Member]: take it away.

[Mike Pieciak]: And adding some lots to it. Yeah. But we would, you know, there's a lot of demand, right? But we'd love to find more opportunities for manufactured house because it's like one of the least expensive ways to have units.

[Marc Mihaly]: Thanks.

[Mike Pieciak]: Yeah. So I'll go on the next slide here just to show some of the examples of our investments. This is an overview basically of all of the investments we've made to date and you can see sort of communities that we've invested in and the amount of the investment. One of the good things about this money, this $100,000,000 that's been invested is like we're not the primary investor on any of these projects. We're a piece of the puzzle. We're leveraging a lot of other money coming in and investing alongside of us. In most of these cases, we were actually like the last dollar. They were, and I'll give a couple of examples, but there were projects that were ready to be financed before or during the pandemic, that labor costs got more expensive, the cost of supplies got more expensive, and then at the same time, rates went up. So, those higher costs couldn't be financed at the higher interest rates, it didn't pencil out. So, this money coming in to be able to get projects over the finish line, we basically ask the project, could you be built but for this money? And they have the required answer, then we want to verify that answer. But that's what we're looking for when we're making those investments. The other thing I'll mention about this pool of money is that it's very flexible. You hear a lot in the housing community about the challenge with a lot of funders because you get four or five or six different funders that have four or five, six different requirements around weatherization or energy efficiency or historic preservation. And then all of a sudden the project costs go up because you have to comply with all of those different requirements. Here, we really don't have a lot of requirements. We just wanna make sure the housing is necessary, that our money is necessary to build the housing. We wanna look at the cost per unit, we wanna look at the impact, but we can invest in manufactured homes, we can invest in senior homes, we can invest in affordable homes and market rate homes. We've actually invested in a couple of economic impact projects. So there are hotels that have housing components to them, like in Windusky and the upcoming year in Rutland City. So, I think it's a great source of capital because it's so flexible and it's also regenerating as these loans are being paid back, we have more money to lend out every year. So, I wanted to give just a summary of the impact. So, when we came in in 2023 and expanded this project and focused on housing, we made about $100,000,000 in housing related investments and we supported about 1,300 units of housing across the state, and also additional to that about 100 permanent jobs. And then we just issued another about $30,000,000 of housing related investments to support another four fifty two units of housing. So about 1,700 units of housing for $130,000,000 pretty good impact in terms of what we're getting in terms of new housing creation and housing units. We ask a

[Ashley Bartley]: Going back a couple of slides, yes, the spreadsheet. Where can I save the criteria that you use to choose these particular projects?

[Mike Pieciak]: So if

[Marc Mihaly]: you Talk to us about, if you will, for governments. How do you guys run this? How do you talk to?

[Mike Pieciak]: How do you choose? For sure. So there's a committee that sort of sits over the 10% Vermont program. It's called the Local Investment Advisory Committee or LIAC. So the treasurer is the chair, there's representative from Vermont Economic Development Authority, from Efficiency Vermont, from the bond bank, from VHFA, and then the five of us make recommendations about what the treasurer will invest in. Ultimately, the statute gives the treasurer the discretion to make the final decision on what projects are invested in or not. So, do a couple of things. We do the investments through an RFP process. So, we've done two RFPs to date. We did one in 2023. And then we did one this past summer. So the 2023 one sort of solicited requests for who wants to apply for this money. And then given everybody sort of the even ground to sort of have an opportunity at being invested in. We then have an investment policy that we've developed outside of the application process that says, here's the rate that we're looking at, here's the amount of risk we're comfortable with, here's the diversity that we wanna see in terms of the amount of money going to a specific project or to a specific intermediary. This is the kind of impact that we wanna see when we're making our investments. So there are those criteria that exist. And then our staff, the treasurer's office will review the applications, make recommendations to that advisory committee that then makes recommendations basically back to me and back to our office to make the final investment decisions. So, did you solicit RFPs? Yeah, exactly right.

[Ashley Bartley]: You did?

[Marc Mihaly]: Yeah.

[Ashley Bartley]: I don't see anything from Essex.

[Mike Pieciak]: Essex County?

[Marc Mihaly]: Yeah.

[Mike Pieciak]: Yeah, so in the Northeast Kingdom, we have investments Caledonia and Orleans County, but the places that we don't have investments right now are Essex, Grand Isle, and then also Lamoille. We do have an investment coming up that's in Grand Isle, but the challenge is like a place like Essex, there's just not a lot of housing opportunity to be applied for. There's not a lot of housing development. So, it makes it challenging to get into a county like that. There's about 7,000 people in Essex, right? When we have other counties that have a lot more housing development.

[Ashley Bartley]: But it's a chicken egg thing, right? Yeah, no doubt. I I guess that's kind of the thing that I'm wondering about is how do you decide who gets to develop and who doesn't get to develop? And how is that being coordinated with those who are working on Act 73?

[Mike Pieciak]: Yeah, so we definitely, I mean, diversity is definitely something we look at and something we factor into our analysis. When we looked at the first 100,000,000, we looked at the fact we actually were, depending on how you break out the state, we were under invested in Chittenden County, we're under invested in the kingdom, we had a lot of investment in Southern Vermont, we had a lot of investment in Addison County, which actually has some of the lowest or most significant housing needs across the board. But like I was saying, we aren't the developer, we can't cause somebody to invest in a particular community, we can simply solicit and then make sure that the money is spread as evenly as possible. I'm pretty sure we've invested in every application we've received from the Northeast Kingdom, for example. There might have been one or two that we didn't, but like every application we received, we made a commitment to invest in the kingdom. It's just that we didn't receive a lot of applications from the kingdom. And

[Ashley Bartley]: then the second question of how are you taking into account the progress of Act 73 in the midst of all of this?

[Mike Pieciak]: Yeah, well, mean, like the speed of construction is something that we're interested in and where is the housing being built. Most of this housing is in the urban center of whatever community is being invested in when you look at that list. Like they're largely our largest towns, but even within that, they're largely in our downtown village center course. So that's great. I think it's consistent with the state's policy goals. It's up there on infrastructure, they're on existing infrastructure. It helps them with their costs and whatnot. The only thing I'd mention and this is not necessarily, it does factor in the Act 73 and other housing initiatives, is some of these projects that we've supported, the Burrows grants an example where it's not because of land use, it was just because of the pandemic. But there are other examples in our portfolio where land use policy delayed the construction to the point where it costs more, almost a million dollars And then with the higher interest rates, they couldn't make a pencil out and they needed our money to come in to help close the gap. And it's great that we could close the gap and have the project go forward, but it would have been better if that were built eighteen months earlier and our million dollars kind of went toward a different project. So we have run into issues with the speed of construction. I think depending on how the, which community we're talking about and where the maps get drawn, the appeals from Act two fifty maybe wouldn't apply to certain of those projects. So that would help a lot if we're investing in those kinds of projects because that's the specific kind of delay that slowed the projects I'm talking about down.

[Marc Mihaly]: Ashley, did you have a question? Thank

[Ashley Bartley]: you for your question because I'm looking and I don't see any Franklin County, which has a large

[Leonora Dodge]: Is it open? There's two

[Marc Mihaly]: Am I blind? Where does this

[Emilie Krasnow]: thing On the left. Commons on the I'm

[Leonora Dodge]: Chittenden, Franklin. It's annoying. Oh, geez, sorry.

[Marc Mihaly]: Ignore me. Ignore me, I need new glasses.

[Mike Pieciak]: We invested in Read Commons, which is great because that's a senior facility and I think supporting senior housing is really important as a broad policy goal. And then the other one is the Bondi site, which is right next to it, which would be about 80 plus units of housing for St. Albans. So, that's when I think of communities we wanna invest St. Albans and Franklin County, one that is growing and a strong investment from our perspective.

[Ashley Bartley]: Docs, I was just confused on your testimony. Was like, wait, but

[Marc Mihaly]: Franklin County, and I just

[Ashley Bartley]: truly do need a new, so I do apologize. And this is ongoing, right?

[Mike Pieciak]: Yeah, exactly.

[Ashley Bartley]: So is it the same deadline each year? Is it

[Mike Pieciak]: Yeah, we want to try to have it be routine, like that it would come out and we want to do analysis twice a year to see like do we have capacity to issue an RFP? I think more likely than not, we'll probably only have capacity to do it once a year. So the cadence that we'd like to maintain is sort of what we did this past year, issue the RFP sometime in the summer and then request the applications over the summer. Then we look at them in the fall and then make decisions, November or December. That was sort of the cadence for this past year.

[Ashley Bartley]: And is it only through regional planning commissions or is it who can apply for?

[Mike Pieciak]: Anybody. Anybody can Yeah, so we get applications directly from projects and we work with them and say, you you really need an intermediary, BHFA might be interested, here's a credit union that might be interested in your community. We get applications directly from credit unions, directly from banks, from BHFA, from VIDA. So pretty broad variety of applications. The only thing I'll mention in terms of the cadence, we got thrown off because we were about to make investment decisions July 2023 when the flooding happened. Think our meeting was scheduled the day after the floods. So we paused and pivoted to investing with the bond bank on some municipal lending. I think we did about $20,000,000 in total of municipal lending to help municipalities be able to bridge basically the recovery that they needed to do before FEMA monies came in and that was to save taxpayers money. Eventually, were able to put that into a different fund and go forward with their housing, but it didn't sort of brought our cadence in terms of doing it once a year.

[Marc Mihaly]: Leonora, do you have a question?

[Ashley Bartley]: I just had, I mean, the obvious, like,

[Leonora Dodge]: We have, maybe we're still riding the wave a little bit of Covid funds. What do you foresee happening to this $1,500,000,000 Do you think it's going to last another year of unprecedented high Do you foresee having to prioritize either by region or by type of project? Or do you need anything from us to help put into statute the way that you would like to guard these dollars or to guard the type of projects that you've been seeing successfully come to completion?

[Mike Pieciak]: Yeah, I think so in terms of where the cash is going to land, point five, this is December into January, so sort of a low point for our cash on hand. It'll build back up in the spring and there'll be payments from local communities that come into the state and there will be federal funds that come in July, it's usually the high point. The high point is more like $2,000,000,000 The average is somewhere between that 1,500,000,000.0 but just a couple of years ago, we had 2,500,000,000.0 during that high point, right? So generally it has been coming down and that is sort of consistent with our projection. We think it's gonna sort of land somewhere between the sort of 1.25 and $1,500,000,000 number once it's all leveled out, because the economy has grown, inflation has caused the budget to grow. There's other factors that just account for the reason we have more money post pandemic than just the federal funds. So, we definitely keep a close eye on that. I think it's probably gonna land on average just about where we are now, but we'll wait and see. There's always things you could do to enhance. Think we're 10% are relatively safe amount. You could always increase that a little bit to have more capacity for housing. There are things that we could do with our housing investments if potentially we had more flexibility. Like we only do loans and they have to be really, really risk adverse. If we had more access to some of the funds that didn't need to be as risk adverse, we might be able to blend them with our funds and make it go further in the housing investment or be more creative. But we have to be kind of plain and vanilla with the authority that we have now.

[Emilie Krasnow]: Just for the sake of time, it sounds like there's a lot of interest in this particular part. I don't know how many more slides you have, but maybe Peter or David or you again could come in at some point and we could expand on this situation. I'm sure you have many places to be.

[Mike Pieciak]: Yeah, no doubt.

[Marc Mihaly]: You know, lose your time. Do you have a little more time?

[Mike Pieciak]: Think we have to be out and make it about seven minutes. Okay. So I just wanted to show this one slide for Jen for Jen's Grand as an example. You know, this was a building in downtown for Jen's, an assisted living facility. It already existed, but they wanted to expand it by about '65 units. Pre pandemic, the cost was gonna be about $17,000,000 Post pandemic, it was a $5,000,000 increase, about $19,000,000 They came to us with an application and said, we just can't make it work at the higher interest rate. We were able to work with the Vermont Economic Development Authority, that's their maximum $5,000,000 but they have authority to lend to assisted living facilities. We are able to make that investment with them and allow that project to go forward. It's now assisted, they had their groundbreaking, they have opened up, they have 65 new units, have people working in there and it's a great program because it's right downtown, it's Medicaid eligible, so it meets middle class and lower wage earner from ours. It created about 48 new jobs on top of the housing. Like I said, it's in downtown, so when families and friends are visiting, they're spending time in Downtown Virginia. And then it's also opened up housing in Addison County, it's the same thing like with Reed Commons and St. Albans, you're not just creating those 65 units, but then people are coming from somewhere to go into the senior housing and that's freeing up houses that are more expensive to build quite frankly, it's more expensive to fill their four or five bedroom single family home than it is to build this multifamily assisted living facility. So that I think hits all of the marks in terms of the project that we would want to invest in. Another project just to show you, this is a completely different project. So for most of the projects we're investing through an intermediary directly into a known project, this was one where we changed it a little bit and invested basically in a community. The mayor of Rutland has a vision for building more housing in their city. They have a credit union, Heritage Family Credit Union that wanted to do the lending and the underwriting, but they needed some low cost capital to help blend in our rate with their rate and make that money go further. So we committed about $8,000,000 to that partnership to support about 100 new units of housing in Downtown Rutland City. Again, it carries out their local vision, it makes the infill investment easier around Rutland, it makes the conversion easier, they've converted some office buildings into housing and it supports smaller housing developers. Like we wouldn't invest in a four unit building, it'd be probably too small, but by investing in the credit union, they can then go and invest in smaller projects that serve an important purpose in Downtown Rutland. So we'd like to mimic this, we've made a commitment to Bennington to mimic a similar program And I think it's a good efficient way for us to get our capital out into the community to make a housing impact. Questions?

[Marc Mihaly]: Yeah. Yes.

[Emilie Krasnow]: If you're done, presentation, thank you. So today's shorter day, but our theme was kind of what's working, what's not working. So, I think I can speak for many on the committee that we really appreciate all the work around housing that your office is doing. Phenomenal work. So, before you part from us, and I know that we'll be seeing perhaps you or members from your office come in on a variety of topics, As we launch into the session, is there anything that you can tell us that, not to put you on the spot, that you think we're exceeding expectations or that we could do better or if that's something maybe you could send us in a memo. But we really want to partner with your office because you're doing this phenomenal work.

[Mike Pieciak]: Well, think the broad strokes, when you think about across the country, who's being forward looking on their housing policy, I feel like Vermont has incorporated all of the best ideas, eliminating single family zoning, looking at parking minimums, thinking about infrastructure investments, then reform to Act two fifty. I think we've done a lot and we have to see some of that play out. The one place where we have gotten held up is on Act two fifty when there are appeals. That has been an uncertain, that creates a lot of uncertainty and a lot of delay and it's not always somebody that's directly impacted by a project that's being built. So that is something that adds time and that's what I mentioned in my

[Marc Mihaly]: slide. You've seen that. Yeah,

[Mike Pieciak]: but that to some degree could get fixed by where the maps land, right? And the Act two fifty exemptions that apply to those areas. So I think that will be really important to see where are those sort of fully exempt areas and does that sort of satisfy the appeals issue or does more need to be done on that issue?

[Emilie Krasnow]: Yeah, and that is on our agenda this session. So certainly if your office has opinions on the appeals process, we would love to hear that since you are directly working to put housing online. We would love to hear your thoughts on appeals. I know it's very important.

[Mike Pieciak]: Yeah, and happy to come back, happy to have our team come back. Like I said, mean, us, the rating agencies, like it's a relationship that we hold in the treasurer's office. We want to have a high ratings, we want to issue bonds at a low interest rate to save taxpayers money to make our money go further. They always asked us about demographics, they always asked us about housing. It's important from that perspective, from being the treasurer, but just as the treasurer broadly, when I look out at the economy, this is the biggest issue, right? So, we wanna be all in on helping the solutions.

[Emilie Krasnow]: Thank you so much, Amit.

[Marc Mihaly]: Yeah, any other questions? Oh yes, go ahead.

[Ashley Bartley]: If we have follow-up questions, who should we contact?

[Mike Pieciak]: Yeah, so Peter Tromboli, who's

[Emilie Krasnow]: here from our panel. And you want to introduce his

[Mike Pieciak]: Yeah, so Peter is now, his title is a little bit New role. Finalized, but he is in a new role of serving basically as our policy director and then treasurer's office. So he'll be our primary point of contact with the legislature throughout the legislative session.

[Marc Mihaly]: Peter, we're gonna be back. I think the idea of trying to give the treasurer's office the flexibility that it would like is something that would have a lot of support around here, and we probably could do with something that's on our wall. Great.

[Mike Pieciak]: We'll be in touch.

[Marc Mihaly]: Okay, thank you so much for your time. You. Thank you, Rutland. You.

[Mike Pieciak]: We have another meeting, that's me.

[Marc Mihaly]: Members of the committee.

[Mike Pieciak]: What

[Marc Mihaly]: I'd like to do before we adjourn, first of all, our hearings start at 9AM sharp. 9AM sharp. Between nine and 10:30 we have three witnesses. Josh Hanford, Samantha Sheehan from the league, and Joan Goldstein, who used to be Commissioner of Economic Development and is now at VDOT. She runs VDOT, Vermont Economic Development Authority. And then we have Maura Collins and Michael Monty from Champlain Housing Trust at 10:30. So we have a busy day after lunch, we're taking witnesses, and then it's the governor's state of the state. So please be here at like 10:00 or 05:00, so that we can start sharply at 09:00. And you see what we're doing, again, I repeat, if there is somebody that you think as time goes on that we should hear from, let's do it. My goal, I guess, we're going to try to have these hearings right up front, so that by the time we get through next week, we've heard from everybody and we can start, we'll have people introducing bills, and we'll think about what we do next.

[Leonora Dodge]: Yes? I just wanted to, I don't know if Debbie's, if you're still on with, I see you there. Hi Debbie. I hope you're still awake. Don't see, this is a lot of our agenda this week seems to Just be just this this But there's more Is this development heavy? Right? Much about building.

[Marc Mihaly]: Hey, Debbie.

[Emilie Krasnow]: It's great to see Look at that. So I don't

[Marc Mihaly]: don't we have is we have the housing and homeless coalition coming in, and it's, so When is that?

[Emilie Krasnow]: Next? That's

[Ashley Bartley]: our Thursday.

[Emilie Krasnow]: Thursday, Chad's new

[Marc Mihaly]: Yeah, Chad's new role. But maybe what I'll do let's Miriam, if you could compile a list of the witnesses that we either have coming in or would like to, why don't you send that to the committee, take a look at the list and think about others that you'd like to invite, we have the time, now is the time to do it. We're going to get really busy, so now is the time.

[Emilie Krasnow]: I think I was saying on the break, after we were hearing that, like, to have some town planners come in to talk about what they're seeing too, like, so if you feel inspired, would suggest a vote.

[Marc Mihaly]: Yes, it should be people who are thoughtful and will have something concrete to add. And we have a number of labor bills which have been introduced to us. We're gonna have definitely a labor agenda as well, but I'm focusing for now on the housing. Okay, anything further? Yeah. Thoughts? Can we have

[Ashley Bartley]: a show of hands of who would like hard copies I of couldn't remember.

[Emilie Krasnow]: Oh, lots. I don't know, Debbie, do you usually get hard copies? Yeah, okay. We'll fax it to you.

[Marc Mihaly]: Whose hands were up? +1, 23456. Okay, alright. Anything else before we adjourn? Welcome back everybody.

[Leonora Dodge]: On Friday

[Marc Mihaly]: Do

[Ashley Bartley]: you have do you, Marc, have the same or do you have a hard and fast rule about how we can participate? And what I'm asking is a week from Friday, I have to I have to leave after house floor because my kid is performing.

[Marc Mihaly]: What do we do? Did no. The only thing is I can't remember. Voting. Voting.

[Leonora Dodge]: Yeah. You have to three.

[Emilie Krasnow]: Three three voting. Three votes. Yeah. Remote three remote votes.

[Ashley Bartley]: Yeah. Do you want to know in advance? Yeah, let us know in advance.

[Marc Mihaly]: How far in advance? Do what you can. And let Mary What? Total or another day? No. This

[Leonora Dodge]: is when we vote on a bill,

[Emilie Krasnow]: like to get it out of

[Leonora Dodge]: committee, that you can do three remotely from Zoom. The whole session. The whole session. Yeah.

[Ashley Bartley]: When you said let us know, is that the way I I would

[Marc Mihaly]: would let Miriam know. She'll let us I I just wanna know. Because partly, you know, when someone's not in their seat and it's like 09:00, I'll wait till like 09:02, and you know, or something, I like it when we're all together, and if I know someone's not gonna be here because, then I don't wait. Okay? Okay. Great. Well everyone, thank you so much, welcome back, and we're hitting the ground running. Did you have something?