Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Let's grab a chair and so the Welcome two of you can sit back, everybody. This is still the committee on general accounting, and it is still February. One of the functions that this committee and every committee in the House has is to provide a letter of advice to the Appropriations Committee and tell them, as the agencies that we deal with, certainly do we have priorities, commentary, etcetera? And that letter is due next Friday, and so we will be hearing from the agencies that are relevant to our housing mission or our labor mission. And we do not control their budget, that is done by the Appropriations Committee, but the Appropriations Committee looks to us for advice. I can tell you from my own experience on the Appropriations Committee, they cover the entire state budget, so that means that they rely heavily on an individual who is assigned to this on their committee, who is in turn overwhelmed. And so, advice from us is of importance. So, we're going to start the effort today with VHCb and hear from their people. Would you like to introduce yourselves and take it away?

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: For the record, I'm Beth Sewell, Executive Director for the Housing and Conservation Board. I'm Polly Major. I'm the Director of Policy and Special Projects for the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: I don't think we have to introduce ourselves.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I think we do know all of you at this point. Thank you so much for having us in this morning. We're here, as the chair said, to talk about our budget. And in talking about our budget, we want to talk about the catalytic impact of our programs, the results that you're getting. That catalytic impact is on people, it's on communities, and there's also benefit to the state budget of building housing and avoiding other costs, such as the costs in the VA program, costs in our hospitals, the costs in the connection system. We want to specifically touch on leverage and talk about who we're targeting for assistance. And we'll touch a little bit just with one slide on the board's broad mission. I know this afternoon you've got a meeting with your colleagues in the Human Services Committee, and we'll talk very briefly about that as well. Just as an overview of where we've been, we have gotten a huge amount, more than I would have ever imagined. I have a vivid imagination since the pandemic began of resources to invest all over the state that's touched 5,600 homes so far. We'll talk about that a little bit. But what is happening today as the budget has tightened is that developers are beginning to get more careful about where they'll spend money and how much risk they'll take if they open the project. And there are still great opportunities all over the state that really can be realized. So a piece of appropriating funds is one of sending a signal to the development community that will get them to take risks and get stuff underway to find otherwise not. This very first slide, just if you walk over to Main Street and Montpelier down 4th Street, you see all those parking. A federal building that's been empty since the flood of 'twenty three, there's a condition in Montpelier on the question of resilience, how they're gonna bounce back. They've been in negotiation or discussion with the feds about buying that building. That would not be a good site for housing, but the parking lot behind it and some of the additional parking lots would be available. Just the parking lot behind it would accommodate, they think, 80 to 90 homes if you build a four story building. So there's potential lots of places without sprawling out into the countryside that we can build. We visited in Chester this summer and I understand there's a site that might accommodate as many as 100 homes right here in high school. So there are opportunities all over the state, and the larger the signal that is sent, the better. We are supportive of the recommendation for PACE funding that the Governor has made. We did discuss one time funding. There is no one time funding for VHCb in this year's budget. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Paola to talk about the budget.

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: So here's an overview of the governor's recommendation for BHCD's budget and how it compares to last year. Just as a reminder for the committee, BHCD's base funding comes from transfer tax. In our statute, it assigns 50% of the property transfer tax receipts to VHCV as our trust fund to invest in both housing and conservation. We then manage other dedicated funds for other uses. So last year, the legislature elected to point $5,000,000 of general funds towards BHCB to broadly develop housing and $2,800,000 in general funds really focused on advancing one project in Burlington to serve people with developmental and intellectual disabilities. So this year, and then we also administer capital bill dollars in the past, so we've done that for housing conservation. As the governor has recommended full statutory funding out of the property transfer tax for BHCB, the institutions, committees have directed capital bill dollars just towards our clean water programs.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Holly, refresh our memory. Last year, the $7,800,000 was there any amount in the governor's budget or did it come out of the House and Senate?

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: There was not any in the governor's budget. The governor did direct that full statutory funding to property transfer tax, so not one time dollars for VHCB. Then the House Appropriations Committee added $5,000,000 for housing development and the $2,800,000 was in the BAA that got swept into the end of the year budget. So moving forward this year, it's both statutory funding for our base budget and that capital bill funding as well. We are often in here on housing, I just want to touch on where else is the more dedicated funding?

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: These guys have no shame.

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: So we see our conservation programs, as I think the chair has experienced, really bolstering the rural economy. We see many conservation projects with these outdoor recreation benefits. Our board just did an award with the Vermont Land Trust and Vermont Adaptive to get Vermont Adaptive its first home base in Rochester and help that organization really expand its mission to serve Vermonters with disabilities, serve disabled veterans, and we're proud of the work that the Conservation Mission does there. I'm not a Caledonia resident here, so maybe Gus would like to say a word about

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Caledonia. Well, think this store, which the chair may have fucked with some of you, for your really complicated projects, dollars 2,700,000.0 to bring a store back.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: It's not you there laughing at it.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: It would not have been done but for his determination. There are three apartments in it, so usually what we're doing is 20 units or more. The smallest project we'd ever done other than doing single family homes bit by bit around the city was a seven minute development for the elderly and cat, but there are three affordable apartments that were wrecks before this building was taken on. So it's really brought life back to the village. It functions as a gathering place. It's one of about six or seven schools that we've now invested in. Our board was visiting and granted last year to a library that finally we provided a grant to as they were redeveloping. And there was a disabled person who'd always just been able to get to the front door, now we had because they put an elevator in as full access to the library. So we do this kind of work all over the state. I just want to note because it was so moving when Ramona Adaptive came to our board to make the pitch. I think that's just a Think about conservation and sometimes it doesn't hit, but we're trying to use it really to strengthen rural communities and to bring services to rural owners as well.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: I would add that in terms of just flexibility, one of the big problems you have when you start a project of any size, unless you are a really experienced developer, but if you're completely inexperienced like we were in the dental store case, you don't have any money to hire anyone to advise you. So you're kind of stuck. And VACB has this program called Ready, which essentially allows, I mean, they'll give you $5,000 or something like that on that order in a week or two, I mean, just very quickly. And we were able to use that to begin to hire the expertise we needed, which then got us our next grant for in excess of $100,000 So that's an example. They also have a program that's just about lead paint, and we use that program. So there's a lot. They don't just invest directly in housing.

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Back to housing, been hearing from us a lot. I wanted to capture on one slide really just suite of types of housing that our housing program can invest in. I think we're unique in that we have this housing fund that is able to respond to opportunities and communities, to real estate opportunities, really regardless of the housing type. So we're able to invest in home ownership, we're able to invest in manufactured home communities and have worked with about 50 communities across the state and have this suite of programs that are also targeted towards specific housing types like farm worker housing. We're really leaning in and we'll talk more this afternoon about our work to support housing for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. And our suite of housing programs runs all the way through to supporting Vermont's shelter network. We've invested in nearly all shelters across the state and helped double the capacity of the shelter network since 2020 with our investments. I'll say that federal funds play a really critical role in our housing. He talked about the Led program, that's one that's always supported with federal funds, and we're really grateful for the congressional delegation that has directed a congressionally directed spending request through the HCV to continue to invest in housing over the coming years. We don't know when we're going to have that grant agreement in place with HUD, which state budget year that those dollars will hit. We hope to use some over the course couple of years.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: We can't get a good idea of what's going on with the $100,000,000 earmarks from the newspaper articles. Can you enlighten us as to the housing, $10,000,000 for housing?

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: So I can't speak to all the project specific investments through the state. I can get you the link to the list in the appropriations bill. For VHCb specifically, the senators Sanders and Welch created a fund for affordable housing development, dollars 12,000,000 at VHCb. When we discussed that fund with them and with the staff of the appropriations committee, the goal of that fund is to deepen affordability, to keep development going as we see contracting state and federal resources, and to really support service supportive housing as well. So really getting at that core part of our work around affordable rental development.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: What agency is doing that?

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: So it's through HUD. Through HUD to? Through VHCB. VHCB? Yes. Okay. And they've managed these types of funds through Fair Parks in the past.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: In other words, of the $100,000,000 worth of earmarks that were just announced, dollars 12,500,000.0 came to VHCb to deepen affordability.

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: 12,000,000 came to VHCb to deepen rental affordability.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Rental, okay.

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: There's a project specific award that's flowing through us and that's an award to support shared equity home ownerships. Often because we administer HUD funding, we have good relationships with HUD, so it's easier for us to administer a Fairmark that's running through HUD as a federal agency than it could be for her community partner. That's why they've worked with us in the past that way. Thank you. You see a broad suite of programs here. There's really two guiding principles that tie this together, and that is affordability targeting these homes towards toddler monitors of low and medium income and also the permanence of the investment. So I just want to touch on those as the pieces that tie this sprawling real estate portfolio together.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Before we jump into the next slide, one thing was just that we're happy to have to to be competitive. So that's the photo there. People made a small grant to the Rutland chapter that's bought a new facility, and they're going to be doing penalized work in that facility to different service organizations without them that's signed on. It's the volunteers who fill the panels, so they're going be able to build your round and hopefully up their production.

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I'm hoping to expand that to other chapters in the state too. Affordability for Vermilters is something that we've talked to this committee about, and I resubmitted a memo that you asked us to put together last year that compares AMI to household income and details the types of professions. The BHCV statute asks us to target rental housing at or below median income with most of that below 60% area median income in those tax credit supported units. And then for home ownership, we can go all the way up to 120, most of those are at or below median income. And what this means is that BHCV is able to serve a whole suite of Vermont's working professionals. Many of these essential careers that are making wages that make it hard for them to compete for homes in the market, like childcare workers, like teachers, like nursing assistants, and having the flexibility to have different income targeting levels in the homes that we support means that we can really serve Vermont's workforce. And this is important because Vermont's workforce is locked out of the housing that the market can provide. What this is showing here is the income distribution of Vermont's renters. And what you see is that only a quarter of Vermont's renters, 26% to be exact, make enough to afford the average monthly rent in the state at 30% of their income. So three quarters of Vermont's renters are paying, maybe in the situation, they're paying more than 30%, they're cost burdened. And so as we're trying to meet the housing targets of the state, it's really important that we are building housing that Vermonters can afford and because of the cost to build that we are seeing needs subsidy. The other kind of guiding principle we have behind our housing programs is permanent affordability. I know you've heard us talk about this in the past. And this is really a policy aimed at preventing displacement, preventing someone from facing rising housing costs that means they can no longer afford their home and they need to move or they might find themselves homeless as this woman, Roxy, did. She worked through her career in health services, she was a lifelong St. Olives resident, and she ended up at the end of her career homeless for three years. We invested in a building re commons through Cathedral Square that's for older Vermonters, and she was able to come into that home, get a home there, and she's not going to face those rent increases. That means that she would be homeless again. She said when she walked through her door for the first time that she felt peace of mind. And I think a piece of that peace of mind is knowing that she can stay there as long as she needs because it is permanently affordable. The other benefit of permanent affordability is we've invested in these homes over time. We've helped create this portfolio for the state of Vermont. And when the pandemic hit, when we started seeing an increase in homelessness, we also saw that permanently affordable portfolio start to house people coming out of homelessness. It's available there as a resource. So while we're housing people in new units we're building like Roxie's in St. Albans, our partners around the state were housing developers and managers. We're also seeing that 36% of the units that were turning over, that they were leasing up, someone had left, someone was coming in, were going towards people exiting homelessness. And over that five year period, 2,000 Vermonters, formerly homeless Vermonters, were then housed in permanent housing within this permanently affordable portfolio. And that is a, I think, huge savings in terms of the GA program, what that would have cost to shelter those people through that program rather than through affordable housing. There's been some great research and great effort put towards defining Vermont's housing need and then regional and local housing targets. The HFA put together this chart that I'm sure you have seen many times this session that breaks down of those housing units we need to build, how many of them need to be affordable to different segments of the Vermont population to ensure that, yes, we meet the numeric goals of the number of boxes we need to build, but we also meet the economic goal of housing, the Vermonters who here and looking for housing that's not going to cost burden them. You see that blue section that's below 80% AMI, those are the homes predominantly that VHTB investment is helping to bring online, that market investment is struggling to bring online because of the cost of housing. So in order for Vermont to meet its housing targets, its housing goals, continued subsidy to build those homes that fall into the blue is really gonna be critical. And I will turn it over to Gus to talk about how we've been able to do this at scale for the last five years. So I think one of

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: the benefits that we provide is sometimes early dollars into a deal that can What we report to you on are the units that we are directly funded. So we have funded homes, new homes, new construction in the TIF District in St. Albans. That's brought other developers to the table. So there's now something like, we've invested in 194 units in the TIF District, and 150 are new units, including that Oakley building that Roxy moved into that opened this fall. There's another 120 units that private developers have built in the TIFF District. Similar thing at Cambrian Rise Of Burlington and the Newtown Center. In South Burlington, Stonecrop in Middlebury, the picture there earlier, we're the first dollars in the buildings that get built, and then there's more private investment. That's what happened with a private developer in Morrisville, is he had plans on Gordon Lane to build a number of apartments. He decided that the best thing he could do in order to get the housing built faster was to flip the first 30 units to our local housing partner there, And then he immediately was able, because his capital had been freed up, build 30 more market rate units. So that's sometimes an impact that we're having. We don't report that we supported 60 units in Morrisville. They report on the 30 that we invested in, but you're seeing that catalytic impact across the state. You had a discussion with the Ride Your Bike folks, have just given us a proposal. If we had one time funding, this is something we would love to do. We'll do whatever we can and we would view their application, but they need close to $7,000,000 for 67 of 200 units in this development. Again, the catalytic impact is a whole lot of housing will get built if we can make an investment here, but it'll be hard to put a huge percentage of our budget just into one project in one year.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Is a question about that? The 7,000,000 or so they want from you, is that, I assume that's part of a capital stack that includes federal tax.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: They want to use the 4% tax credit. So yes, there will be tax credit. This will be what's called in the business an eightytwenty deal, so 80% of the units will be market rate more or less 20 or 25%, somewhere in that range will be affordable.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: So do you have any sense as to what the leverage of your 7,000,000 will be in terms of what the other sources that would not be used, for your 7,000,000?

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: What I can tell you is that the two zero four units they hope to build is probably about $100,000,000 project, and I can get you precise numbers, but it's in that range. So if you think about $7,000,000 unlocking, you can look at it just in terms of a condominium that would be permanently affordable, you can look at the larger project, the larger project is a little under a half million dollars a unit that they're building, and that's with the economies of scale when it comes to building a 200 unit building. Debbie? I just had a question on this ride you're buying. Is the builder a Vermont builder or out of state builder? There are a lot of in state investors from the Burlington area. They've brought in a group, a company that's actually pastraminding and putting financing together for the deal, the Champlain Housing Trust will have an interest. There'll be our grantee and our partner provide funding with a project and some sort of option purchase at the end should it all have. We just got the application a week. This is just like, if there's more money available, this is the kind of thing that can happen just as someday there could be housing unfortunately. So are you saying it is an out of state builder? We don't know who the builder would The be builder itself, the developer company is from out of state. They've built all over the country. This would be the first Vermont investment. And this is probably much larger than most Vermont developers would undertake Thank on their you. But it is, again, in terms of the question of how do we use the state money to bring in private investment? This is a good example of it. I would imagine the contractors will be the one phase. Okay, I will add, from my own experience,

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: this is not atypical. In other words, when you want a major project of this size, the developers tend to be national entities that specialize in this, and they come in as a partner and they work they actually very often hire a whole suite of local entities or governmental agencies and sort of create this local thing that they do. And then when it's done, it's done, and then they move on to some other city and do it all over again.

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Were they in did we hear we heard from this.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Yes. They

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: were here. And the developer, remember the guy, I've forgotten the name of the developer, the developer is, you know, a national company, but the local partner, the tall blind guy, was from here for a reason, was his vision, whatever his name was, I can't remember. Rascoille. Rascoille, yeah. Thank you. Okay,

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: so this chart just shows you what's gone on with our funding over the course of the last number of years, and in fiscal twenty twenty two is when we got the largest investment from you, and we put a lot of it to work, a little bit of a tail off in 'twenty three because people had so much more than they expected, and then in 'twenty four, built back up, and then you can see what's happened, our funding in 'twenty five and '26. So the trajectory is downward. And that's why I say the signal that we can send to the development community is really one of, you're gonna have to be more careful because we're not sure that every good proposal that We are sure that not every good proposal that you give us is gonna be able to get funded in the next year or even two years as the budget tightens.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: The dark blue is the state, right?

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Dark blue is the state funding. So this is what was accomplished over the course of the pandemic. So as I said, we're up past 5,600 homes and apartments. We'll add another 100 or so as we spend down the final dollars. There's been a lot of discussion about costs. It's a really important issue. It's one that keeps me up at night. But again, to the question of leverage, we're investing on average plus all of these activities from home ownership to home access to lead paint to building shelters, 80,000 per unit. It is true that if you want to build multifamily housing or a single family home, you're going to likely be approaching 500,000 or north of it. So some activities are less expensive than others. We converted 12 hotels to either apartments or to shelters. We did that and our work over the pandemic was, at least as of a year ago, averaged about 335,000 units for multifamily housing, but costs continue to go up. So that's a big concern. But what we are trying to do, again, is to leverage the state's money to bring other investments to the team. You've heard Laura Collins talk about 4% tax credit. So this chart shows you the average investment using the 9% credit and the 4% credit. And what you see here is the orange is equity from investors in that 9% credit and equity on the other side of the chart from the 4% credit, yields significantly less. So the 9% credit on average is covering 60% of a deal or a little bit more. 4% credit is carried generally covering 30 to 33% of the cost of the deal. So what has to happen there is it needs more money from other places to work. And that's what the blue is, is our investment to make those happen. The virtue of using the 4% credit is for Vermont, it's virtually unlimited. So in essence, when we can't use it, we're leaving equity on the table, we're leaving investment that could come to Vermont on the table. Most of the investments have come through banks. In the old days when I started this work, most of the banks were Vermont banks, that's changed, they're now multi state national banks, but they are still bringing their investment here. One of the reasons that Ever North was created was to provide both the technical capacity to bring those investments to Vermont and to bring them to rural communities that one would call underbanked. So if you're in the Northeast Kingdom, there are two local banks. They're both excellent and there's a maximum amount they can invest in tax credits. So it takes other investors to keep those dollars flowing in. That's one of the reasons Ever North was created first as a Vermont entity, it's housing Vermont. Then a few years ago, they merged with a counterpart in Maine to cover the whole here. And that's proven successful in terms of increasing the amount of equity flowing into the law. Would not have gotten as much done over the pandemic without their ability to bring the investment into the bond. This just shows you 4% yields from 2020 forward. And so it's over 1,000 units even one walled new 22 communities. Are a couple of projects that are at either end of the state using tax credits. Ben High in Bennington was vacant for more than thirty years. Several people bought it, failed at developing it. When the pandemic came, a local developer and the community really said, this is really important. This thing was right in the center of town, riding away. The community put up $3,000,000 of its own tax dollars to make this happen. You actually had a special appropriation last year for it. We were the first investors here, first official support for the project. There's a lot of, and the governor has been very big on this one. Sacred Heart is using the 4% tax credit. They've finished, they're about to finish a phase one investment there. Phase two, we just funded a few weeks ago. So their numbers, another 30 units are not included in these totals. The Newport community is really excited. And you can see if of the people are gonna have great views of the Lakeland from here, and there's room for more development there. So Rural Edge has been doing a great job pushing this project forward. There'll be a third phase at some point, hopefully the recent home ownership of the site. It's a short walk into the downtown and again, a facility that's been vacant for thirty years. I talked to Senator Engels about this a few years ago, he's a realtor. He said over the years he'd taken four or five clients through there, nobody could ever make the numbers work, and he said to me, Now I understand your role, you're here when there's a market fit, there is numbers don't work. And that's exactly true. A lot of old school leaders, we're building a lot of very centered, a couple schools in Rutland, the Watkins School, former Catholic school that has been converted into housing and my guess is that will be a bigger part of our business in the years to come. This goes to the question of leverage by project type. And on the left hand side of this chart are shelters. Very hard to leverage other dollars for shelters. Can't use tax credits for shelters, whole bunch of kind of programs, will not fund shelters. So we're often the major, if not only fund. But here's an opportunity for leverages in a community like Hartford in the Upper Valley where there's all kinds of fundraising capacity. When we've worked with Cox, they've been able to raise money in the Burlington area, but it's pretty tough to raise money for shelters. On the right side of the chart are multifamily rental deals. And so what you see here is a combination of the yellow of primarily a private capital flowing in, whether it's a 9% credit or the 4% credit. I probably should have said, but I think you've heard this before, the 9% credit has a limit to it. And that's why if we could have unlimited 9% credits, that's what we do. But the Fed hadn't done that. And in fact, one of the best things I ever did in my career was to, the tax credit used to be provided on a per capita basis. In about 2000, I was taking Jim Jeffers on a tour of housing developments and he said, how can I help? And I said, Senator, can you get us an all state minimum? And that raised the annual allocation of tax credits from 750,000 a year, close to 3,000,000, which then turns into $25,000,000 of equity. So he did that for us, but without that we would have only been using 4% credits for all these years. Pipeline, we are going to have with just $6,000,000 or so left in this year, dollars 20,000,000 coming at us. We think between this year and next we'll have $70,000,000 in applications. So if there is any ability to take a look at the budget and find more resources, we're happy with the work. I should say that the governor did put a significant amount for shelter in his budget to the agency of human services. And you should just understand that they are contracting with us currently to actually administer those funds with the projects. Can

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: we just drill down a little here? So housing 70,000,000, what does that mean? What is that 70,000,000? Is that projects that are, you think would apply?

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: That we see as what the pipeline could produce, depending on the signals that we send to it. If we tell people who are in early feasibility, we're only going to have $30,000,000 next year and that will slow down the pipeline. People will stop hiring architects, engineers, spending money on permitting, spending money on feasibility, depending on what the budget is. Is that

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: $70,000,000 That's applications. That's your application. That would be money that you would fund, it's not the total. It's not the total. Right. How many units that would be?

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I'll get back to you with that number. I don't have it at the top of my head.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: So in other words, if you had, if someone wrote you a check tomorrow from the state treasury, or another, well, for your housing part of your budget, because the, how much of, I guess,

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: let me start this way, of your base funding, how much goes for housing and how much goes for So the statute asks us to balance the funds. During the pandemic, when there was a lot of one time money, we were at about fiftyfifty. The board discussion so far has been to go up to 65% this coming year, that's what we're asking. For housing. For housing, but we do love when the budget is all finally done, and we visited with you and your colleagues in the various other committees from ag and natural environment to human services here, the appropriators will have a further discussion about whether 65 is the exact amount they wanna stick with, but that's our current target.

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: And I just wanna clarify that that is for the Housing and Conservation Trust Fund funded out of the property transfer tax, not 65% of all state funds coming to BHC. One time general fund for housing is just that, for housing out of that equation.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: I'm just trying to make sense of this 70,000,000. So, do some primitive math, 65% of your base funding is

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: It would be around $24,000,000 but we do have some operating costs.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: So, let's say roughly 20,000,000, so you've got 20,000,000 to play with, and you could do $70,000,000 worth of work, what's missing is $50,000,000 And

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I can't imagine that you or the appropriators can replace that. What I can tell you is that our one time ask for the administration is $12,000,000 to be divided $3,000,000 for shelter, which may have more than covered with their AHS request, 3,000,000 for IDD, which we'll be discussing this afternoon, and 6,000,000 as a general appropriation. So the one time last year for housing in general was $5,000,000 Right, okay, thank you. Other questions? This last picture, this architect's rendering comes out of a design competition that the Home Loan Bank puts on that Rural Edge participated in, so students across architecture and real estate programs help to design this thing, and the workforce housing up in shape. That's awesome.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Questions? So, in sum, what we just said, it looks like about 20,000,000, a little more maybe, of the money that is proposed in your base funding. Then you asked for 12, you got zero in the governor's budget.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Governor did put money in for shelter, Yeah, not through

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: okay. And the pipeline could be up to a total of 70,000,000. I think it would be good to know the number of units of 70,000,000 would support approximately.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: We'll get back to you. Thank you. Other

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: questions? Thank you, so, oh, Is every dollar you have right now is allocated, I'm guessing?

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: We have a few million that we have applications coming to us in March, May, and June.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Will those, do you have money left over or is

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: there more applications than money? We expect $20,000,000 in applications chasing a few million dollars. Expect the model to be allocated pending underwriting.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Other questions? Alright. Thank you so much.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Line. Yeah.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Before we go offline, we will reconvene at 01:00 in Room 10 for a joint hearing with the CALS Committee on Human Services, and it's concerning the road home, a report on the road home. The

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: report on the road home is the report that came out of S1U or whatever '69 last year, we haven't heard a report on it. Yes, I believe.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: Intellectual and developmental disabilities, right? I think we are adjourned, and you

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Thank

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair)]: can

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: go you.