Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Welcome back everybody to the House Committee on General and Housing. After a few bill introductions, we are returning to our initial set of hearings where we're just looking at what legislatively has worked, what has not worked, and thoughts for where we should go. And we are now taking testimony from the Land Access Opportunity Board, Cornela Matathieroa and Jean Hamilton.

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: Thank Take it

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: you. Thank you. For the record, I'm Elam Matathieroa, co director of the Land Access Opportunity Board.

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: And I'm Jean Hamilton, the other co director of the LLOG.

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: We want to begin, as we always do, with our touchstones, and I'm going to read them out loud for us so we can consent to working together with these in mind today. We do sing generously, and we speak our truth from our heart

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: and mind. We make the way that we work together an example of what is possible. And we trust that we each hold a piece of the puzzle and that we need each other's pieces to understand the whole picture. Do all consent to working with those touchstones and nine today to make our time? Thank you. Great. And thank you for holding these testimonies. It's exciting to share our reflections with you today. Before we get started into our reflections on policies, we wanted to create some shared understanding about what the LEOB is, what we do, how we do it, because we hear a lot of confusion and misconceptions, which makes sense. LEOE's policy statute or enabling statute is unique. It is very powerful and has a lot of potential energy and opportunity. And it's also really complicated and complex. So just wanna do some level setting there. And then we will look at some reflections on housing policies we've been interacting with. And then just hoping to lead to some takeaways of a spirit of working together. We wanna leave you with hope and courage. We really see there are opportunities for change. And those opportunities come in investing in things that are working and then really just getting laser focused on some of the areas that the worst problems are accruing. So does that agenda look okay for today? Please, any questions along the way? Work is obviously very complicated, so please don't be afraid to ask your questions.

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: So what are the LAOB advisory powers? How is it that we do this work? The LAOB was created in 2022 as an independent state board to address disparities in land and homeownership for people and groups in Vermont that have been historically and systematically marginalized from land and homeownership. I love to name our priority communities. They're all poor or low income Vermonters, Vermonters with disabilities, LGBTQIA Vermonters, immigrant people new to Vermont, Vermonters who are people of color, and Vermonters who are psychiatric survivors. We believe that by centering communities who have been most marginalized and disadvantaged in housing and land access, we recognize that with these populations, we recognize that the LAOB belongs to all Vermonters. The LAOB operates from this foundational belief that when marginalized populations in our communities are doing better, we all do better. And when we talk about disadvantaged communities, we are talking also about communities that have survived generations of poverty, that have worked against the odds, and that have a lot of resourcefulness and knowledge about what their needs are and what systemic solutions could look like. We are a nonpartisan body, the Land, Access and Opportunity Board, and we are dedicated to fostering civic engagement that is community led and that helps us work together to come up with systemic wide solutions and challenges to housing and land access.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: We have a question here.

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: Just so I know, can you confirm what a

[Committee Member (House Committee on General and Housing)]: psychiatric survivor is? I'm not

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: sure I've ever heard that term used. We would define it as anyone that has participated in this, that has gotten psychiatric care, that has participated in the system

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: of psychiatric support, that

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: has a mental illness, that lives with a mental illness.

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: Okay, thank

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: you, I appreciate it. That's in recovery from

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: or with? Is that, by the way, we have had other testimony here where people are struggling with definitions of developmentally disabled versus mentally ill versus Elizabeth, you can help me out on this. I don't even begin to understand it, but is your definition written down or is it in statute or is it in your regulations in any way? I'm just curious.

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: It's not in statute, but we do one of our 12 appointing bodies or appointing organizations is the Vermont Psychiatric Survivors Organization, which is a pure black grassroots community organization. So no, our statute does not define each population. Instead, our statute names 12 appointing organizations that represent these different

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: And the psychiatric survivors is one of the named organizations. Thank

[Committee Member (House Committee on General and Housing)]: you. Again, I don't think we've ever heard that in relation to some of our work. We have

[Committee Member (House Committee on General and Housing)]: it in this building, but I just want to just say that also it's very widespread in the recovery community. So VAMHAR, Vermont Association for Mental Health and Disk Recovery. So that's also, when you talk about mental health and you talk about addiction, you talk

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: about recovery, talk about all

[Committee Member (House Committee on General and Housing)]: those things, people are in recovery from multiple things. And so whether it's from addiction or mental health challenges or psychiatric barrier. Yeah, there are different types of things.

[Committee Member (House Committee on General and Housing)]: And I'll also add that we actually do talk about it quite a lot in this building and it's not necessarily In this committee. But it does have an impact on a person's ability to gain housing.

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: Oh, absolutely. I just wanted to make sure I had a basic understanding of what that meant. So that was very helpful. Thank you. Absolutely. And we're happy to keep talking about this tension of these definitions together. I think for our purposes, we want this to include more of our monitors because we want to make sure that we are looking

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: at the bottlenecks for housing in a way that actually looks at what are

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: the real challenges for the populations that we're working with.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: And these organizations, you mentioned there's 12, And they are in statute as your

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: They are, I believe they're

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: called our appointing authorities or appointing entities. I'm sorry, I think it's appointing. Apply to the board.

[Committee Member (House Committee on General and Housing)]: Appoint to board, appointing authorities. Appoint to board members.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: How big is your board?

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: 24 board members, 12 organizations now.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Okay, got it. Thank you. I didn't know that. We

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: just had a little change in it last year. Added,

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: is it 12, is it 13? I don't remember.

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: Our advisory powers, our statute is unique, as Jean said, and it's potent. Broadly, we categorize our duties into two main functions. We have advisory powers and grant making powers. Interestingly, what we call all of our statutorily defined, assigned duties are advisory powers. People assume that our work is to build houses, which is something that we're hoping to do through our grant making powers, But our work is specifically to identify bottlenecks, levers, and make recommendations to the existing systems. Our job is to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's not to destroy the existing system, to create a parallel system. Our job is to inform the existing system. How do we take all of these wonderful pieces, all of these wonderful civil servants, and get this system actually serving the populations in our state? What this means, in a sense, is that we are a really good investment. We are a strategic and effective investment in Vermont systems. We take $3,000,000 and then we take those $3,000,000 and then we look at the whole system, and then that translates to more and cheaper and housing that actually serves the communities that they're intended to serve.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Is the 3,000,000 your current budget?

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: It's what we're asking for this year.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: It's what you're asking What's the current budget?

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: We were based last year for 1,600,000.0. But there's a little

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: bit of a finer detail on that, which is that we did have some carry forward. And so we are currently operating with a $2,000,000 budget because there was a reversion of $1,000,000 of a prior appropriation that you will now be seeing back in the BAA, I would think the governor did include it in his recommend. So this year, FY26, we are operating with a $3,000,000,000 budget and our FY27 is projected.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Wait, so Yes. Yes,

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: it's a little complicated.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Okay, well, no, I don't think it's that kind So it's one, you've got a carry forward. Plus.

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: Oh, and you know what, I have a slide that could just show this. We came, last year we got 1.63 in base. That was our first year in base funding. We were carrying forward 1.35, 1,350,000 of these prior appropriations as we have been preparing to launch programs. FY twenty six was our program launch year. In August, the administration reverted, where did I go? There it is. Took back $1,000,000 and says, you haven't used this $1,000,000 yet. What are you doing with it? We've been in conversation with them over the fall to say, oh no, that's a real budget. We really are launching programs and are understanding, not understanding. We know the governor will be including that recommendation because the administration understands that we are launching these programs. So when you add 1.3, which was our carry forward to our appropriated base from last year of 1.6, that's 3,000,000,000. And then our FY twenty seven budget is 3.27, I think, 3.2 something.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Kind So of adds up to 3,000,000.

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: Exactly, right around. And

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: you're asking for 3,000,000, but this time straight without the carry forward That's without right,

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: in a mix of base and what time.

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: I have been wondering if it's helpful to continue from here. No, but I don't need to.

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: Don't think you get us started. Sorry, I can't relocate. Okay. So I think where we were with talking about our advisory powers, which was an investment because really our advisory powers help us work together with all of the actors who touch housing and land and identify where are the bottles, where are the gaps, where are people falling through? That's what we have been doing with our advisory powers.

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: Yes. So we use these advisory powers to get feedback, to get information, to learn about what the needs are, and to identify what are the strategic impacts across the housing event system. So we have been doing this. With that slide, you saw the different working groups that we're a part of. We have been strategically looking at what are the best investments.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: So the advisory powers are exercised by participating in working groups, how else? I mean, what are the modalities? I'm not talking about the substance, which I imagine you'll get to. I mean, like how do you exercise this somewhat unusual power?

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: Yes, we do in a lot of different ways. We build relationship and we spend time with different organizations asking questions and looking at what are the processes, systems, who are the people who are in charge and leading these organizations, what are their values. We work with them one on one. We work with them in small groups. We work with them then in cross system working groups, like think tanks, in which we invite different sectors to have these conversations together. We work with them with formal feedback and memos, if we have to, to then inform them directly about what are upgrades or what is it that we're seeing in the processes and how to improve their community engagement process or who is being left out from these conversations, etcetera. What else would you add in

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: the Yeah, ways in which we do we've been contracted by agencies and for example, RPCs to help them understand something. We have been contract to help design facilitations for conferences to make sure that the right audiences were being reached and the right conversations were being framed. We have also convened a lot of case studies and brought people together. Right now we have two, we have so many, there's so many case studies, but right now one that is actively alive that I think you will see LAOB's convening leadership on is, hey everyone, what can we do about Act two fifty this year? Let's stop saying like, oh, there's some problems and also it's dangerous to open it. And let's actually do the work and work with the community advocates and listen to the community members and say, how do we work with lawmakers to make a targeted reform that is really well informed with where we then need to focus our attention this next year so that we have a more careful and caring rollout of these 181 reforms.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: What's the timeframe for that one?

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: That is alive right now. I know, but Last night we met with Lurb and ANR. We are actively calling advocates and conveners together to say, should we be meeting every Wednesday in the state house? What are your issue? Hey, what questions did you have about rural impacts of Act two fifty? So we're actively doing this.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: And so I mean, is there a target time for conclusion or delivery of a report or some kind of target or are I you just seeing how it

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: think we're actively working with you all at this point to do that. So no, there is not a delivery date because we are literally making this up. This is the kind of work LEOB is doing. Nobody said, this is your job. Nobody gave us money to do this specifically. This is us interpreting our advisory powers to have said, hey guys, this act 181 rollout is dangerous the way it is right now. We could have some really negative impact. That doesn't mean we should cancel act two fifty, but let's actually be strategic. And that means let's get everyone together around the table talking honestly, not as lobbyists like trying to get a trade, but just honestly, how do we do a fair assessment and make a reasonable viable plan for how to care for

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: our communities? Out of curiosity, a technical question, but an important one. When you convene a case study and start holding meetings, you're an instrumentality of the state, do the open meeting laws apply?

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: Great question. The way that we have interpreted that is anytime our board meets, it is absolutely an open meeting. So our committee meetings, anything that we pay our board members to attend is an open meeting of the LAOB board. That's when we stipend our board members to participate.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: But not the case studies necessarily.

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: Case studies have been both. We have hosted them as board committee meetings and we have also hosted more community based. We had a land vision of Dan out at Fable Farm this past summer that was not even hybrid. It was very much in person.

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: We had an event, the anniversary of the floods, in which we got a whole bunch of people together to be talking about where people have power solutions to these water system issues that involve most of the time, we do put things out broadly to community. We haven't been

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: in the practice of making them open.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Right, which involves all kinds of other things, right.

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: The official postings in the official places. And I think one, it's also important to know that a lot of this advisory hours work is very sensitive. And so, spoke to the relationships and sometimes a lot of the work we've done is one on one coaching with executives from the system. That is very kind of sensitive coaching about

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: looking- All of the barriers.

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: All of the The the economic barriers, the inner

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: the outer pressures. And these are things that happen behind closed doors that we're trying to also like honor these relationships that are so important to us, and that have been really wonderful to collaborate and create, and also give the hard feedback and the next steps and work together. Because this is not a we're going to put fingers at different people and just go fix it, and it's never going be good enough. That's not the place that we're working from. We're working from, it's like, okay, let's put it all together. These are all the things, and how are we going to work together to get these solutions and to find the resources and get it done. I think with the time, we should

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: go there. Okay, totally. I want to say one thing, which is that the reason for the sensitivity is that like what we are finding through all of this work is that each one of us has to step up a plate with what we have agency over. And that really means talking to institutions as collectives, and then also everyone up the chain of that institution to kind of invite in what we said at the top about hope and courage. We don't have to just revert to lowest common denominator because it was hard last time. If we can be more honest, if we can be more honest about the barriers and know that it's not personal, then we can be more honest about how do we do something like Fix Act two fifty with courage and collaboration.

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: And we are in a very delicate moment. Right now, we are at a tipping point in so many different ways, and people are afraid, and people are ready for confrontation, and people are pointing fingers, and people are already coming to situations with a whole lot of worry, concern, defensiveness, resentment. And we want to make sure that as we're, and that is information, and it's also not the energy that's going to help us creating together. And we're bringing what we want to see to that table and then having those honest, hard conversations about showing up with our differences instead of doing what we've done before, which in my experience is that we go from, Okay, you get this, I get this. It's not, These are all of the needs in our community. How do we meet these needs together? It's like, you get the city centers, we get the green landscape. And that's not actually realistic. Who are the people in our state, and how do they want to live? And how are we stuck still in the past without actually thinking about technologies and future imagination? At one point, we didn't think that we were going to be able to fly across landscapes. And now we have airplanes. So we are at this moment of what is it going to be in the future, and how is it that we're going to be working together to develop the technologies, find the creativity, to move beyond this eitheror.

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: So obviously, or maybe not obviously, your invitation on which policies to speak to and then plus all adjacent housing policies is a big ask. We put some bullets here that we hope you'll follow-up with us on. We'd love to talk if you are interested in really going deep on Act two fifty and sort of peeling back, like what are these challenges we're seeing? The top line is we really recommend slowing down the rollout of 01/1981 to give more time. We need to understand what's happening to the rural economy with these changes. Like it's not what When we hear the potential of tier three might impact single family homes and that that's not clear, it's not absolutely clear at this point that tier three will not create Act two fifty permitting on single family homes, we're already too late. We can not be rolling out a tier three that might possibly mean that people have to get F-two 50 permits on their own one home. Put in an acceptance and stuff like, woah. Anyway, I will spin out, but we really need to understand that. We need to understand concerns about tier one and do communities have capacity to actually sign up for that? Are they signing up for it? How is tier one potentially exclusionary? We need to look at our food land security. Is every Vermonter going to be able to have the right and access to land to grow food? Because that's a pretty important part of baseline housing security, even basic human security. All of these issues, really what we've learned more than anything is we can't keep addressing these issues in silos. We can't keep doing land use planning, like conservation over here, housing over here. There needs to be more conversation between rural growth areas. That's the kind of work that we aim to do this year if we have a little bit of breathing room with rolling out 181. Civic capacity is imperiled and you'll see that in the Virta report, which was a working group on technical assistance. We are foundationally focused on community engagement, the spectrum of community engagement. What

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: is Virta and We

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: got Vermont, economic something in rural don't know. Vermont, technical assistance. It's a assistance report, rural technical assistance capacity that was written into 181 that we participated in with the big working group. And it is a very effective research report that was done with some of the rural studies. The point is our declining civic engagement and civic capacity across our communities is going to make anything we're trying to do next year and in ten years harder unless we really figure out a way to turn that around. And we have great ideas on that. Again, there's much more to talk about here. In terms of next steps, we would really like to talk with each and every one of you individually. We would love it if you would invite us back in so we can tell you more about how our programming is speaking to the policy opportunities here. And we really urgently and eagerly wanna work with every single person in this room to understand how do we create land use planning and policy systems that see the whole picture and don't do trade offs between the two loudest voices in the room. That we really work to secure economies, our thriving rural communities, and a right to grow food everywhere in Vermont. That these are some of the coalitions. The Food Security Roadmap Coalition is another space that if you're like, yes, I'm about that, it'd be great if you could join us in those conversations. I'm sorry to go a bit over. Going put this back up in case there's anything specific questions any of these or Where of

[Committee Member (House Committee on General and Housing)]: does the Virta report live?

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: I'm pretty sure it has been submitted to the legislature already and maybe in a final draft form. And I guess it would go to whoever.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Environment maybe.

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: Okay. Don't know. Maybe it's about technical assistance and municipalities primarily. You can find

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: it and show it

[Committee Member (House Committee on General and Housing)]: Kathy was just talking about it.

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: The state of it and recommendations. This is one of the things we see across the board is when our policies misneed the involvement of our municipalities, we need to resource them to be able to do that. And right now, there's a big gap there.

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: And that one of the impacts of not listening to all the needs of the community is that more and more parts of the community stop trusting the system and stop participating. If people don't feel that the specific spaces represent their needs, and they can't get to the meetings, they're inaccessible, they don't feel heard, then why would people keep engaging in civic engagement? And that's really some of the cultural investments that we're aiming to make, is how do we turn that around so that our TA system is reteaching communities how to be a meaningful representation of their governance needs.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Questions? I guess I have a question. Can we talk for moment, could you tell us a little more about this access to food lands? I admit that I'm used to thinking of it from the lens of making agriculture in Vermont viable and real, and producing food on our agricultural lands, and most zoning allows agriculture. So what is the concern and what are you talking about here?

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: So one very new concern is that last fall or late last summer, the Vermont Supreme Court made a ruling that has now allowed for zoning to zone out agriculture, particularly- Well, to regulate it.

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: To regulate it.

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: Exactly, to regulate it, and which is new. Previously in Vermont, if you pursued an agricultural activity, you were exempt from municipal permitting and regulation, which I think was like a real core to Vermont culture, is a culture of agriculture. For our communities, we have heard from day one from our communities that a really high priority in terms of what does the kind of housing look like that our communities want is housing that has access to being able to grow food. Growing food is really a basic human right or it should be. And then our communities also are more likely to be in apartments, in downtown areas, in affordable housing because of the marginalization and characteristic of our communities. That means that if we start giving municipalities the right to regulate where food is grown, where agriculture happens, and they are most likely to zone agriculture out of downtown areas and growth areas, our communities who also often lack access to cars and transportation are now in a situation where they may physically not be able to have this basic human right to grow food. Economic pressures are also such that when we talk about like landscape level environmental justice or landscape level access to farms. We have to remember that many people in Vermont do not have cars and cannot leave where they can walk from their homes or take a bus from their homes. We know also on the positive side, how extraordinarily positive community farms are like the inner Rail Center, CSA farms that are close to houses, how much impact that has on quality of life, how much impact that has on public health and the future of the children who grow up near those farms And how many people move to Vermont or stay in Vermont because of how much they value that kind of quality of life. The land use policies that I've seen since I've been doing this work the last couple of years in the state house are really exaggerating this separation of our built environments where we're gonna put all the housing, which also kind of means the affordable housing and then the rural landscape where sure we'll put the farms out there, but what about the community here? The final point that I wanna make is that if you ask any of our farm viability providers, small community located farms are one of the most promising viability factors for new farms. The old models of having the 50 acre farm, the 20 acres of vegetables, praise them, let's keep going. But that's a hard, there's not a lot of those farms left and it's a hard business model. Selling wholesale vegetables is hard. A lot of farms are now saying, Hey, we actually wanna be a half acre farm. We're gonna have a CSA with people who live right in this neighborhood and we're gonna fill up our 35 CSA slots every single time because it's our neighbors and you love it and we have pizza night here and everyone's doing better. But our zoning, our land use policies are now saying, they're not addressing that at all. It's not even like they're saying something, just agriculture has been left out of 181 planning. There's no strategic mapping for ag lands, certainly not for community food lands. And then you look at the growth areas that are mapped on these future land use maps. And of course they are mapped over primag soils because primag soils also are the best perk land, they grow the best houses. And so that's fine, we need to build more houses. But before we go develop all the primate soil that's within five miles of our downtowns, can we at least do a mapping exercise to say, hey, actually every 2,000 people needs this many acres of food land. If we wanna make it walkable, let's do those layers. That's just pure data. We could do that this year. But what I will tell you, what we can tell you from everyone out there outside the building who work adjacent to this, they will say, unless those lawmakers tell us to do it, we can't possibly So do

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: please, to

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: make a strategic food lands map. And then the RBCs will say, yes. With some caveats where they need to be resourced.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Thank you very much. You have a question?

[Committee Member (House Committee on General and Housing)]: The question is, can I summarize what I just heard you say? Yeah. So that I can think, so that it can, and-

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Yeah.

[Committee Member (House Committee on General and Housing)]: Because that was a lot. And, and, well, and it makes sense, but I wanna make it relevant so that it's relevant to, to this. So what, what I'm hearing you say is that your role and what has been successful is engaging with orgs outside when talking about development and ensuring that when we pass Act 181, etcetera, and our reforms, that they are keeping in mind the land security and housing and food maps, right? And the zones, because when we're talking about housing development, as we've heard in all of our things, none of these conversations have come up outside of this particular group, right? And so we're talking about very specific demographics who we're talking about affordable housing, but we don't talk about what that means and what that looks like. And I love talking about diverse housing stocks, because not everyone is meant to live in a densely populated area. And so your primary work that you're doing is making sure that the work that we do in this building and coming forth, all the things that we roll out, is bringing back that accessibility to diversified housing stock and land access and food access to people with marginalized identities so that they're not being left behind and they have access to that quality of life, that land and that health.

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: Yes. Thank you.

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: Can I say one extension? Because yes, and what we find as we talk about this, it's a lot more Vermonters than you think who resonate with this. Like we walk into rooms and we talk with representatives from red rural districts and they're like, yes. Our view, we go out in the community and we meet all kinds of people who don't look like us or vote like us. You know? And they're like, wait, does this mean that my kid might have a chance to build a house on the land I should saving for her? They're like, yes. So this is like, yes, it is for our communities, but

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: humbly. When we say Marc

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: this represents a lot of people's needs.

[Committee Member (House Committee on General and Housing)]: Yeah, that's what I, when I say Marc Mihaly's identities, that's all encompassing. And so that's including, when we talk about poverty, just want a side note, sidebar, because we talk about affordability and housing and access and all of these things. And I was just reading an article the other day about just food and what, we talk about obesity, blood pressure, diabetes, all of these things, removing sugar or vending machines. But however, if people can only afford low quality food, that's what they have access to, then their health is going to continue to suffer. I just want say thank

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: you for your work and thank

[Committee Member (House Committee on General and Housing)]: you for making sure that we're including food access, health and part of land access in the housing conversation so that we're not overbuilding.

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: We are bringing this conversation to all of those working groups. In those working groups, we are talking about food lands and including them in the phase three of Homes for All, for example. And that we are making sure that when we are making Vermont strategic investments, that we are considering a new paradigm, not one that absolutely separates people from land as the ways for us to protect our rivers and our rocks and our beautiful water and our trees. Because for us, we have a fundamental belief that we can live with the land and that there are ways in which we can look forward to a more diverse housing stock, neighborhoods, maps, urban areas with plenty of food growing spaces, with resources for aquaponics, with, you know, there's visions and dreams that we can make happen working together, too. If you make us, if you tell us you want to know more about it, so then we can create the legal precedent. Is how it works, right? You have to write the paper that makes it the priority for them to be able to reference it back for us to the next pieces.

[Committee Member (House Committee on General and Housing)]: Any further questions for? I have one comment.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Please go ahead,

[Committee Member (House Committee on General and Housing)]: I know. I just wanted to say all those things that you're talking about, actually, person that's in charge of I think he's in charge of zoning in Concord, Vermont. I don't have his name off the top of my head, but you can just, you know, look on their website, Concord, Vermont. And he has talked about all those things about building housing where you actually have gardens growing on your housing. So I think that would be a good resource for you guys to look at while you move forward.

[Elam Matathieroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: Thank you.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Well, thank you so much for sharing time with us. Thank you. Appreciate it very much.

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: We will share the slides. I'm so sorry. Okay. Thank you.

[Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: One more thing and then we don't have anything else, right? Okay. Looking forward, tomorrow, we start at 09:15, and we're going to hear from the Vermont Natural Resources Council and their take on a lot of what we've been hearing and move on from there throughout the morning. We have a security briefing at eleven. At the moment, what's going to happen in the next week is that our Vice Chair, our Ranking Member and I are going to go through all of the bills on our wall, which is a moving target because bills are still being referred to. And in fact, bills are still in drafting at least until Thursday. Thursday is the deadline when you've got to really have it together. And then we have until the end of the month to have bills, have the names of the co sponsors and be submitted, actually submitted. So theoretically, we're really not going to know all the bills that are referred to us until the end of the month. So what we're going to do is we're going to meet, look at all of these bills, and get a sense as to what we want to take up and the order that we want to take them up in, and then bring that back to the committee for discussion. That will happen sometime next week, but it will be ongoing because we're going to get more bills sort of as we go. And that, are there any questions about that, about bills, deadlines, etcetera? With that, I think we can adjourn because we're done for the day. Any last minute things on the record before we go off? End case for