Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: To the House Committee on Tenable and Housing, and today is 01/13/2026. I'm still ready in 2025, when I should think.

[Unidentified committee member (male)]: And you still think it's morning.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Isn't it morning? No. It's the afternoon, just a little after one. And we are still in what I would call an initial set of hearings where we ask people to come and talk to us about the broad issue of, in terms of our legislative history, our past, and our future, what has worked, what isn't working, and what could we be doing that we're not doing. And our first witness today is Kathy Beyer, who's Senior VP of Real Estate Development from Ever North. And Kathy will describe to you, Britsy, what Ever North is. Kathy, take it away.

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: Thanks so much, Chair Mihaly. So just as a reminder, Ever North is an affordable housing developer and provides financing for affordable housing in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Through our over thirty five year history, we've raised over $1,600,000,000 in private equity that has been used to construct new housing across the Green Northern New England states. In Vermont, we always work in partnership with what we call our local nonprofits. And I know most of them, all of you in your communities have relationships with folks like Champlain Housing Trust, Windham and Windsor Housing Trust down in the Southeast or Rural Edge up in The Kingdom. We work all across the state in every corner. What I strongly say is what has worked and what I'm very proud of having worked in this industry for a long time is that through the Vermont Housing Conservation Board, Vermont Housing Finance Agency, the VHIP program, the State Housing Tax Credit program, these programs weave together and

[Unidentified committee member (male)]: through them, we have been able to

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: accomplish much of our goals of building affordable housing. And certainly we can illustrate the outcome of that work by the five ribbon cuttings that Ever North County had in 2025. So again, in partnership with Champlain Housing Trust, down street, Cornerstone Housing Partners, and Windham and Windsor Housing Trust, we opened the doors to almost two fifty new homes. I have a map there on that, I shouldn't say two twelve, it say two fifteen.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Yeah, but is there a way to

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: I know, I tried and sorry. Last time I tried, I screwed something

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: up. Where?

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: You do get this in your testimony. Sorry about that. I actually not, I don't have many more slides because everyone in time to just have a fun statement.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: I don't know, it's 2026, I don't know if people can even think without PowerPoint.

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: Yeah, know, right? So again, it was such an amazing year. Literally every other month we're having a ribbon cutting and the joy of these events, not only the people who are going to be moving into their homes, but the turnout from the community was unbelievable. Saw them in Windsor, we saw them in West Rutland. The community was so proud of these new patterns, which of course, because they're permanently affordable means this housing is an asset to the community. It's going to be there for generations. And that's what leads us, leads me to, I think you've heard this is that we do think it's important to try to find a way to find additional investment for housing in the 2027 budget. We as the collective housing nonprofit network in the state are advocating for 45,000,000 in new investment in housing. And we do appreciate the base funding that all of these programs get. In order to keep up this pace, we are going to need to see additional investment from the legislature. We're hoping this committee can maybe

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: take and enroll. You got

[Unidentified committee member (male)]: a question there. Sorry, I just want to make

[Unidentified committee member]: sure I understand. Are you asking for an additional 45 in one time or are you asking that to go into the baseline one And

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: would that be in addition to the 30 some million that's the base VHCb or including? In addition.

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: So, the last slide I have

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: I guess I have another question. I can't resist when you start throwing around 45,000,000 Is that a request by agencies which either will or will not appear in the governor's budget, or is that nonprofit, so it's just not going to be in the government?

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: It's not going to be in the governor's budget. It comes from the housing nonprofit network around the state,

[Unidentified committee member (male)]: so we can keep building such housing as we can.

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: The last slide I wanna show you only because Chairman Mihaly asked me to talk about costs and I wanted ideas for how we might be able to bend the curve on costs in residential housing. And before I do that, I just wanted to talk about a concept that I think is really important when we talk about costs. And that is just to make sure that we're having an apples to apples to speak. And when

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: we

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: talk about the cost of housing, particularly in rental housing, we often say it costs per unit. Of course, cost per unit. What this slide illustrates is why it's very important to discern between buildings that are primarily studios and one bedrooms and buildings that have two and three bedroom apartments. And in our housing, we do build a lot of one bedroom apartments because there's a strong demand for that. About half of our apartments are one bedrooms, but we also build two and three bedroom apartments. And no surprise, those are much larger apartments, right? You have to have more square footage. So really what we should be talking about is cost per square foot. And this slide illustrates that while you might have a 30 unit building that on a per unit basis, this is construction cost, not total, it's 287,000 a unit. Whereas the one that has two and three bedrooms is much, much higher. And this is actually the case. These are reflective of two real world buildings where the cost per unit, once you start adding two and three bedrooms, you are, if you can read, and again, apologize for the smallness of this, the building. Okay. I'm presenting my shadow group. So, I mean, it's just math, right? When you have mostly studios and one bedroom, your total square footage of the building is about 21,000 square feet. But when you add two or three bedrooms, the total square footage of the building is almost 33,000 square feet. It's a bigger building and you multiply that times the cost of construction, and that's why it's much more expensive on a per unit basis.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Yes, I'm just trying, we can't see everything here, at least from this instance. Is the right hand This

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: bumpy still is 10 studios and 21 bedrooms. Studios are typically four fifty square feet and one bed is 600. So if you add that all up and you include space for your lobby and commons, hallways, that's about 21,000 square foot building.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: And 287,000 a unit.

[Unidentified committee member (male)]: A unit. This

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: building, because two bedrooms are typically nine twenty five square feet, three bedrooms about twelve seventy five, the total building is now almost 33,000 square feet. Much bigger construction number, much bigger per unit number, much lower square foot costs. So just so that I understand,

[Unidentified committee member]: this isn't necessarily on how we make it less expensive. It's shifting our mindset.

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: Yes. What would be your recommendation on? Because I

[Unidentified committee member]: think we've all talked about how housing is kind of intersected with every single committee and issue and agency that we have in Vermont.

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: How would you recommend we start talking about this to make that more applicable throughout other agencies and other states? Yeah, and it is a conversation that happens across other states as well. The common denominator is cost per square foot, not cost per unit. Or you could say cost per bedroom. I didn't add that, include that on here, but really think about it, the number of people housed in this building with two and three bedrooms is about

[Unidentified committee member (male)]: 55 people, and

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: this is about 30 people. So you're housing more people. You're housing a lot more people. Cost per person is also lower. And I bring this up because right now private developers, because construction costs are so high, they're primarily building studios and one bedrooms. And I don't blame them because construction costs are so high. But we in our work, certainly with Champton Housing Trust, see this need, particularly among families for two and three bedroom apartments. There's still gonna be that need for two and three bedroom apartments.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: So in sum, the cost per square foot, or the cost per bedroom, is cheaper in multi bedroom units, the two and three bedrooms or more. And more expensive studios and one bedroom. It's essentially Although, isn't there a market for you guys in studios and one bedrooms Yes, for it's probably the elderly.

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: Our elderly is typically are at least half studios and one bedrooms, because there definitely is a market for that. So again, it's more, I just hear this discussion a lot around cost and everybody talks about cost per unit.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Those are hard costs.

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: That's just hard costs. Yeah.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Yes, sir.

[Unidentified committee member (male)]: Can you please explain how the HIP funding figured in to take out from the units you were talking about in the beginning of your presentation.

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: Yeah, in the beginning of my presentation, the five ribbon fettings I showed you, those were all projects that benefited from the federal loan and housing tax credit program.

[Unidentified committee member (male)]: It's a

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: major source of financing for large multi bedroom rental housing. And BHIP is more targeted to the smaller properties. And so what I showed you did not have the money in it. Chris has information on how many units BHIP has created. I saw on your

[Unidentified committee member (male)]: Oh, housing programs that worked. Yeah. But you called it out as one of your funding sources. That's why I wrote it down.

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: I'm sorry, I misspoke when I said that.

[Unidentified committee member (male)]: Thank you.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: She just said it's working.

[Unidentified committee member (male)]: Yeah, hopefully that's what I said. Yeah. I mean, my understanding is that VHIP isn't supposed to be used for developing housing. It's supposed to be, that was my understanding of It's renovation. It's renovation of individual units, right? Right, yeah. Just clarifying. Thank

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: you. So

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: I was going to move on to what's I was asked a question, what's worked? And some ideas for where we might be able to make some improvements. So you have passed significant legislation in the last three years, the home legislation and Act 181. And there's a piece of Act 181 that people don't talk about that much, but the RPCs were given the directive to go about and set housing targets by community. And it was a robust exercise. And maybe communities have that target. And I think it's helped advance that discussion about where do you want your housing built? Oh, you know, I live in Hinesburg, you need to build, I don't have the exact number, but 500 more housing units where you don't want do that. And I've noticed around the state that communities are talking about how they are going to meet their targets. Where are we going to build? So I think that was

[Unidentified committee member (male)]: like, maybe a bit

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: of a, it's a softer outcome of Act 2,081, but I think it's been a meaningful one. I also am very hopeful that under the Holmes legislation where duplex by right, quadplex by right, where there's single family zoning is resulting in more housing. Think it's, those numbers probably aren't coming in yet, but anecdotally when I drive around, I'm always noticing when somebody is replacing a single family home with a duplex or a quadplex. The reduced parking requirements. So many towns had zoning that said two parking spaces per unit. And now under the homes legislation, if they're on water and sewer, it's one parking space per unit. That is monumental in our work because parking takes up a lot of space. So that has been very helpful and something that we have had immediate impact in our projects. We did lose one tool in the passage of Act 181. And I struggled with this during the, I was involved in Act 181. So before Act 181, most of our housing benefited from what's called the priority housing project exemption. And under Act two fifty, if your project included 20% affordable and you were in a downtown village center, growth center, neighborhood development area, your project was exempt from Act two fifty. And that was a big benefit. And we would have private developers reach out to us and say, hey, we're planning this larger 200 unit development and we'd like you to participate and do the affordable component and then the entire development was exempt from Act two fifty. So that the PHP, Priority Housing Project Exemption, kind of forced some marriages that may not have otherwise happened and that were some good outcome. Now rightly so, I think Act two thousand eight eighty one, if you are tier 1B, all development is exempt from Act two fifty because we've decided this is where we want building to happen. But by de facto, that means we don't get these PHP marriages, so to speak. So we have lost that a bit and I'm not going to dwell long on it, but I- You got it. Yeah. So actually,

[Unidentified committee member]: the governor's proposal sets that if a community opts out of tier 1B, that those areas are still eligible for the PHP exemptions. And then I think in an effort to also kind of revitalize the idea of what PHPs are in year 1B, they also are looking to increase it from a maximum of 50 to 75 in that area. Is that something that you would

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: support? I think so, yeah, I'd like to spend a little more time, but yeah, I think that's

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Actually, have a question about that. If we live with the current language, so a community has to opt in to tier one, and let's say it doesn't, so it's kind of in the same position where in an opt out world it opted out. But now, a community that could be opt in doesn't. Does the PHP still apply in that community?

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: I believe so. So you're right, there's still some various possibilities.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Then the status quo ante applies. Yeah,

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: that's a good point.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Okay, I'm just checking because we were talking about that.

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: And I want just touch on one more thing, which was not really in the Home Legislation Act 181, but we are supportive of the governor's executive order on returning to the 2020 energy code. Energy code is something I've spent a lot of time on. And in statute, the energy code, when it's updated, needs to do a cost benefit analysis, right? Like we're recommending these changes to the energy code, but there's been an assessment of the benefit that's gained by that. And we believe the 2024 code needed to go through more of an analysis about the benefits the 2024 code, and it definitely was going to cost our housing more money. So we actually are supportive of continuing the twenty twenty code for now, which is right now in rulemaking, and my understanding is what is being implemented. So looking into the future, what can we do, particularly around increasing the pace of housing production and lowering costs? And first and foremost, what I would like to ask this committee to do is to consider getting involved in BABA, Build America by America. This is federal requirement, but I have to tell you, it is gonna have such an impact in this state and on the state dollars you're invested in housing. BABA is a requirement that comes with the federal money we now use for housing, CDBG, the HOME program, and the Housing Trust Fund program. And what Baba says, Baba Tax credits? No, it does not come with the tax credits, but we use home and HDF and so much. So Build America by America was started back several years ago for infrastructure projects, building bridges, roads, water and sewer extensions. And those funds had this concept of Build America, Buy America. Go find domestic sourced products to, we want you to use domestic sourced products. And in infrastructure, that's actually not as hard to do. But in 2021, the big infrastructure act passed by the Biden administration added language to define housing as infrastructure. And as a result, housing, affordable housing using these federal dollars must now comply with BABA. And think about a multifamily housing building. Think about the hundreds of components that go into that apartment, the kitchen sink, the cabinets, the windows, the flooring. We, when we have projects now subject to BABA, have to ask every one of those components, we have to try to domestically source. And you can imagine in some cases, they're not built in America. Heat pumps, we can't find a BABA compliant heat pump. Elevators, we can't find a BABA compliant elevator. In one building, we couldn't find door stops, you know, those little things like, you know, so the door doesn't bang into the wall. Well, guess what? None of them are made in The United States. So I think it was an idea that there was a good idea behind it. It was a way to increase domestic production manufacturing, right? That sounds like a good idea. But when applied to housing, the cost and the slowdown in our ability to get through construction, think is too high. And I really, we are working with a congressional delegation across all three states on this. And I think it would be a strong indication from this committee to sponsor a letter to the Vermont delegation, asking them to work on the language, which

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: will

[Unidentified committee member (male)]: not eliminate BABA.

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: It will just return to infrastructure is infrastructure. BABA is going to apply to infrastructure projects, but we're not going to apply it to affordable housing projects. That is probably the biggest thing that we could, in terms of cost and the pace of our construction, that is the biggest, threat we're facing for 2026 and 2027.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Might I ask, is there, would it be difficult for you to provide proposed language to us?

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: I have something like that

[Unidentified committee member (male)]: directed for you to consider. Surprise, surprise. Yes. Just curious,

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: changing costs of procuring due to tariffs or whatnot. Procuring foreign made goods, are they that much is it that you literally cannot find the products? Or is it that they're just so much cheaper to buy from abroad? For some products, we cannot find them, like heat pumps. The tariffs are another issue if they just add costs. Maybe we can avoid tariffs because we found a domestically made product. And we certainly try to use domestically made products, but I really think it was an unintended consequence. Like, oh, let's put housing on the infrastructure. Oh, no housing is under Baba. Oh shit. This is an oh shit moment for affordable housing. And it's being discussed across the country. I've got couple more ideas for you to consider. One is that I know this committee has had a discussion and I believe a report was delivered. I haven't had a chance to read it. I do think that we need to make progress on how we adopt the soil standards in the Brownfield program. And one idea that has, I know, been used in other states is that the adoption of the soil standards in Vermont is now done by my understanding, one person at the Vermont Department of Health. And in Massachusetts, they have a multidisciplinary panel. So, you know, we're balancing risks all the time, right? We can't get to zero contamination. So if we're balancing public health risks with other goals, that perhaps a multidisciplinary panel might take that approach. So I think that is an area that's been discussed for a long time, and I think we need to address it in Vermont. Are you thinking a one time panel or an ongoing panel? Ongoing. Because the standards get updated. I mean, just as new research and information comes in, there's appropriate times to review the standards, revisit the standards.

[Unidentified committee member (male)]: Which also costs money.

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: Yeah, I mean, could be a multidisciplinary panel of people who work within state government. So you might have someone from the Department of Health, someone from Department of Environmental Conservation who does not, the DC brownfields program does not set the soil standards. And you might have somebody from ACCV, that you weren't actually adding costs. Then I want talk a little bit about, I know these ideas are under the purview of the House Environment Committee, but I know you've also in the past talked about some of the issues related to permitting, particularly affordable housing. And one of them is, from time to time, we have experienced fairly contentious DRV hearings. For whatever reason, there is disagreement among the neighborhood or among the community. And those hearings can go off the rails pretty quickly. And perhaps the DRB chair is new or they're very, when a local permit hearing becomes contentious, it's very difficult for the chair and the zoning administrator to try to keep hearing on topic, which is the Saudia LaMont. And I've talked with a couple of regional planning commissions about whether they might play a role where either the applicant or the town could say, hey, it's pretty obvious this one is going to be contentious. Can a staff person from the regional planning commission come in and simply coach the DRB chair. Not have any influence on the outcome of the decision, but can we make sure the proceeding continues in a way that stays on topic? And I will say we have had experiences at DRBs where questions are being asked that quite frankly should not be asked at a DRB hearing. So that's one idea I think that you may be discussing blurb report on appeals, where there's a recommendation for how we might speed up the appeals process, which I do have for many years been talking about and hoping we could find a way to speed up the resolution of appeals.

[Unidentified committee member (male)]: I'm sorry. Just for clarity, when you say allow RPCs to come and work to coach, do you mean RPC staff or the commissioners?

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: Staff. We have a great example of that actually in Winds everywhere. So we built this beautiful housing in Downtown Windsor, Central Maine, 25 apartments. And the zoning administrator, I think it was part time, and then long story, the zoning administrator left and there was no zoning administrator. Regional Planning Commission came in and staffed the rest of those VRB sites and it worked very well. So, I don't think this would happen all the time, but you know when a DRB hearing is going to be contentious, right? And maybe that's only 5% of the time, but I think that they could use help.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Do you think that they need specific legislative authorization to do that? Or do you think it's already within

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: I think the RBCs think they do. Okay. Another appeal issue, which I've talked with Chair Mihaly about a little bit, is some towns have your permitting process as a three step process. You get sketch plan review, preliminary plat, and final plat. And technically you could get appealed on all three, at all three times. And most of the time, if we're gonna get appealed, we're appealed on preliminary plat, which is when your project is pretty much It's plat, sorry. Preliminary plat.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Plat is subdivision, in other words, the typical, the first preliminary plat is a discretionary decision by the town to allow cutting the property to be cut up. It usually says, correct me if I'm wrong, where the roads are, what the infrastructure is. It defines as much as they can define like that. Where is the roads? Where is the infrastructure? Where is the sewer or the water if it's there? And then the final is filed by the developer that essentially shows they've done all that.

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: It's dotting your eyes and crossing

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: your And spinal first is a massively discretionary opinion, you know, it is really the enabling action by the town and it has conditions attached to it. You have to do this road by this time, you have to do I mean, the whole point of subdivision is to avoid a situation where, you know, some developer comes in and leaves houses isolated where they can't get to it or they don't have

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: water and sewer.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Adequate water and sewer. So there are all these conditions written out. The final map, which is the one the final map, when you get the final plat, we call it a plat here, where you get the final plat, that's what allows you, you then have a lot you can sell. The lot exists at that point. That is not a discretionary decision. That is a decision that's like, just check the box. Did you do all the, you know, did you pay this, did you put this in, is that right?

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: Essentially, yeah. And what I'm trying to, this is an idea that needs more exploration, but technically a developer could be appealed at both preliminary and final, which essentially is the proverbial two bites of the apple. If you appeal at preliminary in my mind, you should not have the opportunity to appeal again at final. But again, requires more research and it just might be a good topic to bring up with house environment. So there's a lot of details. The last suggestion I'm going to make today, and I think this will be controversial among some 15 folks, is back to the energy code. And we have a statewide energy code. And as I mentioned in statute, when that code is adopted, it's actually done by the Department of Public Service. And they are asked to look at the cost benefit of changing that code. But we also have town energy committees, and often town energy committees advocate to go beyond the state energy code to aim higher, to do more, which all sounds good, but there's no cost benefit analysis done by the town energy committees, and they're not equipped to do that. And I guess I just think it's worth considering, if we have a statewide energy code, why are we then also enabling towns to come up with different versions of an energy code. As a developer, you have to adjust town by town. Might be something worth looking into. I'm sure there'll be strong opinions the other way on that one.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: I do have a question. You mentioned before, but then you cut yourself off the LERB report. Did you want to say anything about the LERB report? And I do have a question about it.

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: Well, I recognize that there's a lot that goes along with the nerve report. I don't want to shortchange it, it almost needs to be a separate discussion. And I guess I wanted to say, I think we all agree that we need appeals to be resolved in a more timely manner than we currently have in the system. Unfortunately, Ever North has been through more appeals than probably any developer in the state. And I can tell you the court takes too long. If there's a way to improve the timeline in the court, I'd support that, but I struggle with seeing how we're gonna be able

[Unidentified committee member (male)]: to improve the timeline within the court. Right, here's my question.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: There is going to be a bill introduced, whether it will go anywhere, I don't know, but they'll be introduced in both houses that addresses the Lurbin War. My question is, what a number of people close to the situation argue that a major reason for delay is the original decision by a project proponent, which may be irrational at the time, to separate out appeals, excuse me, to separate out in time the permit from the DRB, the permit for Act two fifty, and state permits indicating that each one of those may be appealed and that if you do them one at a time, it's rational. You want to get your DRB decision before know where you stand before you go to your Act two fifty, but it means that the DRB decision is appealed and then while that's going on, then the act has to be resolved until you go ahead with the Act two fifty, and then that's appealed. And if a developer simply went for everything at the same time, they'd have a much shorter period. So some people blame the developer decisions. Do you have any thoughts about that?

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: Yes. We had a famous project in Woodstock called Safrid Commons that took ten years to get through the appeal process. And that was one where I think we did have a consolidation of the appeal of the local permit and the Act two fifty permit. And honestly, I think it cost us more time. I would rather get vested in It's all a balance of risk, right? Like how much money I'm going to spend, I haven't resolved this appeal. Well, I'd rather work on resolving the appeal of the local permit, go after my Act two fifty permit. During that same time period, I can resolve that appeal. Hope that they're not gonna appeal the Act two fifty, but you might get appealed on the Act two fifty, and then work on that. I'm speaking as actually an experienced developer who's gone through appeals, that would be my preferred in balancing the risk. If I have to wait, I get the DRB in permit, oh, the court says, well, go get your Act two fifty permit and see if that gets appealed, then I gotta wait that whole time and I haven't resolved the DRB permit. So that's my experience. Ironically, or maybe not ironically, the good news is so many of our projects are going to be or are exempt from MAC two fifty now. So it's going be more and more rare that we actually trigger MAC 50, which is a good thing, right? That's what we're trying to do. We're going to build where you want us to build. We're gonna need that local permit, but we're likely gonna be exempt from active duty. I'm speaking for multifamily housing. I'm not speaking for other types of

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Is that it?

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: That's it. You asked me Thank to

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: you, this has been wonderful. Really wonderful. Are there any final questions?

[Kathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Real Estate Development, Evernorth)]: Thanks for the work you do. I know it's not easy.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Kathy, thank you so much. What we're doing now is Representative Kimball is

[Unidentified committee member (male)]: Okay.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: What we're doing is transitioning for an hour or a few minutes, not too long, one forty five. We're transitioning to introductions. As you may remember, just to remind the committee, there are kind of several stages to a bill. Forgive me if you all remember this, but it was nice to remind myself. We have adopted in this committee a policy which not all committees have, which is that any bill which is referred to us, we give the author of the bill a chance to come in and spend five or ten minutes just explaining whatever they want to say. Here's the bill, here's why I did it. Short and sweet. That way we all kind of know what's up there on the wall. Then the next decision is, are we going to take it up? Are we going to take the bill off the wall? And when we do that, if we decide to do that, we have legislative counsel in here. We may have the author again, and legislative counsel lays out for us exactly what's in the bill, and we can take testimony on it, and if we wish, we can mark up the bill, change it as a committee, and then either pass it or not. So these, this week, we're going to hear a bunch of bills just introduced, And at this point, until Charlie gets here, why don't we take a five minute break and go offline, we'll please everybody be back by ten up, I think Charlie may be here by then at