Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Okay. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for being here this afternoon. And we have a packed house. We've got a lot of things on the agenda this afternoon. And I want to do a little update and sort of stage setting, if you will, before we get to testimony this afternoon. Okay. First off, Eric and I have been doing a lot of talking, doing a lot of brainstorming. We met with representatives of the Agency of Human Services yesterday. And we met with some advocacyprovider groups today. And we met with Katie today. What we sort of the, I guess, what I would call a revised plan is that we're gonna do a committee bill. We're going to look at elements of 90 '1 and elements of five ninety four and new elements have have honestly only existed in my head so far, not in discussion. But we will have those discussions. And I think our conversations with the I'll start with the agency first, the agency human services, I think were fruitful. However, I would say that there's probably still considerable disagreement about some things. One of the sticking points is on essentially the definition of residency. And as you know, in May, there's three things where you have to prove residency. And I had a question about that. I believed that that crossed over into durational residency, most likely. And so I did ask alleged counsel about that. And the opinion that Eric and I received was that, yes, she thought that an argument couldn't be made that that, in fact, represented durational residency because it takes some time to acquire those things. So we bantered around a concept that would try to give the agency of human services evidence, if you will, of an individual's intent to stay in Vermont. And Katie is working on that as we speak. And we'll get that back from her, I'm hoping later today. So that's a major sticking point. I'm just gonna be honest that if that's a sticking point that we can't overcome, I'm not sure that we can overcome any of the rest of the bill or a bill, if you will. And so we'll have to see how we land on that. So I want us to get to the end of a process and have that be the thing that undermines it being considered by the body, the Senate, and the governor. It's not that it's not a process that's worthy of our attention, because it is, but we have a lot of things that are worthy of our attention. And we have a date for crossover that is after we get back from we've all seen it from from after we get back from town meeting break. And so I want to make sure that as a committee, we're using our time wisely. So that is I guess I'm just going put out there. A nonstarter, honestly, if we can't get past that. It's also one of the things that Eric and I represented with the department was their intent. They have an intent to move back to adverse weather on a day to day notification process, essentially what existed prior to to the pandemic. And that is also a nonstarter because, one, it requires an intensive amount of legwork, and it doesn't really result in anything positive. And so those are two main sticking points that we need to overcome in order to end up with any kind of bill. If we are able to overcome those sticking points, what I'm hoping that we can work on is something that has elements of a continuum of supports and services for people, which will have elements of what's in May, but also represent the continued use, albeit at a reduced rate and trying to continue to reduce it, of the use of hotels in the way that they're used right now. I think that I'm also trying to achieve some sense of stability for shelter services that now get funded year to year based upon proposals that are submitted through housing opportunity program. And so trying to look at the potential for a two year funding cycle for shelter services. So there's a lot of different things that have cropped up in our conversations over the last couple of days. I've kind of thrown a few ideas out on the table, trying to figure out how we put words to those ideas and how we incorporate some of the positive things in both bills and then add or build on that towards a system that would have a transition. So there'd have to be a transition period because not all of these things would be able to be achievable in FY '27. But that would build on probably what I would call a two year transition period and then move to a desired state. What's not included is the concept that we had in age 91 of moving decision making to the communities, because that appears to be a nonstarter for the communities. There doesn't appear to be a way to come together in that. And the department doesn't seem to be I don't think that they have a preference one way or the other. I don't know. Even though they have actually moved in that direction already this year with the domestic violence system is now done through the network. So who knows? Maybe after some period of time, it could happen. But it's not going to happen in this bill in particular. So I just wanted to update committee members on those discussions that Eric and I have been having. And it's a process. And so it's not something that we can do as all 11 members of us on committee. But I wanted people to not feel in the dark about what's happening. It's like, when people have asked me, well, should I be marking up five ninety four? It's like, well, no, we're not really going to mark up five ninety four. We're going to mark up a new bill. And that's if we can overcome a couple of these barriers. The other thing that is important is I have not yet I don't know quite yet if we are going to deal with appropriations in in a in this bill new bill, or if the appropriations process is going to go separate in the governor's budget. So I have asked appropriations for their guidance on how they wanna handle that. I'm okay either way. But if there's changes in one and it's not in the other, then that makes it a little bit we've gotta make sure that they continue to match, I guess, is the thing. And if you're interested, the Department for Children and Families gave testimony and appropriations yesterday afternoon. I sat in on that testimony. I'll be honest, they didn't provide a whole lot more detail than they did here, but we are having them back with division directors and deputies here so that we're able to ask more detailed questions. Because there's a lot of questions. There's big generalities in the housing proposal that we don't really know the details to yet. So there's a lot to dig into. Any questions about that before we kind of delve into our testimony? Yeah, go ahead.

[Doug Bishop (Member)]: The first sticking point you referenced was related to residency. It seems like the question of durational residency is pretty well settled law by the US Supreme Court. I'm not sure I'm understanding where the other residency issues come in and how they differ from durational residency.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: So in May, you might recall there are three things that the state is looking to have, so to prove your residency. So one is presence of a Vermont driver's license, presence of a Vermont utility or other bill, or certification from a Vermont provider that you're here getting services or you have a doctor that certifies or something. So those three things in conversation with legislative council could be interpreted as requiring a duration to achieve. And so therefore could meet a constitutional challenge as regarding the prohibition against durational residency. But it's something that the state is very committed to. They're very committed to the concept of weeding out people, although there is no data on the numbers. So we keep talking about this. And though we have anecdotes, everybody can say one case or two cases that they've heard about. We have anecdotes that people come to Vermont for winter weather because they can get into a hotel. And so that's the problem that they're trying to solve. Again, we don't have data on what those numbers are, but that's the problem that they're trying to solve. Honestly, the perception that exists among some of our colleagues. Yeah, if I

[Anne B. Donahue (Ranking Member)]: can add to that. So I think what is allowed, what can be, is that a requirement that the person intends to stay here. That is constitutional, that they've shown up and they intend. But then that's like, so how do you establish that? So I think that's the rub, is there is one avenue that would be legitimate that could, if somebody was truly here because they just want to be here for the winter and go back, you you can say they can't, but then it gets like, how do you do that? Because it becomes very difficult.

[Doug Bishop (Member)]: Is the state's position that the proof of residency that they're asking for is somehow getting to that intent question?

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: I believe that that's what they believe, yes. And their attorneys may differ from our attorneys in interpreting whether the three items that they enlist in the bill could be evidence of your proof to intent to stay. So Eric and I worked on language with Katie this morning that we threw out some of the ideas. She said, all right, let me take that back and kind of massage it and see what I can come up with that provides evidence of intent to stay. And so that's essentially participation in your service plan. That's kind of what it boils down to. And so it'll be a wait and see. So as soon as we receive that, my intent is to forward that onto the department, the agency, to see, have your attorneys look at it. Our attorney tells us one thing. You have a different perspective on it, and this is where we're at. And then the second thing, the second barrier to overcome is the night to night kind of thing, which isn't going to go.

[Brenda Steady (Member)]: And there is the department agencies committed to the night to night.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Well, that's what's in their proposal. Although I have to tell you, you can't really tell that from reading it. It was helpful that they explicitly said that.

[Brenda Steady (Member)]: So that's why I wanted to hear, they've said it.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Yes, they said it. Yes, yes. Okay. Any other questions before we move on? Okay, great. Since we have a packed house, I'm going to do introductions because we have a couple of people. It's your first time being here in committee this year. Not the two of you, but other people in the room. So Theresa Wood from Waterbury. I also represent Bolton Fuels Core in Huntington.

[Anne B. Donahue (Ranking Member)]: Anne Donahue. I'm from Northfield and also have Berlin.

[Daniel Noyes (Clerk)]: Good afternoon. I'm Daniel Noyes.

[Daniel Noyes (Clerk)]: I represent Wilkett, Hyde Park, Johnson, and Belvidere.

[Eric Maguire (Member)]: Hi. Good afternoon, Eric Maguire. I represent Robert City.

[Doug Bishop (Member)]: Representative Doug Bishop from Colchester.

[Todd Nielsen (Member)]: Todd Nielsen. I represent Brandon Farnestown. My name is Zon Eastes. I live in Guildford and also represent Vernon.

[Esme Cole (Member)]: Hello. Esme Cole representing Parkford.

[Jubilee McGill (Member)]: I'm Mary McGill. I represent Biffport

[Golrang "Rey" Garofano (Vice Chair)]: and Hilberry, and we bridge. I'm Ray Garofano. I live in Essex, and I also represent Essex Junction.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Where are most of new assistant? I'm gonna go right around the outside.

[Amy Ross (Vermont Interfaith Action)]: Amy Ross, I'm representing the Mind Youth Faith Action. Department Department of Services, you

[Alex Campbell (ACLU of Vermont)]: can see. Alex Campbell, CACLU, Zonnen.

[Amy Ross (Vermont Interfaith Action)]: Yvonne Fitzsimmer from Haven, successful Vermont.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Thank you. Thank you all for being here, and thanks for the VLI folks being here today. It's great. It's great to see state employees participating in that leadership institute. It's wonderful. Okay. And we have our witnesses here today. So the floor is yours.

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: Well, thank you so much, and thank you for the introductions. For the record, I'm Paul Dragon. I'm with the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity, and I'm joined by my colleague,

[Chad Simmons (Housing & Homelessness Alliance of Vermont)]: Chad Simmons with the Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont.

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: And we're here to testify on behalf of Vermont Community Action Partnership, Housing and Homelessness Alliance Vermont, ACLU Vermont, End Homelessness Vermont, and Vermont Early Childhood Advocacy Alliance. Thank you so much for having us. A special appreciation for Chair Wood and Representative Maguire for your work on this and all the conversations we have, so thank you. First, we want to thank all of you, the committee, for for continuing to address the ongoing crisis diplomacy We're in our here today to propose an alternative to H594 that is still within a limited timeline. Our proposal centers people, funds, existing services and supports that work and recognizes the need to ensure that people have access to a pathway to permanent, secure and affordable housing. The proposal does not solve the problem of homelessness, but it focuses on helping people while developing a long term proposal for the state. We thank you for the consideration of this proposal, and we, as a collaborative entity, will be available for you as you consider and develop your bill language further. We focus first on the purpose section because it's important to have a person centered, dignified approach to working with people who are at risk of experiencing homelessness. Words matter, and we believe we share the same goals. We hope our proposal for a purpose section captures those goals. You have our document, but we will also read our purpose statement. Chad and I are going to take turns, and we will welcome a conversation, a discussion that is whatever the desire of the committee. Before we read the purpose section, though, we want you to know that we are working on more of a proposal, including line items for an appropriation, and that will come later. Again, we'll hope at some point you'll consider our full proposal. So with the purpose of this act, we agree that we'd like to build a system in which homelessness is rare, brief, and non reoccurring by prioritizing prevention and support for those experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity. We want to center the needs and the voices of those most impacted by the housing crisis, improve outcomes by listening to those who have experienced homelessness and housing insecurity, and offer solutions that give individuals choice, dignity, and autonomy in directing what support they need. Support and resource the Agency of Commerce and Community Development and the Agency of Human Services in their respective missions to plan for and create safe, stable, affordable housing, and improve the conditions and well-being of people in Vermont, with particular focus on those at risk of experiencing homelessness. We want to ensure that housing, shelter and services are transparent, accessible, effective, efficient and data informed. We want to build a strategy to transition Vermont's homelessness response system away from an overreliance on emergency temporary shelter towards permanent housing and long term housing solutions with ongoing support. Create and resource comprehensive strategic plan with the goal of eliminating unsheltered homelessness and ensuring homelessness be rare, brief and non recurring. Efforts to move from a short term solution, such as emergency shelter and use of hotels and motels should not result in people being displaced or left without access to safe shelter. We have enough of that state. We want to improve our state and community partnership so that all people in Vermont are at risk of or experiencing homelessness, will have access to human centered, equity driven framework that recognizes homelessness as a crisis requiring an immediate response, just like public health crisis. We want to support and resource our existing emergency providers through the coordinated entry and continuum of care systems, as well as new and emerging non traditional systems of care. We want to ensure that voluntary services, supplements, including emergency and temporary shelter, housing plans, access to rental assistance or other supports to achieve permanent, secure, affordable housing that they're available to all those at risk or experiencing homelessness. We want to include a stronger focus, and you'll hear this quite a bit, around on flexible person centered approach that offers a range of voluntary supports and interventions, allowing individuals to access what works best for them when they are ready. We want to ensure that the benefits and services for Vermonters experiencing or at risk of homelessness recognize their constitutional rights and liberties, including due process protections like notice and the right to be heard, that people living with disabilities and complex needs are given equal access and accommodations to access and remain in services and programs and shelter. We want to build our state's diversified system of emergency housing options, including but not limited to a range of shelter options, including low barrier, peer centered therapeutic recovery shelters, transitional housing, shared housing arrangements, family shelters, host home models, master lease units, occasional use of hotel motels, and rapid rehousing placements, paired with a broader human centered framework that prioritizes dignity, choice, and long term stability in order to help people achieve permanent, secure and affordable housing. We think this is the only way forward. Support municipalities by providing resources and technical assistance to address the impacts of homelessness, especially unsheltered homelessness. Our outline includes language for shelter and support expansion, general assistance hotel motel benefit, reasonable accommodation, and a study to bring recommendations back to the legislature by November 2027. I'll hand it off to Chad. Thank you.

[Chad Simmons (Housing & Homelessness Alliance of Vermont)]: So this next section is around shelter support and conversion expansion. I will note that Julie Bond from Good Sam was an architect of this proposal, and so I welcome any questions that you may have afterwards for her to respond to. So in order to ensure everyone has shelter when needed and reduce the use of hotel motels, shelter stabilization and more shelter capacity is needed. Shelter capacity is particularly needed for specialized needs and care, including residential settings with nursing home level care, senior residential care, supportive single room occupancy, or SR, homeless, homeless youth, and those experiencing substance use disorder. Additionally, the current shelter system desperately needs administrative and navigation resources to adequately and successfully provide outreach, housing and health navigation, and to cover the general operations of shelters. To effectively address Vermont's current homelessness crisis and to responsibly reduce reliance on the GA Hotel Motel program, two key steps must be taken. First, to fully fund HOP to operate the existing shelter system, stabilizing an underfunded shelter system while improving partner coordination and case management. I think you heard a number of witnesses testify that this had been the last week. Establish a five year annual investment in need specific housing or convertible shelters to enable hotel motel divestment. Vermont cannot build its way out of the motel program by endlessly expanding hotel shelters. The long term solution requires scaling publicly supported need specific housing and improving data collection to better understand the regional needs. The permanent supportive housing models require to serve individuals experiencing homelessness who also have complex co occurring needs. A five year annual investment would support the expansion of existing permanent supportive housing and development of convertible shelter projects. These funds should be administered through VHCV, who I know you all will be hearing from this afternoon, or another appropriate entity and awarded to regions, municipalities, and communities, shelter operators and supportive service providers, community agencies, and development partners. The shelter stabilization and convertible shelter expansion work together to stabilize the existing system while building a realistic long term pathway away from motel use. Principles that guide this two part proposal are the problem, beds removed does not mean people are gone. A one to one replacement. Housing must address need. And the bridge, shelter that transforms and not traps. So convertible shelter projects. Begin the operation as emergency non congregate shelters, allowing the state to add capacity quickly and reduce motel use. Be designed with the, from the onset with a clear redevelopment plan to convert into permanent supportive housing with a defined defined timeframe. Include identified operating partners, clinicians, and specialty providers aligned with the populations to be served post conversion. In some cases, the original shelter operator may continue operations. In others, responsibility would transition to more appropriate specialty providers once conversion occurs. This approach acknowledges current urgency while avoiding the creation of permanent shelter infrastructure that cannot evolve. Why the convertible shelter approach works? Creating an annual investment in shelter capacity designed for conversion accomplishes several critical goals. It allows the state to begin reducing motel use in a one to one ratio by bringing shelter beds online more quickly than traditional development allows. It leverages currently relaxed zoning and particular and particularly downtown citing opportunities for emergency shelter use. I know that question came up in previous testimony around, zoning in downtown siting. Prevents the creation of stick stranded shelter infrastructure by ensuring conversion into permanent supportive housing with appropriate clinical and service operators, gives legislators and agencies a clear, immediate pathway to reduce motel reliance while longer term systems are built, and aligns with the proven approaches that have successfully reduced homelessness through balanced investments in shelter and permanent supportive housing. For

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: the general assistance hotel motel benefit, any hotel or motel that wants to participate in General Assistance, if meets the requirements, will be available as an option for placement. Municipalities where hotelmotels are participating in GA are eligible for funding. No caps on overall day and room limits or tie them to the time it takes to find housing. Rooms are available to those who need them every day of the year. Eligibility is determined solely by a person being homeless, and not having access to other shelter or housing options. People in GA emergency housing should have access to a pathway out of homelessness. To do this, the Department for Children and Families, DCF, Economic Services, ESD, must work effectively with community partners by using the homeless management information system, HMIS, shared statewide system required of all homeless providers. And then fully participate in coordinated entry to assess the needs of Vermonters in GA emergency housing and connect them to voluntary resources and services that help them get and keep housing. Ensure that services are voluntary and robust so that people experiencing homelessness have access to services and supports that work for them and are offered in places that can be accessed by our participants, by the participants.

[Chad Simmons (Housing & Homelessness Alliance of Vermont)]: So the next section is around reasonable accommodation, our Partners in Homelessness Vermont, ACLU of Vermont, supported the creation of this section. Consistent with the Americans for Disabilities Act and its implementing regulations and with the Vermont Public Accommodations Act, the department shall ensure that people with disabilities have equitable access to shelter and services. Where reasonable modifications to program rules or procedures are necessary to ensure equitable access, it should be liberally granted. Reasonable modifications may include, but not limited to, paying more than $80 per night per accessible room, extending the limit on the number of nights of assistance provided in recognition of the challenges people with disabilities may face to secure housing or extending the authorized length of stay, e. G. The requiring renewal once every ninety days other than in case of a change in circumstances. In fiscal years 2027 and 2028, the department shall ensure that all persons experiencing homelessness have equitable voluntary access to coordinated entry, housing navigation, and case management services, whether they reside in a community based shelter, GA, motelhotel, or unsheltered or in other non permanent shelter or housing. Advocacy or support by or for individuals or groups experiencing homelessness shall be protected by any felony response.

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: The next section is for an action plan and study, and I think the committee knows in 2016, there was a roadmap to end homelessness. And one of our fears of this is that if we have another study in place, it won't be acted on like the 2017 study. So we are some deep thinking and then some action based on this study.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Can I just ask a question? Because we did have a whole presentation from the ACLU about recommendations around the study. Unless this sort of differs considerably from that, I'm not sure that we need to review it again. It does not. Okay.

[Daniel Noyes (Clerk)]: It does not.

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: Thank you for clarifying. And that does conclude our purpose statement. We think, your point, Chair Wood and Representative Maguire, as you considered alternatives in your opening statement, that we think this purpose statement is translatable and transferable to other acts and other legislation. This is what we believe as a

[Chad Simmons (Housing & Homelessness Alliance of Vermont)]: community of organizations. Yeah, we encourage thoughtful consideration for these proposals.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: And what I see you recommending is sort of like thinking about sort of a foundational approach that values the personhood of the individual of each person and their household, and looks at this both from that lens, but also from a systemic capacity issue. Looking at as here we are today, we need to transition to a place where we want to be better. And that desired state is still out there a bit, but we want it to be informed by a study where the partners come together, all of the interested folks come together and agree to further action steps, I guess, essentially is what I would say. Thank you. Okay, let's open it up for questions from committee members. Go ahead, Representative Bishop, and then Representative Maguire.

[Doug Bishop (Member)]: I guess my question would be one that's coming from, I think, trying to answer the questions that may come from critics of this approach and the emphasis on the voluntary nature of participation in programs. And we talk at times about how sometimes the current system has caused some people to be stuck, if you will, whether that's in the hotels or otherwise. Can you share why you think the voluntary approach is one that will ultimately succeed and not cause people to become stuck? I think the voluntary approach succeeds right now. I think we're living in an underfunded system.

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: So when you're able to not have case managers have 50 to 60 people on their case management load, then you can do a lot more work with people, and I think what we find, and I'm sure the other shelter providers and CAP agencies will agree, is that once you start requiring something, there automatically becomes a wall. When you start to engage people with many different options, which I think there's a lot of options at five ninety four, and we agree on that, and there's options here, then you start to open the door for people to come in. And once they come in voluntarily, you will see progress go much further. This is rooted not just in a principle of voluntary, this is rooted in practice. This is rooted in people being so overworked. This is rooted in so many people being left outside that once you do this, and we know, we wouldn't just say voluntary without being deeply rooted in what we need as organizations doing this work and practice every day. And we have cure plans with everybody that comes in, we meet them where they're at, and we work them through. And I think it's what we've been doing right now is living in a system that's been not diversified enough and underfunded, and that's where the challenge has been.

[Brenda Steady (Member)]: Thank you.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Senator Maguire?

[Eric Maguire (Member)]: Yeah, no, thank you for all this. Again, as we discussed previously, you know, Wardys, we're all on the same page in regards to the stimulatory approach to the suboptimal care. But when you mentioned the one to one replacement, are you speaking of strictly a shelter replacement from a hotel placement? So we draw it on on a hotel placement, and that's an automatically shelter placement? Or are you speaking in regards to a voucher for rapid rehousing or a preventative voucher in this case or a retentative type measure? Think that's where Great question.

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: I think we are in a crisis right now. So unfortunately, shelter build out seems to be a little bit easier, and it's not easy, than finding housing for people. So when we're talking about a one to one replacement, we are all very concerned about the hotel program. We want it to diminish as well, and just be used as a backstop. But once we start to reduce hotels, people are going to come out to a flooded shelter system, and they're not going to get a place, and they're going to live on the streets. So really, we're talking about shelters as appropriate options until we have the housing, diversified housing we can get in the vouchers, which are limited to get people. And so it's more about one to one shelter piece, because we just don't have the housing.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Yeah. I mean, I was Go ahead. I was just gonna ask, if you don't mind if you don't mind me asking Julie a question related to that. What what I was reading in the one to one was conversion of existing or existing hotels as shelter, not as shelters per se. Know Alternative. Yeah. Providing more supportive services. I'm trying to not, you know what I'm saying?

[Alex Campbell (ACLU of Vermont)]: Is that what you're meaning in

[Julie Bond (Good Samaritan Haven)]: the one to one? When to reduce the use of the motel system in general and whatever the percentage of reduction of beds to whittle that program down, that reduces beds period. And so it's not necessarily to convert a hotel unless that motel has an interest to convert it that way. It's more about creating the response to the whittling down of the motel system So it's not just a conversion of motels, it's not necessarily appropriate in certain circumstances. There's more appropriate things for permanent supportive housing to address very, very particular needs of those we're seeing in motels or in shelter and drinks to be a better student fit for them.

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Representative Cole? And just to add on to

[Esme Cole (Member)]: that too, so like one to one, it's not necessarily like a cot in a gymnasium. I think sometimes when people think of shelter and they think of like, that'll count. So permanent supportive housing is exactly the term that I think needs to be, because if we don't clarify, if we get specific, I'm concerned that that could slip into class as well. How is somebody going to go through a major life transition if they're starting from a cut and

[Chad Simmons (Housing & Homelessness Alliance of Vermont)]: not in a congregate situation? Yeah, we did really want to specify and not in a congregate. Again, it's that conversion, so avoiding that.

[Anne B. Donahue (Ranking Member)]: Representative Donahue? Just two thoughts. The first on that one, I really think that we should eliminate the use of the word shelter when we're talking about the kind of programs we're talking about that are supposed to get some supports that are not supposed to be a cot in it, because it really confuses public perception. It confuses legislators who are not deep into But that's a bit of an aside. I do want to comment on, I don't remember ever hearing from anyone else the concept of convertible shelters, I just think that's a really strong concept because it avoids, first of all, the cost of creating something else and leftover. But also, it's just a real logical efficiency and money saving around it and moves where we want to go. Anyway, I like that concept very much.

[Eric Maguire (Member)]: Could I That's respond to literally the evidence based design within the continuum of care that's acknowledged by the National Alliance to End Homelessness Service Enriched Interim Options. It aligns with everything that Dragon is saying. It aligns with some of the principles that we are looking to move forward in expanding and getting the necessary resources into this continual carry on. Thank you for bringing that up.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: What the part that I'm so I like the approach too, I guess that was my question to you, Julie. I was trying to figure out, like, what are those things?

[Julie Bond (Good Samaritan Haven)]: What are those

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: things? Yeah. Mean, what does a yeah. Like, what does a convertible shelter look like? That's what I was just looking

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: at. Yeah. I mean,

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: is it is it I don't know. Is it a place I on a the very Montpelier Road that was a motel that's now senior room occupancy, but it's gets services. It's a transitional housing kind of situation.

[Julie Bond (Good Samaritan Haven)]: Well, that's not so that's still a shelter. One of our shelters in Sprankton Haven, and it's a general population shelter, so it doesn't have any particular use. So I think there's a need to try to adjust two things in the problem that we're all facing with this crisis is that there's an interest to reduce the motel system. And there's a need to address the complex care of the people that are in the motels and in the shelters and outside. So those are the two big issues. And so if we're gonna reduce this without increasing this, we have those who are unsheltered outdoors. So that's what we're seeing. And so if we can, and this takes a little bit of time, it can't be like, you know, in two weeks we can do this, but like, we want a percentage of decrease in the motel system, bed to bed. Are there projects that are in pre development, are interested, they're in full vision around the state, different communities do it different ways, but you can have a shelter created that can bring in your general population immediately from the motels. And then at the same time you're creating that, you're bringing in the partners who are experts in the clinical needs, the developmental needs, the things that are not served right now in shelters. The real need, like the mental health care, the medical needs, the elders that are experiencing dementia in the shelters, you can create plans for these spaces to be then focal points for that type of care. So over time they become that and they become a permanent supportive environment, not a ninety day shelter. Housing entity. They're still publicly funded. That needs to happen because they can't do So there's a lot of that that I think could be preplanned. That takes effort, right?

[Alex Campbell (ACLU of Vermont)]: It takes on all of

[Julie Bond (Good Samaritan Haven)]: our partnerships around the state, but that's what we're looking to do,

[Alex Campbell (ACLU of Vermont)]: I think, in all of these needs and wants.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Other questions for these two witnesses or other sidebar witnesses? Go ahead, Representative Bishop.

[Doug Bishop (Member)]: Clarify the vision in my head for these convertible shelters or ones that are serving particular audiences or sets of individuals, would they be staffed 20 fourseven or is it staffed nine to five with supports? Is there a particular vision for that aspect?

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: Julie said it really well. I'll give an example. You've both been to the Champlain Inn. So if we're thoughtful, like Julie is saying, about developing new shelters with efficiency in the long term view, could get people in right away. And then as our homelessness challenge crisis diminishes, we can convert them to permanent supportive housing. The Champlain Place shelter could be permanent supportive housing, that is typically based on the idea would be Medicaid reimbursement for the services. And I think, you know, we would be looking for 20 fourseven. That's a discussion, but 20 fourseven, because we are talking about people with really complex needs in those shelters. But then people always think about shelters as temporary. Wonder of this is like, no, this is permanent supportive housing in infinitude, right? It goes on forever. So that's the great thing about it, and then people get their own place to stay with support services.

[Chad Simmons (Housing & Homelessness Alliance of Vermont)]: I know Polly and Gus from BHCB will be in afternoon and can speak to some of the examples, Paul just talked about, of the nonprofits, the CAPS, other service providers have seen successfully done throughout the state. And I would just be remiss. Like, this is kind of what we were talking about last week, little bit about this idea of investing in the system with the thought of moving us towards a continue throughout that continuum so that we're investing in long term support of housing.

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: And it helps the housing goal, right? Because this is permanent housing, so it helps our collective housing goal.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: What's right through my head is that it's permanent supportive housing, but you don't necessarily stay there permanently.

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: Well, everybody will always have a choice. And it's more vouchers become available, and people can succeed and get the services they need and become more stable, they could move out if there are other housing options, including housing vouchers that they would need. So it is a good model for getting people stabilized. It's also a model we fed somebody at the Champlain place two years, because nobody will take this person chronic medical co occurring deep mental health condition. So for that person, permanent supportive housing might be many years. Right, but that's not a convertible shelter. That could, no, what we're saying, it could be-

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: That's what this is. Getting

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: from you. Imagine, right? Like, we're back in 2017, and Vermont has the second lowest rate of homelessness, which we did in 2017. Now we have the fourth highest. But imagine we get back to there, and then we're able to convert some of these shelters like the Champlain Place, that would be our dream, our staff's dream, to convert it to permanent supportive housing.

[Anne B. Donahue (Ranking Member)]: Would it be somebody who wouldn't necessarily be able to, live totally independently, even

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: with a landlord, a private landlord.

[Anne B. Donahue (Ranking Member)]: This would be their permanent home, Well, right, by the and supported by the services, yeah.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Other questions? I'm going to move to a couple of questions about reasonable accommodation now. I think part of what I've struggled with is interpretation about what reasonable accommodation means when it comes to housing or access to shelter. And well, we've seen challenges to that time and time again. And for the most part, the department loses. And they don't I'm not understanding and I guess I'm not asking you to define it for them, because they can come define it themselves, but what they believe reasonable accommodation means. But what you're describing here, being consistent with the Americans with Disabilities Act, relates to the difficulty somebody, because of their disability, might have in securing permanent housing and or permanent supportive housing if they need that. And an accommodation, what I'm inferring from what you're saying here could be actually a variety of different things. You give three or four examples here, but those might not be the only examples. But you're saying on account of their disability, they should have essentially a more flexible pathway, if you will, to permanent housing than maybe the general population would have.

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: I think what we're struggling with as health providers and community action agencies that we're working within a system with people, some people, many people, with extremely complex medical, mental health co occurring And it is a struggle for our staff who are not mental health professionals or nurses to work with many of the people that we have. So it's not just about the structure Accessibility is super important. It is about how do we integrate those needed services for people. Otherwise, we're going to keep going down this road with so many people on our caseload, I like the term caseload, and so many people with extremely high needs that we're not able to care for. So I see it in both the structure and the service provision. Go ahead, Thank

[Golrang "Rey" Garofano (Vice Chair)]: you both for the information. I'm just curious, and this might be a bigger question, but is there a way through the coordinated entry system to know what percentage of the total number that's on the coordinated entry list has these super complex means, right? Like when you're thinking about there is a certain population that is experiencing homelessness that with a little bit of assistance and the availability of the right housing, would need a lot of these supports. I'm just trying to quantify that big, huge number. What are we, like 4,500 now on CE? So what is the percent? Do we know that?

[Chad Simmons (Housing & Homelessness Alliance of Vermont)]: So, Reverend Lam, you asked this question last week, and I my team thought it would be a similar answer to pull together. And so I'm asking my team to gather that data to look at what we can actually tell in terms of people who, because they voluntarily, as part of the vulnerability assessment, I believe, and you might have some more information and others around the room might have some more information, but they voluntarily share what conditions are they experiencing in that moment. So right now, I'm trying to figure out how can we tell you that story of what folks' responses are, because I haven't been able to find out yet in my research.

[Golrang "Rey" Garofano (Vice Chair)]: I'm wondering if that's something potentially if we worked up on a research study, right? Is that something that Because I'm kind of thinking about the hierarchy of needs, right? Like, the most resources are going go to that population that has the most extreme needs, but what are the numbers we're talking about? And I know that's not an easy thing to get to.

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: We do have some data, as Chad said. It is somewhat limited based on a self report. We have a vulnerability assessment that prioritizes people who are most in need, but it is not complete data. Then there's many people who are unsheltered that are not, like we can go to our community resource center in Burlington and a lot of, it's hard to get people to do the coordinated entry assessments. So it's incomplete for some shelter.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: I mean, think we've heard testimony several times that that's an underestimation or underrepresentation of the people who are actually homeless. Since you brought up coordinated entry. So one of the things that perplexes me, honestly, is the presence of two systems in the state. And I learned this through some of the research that Representative Maguire has done, that other states actually utilize it more potentially effectively, for instance, by inclusion of a service plan within coordinated entry because that's apparently a module that could be there or something. What I'm trying to get at when I'm thinking about sort of the integration, you You know, all are familiar with presentation that we had from the Agency of Human Services last week around oh, was it last week? Might have been the week before now. I'm not sure. Around the different roles that everybody in the agency human services has around trying to come to the table and sort of the concept of, we talk about service coordination and case management a lot and how that's sort of integral to the success. We had Tom here from Southeastern Western, sort of in between Southeastern and Western Vermont, London Dairy, kind of in a weird spot, describe the intense effort it takes in order to move from somebody who was placed at a hotel to get them into housing or to get them into those supportive services. And I'm just trying to think that if we have a system that everybody agrees to use, including those other departments and their community partners, so designated agencies, like Area Agencies on Aging, if you have somebody who's homeless or somebody who's in a hotel or somebody who's in a shelter, somebody who needs access to permanent housing, right now, there could be 20 different entities out there minimum that have different notions of what a service plan is. And an individual could literally have five, six, seven different organizations that they're dealing with. Who is their real service coordinator? Who is their person that they can go to for any question that they have? And how does that person easily understand what other departments are doing on behalf of that person? And it's not an easy nut to crack, I have to say. I've around human services for a long time and it's a perennial question. It's not an easy question. I realize that. But I'm just trying to figure out, do we have tools that exist that can help move us closer to that. So if we had the department using the same data system that providers use, if we had all the providers in one system, not in two different systems, that collect slightly different elements of the dataset that's out there. If we utilize that system to also have the service plan so that people would know what services are being authorized for an individual or know that, okay, this person is discharged and they're now on choices for care or they're now on a DD waiver or they 've now moved into mental health residential. We're being asked right now to invest tens of millions of dollars in a housing proposal that is pretty general, honestly. It doesn't really tell us exactly what we're getting or what we hope to get. And I don't see it being backed up by a system that can help us with understanding what that investment might yield. So I'm just interested in any thoughts that you might have. I know that people, you know, in both of the coordinated entry systems have, tried to work together to make sure they're collecting the same data elements. And I know that there would be turf issues, and I know that there would be fears about loss of something or other resources.

[Jubilee McGill (Member)]: I'm

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: having a hard time really figuring out other than this is the way it's always been done, why we're doing it this way. And we have somebody from Chittenden County, we have somebody from the Balance of Sight.

[Golrang "Rey" Garofano (Vice Chair)]: Yeah, maybe ask a question that might provide some helpful frame. Absolutely.

[Erin Jacobson (Chief of Staff to the Mayor of Burlington)]: You all

[Golrang "Rey" Garofano (Vice Chair)]: my understanding I've worked in each of my us in its various forms. Think the third service model there is. There's referral systems in there. So could you guys just talk about the capabilities? And right now, we've worked out the differences. There isn't different data being collected between the two COCs. That's all figured out. I think the big data is bringing the state agencies in, which we've received testimony that it's too hard. But so could you just talk a little bit about the capabilities of Clarity if we were? Because I do know other states, Dale and Diva, they enter right into, and it is the system.

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: I will start and then I think you should maybe get a coordinated entry expert in. I'll tell you what I do know. So we do have two systems, obviously. Think the idea of service plan. So once we do the vulnerability assessment, the assessment of the Coordinated Entry Committee meets, they go through it, they look at the kind of score of the vulnerability. Domestic violence is a separate thing, and they've got their own process. But then it does get entered into the individual organization system, and there is a referral component. For that referral component to be powerful, all entities have to want to be involved, like, you know, recovery and mental health and substance use. So that's important. I do think, and I know the state has been trying to work on having them be involved in this, and I think that will be another powerful tool. I know the two systems tried to come together at one point. We are a small state. You know, I'd encourage this committee to really explore that to see what it means. Then to build out, you know, just speaking personally, a robust service plan is, I think, a great idea. We would need releases of information with a lot of different people, and maybe that's okay, but that's something that needs to be explored. I think it's an interesting idea, Chittenden. I don't

[Chad Simmons (Housing & Homelessness Alliance of Vermont)]: have much more to add on that. Think Paul did a good job. My lack of knowledge of direct use of coordinated entry is limited. I think there's other partners around the table that might be able to speak to it more succinctly than I.

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: Yeah. Go ahead. I see.

[Eric Maguire (Member)]: Yeah. That was would say, versus going through the training of the HMI. But what was interesting with that is I'm only able to access the statewide piece I cannot access to their counties, which seems to be rather how we know who's going where, who's going where. So I think it is important to continue get all clarified for the benefit of those that were served.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Yeah. I'm not sure it's clarification that we need. I think it's because No, it not.

[Eric Maguire (Member)]: Sounds like the fidelity of it needs to be

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Well, I think to AHS credit, I think that they I think you just said this, Paul, that they're trying to figure out how to get other departments and the community partners in those departments to participate. And I think that it's one of the things maybe we can help out with by making it a requirement for people who are, if they're serving them and they're currently receiving homelessness services in some fashion through things that are laid out in this bill. Yeah. So I'm just checking in with Julie to make sure you because you're behind me. I just want to make sure you don't have anything to say.

[Jubilee McGill (Member)]: Was there anything?

[Alex Campbell (ACLU of Vermont)]: Yeah, I was just gonna add about coordinated entry.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Just because you haven't spoken before, just say anything.

[Alex Campbell (ACLU of Vermont)]: Was just gonna add about coordinated entry. We are not in the HMI system and we can't do coordinated entry. But what we do is we, and one issue area that we're, I think, working through is that people get removed from the coordinated entry system. Oftentimes they're outside, but they aren't able to participate the same way. And if they move between those two districts, then they have to start over again. Or even if they just move within a district, the balance of state, right now the department is creating a situation where they have to start over again. And so that's a bit of a problem. But that said, I think that the partners work really closely together. So for those of us that are not in the HMIS system, we are able to really reach out to, like just the other day, I reached out to Alison and said, I need some help. We have a client who's willing to get into coordinated entry and we need some support around it. And then they're able to get us the information we need from the coordinated entry system because we are considered a housing partner. And so that is something that, but I think part of it is the system, but part of it is the teamwork approach, which we've done very closely with Sam, for example, and with Brock and Rutland, and that one on one conversation is how you're really going to identify where the complex needs are and what people need to get out of that system. Some of it will happen in data, but a lot of it is gonna happen from drawing that conversation down because some people are very uncomfortable revealing those things. I think that there's a critical need for the system to be a little more cohesive, but I also think there's a critical need for those one on one team meetings to happen about specific clients. And we cannot leave that for that.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: No, I think the one thing that hopefully we all know is that relationships drive positive change and response to critical situations. When there's trust that's been developed, there's more likely to be a reaction and participation and things that are helpful. I'm just trying to figure out, though, from a little bit higher viewpoint in terms of thinking about systems. I'm just trying to think sometimes logic thinking is not helpful, and sometimes it is. But I'm just trying to think logically that if you have a complex person and you've got five different organizations involved in the care and the planning and trying to figure out where to go next steps and working on relationships with the person, And different people are spending a lot of time doing that. And that all may be absolutely necessary in order to move a person who's got complex needs into more stable situation that's going to help them. Wouldn't it be better if you were all communicating in one system?

[Alex Campbell (ACLU of Vermont)]: Yes, and I wanted to add that there's also cost involved in HMIS.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: I understand that. There would need to be resources appropriated to that.

[Julie Bond (Good Samaritan Haven)]: Clarifications currently the way we experience our organizations that the coordinated entry system is really housing based in terms of, yes, you share your vulnerabilities when you do this intake as a person. It tells you how vulnerable you are and how quickly you might get to the top of a list for housing. It doesn't address the needs to take care of your root causes and That's complexities, currently outside of that. But it could, but it is not. It's not there, now I know. Good. That beneficial to give a message for I don't know, but that's how it starts now. Yeah, just so I just wanted to-

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Yeah, no, thank you. I think, and that's what I was learning from representative Maguire and his research that in other states, they actually use it for not only the housing, but the complex needs and the social planning that happens as well. And and the we agency of human services has been really upfront about wanting to tackle this issue as an agency wide, all hands on deck kind of issue, trying to think about effective ways for that to happen in different systems right now doesn't seem like an effective way for that to happen. So this is more just like discussion at this point in time. And I appreciate none of these things, each one on their own accord, each one of these things that we've been talking about have sort of major implications. I get that. Nothing is simple. And that's why, as I started out with sort of an update about what's happening, I think I wanted to make sure that people understood that there's sort of like the current state and a transitional state where a lot of different things and a lot of different talk would need to be happening and perhaps a report. Hold on. And then a more state where we've improved, we have the results of an improved system. Yeah, go ahead. In both

[Julie Bond (Good Samaritan Haven)]: of those conversations on where the systems and the partners can converge, when you do a convertible plan, when you're in the pre development of a solution, talking with the partners, the service providers ahead of time and saying, when we get to this point, we're all in it and this is how we're

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: going to

[Julie Bond (Good Samaritan Haven)]: plug in. That's the same type of conversations we're trying to do on those systems. We already have some of those going already, like through the state and through the situation table that sometimes exists in some communities, which is working quite well. So they're external to that HMIS system at the moment. And I think through this housing solution, it will naturally integrate those partnerships and services providing of expertise for those individuals. So it's possible to do it from the outside and then in.

[Chad Simmons (Housing & Homelessness Alliance of Vermont)]: Yeah. Yeah, make a bug for the study. I think this is one of those instances where I think this is a great conversation, and I think if we bring partners together in a very intentional way, I will just be candid that one of the things that excites me about representing HIV and the many different organizations is that we can pull those folks together, and I'm actually interested in what I shared in testimony last week around holding state government accountable. And I would be coming to you all year after year and saying, how are we doing on this roadmap? How are we doing on making changes that we've identified, that folks all came together and said, this is a problem, we need to fix it, or this is working and we need to fund it more appropriately. How are we doing on that? I'm actually working on the other side of this building too to have a housing plan. I would like to have this kind of a plan be integrated with getting folks into stable, permanent housing. I think some of the suggestions you all just heard today lead to

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: that. That work, Semmes, just

[Brenda Steady (Member)]: strikes me that reading, for instance, your value statement, and I'm sure there are

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: lots of your ones around,

[Brenda Steady (Member)]: but if you could get folks to an agreement of a set of values, then it strikes me that what we're looking at next is what are the barriers that stopping us from moving forward? And I think people could list probably pretty easily quite a list of barriers that need and we could probably collectively figure out which ones are approachable in what timeline that begin to actually start dealing with those. But so long as we're asking people to look at this situation and just describe what they could do to fix it, we've got so many little small efforts. So I really applaud the notion of getting everyone in a room and maybe the study's the way to do it. I'm not experienced enough to know how. What's the best way to get it done? But it strikes me that whatever it would take to get people around the table, around a set of values and begin looking at what the barriers are to achieving those values, I think that's what motivates me and excites me in this project.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: In this committee, is sort of the most recent impactful large scale studyplan was around child care. And part of it was good, and part of it got shelved. That's essentially what happened. The governance side just got shelved, really. And then understanding what the financing would be and how much that would take to achieve long term sustainable, but that required an additional revenue source. And I honestly think that some of the things that we're talking about here require additional investment beyond what the administration is proposing. And I'm just gonna be honest. I don't see that. I don't see that happening. And I don't see that happening in a way People are trying to shrink what we put into this, not expand what we put into it. And yet, at the same time, I almost feel like there's some aspects of of the proposal that's called the housing proposal, and it's outlined in the DCF book, that is kind of trying to build a system for the number of households and people that we knew were homeless prior to the pandemic.

[Golrang "Rey" Garofano (Vice Chair)]: Back when we had the lowest number of

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: homeless people in the country. Doesn't really address the current. There are elements of it that I think are good, but it doesn't seem to have the breadth of resources to try to address what we now know is a larger problem. And I just need to say it for the record. All those people are not from out of state. Is by proving your residency is not going to reduce the problem that we have. I mean, it might be 10 people. I don't know. It's not a lot of people. Yeah, go ahead, Eric.

[Eric Maguire (Member)]: And with that, that's a great statement. But I also want to make a statement that everybody that's in the hotel and is homeless has complex needs.

[Brenda Steady (Member)]: Yeah. Correct.

[Eric Maguire (Member)]: Has substance abuse. There are many individuals that all they need is just that Yep. One little entry point to here. They are stabilized with signaling cars. And I do hear a lot of that around too. Wanna make sure that we are sharing it from all ends. Thank you, Brenda.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Yeah. So I

[Brenda Steady (Member)]: think I think that I would just like to say that, I mean, this is identified by so many people as a crisis. I mean, it's granted this state have, we have a lot of crises going on. I get that. But when price use is happening and then it can be like a flood or a fire, extraordinary means are and efforts are required. And I think just sort of taking the attitude that we grow with smaller resources, we can keep hitting at this and maybe we'll solve it. I don't think that's gonna cut it in this case. And so I think beholding the crisis mentality is important, I think, because it activates people collectively, and I think that's what's gonna make a difference here.

[Anne B. Donahue (Ranking Member)]: Anne, Just a piece of understanding the proposal that you've worked up. From the absence of the terminology more than affirmative statement, it seems like the concept we've worked with in a lot of what we've done of this most vulnerable and who's eligible or not, that you're saying, Anyone, this is for all people that we want to get this help. And that leaves a question, clearly, at least in the interim, as systems get improved, hopefully that changes, but in the interim, that means a lot more people by definition. So if there's an assumption that we don't have completely unlimited resources, how do you envision prioritizing among an increased number of people who can't be excluded based on a criteria set? I would first just like to say that CVOEO hired an emergency services director,

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: and we're about to activate four nights at the North Center with 70 plus people. We see this as an emergency, and I'd love the state to see it as an emergency because we are canning or providing CPR, I think every single night that we've activated, at least once. So we see it as an emergency. I think Julie sees it as an emergency. I think Chad does and all our partners here. So we need this to be an emergency. Representative Donahue, think if I'm hearing correctly, like we were thinking, you know, the state has 1,100 something hotel rooms or something like that. We know we're not going to get every thing we need, right? There are still a lot of people being outside. What we need to do is, I think, is consider that one to one replacement before we make any changes in the hotel system, because every time you put somebody out of a hotel, and they could be working, I totally agree. We have a number of people that are working living out of cars, we have a guy at the emergency shelter was working at Walmart. Every time we do that, it comes back into a flooded system. Yeah.

[Anne B. Donahue (Ranking Member)]: I understand all of that. But that's not I mean, what what if we're if we're proposing that we really we wanna open this up to anyone who's who's homeless, who's on the street, which is, by the way, my strong desire

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: I know exactly.

[Anne B. Donahue (Ranking Member)]: To do that. But if we do that, and we can save the crisis, and we can say we're going to add a lot of resources, but at some point we know we can't just have unlimited resources. So we've got more people and finite number of hotel rooms. I mean, even when they were all available, we had people who were in the vulnerable category who were turned away because there wasn't a bet. So, how do we work through that priority if there is an upper limit ultimately still? I'm agreeing with you.

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: I think what we're saying is that we know there'll be a limit on hotel rooms. There currently is because we have a whole bunch of people outside. What we're suggesting is that we stop the chaos of the hotel system where nobody knows when a person's in or out. The people don't know, the service providers don't know. I'd love to hear everybody else's perspective. I think for us, we're not saying raise the hotels to 3,000. We're saying you've got it at 1,100 something now. We already know that we're not going to end homelessness. We say it right here. We're going to build out a plan and we're going to live with a number of unsheltered people right now. But how do

[Anne B. Donahue (Ranking Member)]: you pick who's those people if there's no

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: They go through coordinated entry and they have a vulnerability assessment and then we work with economic services to figure out who can go in the hotel, who's in the shelter, and who's prioritized for extremely limited housing.

[Anne B. Donahue (Ranking Member)]: So in other words, it's based on the individual vulnerability assessment rather than in statute or by policy, these categories are the more vulnerable. That's the system we have now that HUD also gives us Right. Determine coordinated entry process and the assessment. Yes.

[Eric Maguire (Member)]: May I jump in right quick because that's exactly what it is. It's the equity in the resource constrained environment is coordinated entry prioritization by vulnerability and length of homes. That's a core HUD expectation designed to maximize fairness and impact while preserving

[Anne B. Donahue (Ranking Member)]: So we've never had to have It's We've never had to say we are defining only these people as That's that's we've never needed to say we're only defining these groups as eligible because, in fact, there's a built in That's right. Vulnerability. Yes. Helps clarify it tremendously. Thank you.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Yeah. Except for we have defined. That's what

[Anne B. Donahue (Ranking Member)]: But I was what I'm hearing is, but we haven't needed to if we were willing to let that system do it. Because then if we have so many rooms, it's going to be not based on who meets that piece of statute that says you have somebody who is this age and so forth, but instead it's going

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: to be based on the HUD criteria of how vulnerable is your family or your household. I get that at the community level. But right now, it's the state determining who goes into a hotel or doesn't. That's not the criteria that they use.

[Anne B. Donahue (Ranking Member)]: Right, and what I'm saying is it sounds like we shouldn't be using state criteria. We should be using the system that is individualized. And part

[Golrang "Rey" Garofano (Vice Chair)]: of the challenge is because we've never had a statewide plan that kind of funnels every ensures everyone is funneled through coordinated entry. Right. Except right. Mean, we're sort

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: of having committee discussion now and we have another witness coming on. But I think I need to caution because it is you can't get it would be very difficult to have somebody complete coordinated entry before they had access to an emergency shelter over their head because it's not possible. It's a very long And you have to develop a relationship with the individual, and it's a process. So I just need to caution about that. And it is also one of the reasons why I think that this needs to be all part of one system and managed in one place in the department, not in multiple places in the department, because it needs to be part of a continuum and not have different decision makers.

[Anne B. Donahue (Ranking Member)]: Yeah, in my plan, you could do it. Because while those people were getting to that coordinated entry place and getting to that placement, would not be on the street. Yeah. Have a place. They would have the ability to not be on the street, the choice to not be on the street. Even if it was a lousy choice, it would still not be the street.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: That's right. You have some final remarks. I was just gonna ask if the witnesses had any final remarks because we do have another witness waiting.

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: Just say what's I I understand your I think you made a great point on the hotel, and I know it's complicated. What's not helpful is you're in one day, you're out the next day, you're in, you're out, you're in, you're out. That's difficult. What we would love to do is come back with a more built up plan and some line items.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Continual feedback is always welcome. I didn't say at the outset, but I am hoping we have actually a set of must pass bills that we need to be working on in addition to the budget. So I'm hoping by the end of next week, we're able to vote something if we are going to reach a place where we can reach some sort of basic agreements with the agency and human services and the governor's office. Continue to work on the ideas that you've talked about here in this outline. And we will also, I'm sure our budget partners for DCF, OEO and economic services, Rep. McGill and Cole, I'm sure you'll make the case about responding and reacting to the governor's proposals in his budget there. So you'll have an opportunity to kind of come back in that context as well. Thank you both.

[Daniel Noyes (Clerk)]: Thank you

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: so much. Thank you so much. It very much. Okay, we are now going to be hearing from the mayor's office in Burlington. Welcome, Erin, as we people are sort of shifting a little bit here, so I want to make sure everybody can hear you. So wait just one second.

[Eric Maguire (Member)]: Okay.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Okay. Thank you, Erin. Thank you for being here, especially as I know you're transitioning. And so this is, I don't know, maybe one of your last duties as working in the mayor's office. But thank you for being here this afternoon. And we really wanted to focus a bit on the sort of status of things from the mayor's perspective in Burlington and know that you have been doing yeoman's work in terms of trying to provide temporary shelter for people during these cold these last couple of weeks, which apparently is gonna go into a third week now, and any feedback or reactions that you might have to the bill that's currently on our wall. So welcome this afternoon. Appreciate you being here.

[Erin Jacobson (Chief of Staff to the Mayor of Burlington)]: Great. Well, thank you for having me, Chair Wood. And, yes, this is one of my last duties as my role of chief of staff to the mayor of Burlington, but it's also one of my favorite duties. I love I love anything to do with the legislature, and so really thank you for the opportunity to be in your committee today. I'm sorry I couldn't make it in person. For the record, my name is Erin Jacobson. I am the mayor to the chief of staff in Burlington. And, yes, indeed, especially on 02/03/2026, it's true. We are experiencing the acute crisis that is homelessness in Burlington and across the state. It's not just Burlington, but it is absolutely clear to us here that this is not just a short term crisis. This is really a systems level emergency that requires the kind of work that you're doing in your committee that you have been doing. We really appreciate how dogged you've been on this issue and that you're continuing to try to find a path forward. We very much share the overarching goals, of our community providers. I was just listening to part of the testimony from, C. B. O'Leal, from Paul Dragon just now. We too share the goal of making homelessness rare, brief, and nonrecurring. We want to be able to move away from our emergency from the emergency shelter system towards long lasting permanent sheltering solutions. And at the same time, we know that we're not there yet, and that any move that the state or the region or the city is able to make towards permanent solutions will require that we continue to have the the safety net that we currently have as imperfect as it is. So I was listening carefully. I'm not going to claim to be an expert on this, but I was listening closely and with interest when Zon and others were speaking about the one the need for the one to one so that if the motel program diminishes, we don't just lose more beds. And I do believe that is important. For some context to that, for the for the current acute emergency needs we're facing right now, the mayor did convene an emergency meeting in late December. Dozens of people attended. There were service providers, city officials, and not just from Burlington, but from some of our sister cities. Law enforcement, not just from Burlington, but from sister cities, first responders, medical providers, legislators, city councilors, faith leaders. It really was the whole gamut of everybody who is trying to work together to solve this problem, big picture. But also the point of the meeting was, is there anything more we can do? It is December. We know it's not gonna get warmer out, and it hasn't. Is there anything more we can do than what we're currently doing knowing that we will not be able to meet the need? And I have to say that, unfortunately, we did not identify an easy solution. We continued to meet with folks after that emergency meeting. But, you know, for example, one thing we heard in that meeting is that we're all sharing this crisis with not really having a lot of good solutions for when people are unsheltered. We heard from a sister city police chief who said that sometimes when they're facing people in their town and they don't know how to help somebody who's unhoused and facing different crises, whether it's substance use or maybe mental health or maybe physical health needs, there's really not a lot there there, and they kind of have the no choice, no good choices list of options, which include City Hall Park in Burlington, the emergency department, or jail. Acknowledging that none of those are solutions and that no police officer, no firefighter, no emergency responder, nobody wants to be faced with the thought that that's where you take people who are in crisis having to do with being unhoused. So we did, after that meeting, continue to meet. We met with a group of faith leaders who really were very interested in trying to, stand up some additional shelter beds. We were very hopeful for a few weeks there. We then ran into the challenge of not being able to identify how we could safely staff an operation that would take place in different church facilities around the city. And that is an additional barrier to what we are facing now. It's not just the need for more beds and more permanent beds, but we just know that the needs are layered. We know we need additional housing, additional shelter capacity, more case managers, more people who can provide supportive housing for complex needs. These are all things you know, but we certainly face that in the moment of getting very close to being able to set up some additional beds and then just not being able to because of the complex needs and the complex staffing requirements that those those needs entail. I would say, in addition to that moment, this from this winter, about a year and a half ago, we did try to quantify what is the economic impact of this city's attempts to address homelessness, acknowledging that the there's no ability to quantify the human impact and the trauma that unhoused folks face or the trauma that people who are trying to help them face. But we did want to try to get a sense of what is what is the economic impact to this city? Because this was something we wanted to be able to communicate to the governor's office and then ask to please try to do something to help from the state level. Not not claiming that this was a perfectly executed data explorer exploration, but we did over the course of about a month about a year and a half ago in the fall, pull each and every single one of our departments and ask them to quantify what they think they are expending on our efforts to address unsheltered homelessness. We got responses back from nine city departments that had significant dollar expenditures attached to unaddressed homelessness. At the time, this was in the 2024, so three quarters of the way through that year, the total was $6,300,000. We projected pretty accurately that the total by the end of that year would be $8,000,000. That same year, our budget gap was about $8,000,000. The the departments with the most significant expenditures were our Department of Public Works, our Parks Department, our library, our police department, and our fire department. With the fire department, by the end of that year, spending approximately $5,000,000 on trying to address unfeltered homelessness. So this is all to say that the what it costs to address the problem when we don't have a solution coming from the state, the ex the cost just trickles down to municipalities. Or I know you've heard from UVM Medical Center and the emergency department. They are also experiencing great economic impact to folks who are unhoused showing up in the emergency room. And it's not that they don't wanna help them, but it's just that they're not the the best source to be able to provide the kind of help that people need. The quantification piece, I think, is relevant because as I heard at the end of the your conversation just now with Paul Dragon, I know this will cost the state a lot of money to to turn this around, to to get us to a place from this crisis, emergency, acute needs that we're just really never really getting on top of in Burlington to something that is going to be much more sustainable for everybody involved, for the people who've experienced homelessness, for our community, for residents and visitors. But I would just say that it the additional investment if we had if we had made this investment a decade ago, then we wouldn't be where we are right now. And I think about this with a lot of things. And I also happen to on one of my apps, I'm trying to fix my insomnia, but one morning on one on one on my sleeplessness app, this proverb popped up. And it said, the best day to plant a tree was ten years ago. The second best day is today. And I think about that all the time with housing. I know it's expensive. I know it's expensive to build housing. I know it's expensive to build shelters. If we had started this ten years ago when the study that that Paul was referencing came out, we wouldn't be a state that has the third highest homelessness in the nation. We wouldn't the city of Burlington wouldn't be expending $8,000,000 a year on, frankly, not even doing a perfect job of meeting the needs and this emergency that we're in. And we wouldn't be the only city that would be better off now. So I'm just really, really grateful that you're continuing to work on this. I know it's expensive. I know it's complicated. I wish we'd already done this ten years ago, and it's not too late to do it now. But I'm happy to take any questions, and I'm I'm really grateful to you all for continuing to work on this. It's important. Thank you.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Thank you, Erin. Appreciate that. And if you have any written comments that you wanna make sure get into the public record, if you would forward them to Lori Morris, that would be great. I have a specific question that I was hoping Paul would be still in the audience, but he had to leave. One of the creative solutions that was intended to be temporary at the time, and this happened during COVID, was the establishment of the pod, little pod community that you have there in Burlington. And I know the CBOEO operates that. I'm just wondering, do you have any comments just briefly on your thoughts in terms of city infrastructure. We would need to talk to CCOEO further about how that plays out for them on a daily basis in terms of supporting that location. But I feel like, you know, one of the things that we've heard that still that rings in my head is when we listen to people with lived experience, they oftentimes have developed relationships with people around them and the sort of this sense of community that they have with peers in their sort of circle of homelessness. And often wonder We always think about individualized approaches. But sometimes people may have a desire to want to co locate with personal space, but co locate in close proximity to folks that they've developed relationships with. And I think about I have not visited. I've seen pictures and heard testimony about it. But I'm just wondering about your thoughts about you know, that sort of pod setup that you have there in Burlington.

[Erin Jacobson (Chief of Staff to the Mayor of Burlington)]: Yeah. I do think you could talk to it's CHT who runs the pods.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Oh, CHT runs it. Okay.

[Erin Jacobson (Chief of Staff to the Mayor of Burlington)]: Alright. So you could certainly reach out to Michael Monti or other staff at CHT. From my perspective, from where I sit, and I have asked this question of a couple of city staff, in general, the pods are going well overall. There is some

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: we do

[Erin Jacobson (Chief of Staff to the Mayor of Burlington)]: hear about some behavioral issues sometimes. What I would say about the pods, and this kind of goes back also to what what I heard others testify about, the pods were supposed to be transitional. Yeah. And they've turned into a much more permanent placements because there's not necessarily enough of the permanent supportive housing that people would need next.

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Yeah.

[Erin Jacobson (Chief of Staff to the Mayor of Burlington)]: And so that's not that's not a fault of the pods, and that's not to say that then, therefore, the pods aren't working well. It's just that we need more shelter options across the continue continuum if transitional housing is going to be able to truly be transitional. Mhmm. I should also mention too that and I and I meant to say this earlier in my testimony. I know that this bill is kind of currently under construction and that you're also looking at h ninety one for possible things in that bill that that could be worked back into a new bill. I would say that one thing that the city really appreciated in h 91 was that it had direct financial support for municipalities.

[Daniel Noyes (Clerk)]: Mhmm.

[Erin Jacobson (Chief of Staff to the Mayor of Burlington)]: And I I only raised that this in conjunction to the pods because, in fact, I'm not I'm not even the expert in this city who who can answer all the homelessness questions with with a lot of data. Like Sarah Russell used she worked

[Daniel Noyes (Clerk)]: at the

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: city. She is she

[Erin Jacobson (Chief of Staff to the Mayor of Burlington)]: is phenomenal and incredible, and she and she no longer works at the city. And we are we are trying to figure out how can the city afford to hire another Sarah Russell. And we started looking through all the couch cushions for more pennies, and we ended up deciding that we need to repurpose an economic and workforce development staffer who can step up and help with some of our homelessness issues. This is all to say, then you start to get you start to feel like, well, what if we're if in the homelessness conundrum, we're also saying we need more trained staff who can staff the kinds of supports and shelters we need, and now we're taking a person from the economic development staff to deal with homelessness. You just kind of wonder about, are we really using our limited resources effectively, and how long can this go on? So all to say, I think it really does benefit everybody to have trained, capable expertise within municipalities like Burlington who are facing these complex issues so that you can well communicate with lawmakers, policymakers, but also be one of those people who can help with connecting folks services. That was another thing that Sarah did a lot of. And so she was frequently at the pods, and she was frequently somebody who could help connect folks living there with services and with other other opportunities and then could report back to us, and that could help us understand more of what was going on for our community needs. So any way that this bill can also provide some direct support to municipalities is welcome. We don't get any direct support from the state. We get pass through monies from CVOEO for our costs related to the emergency shelter, for example. Mhmm. But we're we and I'm sure we're not alone, don't get direct funding to help the city with the investments that we need to make in in addressing unsheltered homelessness.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Just walked back into the room. We were just talking about the PODS in Burlington, and I was mistaken, I realized it was CHT that has Do you work with the folks in

[Daniel Noyes (Clerk)]: the PODS at all? So, Chittenden Housing Trust operates pods and we have two employees working with their team too. Okay, so it's a collaborative.

[Anne B. Donahue (Ranking Member)]: It's a collaborative. Were

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: just talking about having heard from people with lived experience that there are some folks who would like sort of to be able to extend that sense of community with the people that they have come to know in their homelessness situations, but obviously having their own space as well. And some ability to sort of think outside of the box and thinking about maybe smaller confined communities would be something actually we hear for folks with developmental disabilities and people with mental health challenges at times that we don't do in Vermont. Mean, the pods was really one of the first times that I had seen that.

[Julie Bond (Good Samaritan Haven)]: So thank you for coming back in.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Thank you very much. We appreciate your testimony today, Erin, and best wishes to you in your next endeavor.

[Erin Jacobson (Chief of Staff to the Mayor of Burlington)]: Okay. Thank you, Cherilyn. Thanks for having me.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Alrighty. Yes. Okay, next we're going to hear from Kate Logan in her role as director of the Vermont Coalition of Runaway Youth and Homeless Youth Programs. So welcome. Thank you. First,

[Kate Logan (Director, Vermont Coalition of Runaway & Homeless Youth Programs)]: Kate Logan, Director of the Vermont Coalition of Runaway and Homeless Youth Programs. So first I'd like to thank Chair Wood, Vice Chair Garofano, Ranking Member Donahue, and all the members of the House Committee on Human Services for hearing my testimony today. I serve as the director of the Vermont Coalition of Runaway and Homeless Youth Programs, or VCRIP. In my role, I also serve as the youth representative on the Balance of State Continuum of Care Board of Directors, as well as a co chair of the statewide committee to end youth homelessness, a subcommittee of both the Chittenden County Homelessness Alliance and the Balance of State COC, which is a new table of over 25 and growing youth serving agencies across the state. At eight project sites outside of Chittenden County, BCrip partner agencies offer five federally funded programs providing shelter, housing, and services to homeless youth aged 12 to 24 years old. Today, I offer testimony on H594 in order to advocate for an approach to homeless response that adequately reflects the preventive nature of housing and services for youth, for unaccompanied homeless youth and that, and young adults. In fact, think that understanding youth homelessness is foundational to understanding why a housing first and trauma informed model for homeless response is essential to successfully ending homelessness in Vermont. But first, I'd like to introduce you a little bit to the Vermont Coalition of Runaway and Homeless Youth Programs and the work that we do every year to address the increasing incidence agency within Chittenden County. So I represent Burlington, but I, in my professional life, serve everywhere outside of Chittenden County. We serve unaccompanied experiencing housing instability and homelessness from ages 12 to 24 years old. Our funding is provided by the US Department of Health and Human Services and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. We serve two populations of unaccompanied homeless youth, twelve to seventeen year olds and eighteen to twenty four year olds. In other words, the homeless youth response system in Vermont is directed entirely outside of state government, but is integrated into our federally mandated and funded continuum of care in the state. Does your organization or

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: coalition receive funding through the HOT program or any other DRIP doesn't. But next sentence.

[Kate Logan (Director, Vermont Coalition of Runaway & Homeless Youth Programs)]: Other agencies in our coalition also receive state funding for other youth serving programming like COMPASS, YDP, YIT, and Barge, while also using HOP program resources tailored to the needs of young adults. And I'll say a little bit more about the HOP relationship in a moment. So VCRIP, a little bit more background. VCRIP was founded over forty years ago by a group small rural youth services agencies who knew that working together would allow them to serve their communities more effectively and efficiently. Vermont's homeless response system was built to be responsive to our rural geography, defined by the challenges of serving a population that predominantly lives in scattered towns and communities throughout the state. Our cold winters, our muddy springs, and our extensive network of forested lands and dirt roads create a service environment that requires a community level response to housing instability. So that's how BCRIP was founded in response to this approach. We have providers in every corner of the state. If we had more funding, we'd have more representation of every area. We have a question. Yes. Oh, can you tell me what VCRIP is? VCRIP is the Vermont Coalition of Runaway and Homeless Youth Programs.

[Daniel Noyes (Clerk)]: Okay. Okay,

[Kate Logan (Director, Vermont Coalition of Runaway & Homeless Youth Programs)]: thanks. Much easier to say VCRIP, but it's completely impossible to understand what it means.

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Thank you.

[Kate Logan (Director, Vermont Coalition of Runaway & Homeless Youth Programs)]: Yes, of course. Feel free to ask me to repeat

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: those many I Okay, great.

[Kate Logan (Director, Vermont Coalition of Runaway & Homeless Youth Programs)]: So in order to ensure uniform service provision to homeless youth throughout Vermont, service providers united under the banner of Btrip to learn, train, and serve together. So this approach includes submission of competitive applications that include multiple members of the coalition in order to allocate resources as widely as possible, ensuring that core services exist in as many regions of the state as funding allows. Elevate You Services, which is located in Barrie, Vermont, has acted as the fiscal agent for BCrib, since our inception in 1891 1981, and continues to be our home and the recipient for all BCRIP funding, including for this proposal. So I direct the funds, but BCRIP is not a separate agency on its own. And Elevate Youth Services also houses the Youth Development Program and the Youth in Transition Program to other state funded statewide programs that operate on a coalition model as well. DHHS provides funding for our basic center program through which our partner agencies provide emergency shelter to 12 to 17 year olds who are not systems involved. So rather than shelter youth in costly physical shelter sites, the Basic Center Program provides shelter through either host home families or emergency housing provided by family and friends that's brokered by case managers that are partner agencies. And then either shelter option is offered only with the agreement of the unaccompanied youth's parent or guardian. Our goal is to divert youth from systems involvement, intervening at the first instance of unaccompanied homelessness, which is generally a result of family conflict or family instability at home caused by economic or health crises. According to the Vermont Agency of Education, we have seen reported unaccompanied youth homelessness increase 100% in the last five years, while the state has dedicated no resources. And the federal government has maintained level funding for prevention oriented programs like ours. HUD provides funding for our four programs that offer housing and services to 18 to 24 year olds experiencing risk of homelessness. BCRIPS response model begins by connecting homeless or at risk youth with housing navigators at each of our partner agencies. You've likely heard of coordinated entry. We've already talked about it a bit today. True. We've actually heard about coordinated entry. Youth enrolled in our HUD funded projects come to our housing navigation program, sometimes before they've already been entered in, sometimes before they've been entered into coordinated entry. Or sometimes their housing navigator helps them get enrolled into coordinated entry. But at some point, every youth who enters our housing navigation program ends up in the coordinated entry queue and prioritized for housing services. So in our local housing coalition areas where BCRIP agencies are active, which again, is just totally dependent on funding. A separate youth priority list is maintained and referrals are generally made to providers who are equipped to meet the specific developmental needs of young adults. Currently, have the capacity to provide medium term housing to 46 youth households annually, providing from twenty four to forty eight months of housing assistance and up to five total years of wraparound services. Case managers support youth in finding and maintaining permanent housing, receiving job training, getting their health care, including mental health care, and developing the fundamental life skills that they need to, live independently. We also offer short term emergency housing assistance for another 12 youth households annually, youth who can generally remain housed on their own income with some support in resolving a housing emergency. Our housing assistance programs meet approximately 15% of the statewide annual need for homeless youth. Our housing navigators are also equipped to connect youth with additional housing options beyond what we can offer. And we provide approximately 50 additional youth with these services annually. In total, we're able to meet approximately one third of the statewide need every year. The wait lists are long across the state. Again, in this age group, 18 to 24 year old youth homelessness has increased at the pace of the state's increase of homelessness. These are all Vermonters. They're certainly not coming from outside of the state. And the rate of homelessness is escalating primarily due to increased economic pressure. It's pretty simple, actually. And we don't foresee any increases in federal funding, that would help us to better meet this need with youth informed housing services. Additionally, nearly half of our partner agencies have also begun to provide shelter for homeless young adults in congregate, HOT funded emergency apartments that have opened in just the last two years, now providing 24 shelter beds for young adults who are often simultaneously enrolled in our housing navigation program, so, where they get to individually plan their exit from shelter and plan for achieving housing stability. This is a system that's working. Its scale is too small, but it's working. We have a nearly one hundred percent success rate in exiting youth to permanent housing and are then able to offer up to a year of ongoing services after a youth has exited the homeless response system. So we're proud of the work that we do and wish we could do more. So that's a snapshot of the programming that we offer. And now I'm going turn to a better picture of homeless youth and the relationship of youth homelessness to chronic homelessness, which I think five ninety four is primarily concerned with is interrupting the adult cycle of homelessness. So around fifty percent of homeless adults first experienced homelessness before the age of 25 years old. Half prior to the age of 18 and half between the ages of 18 and 24. If we as a state were to immediately address a young person's first experience with homelessness with a full range of services, we would interrupt often intergenerational cycles of poverty and abuse that lead to lifelong struggles with housing stability. Approximately half of those who experience chronic homelessness fall into this category. One hundred percent of homeless youth between the ages of 12 and 24 report at least one adverse childhood experience, and most report several, with most homeless youth experiencing emotional neglect, emotional abuse, and or physical abuse in their home. It is crucial that the state partner with B. C. R. P. And Spectrum across the balance of state COC and the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance to provide the full range of intensive and appropriate supportive services at this stage of a person's life. In the long run, the personal and public cost of not providing a full response to youth homelessness is a mistake. It's just a it's a policy error. So now I wanna specifically respond to h five ninety four. I just have a couple points. I'd repeat the majority of the feedback provided by others. And I'd offer two specific pieces of feedback that are particularly relevant for homeless youth. First, as a representative for a network of youth serving providers, age five ninety four's failure to prioritize unaccompanied homeless youth response fails to acknowledge the preventive nature of an immediate and intensive response to youth homelessness. Same thing in the conversation around GA emergency housing. Youth were the first to go, unless they are a parenting youth, which thankful for that inclusion. But yeah, that removed hundreds of shelter beds available for 18 to 24 year olds that could have interrupted that youth's first experience of homelessness. Again, we've added 24 shelter beds through HOT funding to the youth homeless response system over the last two years, thanks to additional HOT funding becoming available. But there are 300 youth experiencing homelessness in Vermont every year right now. So that is a drop in the bucket. And youth aren't it's not appropriate to shelter eighteen to twenty four year olds in an emergency shelter for adults. These are young adults. Their frontal cortexes aren't fully formed yet. We need a different service model for eighteen to twenty four year olds, and especially for 18 year olds. Can I just ask a quick question? When

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: I think about the age ranges that you serve from 12 to 24, essentially was it 12 at the young end? Yeah How youth I'm trying to envision a 12 year old figuring out how to find you. Well,

[Kate Logan (Director, Vermont Coalition of Runaway & Homeless Youth Programs)]: we got a little bit more money from the federal government this year to do more work. Didn't provide more funding for shelter, but did provide funding for us to do street outreach. But we're required to do outreach work. All of our basic center program case managers have relationships with every McKinney Vento liaison in the school systems. They do outreach at community events, tabling. We're going to take advantage of this additional federal funding that we were given this year to develop a more robust outreach program in communities. Grateful for that. I will say though, the federal funding has remained level. We used to be able to fund nine agencies around the state to provide the basic center program, and now we can only afford to provide three. So we only cover the Eastern side of the state with our basic center program, unfortunately. And Spectrum has very limited programming for this age. It is often parents making referrals, school counselors, teachers, and at one of our agencies, the youth themselves, because they've done a really good job of outreach and they built their program into a peer outreach program that they have. That's Interxion down in Windham County. Yeah, eventually find their way. But yeah, also most of the programs also are funded by COMPASS, so that prevention and counseling services. So very often a youth will come be referred to COMPASS, or a family will be referred to COMPASS when the case manager recognizes the housing instability component in the family situation, or that youth has left the home or has been kicked out of the home, then that youth is then enrolled into basic center program. Thank you. Yeah, of course. Yeah. So second, my second point, direct response to H594, is that we would urge the committee to learn more about how service delivery already works on the ground and to wholly integrate the state's response into and, in fact, bolster capacity for the continuum of care already operating in Vermont. It's federally mandated and funded, and the Continuum of Care allow every community to coordinate services at the local level. We and the BPRIP network have worked hard to ensure that the youth homelessness response system is woven into the COC through both federal and state resources. So we don't want to remake the wheel. But we can do a way better job of providing more capacity for every local housing coalition in the COC and integrating the state's emergency housing response with our COC. Definitely do want to do that. As the committee, continues to deliberate how the state will design a comprehensive homelessness response system, I urge you to make choices that strengthen the capacity of the homeless response system and while doing so, consider it a necessity to ensure that homeless youth are integrated into and prioritized in the system. Thanks.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Yeah, go ahead, Representative Noyes.

[Daniel Noyes (Clerk)]: Thank you so much for your testimony. I just wonder what's the prevalence of youth exiting state custody that you see into homelessness?

[Kate Logan (Director, Vermont Coalition of Runaway & Homeless Youth Programs)]: Yeah. Well, we know that about forty percent of youth who experience homelessness at the ages of 18 to 24 years old

[Daniel Noyes (Clerk)]: had some systems involvement. So like coming out

[Daniel Noyes (Clerk)]: of foster care into homelessness?

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Yeah. Yeah. So

[Kate Logan (Director, Vermont Coalition of Runaway & Homeless Youth Programs)]: my home agency, Elevate Youth Services, for example, operates a facility called Return House that is funded by DCF to provide transitional housing for foster youth as they transition out of foster care into homelessness. 12 bed facility there.

[Daniel Noyes (Clerk)]: Thank you.

[Kate Logan (Director, Vermont Coalition of Runaway & Homeless Youth Programs)]: Any other questions for this witness?

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Thank you so much. Appreciate Okay, it, folks. We're running a little bit behind schedule. But we have folks from the Housing and Conservation Board here. And so I welcome Gus and Polly. Polly was able to make this. All right. Great. Thank you. And anybody else you There's not totally room for three there, but if you

[Jubilee McGill (Member)]: want to squeeze in, there's another chair.

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Laurie, I'll just join this.

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: We're set. All set. All right. Thank you for waiting for all that. For the record, Gus Selig, I'm the Executive Director of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. With me at the table is our Policy Director, Polly Major. Also in the room is Jenny Fislip, our housing director, and Ellen Lake Whoops, our deputy housing director. We're really pleased to be here to talk with you about the work we're doing around homelessness. And if I understand the charge today is to focus on homelessness, but we'll also touch on our work with other populations that this committee is concerned with. We understand you want particular updates on when units are coming online and we'll give you a handout on that. We've been asked how we define homelessness and fundamentally what AHS has asked us to do is ask the providers we work with to work with the continuables of care who are making the referrals of people who are exiting homelessness. So we are depending on their definitions to deal with that as a fundamental issue.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: I'd also be interested, and I don't know if you had an opportunity to take a look at the governor's budget recommendations. So he's proposing a fairly significant investment in additional investment in shelters. And so any thoughts that you might have about how that may or may not work in terms of how you all operate would be helpful.

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: We actually made a request for a one time that included more money for shelter. So while shelter is never the first thing I wanna do, I think we all recognize at this moment it's essential and in the presentation, we'll see how much shelter we've helped to add to the state's capacity overload the course of the last five years. So I'm glad there's more money in the budget than our appropriation to deal with shelter.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Thank you.

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: A little bit about the Housing and Conservation Board, I won't go on long here, but what we, we're a quasi public, we're organized the way BHFA or DETA is, so I work for board that's appointed by both the legislature and the governor. Our role in housing is really kind of threefold, but the biggest part of that role is to provide capital to build or rehabilitate housing, and we're charged specifically with making sure it's permanently affordable. We work through a group of nonprofits. We'll show them to you across the state. We're also charged with building the capacity of entities to take on our mission. And you'll see from that network that they are doing many things that I think are of importance to this committee, whether it's folks with IDD, whether it's farm worker housing, any kinds of groups that have been marginalized, we ask them to take those kinds of things on. And then we're involved to some degree in housing policy, but obviously I'm not commissioner of housing. We talk with you, we talk with the administration, but we don't set housing policy beyond the work that we're doing and the funding you give us. To start on a couple of high notes this morning, a couple of us were meeting with a group that are planning the expansion of IBD housing in Moncton where we did one facility last year. And the first picture, we had a great celebration with Pathways at their new facility at Sateria House yesterday for kids who have struggled with psychotic cricks. So that's their first permanent place. They've always been renters up to now. And it's just a beautiful facility that people will feel, I think, loved in when you walk in the door. And that's what we all saw at the ribbon cutting yesterday. So a terrific beginning for them. Here's our statutory purpose, which tells us to do the work we do in housing and conservation for economic vitality and quality of life. And the picture here is a new development in Shelburne, but the reason I wanted to show it to you is because it is a place that Harborplace existed for about twelve years. And Harborplace is a development that AHS came to us about 2012 or so and said, could you partner with, help CHT buy a motel as an alternative, provide GA housing, but with services. Did When that, we knew that a hotel was old and run down, but it was also on five acres in Shelburne. So a few years ago, we moved Harbor Place to another hotel just across Route 7 and began the redevelopment of this site, and there are 94 homes there now, 68 apartments, 26 home ownership units. Among the people who get to buy through our program was a state police trooper who's got a family of eight, a teacher, two folks who worked at Great Robin, and two folks who were using the Section eight program to home ownership to become homeowners, one of whom is a single mom and childcare worker. So our focus, when you hear about the workforce and we hear different things in different committees about who we need to house, we're focused on what we think of what I call the essential workforce. Not people who can necessarily work remotely, but those who've got to show up every day and are doing the work that we all need to have the quality of life we want to have. But it's a great example of, we started with a motel and out of that is grown housing. It actually converted some of the hotels we helped purchase in the pandemic to permanent housing at this point.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: So Gus, how many units in there were reserved for people exiting homelessness?

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I will have to get you the number for that project, but I would think that of the 68 apartments, it probably was It would have been at least 15%, it was was 20. Okay, yep. So good.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: So 20%, so 12

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: or Oh, only was 66, so not quite a third. This will be the only slide on conservation, but I wanted to show it because I think again, it touches on the mission of this committee and the jurisdiction of this committee. So you know that the Boy Scout camp came up for sale a little over a year ago over in Benson, and we and the Vermont Land Trust worked with Outright Vermont, who now owns the camp, and it's a safe place for LGBTQ kids to have a great summer experience. About two decades ago, we had some AmeriCorps members who had graduated from Dartmouth and had done work with youth at affordable housing sites and they said, we wanna start a program, and we created their own nonprofit called the Dream Program to do mentoring at affordable housing sites all over the state. About a decade ago, they said, These kids need a summer experience, and we helped them buy some landing in Fletcher for camp this summer. We helped them buy an island in the lake where the camp sits. So when we think about conservation, we're thinking about how can it also meet other missions that are really important to Vermonters. The most recent project you might have heard about is we just closed with Vermont Adaptive on their first permanent home in Rochester, Vermont. They work with disabled folks from all over and veterans at no cost to veterans wanting to get back in the outdoors after suffering from disability. So that's a little bit about how our conservation work touches on the mission that comes to this committee. These are big numbers. Some of you have heard, I'm sure, that housing costs a half million dollars or $600,000 per apartment. What I want to say to you is, yes, it's become way more expensive than I can sleep at night with, but our average investment is about $80,000 for each unit that we created since the pandemic began. So the number you're hearing is a true number in terms of the overall cost, but what we do is we ask other people to leverage the dollars you invest through us to bring other dollars that's able to get the housing built. Now, some of these activities are very low cost activities. Some are higher cost, including new construction of rental housing. But it's a wide range that includes shelter, has included recovery residences. We didn't have time to update the slide to put in IDD housing, but we're now at five projects serving, is it 30? 30 folks around the state, and we're working on a sixth as we speak. That's what this morning's meeting is about. The other thing I'd suggest you take away from this chart is we do do home ownership. I wish we could do more, But when you look at shelter, recovery residences, lead abatement, farm worker housing, and even manufactured home communities, we're trying to focus the resources you give us on Vermonters who are economically really struggling. And that is gonna be true as Polly presents on the rental housing portfolio and who lives there as well. So we're trying to push our resources to the folks who need it the most. That doesn't always make me popular when I talk on the Commerce Committee who talks about workforce housing and sees the workforce as much broader. And there's needs everywhere, but we have tried to focus your resources on people who are most in need.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: So that seven eighteen homes for people who are unhoused, that's in that five year period of time?

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: This is all in the last five years, and not all of this is complete. There's about 1,000 units that are in development right now. So briefly, and Pali will give you a handout, three ten units, three zero five units will be completed in fiscal year twenty six, another three ten will be completed in fiscal twenty seven, and then a couple 100 more in fiscal twenty eight. And we have a little bit of money left, so we hope to add to that total at our March board meeting.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: When you say units, are you meaning total units or those directed at people who are homeless?

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Total units a set aside for people who are homeless.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: And is that consistently 30%?

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Over the last two years, okay, there's a couple of different ways that I would wanna answer that and answer it as fully as I possibly can. Over the last two years, you asked us, or two years ago, you asked us to raise the percentage up to 30%, and what you'll see in a future slide is since that time, 36 of the units available on turnover have gone to people experiencing homelessness. One of the things I meant to say upfront is I really wanted to thank you for your work in the Budget Adjustment Act on rental assistance, because that is really a primary tool to getting people out of shelters, out of hotels, or out of the woods, because if you can't pay your rent, you'll end up being evicted. So the more we can do to stabilize our rental assistance budget, the better we're gonna do on moving people out. And the fear I have, Madam Chair, moving forward is that the aggressive steps we've taken over the last several years, which total more than 2,000 folks moving from homelessness into housing, is that without rental assistance, we're gonna begin to slide backward. So that is my fear going forward.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Well, I was gonna ask you to comment on the state housing authority's proposal for rental assistance. And they presented to us on Friday, requesting a $3,000,000 appropriation to serve roughly 200. I think our calculations at the head of the table is more like two twenty households. And I'm inferring from what you're saying is that in the absence of rental subsidies at this point in time, which doesn't look like that's gonna change in the near future.

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: It seems as though I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but it sounds like you're supportive of rental assistance in general. In general, yes, because we will not will not succeed in the joint mission we share without it, because if you're living on a disability income, as one example, but even if you have a small income and if you're living on $1,820,000 a year, rental assistance makes a big difference in the level of stress you live with. We do have people paying, using more than half their incomes for rent in some of the apartments.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Yes, we've read some statistics about that

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: for sure. That's not what we want. A couple words about permanent affordability. We have this policy, we've had it since we were brought into law, to protect the investments that you make through us, to provide for mixed income communities, a community like Cambrian Rise, which will be a thousand units. We've now invested in three buildings there, a fourth should begin construction this spring. A neighborhood like that, if it had five or ten years of affordability, would become an economically gated community in no time flat. So your investment is gonna stay forward. The reason we've begun, like what Governor Keynan and at the urging of then Mayor Sanders was to save Northgate Apartments so that it wouldn't be converted to condominiums. So the way most of us, and this is America, think about real estate, it's an investment. And when you're ready to move on, you flip it, or if the market conditions provide, you raise the rents, and then people like the fellow sitting there get pushed out. So permanent affordability means you've got a mission based focus on keeping people in place and not having them lose their housing to market forces or changes of ownership. And that's a big part of what we do. This is the group of people we work with regularly. We sometimes work with people outside of these groups. If we were looking at a map fifteen years ago, there would have been more organizations on this map. We've encouraged consolidation in order to strengthen organizations, mergers of messy. You see it in the school discussions, we see it here, but our goal is to strengthen. Last year we worked on a merger with three organizations, Southwestern Vermont, better than that, Cornerstone. We hope that for the long term that will strengthen up. The Memorial Housing Partnership basically has turned its assets over to Down Street. Randolph and Down Street are having a similar discussion as we speak.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: So I recognize all of those except for Cooperative Development Institute.

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: They're a statewide organization that works with residents of manufactured home communities to co opt them. So that's what their focus and specialty is, manufactured homes, it's part of our overall charge. This network delivers, what's important about this network is they deliver a lot of services in partnership with the folks that you regularly work with. So I were, CHP being the largest, best funded, has recently done an IDD project. They've done shelter projects with both STEPS and with Spectrum. They've worked with CDOE regularly. They've done their own permanent supportive housing. Down street was the basically construction manager and finance manager for the welcome center in Berlin, and they've leased one of their buildings when corrections gave it up also to Good Samaritan Haven. So most of these organizations are in one way or another working with social service groups who generally don't have real estate experience, whether it's construction management or how do you comply with the various federal rules that come with federal funding. So they play a vital role. They are also, five of them, the managers of the VHIP program. So part of our charge is to build organizational strength in every corner of the state so that when there's an affordable housing need, there's somebody with expertise who can help meet it. This is just one example. This is a motel that a bunch of you visited. It was originally purchased first year of the pandemic by Anu, and they got some help from Cathedral Square to get it up and running. They found that running a shelter and staffing it was more than they could do at this location. They wanted to sell it and use the money for services. We said, Sorry, we've put a covenant on this. We're gonna have to transfer it. And we ended up working with CDOEO and Champlain Housing to transfer it and do more rehab. The first batch of funding from the Coronavirus Relief Fund had to all, you may recall, be spent within nine months. We couldn't do a thorough rehab, and you saw the rehab that was done there at that time. So great services there and a great partnership, which has also taken place between CHG and CVOEO up in Franklin County with Tim's Place. Here's a couple of partnerships we've funded in Rutland. One is a former Catholic elementary school, which has two thirds of the apartments are dedicated to people who've been homeless. The other is a former John Deere dealership right across from the high school that was converted to transitional housing by the Long Housing Authority. Some of that is a partnership with the medical center. I think two apartments are reserved as referrals from the medical center, one is for youth. So that's another kind of like any real estate strategy that can result in a good thing we're in favor of and we can be flexible in what kinds of things we fund. Generally, has not been easy to turn commercial buildings into apartments for a lot of reasons. Often, it's just too much interior space without windows, but when we can do it, we'll do it.

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Jess, can I pass you on Rutland for a second? We've certainly had conversations with you, Madam Chair, around does VHCb just respond to communities that are coming to us, or can we do something proactive to have the projects come forward that states and regions need. And I think Rutland's a place where we see that we have been able to work with partners to play a proactive role. We did that with Lincoln Place in knowing that we needed additional housing for people exiting and homelessness in Rutland, hearing from providers there since there's been a barrier with services, we worked with the providers in Rutland to say, it possible for a project to come forward? And this project resulted out of that, and that's happening again. AHS has been very clear that Rutland is a priority for shelter development. And so we are working. We went down there with them to have a meeting with the housing provider there, Cornerstone, and also with Brock to talk about how can we bring something forward. And now we're working with them on a project called the Crow House, looking at how can we add shelter beds in Rutland, and is there a possibility to also add permanent homes down the road there? So in this community and communities across the state where you say, we want IBB housing, we want farm worker housing, we're trying to be proactive in creating the opportunity. So when there is

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: a real estate opportunity, our partners can see it, respond to it, and have funding that they can go after to make it happen. Thank you for mentioning that, Folly, because I have seen a real shift. There was a period of time where we we were essentially saying to Rutland, closest thing you get from state government in terms of a blank check, and it was difficult to get anything going there. But I I do see a shift happening there through your efforts, through Brock's efforts and other community partners. So thank you. Representative Steady and then Representative Bishop. He was actually first.

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I don't want to

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

[Doug Bishop (Member)]: In the vein of trying to identify an opportunity where it comes up and being proactive, recently Green Mountain Nursing Home out in the 40th And Allen area, Colchester Essex Junction borderline has announced that they're going to close come springtime. And while they faced staffing challenges and an old space that was difficult for use as a nursing home, I just didn't know if that was the space that was on radar at

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: all. Not until I opened the newspaper and saw that that had happened, but it is today. And what I would say to you is the Champlain Housing Trust just got some bad news from Lunuski on a project that they'd been invited to bid on, and the DRB turned them down last night after the suit, he said, please develop a project here. So when I was talking to Michael Monty today, he said, I gotta figure out where to pivot. So we've done a lot of work, as you probably know, at 40th And Allen, And it's an area that he knows well. I'm sure it's gonna be come up for some discussion.

[Golrang "Rey" Garofano (Vice Chair)]: So when recipients are lucky and get the permanent rentals or housing, is there a follow-up? Because I hear a lot of property owners saying that their properties aren't being taken care of when the state brings in people. Is there a follow-up to make sure they're successful?

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: So I'm gonna say two different things about that and turn it over to Polly to get into the further parts of the presentation. One of the things that all the providers we've found, we work with, have found they need to do is not just have a partnership with the human services organization, but also have capacity within their own shops to help deal with difficult situations. One of the things we've done that Jenny brought some philanthropic dollars forward is we've started a three year pilot where we placed 10 resident service coordinators in these organizations around the state to do some of that follow-up. Obviously, first preference is to have cap agencies, mental health agencies, others in the usual human service realm, homeless service providers be doing case management. But we have found that sometimes you need a very quick intervention so that a problem doesn't escalate. And I think that's one of the things that we are struggling with as housing providers and as a state is, and one of, I think, the hard questions that's posed by the chair is how much do we concentrate people who have high levels of acuity all in one place? I think we've seen some very good successes with what we call permanent supportive housing. The chair I know visited the Cotts family facility on Main Street, which we funded. And Cotts has that deep experience when you don't have that kind of depth of experience permanent supportive housing. We're not sure quite what the right size is, and so we're experimenting around that. But I do think that we always talk about three legs to the stool, and one of the legs is you gotta have the home, and a second leg is you gotta have the rental assistance and the third leg is for people who need some level of support, supports need to be there in order to have the best chances of success.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Thank you.

[Golrang "Rey" Garofano (Vice Chair)]: Okay. All right, so you've invited us here

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: to comment on H594. I understand it's a very fluid policy conversation. I think our goal here today is in looking, reviewing this bill, it really contemplates this tiered continuum of care that stretches from shelter all the way through permanent housing. And what I want to do is really lift up the different types of programs and projects that BHEV has and has supported that help build the infrastructure for this continuum of care that envisioning. So that as you're moving forward through this policy debate and looking at how do we shore up this system, my hope is that you're able to look to the HCB as the state's really primary funder of the building side of this work, of the capital for the projects. And we've done that, as you'll see, in all these different types of projects. Knowing we're near the end of the day, I might glide through a couple specific slides because I want to make sure we have time at the end to really talk about the housing portion of this as well, because I'm guessing there might be some questions there. So this bill and the administration's proposal both contemplate a major investment in the state sheltered system. We've been part of the ongoing real focus in expanding state shelter system. BHCB's investment in the last five years have really helped to double capacity of that system. We've invested in three thirteen new beds across the Vermont shelter system and really touched six twenty nine beds. So that's a lot of improvements that were done earlier in the pandemic, health and safety improvements. And then more recently, as we've noticed as we've acknowledged the need for more capacity, standing up new shelters and expanding shelters. VHCb has invested nearly $50,000,000 in the last five years in the shelter system in doing this work. The majority of that is resources that flow from the General Assembly through VHCV out to these projects. In the last year, that has shifted to flowing through AHS, And then they came to VHCB and asked us, can you administer these funds for us? And we've done that. So we've done it in both ways. So DCF reports as of the

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: December, they have six forty nine shelter beds. And so is what you're saying here is that VHCb has touched in some fashion six twenty nine of those? Wow.

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: And this is a partnership with the shelter system that goes back far before 2020. Been working with the shelter system.

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I think our first working spectrum was at least fifteen years ago in Burlington, as one example.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: And it actually helps put some context into what is in the governor's budget right now, seeing that total dollar amount of almost $48,000,000 over the last five years puts in context what is being requested now. So that's helpful. Thank you.

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I'd say what we're seeing here is across that five year span, the average investment in a shelter bed was $75,000 But take into account that's both the investments and improvements in existing shelters and the creation of new shelter beds. New beds are much more expensive. They're more between Yeah, I think at

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: this point in time, we're talking about new shelter beds.

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: The bill talks about really building out specialized shelters. I think there's terminology that might be different, but my apologies there. And AHCV has partnered in that. We've worked with Spectrum most recently in their St. Alvin Shelter for Youth. And you certainly heard about

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: the

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: need

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: for youth shelter from Representative Logan right before us. We had a big role in seeing that So for committee members who might not have some of that preceded some of the committee members who are here, but just so you know.

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I know this committee has been discussing the concept of convertible shelter and where we can take hotels and convert them into a model where they're providing more holistic services and partnership with community organizations. And I think a wonderful example of this is Speranza Inn in Barrie, a project that's being stood up by the community housing provider, Downstreet Housing, in partnership with the homeless service provider. And this is one that, while initially the project is modeled as that hotel model with AHS contracting for the majority of the roads there. There's also a long term possibility that if there's a point in time when we're able to build out the housing we need and have the economic supports we need to decrease the shelter population in the state, this is an example of a building that could be converted to housing. We're always looking for that opportunity. And actually, in another project not featured here, Braeburn in Burlington. Burlington, that area was one that it was a hotel used for people exiting the moment since it has converted to permanent housing. So that's a model

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: that we've tried out around the state and exciting to explore more. So what's sort of the range of a cost per unit on something like this? And I recognize it makes a difference in what's the condition of the property before you're going in and stuff like that. But what's the kind of range that we'd be looking at for a conversion like this?

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I had a chart that had the cost per unit of this project on it. I cut it out of my presentation. I want to say maybe 130,000 higher than that for this project. And the challenge with shelter is that we don't have other sources that we can leverage to put into these. So it costs about the same amount for the state investment for us to invest in a shelter bed as for us to invest in a new rental unit. Because the rental unit, we can put in $125,000 of state investment And and leverage

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: it seems as though I'm just trying to think about, so this is space for 42 individuals. I'm just trying to figure out, like, so let's just say down the road, it's converted to permanent housing. Well, I suppose, we keep hearing about single room occupancy as being a big need for people, but they would also need to have kitchens and, mostly kitchens. And so how much additional investment would it take to do something like that in something that's had sort of the infrastructure dealt with, you know, so the HVAC and the roof and all that kind of stuff has been dealt with. But obviously, it seems as though there would have to be some sort of like combining of rooms in order to create

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: We can look at Greyburn Apartments, which is on the Williston Road, and see what it costs us to buy it and operate it during the pandemic and what the conversion cost was. It will not be inexpensive. One of the reasons we did a lot of hotels to housing and hotels to shelter is we could do it fast at a generally lower cost than new construction. What happened across the pandemic is that the longer that the motel program went on, you had motel operators who, on a national scale, 30% occupancy is good for a motel and they had much higher occupancy. So the prices went up and up and up. So we were able to make a bunch of good deals. The first couple of years of This the property, by the time we bought it and renovated it was at the top of that cost curve. As you scale the use of the motel program down, maybe there'll be some deals in the future. But whenever you get to converting a property, you're changing walls, you're changing piping, so it ends up not being inexpensive. But when you already own a property, if the need goes away for it to be used for one purpose, then you already own it, so there's gonna be that cost savings conversion. But we can get you the numbers for what it costs the most.

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: And I think we're happy to come back too if this is a concept you're interested in exploring more and think with you.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: I'm just trying to you know, we we have some suggested investments, and I guess I I wanna make sure that we're making the right investments. And, while they're big, they're not huge. The amount of money that's in the governor's budget is limited, I guess, I would say. Thinking And about shelter beds and thinking about, usually, there's not really access to matching funds or other funds from other sources other than commercial lending, if you could. It helps us to be realistic about what it is that we're purchasing. What it is that if we allocate $8,000,000 or $18,000,000 what is it that we can realistically expect with that amount of money? And not as much as we might think, I guess, is the bottom line. And I think being realistic is really important in terms of having community providers raise their hand and say, yes, I will do this, because they need to know that the capacity is there to fully do the project. Fully do the project and then to be able to fund the operations after the project is completed.

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I think we've covered hotels to housing. I'll just say that this is something we've done a lot of, and we've reported to this committee around it, and we'll continue to look for opportunities to take advantage of these What else? Recovery residences, another area that the legislature asked DHCB what we could do to focus in this. We've worked with organizations like before to help be the service provider in conjunction with the local nonprofit housing providers that are owning and operating the buildings. And we've done four projects around the state, bringing online 59 or so beds.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Just thinking about the investment in shelters, I guess the one thing that I will I know that you've heard me say 100 times that I've said it once is needing on the permanent housing side of things, needing very targeted resources for people whose income is $1,000 a month of SSI. And even though 30% is more and 36% that you've hovered around is more than what it was just four years ago, it doesn't get us there fast enough. But on the shelter side, 100% of that goes to people who are homeless. So I'm trying to think about in terms of temporary transitioning, even transitional housing, that investment for us in this committee, we need to focus on the people who are unhoused. So we want to see the resources that we devote to that 100% going to people who I realize downstairs in house generally got to be broader, but we up here, we want to see 100% of those resources going to people who are unhoused. And so a way to do that is through conversion projects and things that could be used in the future. And like you said, we don't want to build more Money we spend on shelters means we can't spend on permanent housing. And I'll

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: say conversion projects are still going to have the operating needs that, I'll talk about this later on, that are why we need to set rents at mixed income levels. I'm seeing that we're about ten minutes away from 04:00. Do you want me to scoot ahead to the housing sections and leave you with the slides about- Yeah, I mean, we have till 04:15,

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: but we have to break right at 04:15. So I would like to leave maybe five or ten minutes for other questions that people might have. We don't need to see any more examples.

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Good. Okay. Well, we do permanent supportive housing have worked with Representative Donahue on the Road Home report and how to expand IDD housing across the state. We work closely with partners across the state for housing for Vermont elders and know this woman has worked as a health care worker through her life and still experienced homelessness as an older Vermonter, and we know that's a rising population as well. This is where I

[Paul Dragon (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity)]: want to

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: get. So you've asked us to report on units coming online and their levels of affordability. I have a handout here, Mitch. It's also online, I see you have computers. So if you'd like a handout, raise your hand and I'll pass one down. What you have is BHCb's pipeline funded projects that are coming online in the next several years, and at what level of affordability are those projects. A note on the level of affordability, because I know this committee works a lot with percentage of poverty line and housing policy. We work a lot with area median income. And so what I've done here is I've included a chart that says what is statewide area median income for a one person household at different percentages, so you can have an idea of who this might be serving. And all of this is a little misleading because it doesn't represent what the portfolio is actually doing and what it's actually serving. So we know that the average household income for people living in tax credit affordable housing, so the 12 could be affordable rental housing in the state, is $17,000 a year. And that's a mix of household sizes. So that really says that this portfolio is serving people at the poverty line, is serving people living on SSDI, those households with that income of roughly $1,000 a month. And the reason why these households are able to be in this housing is because of the Housing Choice Badger. That plays an incredibly important role in paying the difference between what the building has to charge in order to keep the lights on and what the tenant can afford given their income. That's why the work in the VAA is so important to stabilize the voucher program. I'll also say VHCV's funding specifically plays a very important role in deepening the affordability of affordable housing. So when you look at VHIP, that's set at fair market rent. When you look at Low Income Housing Tax Credit program, that sets rent at 60%. When you layer on VHCb funding, that's when we require rents to come down below 60% to 50% or 30%. So what we're trying to do is deepen that affordability as much as the building can bear. And you're seeing that in the distribution of rents across the state.

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: If I could add one other thing, which is not gonna be clear, in Chittenden County, the rents are higher, the incomes are higher. So without VHCV funding, most tax credit housing would have to get built in Chittenden County. And so even when we're doing 60% rents in other parts of the state, we're making that housing even possible to happen because there's just much less debt capacity in order to serve that population.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: So I just want to give people some comparison with FPL, federal poverty limit. So you're 100% of area median income for one person, 78,200. And so those people have some sense that's roughly 500% of FPL. So it's a little bit different. I guess what I would say, I wouldn't necessarily call that low income.

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: No, we agree with you completely. Most of the rental housing has to be affordable to somebody with tax credits at 60 of median. At 60%. And so down some, but what we're also saying, Madam Chair, the median income of a resident of tax credits is $17,000 a year. So half the population that is in this rental housing is pretty near the poverty level.

[Anne B. Donahue (Ranking Member)]: So average median income is close to 80,000 a year?

[Brenda Steady (Member)]: 78, if I was

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: 100%. 100%.

[Anne B. Donahue (Ranking Member)]: The average median income.

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: That's right, right. What trying to say is, of the people who actually live in the housing, even when the income can be up to 60%, half the people are below 17,000 a year, the actual occupancy. So that's the point I'm trying to make is that that's the group that we are focused on serving that I think overlaps with where you want us to be.

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: And having a distribution of rents is also important because the higher rent units help keep the building operating, subsidizing those lower rent units. It also means that this housing available to people who are in Vermont's essential workforce, in a lot of the health care workforce that we have. It means that if they are earning that, they can still access housing here. And we hear from employers that the availability of housing is a huge determining factor in being able to hire, especially in our health care and services workforce.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Because they're not the highest paid individuals either, Folks working and supporting, doing the very hard work of supporting people who we're also trying to provide housing for.

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: And yet they're not locked out of affordable housing because we allow for that range of incomes.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: I'm sorry. I need to ask a question because I'm looking at the second chart that you provided. And I'm reconcile trying what Gus was just saying about the average, half

[Jubilee McGill (Member)]: average. It's

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: medium and high cost. Okay. 17,000. Yeah. I'm looking at the the chart you provided of the things that will be that have come online in '25 and are coming online in the next year or two. And I'm trying to reconcile that because the things that are at or above 60% are well more than half of the number of units. So I'm trying to figure out how you get to that.

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: There's a difference between what does the law require, what do the regulations require, and who actually gets to move in. One of the things that you heard before we had a shortage of rental vouchers were stories of people who were issued vouchers, went looking on the market and were getting turned down. This is a stock of housing where they were not getting turned down. So I'm gonna go to the next slide that Polly wants to show you. As we did turnover and new units, 2,000 households left homelessness and moved into one of the apartments that we'd helped fund around the state. That wasn't just new units that came online, it was the units that were turning over. So yes, the legal requirement is it has to be affordable at 60% of median, but the people actually moving in, half of them are 17,000 and below as their annual income.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: To get back to the definition, so are you telling me that all 2,033 of those folks were people who came off coordinated entry?

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Early in the pandemic, they may have also just come from a referral from a service provider. So I think somewhere around 21 or '22, we formalized the use of coordinated entry as the major screening tool, but I can't exactly when that hit, but fundamentally, yes, that's the report to us is that from the communities is a little over 2,000 households who had been homeless were provided housing in this portfolio. So nine forty of those were as result of turnover and then the balance is new.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: That what am I supposed to read out of that? So

[Golrang "Rey" Garofano (Vice Chair)]: No. There's two

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: different data sets being shown here. So that's where the confusion is. We can work on that. The 2,000 number is from 2020 through 2025. With the passage of Act 81 in 2023, we started reporting on turnover. So the yellow is reporting post-twenty twenty three, and the blue number, that big number, is from 2020 off, which is why there's a slight difference there. So since 2023, it's those of the new units that are getting leased. So it's the 9,400 households. And what you're seeing with that 36% is that when a unit becomes available, it has a 36% chance of going to someone exiting homelessness. So that is higher than a third of the units kind available.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: By law, you're only required to do 20%. Is that what I'm trying to remember. I know we

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: had a temporary increase. The executive order that Governor Shumlin issued was 15%. 15? There are two different kinds of tax credits. Of the tax credits requires 25%. And then for one year, you asked us to hit 30%. And since that time, is beyond the time of the law, we're at 36%.

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: And I just think this speaks to the extraordinary commitment of the affordable housing providers across the state to really serve this population.

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I think the other way to think about it is up to the time you asked us to report about half of the 2,000 homes, a little over a thousand, went to people who were experiencing homelessness and another nine forty since you asked us to begin reporting on that.

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Because this percentage of the portfolio is increasing in terms of the number of people exiting homelessness, many with complex needs, the affordable housing providers came to us and said that they needed additional support on staff to serve people, to prevent evictions and to support households. And so we sought philanthropic funds to stand up a three year pilot and just know this is only a three year pilot, so we have one more year of it. And hope as you're contemplating the service system moving forward, that we can come back and talk to

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: you about what we've seen here and where we see success and any opportunity to continue that work. As assisted people with rental arrearages, were you able to, through these resident service coordinators, able to help them develop a plan to be on time or not to get behind?

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I think that's part of the work. Will say that my colleague Jenny had to scoot out for an appointment, and she's really taken the lead on standing this program up. So we can happy to answer more questions on it. Wanted to Sorry, I read

[Golrang "Rey" Garofano (Vice Chair)]: it as plant based service.

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: We've had

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: a lot of discussion about how these area median income rents are making affordable housing unaffordable to people exiting homelessness. Just want to talk a little bit about why it is that the rents are set there, why we cannot make a decision to lower all their rents to a level of affordability for extremely low income urbaners. Creating housing really is a two step process. We need the capital to build the housing, and that's the role that sources like BHIIP, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, BHCB, conventional debt, a mortgage. That's the role we play. We help to do the bricks and mortar, build the building. But once you build the building, any homeowner knows there are ongoing expenses that you need to pay. And so that's the second piece. That's the subsidy down below. Expenses like property taxes for that affordable housing is also paying insurance, debt service, utilities, maintenance, and those services costs. Keeping the lights on, keeping them heated. And what pays for that is rent. And so that makes a natural floor for how low we can set the rents. Because if we set the rents below that floor, we can't keep the lights on, we can't keep these buildings heated, and then they don't provide housing. And so that's why you see this distribution of rents. And that's why the federal housing voucher is the critical component, because it is paying that difference between what someone can afford and what their rent is. As Gus said, we needed to increase the supply of affordable housing so people with vouchers could find a place to live, but it takes both. It takes both the voucher and the home for this extremely low income household. And we'll continue to look at ways to bring on those units that people can move into when they have vouchers to make units as affordable as possible. And that's where VHCb is playing their role. It is lowering, deepening the affordability from other housing programs that are out there and trying to get at this continuum that you're talking about in the bill of moving from shelter through transitional housing all the way to permanent housing. The type of housing is immaterial. You're always going to have that operating cost, whether it's a hotel conversion

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: or a traditional rental unit. And I think that we're faced with a dilemma here because we know that essentially those rental assistance is pretty much dried up unless there's turnover among the existing recipients, really. And so we're kind of faced with this dilemma about a state run program, at least in the interim. And the housing authority calls it a bridge program. And yet we're also seeing part of the governor's budget is they're looking at 1,200,000.0 or 4,000,000 or something million dollars for rental assistance at DCF. And we know that the Department of Health has shelter plus care. And we know that there are bits and pieces in the HOT program, for instance, for short term rental assistance. And there was a program that was stood up at CVOEO that's going to be ending this year that they're looking for. And I'm just trying to really figure out, we're paying for something, having it, I guess, scattered, it feels like a buckshot approach. It feels like scattergram. And I'm just wondering if that's the best approach and the best and most efficient use of what limited dollars that I think we know that we have to invest in order to be able to those projects you have coming online, I've got one in Waterbury right now that doesn't have funding for the units that are there, for the people who are expecting subsidies. And so you do have projects on your list of things that are coming online that are going to require subsidies. And right now, they don't have them. And I'm sort of just wandering on here that we need to figure out that problem. And I'm just not sure that the sort of buckshot approach where it's spread out all over the place is going to be the most efficient use of getting more of the money into the subsidy and less into the administration of the subsidies. So I'm just sort of talking out loud, that's all I'm saying.

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: What I can say to you, Madam Chair, is that since the pandemic began, we, BHFA, State Housing Authority and the department met at least once a month, in most months twice to coordinate how we were investing resources. And when VSHA still had rental assistance, Kathleen was very good about, okay, I can put three vouchers here as project vouchers and six in this project and all that kind of stuff. So there has been, at least by intention, a lot of coordination that's gone on. She just is not in a position to coordinate with us.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: She doesn't have the money now to I do mean, that's essentially it. So those previous commitments evolved.

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: She has had to pull some of

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: those She's had to pull them back. Yeah. I I mean, I get that. That's by necessity so that you're not displacing people who are already who are already in housing. You It's a it's kind of a vicious cycle that we have as a result of, changes at the federal level.

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I think the other thing I'd say to that is that vouchers can only pay up to the payment standard. As the real estate market continues to increase, landlords continue to charge more and more, people are naturally displaced even if they have a voucher because they're going to

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: need to find a place Yeah, I've seen it. Before.

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: And they're displaced into the permanent affordable portfolio in the state, because that's where this won't happen to them, where they can stay with

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: these values. Or they're displaced into homelessness, which we have a lot of those, too. So thank you very much. Any last questions for witnesses? Thank you for providing that update. I hope folks take a look at the second sheet as well and look at some of those timelines for things coming on board, which is great to see. I mean, we made huge investments, which we also saw a chart earlier last week, I guess it was, where we had the peak and now we're on the downward slide. And have not had a chance to sort of look all the way through the governor's budget yet. What does that say in there in terms of the amount that's devoted to BHCP?

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: The amount in his budget in the big bill is a little over $37,000,000 which is what the formula and statute calls for us to get. So obviously, as I said, we did pitch to the administration $12,000,000 at one time, asking for 3,000,000 for shelter, 3,000,000 for the IDB work, and 6,000,000 just to expand the housing supply in general. So that was what we put to them. I'm glad there's some money, even if it's at AHS, do you see the shelter? Yeah,

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: yeah. To that money you just said there, that's not counting what DCF has in their budget. That's just the formulaic from the property transfer tax?

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

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Okay, so there's actually more, depending upon how it gets

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: funneled. Yeah, that's what I'm saying is we're glad to have the budget that he's given for BHCB. And even though they didn't say, yeah, we're gonna give you one time money, I'm glad there's one time money to build more shelter in the big picture. Yeah,

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: yeah. Okay. All right, thank you so much. We really appreciate you being here this afternoon and helping us see the progress on that side of the equation.

[Gus Selig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Appreciate it very much, thank you.

[Theresa Wood (Chair)]: Thank you. You as well. Good evening. Okay, committee. Tomorrow, we're switching topics to the budget. We are going to hear from the Department of Disabilities Aging and Independent Living. That's Todd and Dan's budget. So we're going to be looking to you for the hard questions. I'm just kidding, but I'm sure you will have And hard just as a reminder, I'm just going to say it again, because I keep being approached, as does the vice chair from other advocates and provider systems wanting to testify and make their case, and leaving it up to your budget teams to recommend to the full group. And don't just say everybody because we don't have time to hear from everybody. To hear from what groups that you are prioritizing that the full committee hear from. And that is mostly related to, remember, the governor's budget, both what's in it and what isn't in it. Okay? So they have to pass through your recommendation as budget teams before it gets to all of us. I keep telling people that, then they reach out. So don't be surprised when we say, okay, contact representative Donahue and representative Steady or representative Nielsen and representative Noyes, etcetera. So we'll be at Dale. And then in the afternoon, we're gonna be picking up some discussion about May, and we'll have some initial take. Hopefully, reaction and information from Katie on this definition of residency. That's it

[Polly Major (Policy Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: for today.