Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: Here we are, still ways

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: and means. Thursday, January 29, 10:15. We have two members on Zoom, two members in another hearing. And we are going to take some testimony for our miscellaneous tax bill on the Downtown and Village Center Tax Credit. I'm very excited to have Ben Doyle and Caitlin Burkhardt here, if you want to join us in whatever configuration fits your needs.

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak with you this morning. My name is Caitlin Corkins. I'm with the Department of Housing and Community Development.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I'm It's nice of you. I feel like the last few times it's been on Zoom, so it's like No.

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Yeah. It is nice to get back to the, like, in person thing. I'm going to and to share my screen here. I'll see the pretty pictures. You can all see that now.

[Rep. Woodman Page (Member)]: You're going to take us through all of our districts.

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: Oh, that's what they do. I

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: can't all your big fences. I can't promise that I will hit all of your districts. But we have projects all over the state. So I'm going to just do a brief overview. I know this will be reviewed for many of you in the room, but always good to have a refresher.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: A little like Goldfish. It's okay.

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Yeah. So this is the Downtown and Village Center Tax Credit Program. As part of the Community Investment Program, the state recognizes and supports local revitalization efforts across the state. We do that with dedicated staff, such as myself and other folks in our department, as well as funding. The biggest carrot of the program is the Downtown and Village Center Tax Credit program, which was created in 1998. Right now, we have a 3,000,000 cap that we award annually through the program. To qualify, a building must be at least 30 years old and be located within a designated downtown or village center. And if awarded, a project has three years from the date of award to complete their project. So there are a number of different types of credits that we offer through the program to help different types of projects. And I'm going to go through these pretty quickly. The first category is our historic credit. So to qualify for this particular credit through the program, a building needs to be historic, which means it needs to be listed in the National Register of Historic Places, and also be working through the federal RITC, which is Rehabilitation Investment Tax Credit program. So they have to have an approved application for that federal program to qualify for this particular type of credit through the state program. It's meant to piggyback on top of that federal credit. The federal credit offers a 20% credit on all the work that's being done to rehabilitate the building. And then the state adds an additional 10% on the same expenses and investments. For projects that are not using the federal program, either they're not interested in going through that process, which is definitely more involved than our state program, or if it's a building that is old but not historic, we do have other types of credits that we offer. So this is the facade credit for exterior work to make repairs to the building. It's 25% based on the amount that's invested, with a cap of $25,000 in credit. So if you spent $100,000 you would hit that maximum cap that we can award in this tier of credits. Then we have our code credits. These are definitely the most popular, most frequently used credits through the program. And this is all about bringing existing buildings up to current building codes. A lot of our older buildings are not up to current codes, especially when there's a change in ownership. Things that had been grandfathered need to be updated before the new owner can put their business in the building or rent out housing units, for example. We work very closely with the Division of Fire and Safety on this particular credit. They're great advocates for the program. They send people my way all the time, which is wonderful. Basically, that they have identified as a codeficiency that has to be brought up to code is something we can cover through this credit. It's a 50% credit with a cap of $100,000 in credit. We also have separate caps for some of the larger ticket code compliance items, things like elevators, a credit of up to $75,000 and sprinkler systems, a credit of up to $50,000 So when combined, if you have a large building that, say, it has sprinkler system and an elevator and they've got to update their electrical system, it can really add up to be a pretty significant chunk of funding for an individual project. And then our newest type of credit through the program, this was added in fiscal year 'twenty three. Unfortunately, a little bit prescient, I think. This happened just before the twenty twenty three floods in July. It's our flood mitigation credit. And so the intention behind this credit is to support improvements to make a building more resilient to flood events, whether that's making improvements to the foundation or bringing utilities out of a flood prone basement, raising those up above the flood level. Initially, we had hoped this would be something that people would use proactively to make those improvements before there was a flood. What happened in actuality was that a lot of this credit went to building owners who were impacted by flooding in both 2023 and 2024 and use this funding to help them build back while also making those improvements to prevent disaster in the next flood event. And our hope going forward is that it will again become more of an incentive to make those proactive improvements. So for example, on this slide, we have the positive pie in Montpelier. They were flooded significantly in 2023. They used the credit to help build back. Whereas the Bennington High School, Ben High project, it's a former school being converted into housing. And they are proactively making some improvements to the building to protect against potential future floods, the two ways that credit is being used.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Can all these credits be stacked?

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Yes, for the most part. So the only credits that cannot be combined are the historic credit and the facade credit. And that's really because they cover the same thing. But yes, a project could get facade credits and code credits and flood mitigation credits if they were applicable to their project. Credits are used to offset state income taxes and can be carried forward up to nine years. The other way that people use these credits is that they can be sold to either a bank or an insurance company. And this is a way for building owners who don't have a lot of tax liability to still take advantage of the program. It's also a way for nonprofit entities to use the program. They can take their award letter to their local bank and use it to help secure. It could be a cash payment. It could be a reduction on a mortgage or a loan. It also can be a way to help get funding for the project early on up front. So if you're awarded this credit, you could go to the bank and use that to help you get a short term construction loan to pay for your project and then essentially pay off that loan with the sale of the credit once the work is complete.

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: I'm sorry. I may have missed this. But you said you have $3,000,000 to start with. That's an annual appropriation that you get every year, 3,000,000. Correct.

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: 3,000,000 in statute. Yes.

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: And so where does that 3,000,000 come from? Is it state money or federal?

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: This is a state program, but it's not like an appropriation like a grant would be. It's more because it's a tax credit. It's more, I guess how it shows out on the balance sheet is it's money that's not coming in through income tax because it's being tax credit that's I understand. Yeah. Gotcha.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Thank you. If I think about sort of the way this is administered versus, say, how we give BHFA permission to sell tax credits and then essentially issue cash, How do you

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: Who do you think can How do you

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: think that changes who can access what you're doing? The ability to sell the credit? So we give VHFA permission to essentially sell a large amount of tax credits and leave money that they can spend to help projects and people. Right? Mhmm. Versus you all are dispersing tax, the actual credit instead And of I'm wondering if you've just sort of thought about who might or might not be able to access a tax credit because it's a slightly complex instrument compared to just a check

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: or a grant. Sure. Yeah, it's definitely different than a grant where we're writing somebody a check. I do think it allows for the flexibility that's needed because people can use it however they'd like. Sometimes people will use part of the credit themselves and then sell the rest of it. So it's very flexible in that way. And while it sounds complicated, I think this is one of the big things I have to help people who are applying to the program to understand. It sounds like it would be really challenging and complicated, and nobody wants to deal with that kind of thing. But we work with a lot of local banks in Vermont who are very familiar with the program, who buy these credits routinely. And I think they make the process really easy. So I have a list of contacts that I can give to people once they're awarded a credit so that they can reach out to people who understand the program and get to a yes, rather than having to try and explain to a bank, what is this and how do I use it? I'm sorry, I've

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: heard this presentation probably a dozen times. I've never had these questions before. I'm not sure what's happening in your class.

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: What is the that's mint beige.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: In a very dirty mug. What is the return that folks are getting when they sell the credits?

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: It's typically between $0.09 0 to $0.95 on the dollar. It is negotiable. I actually just heard from a recent recipient. They're getting 100% value. What? Yeah. It's a nonprofit organization. And I think the bank is wanting to support the project. So it's not unheard of for that to happen, but usually 90 to 95.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Can you track that?

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: It is something that we ask people as part of our closeout survey.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I'd love to see that at some point. Yeah.

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Yeah, we can get you those answers. So here are just a couple of charts that show recent demand. I know the numbers on the bottom are very small. I apologize. It's the last ten years, so it's a lot to fit into one chart. But basically, this is just showing the oversubscription. This is a very competitive program. And every year, we get more in requests than we have available to give out. The cap over the years has increased, but demand has continued to increase to meet that. I think that's attributed to both just more interest in the program, marketing of the program, people seeing how impacted their communities, but also the rising costs of construction has certainly been a part

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: of that. Are all the requests there would be eligible?

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Yes. Yeah. So we don't get a lot of applicants that are not eligible, luckily. I do a lot of work to make sure that people don't apply if they're not going to be eligible. So these numbers all reflect eligible applications.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: One more question

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: on that slide. That's really high for 2026. On the last slide? Yeah, 2026 just started. Do you tend to Is it FY 'twenty six or

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: It's FY so it's the last year that we just forwarded. So you can see on this in 2023 and 2024, we had a slight increase in the cap, and that has gone back down to the 3,000,000 in 2026. The reason the number isn't quite exactly three is that we do occasionally get projects that don't move forward for a variety of reasons. Or believe it or not, projects that come in under budget. And so when that happens, we roll those funds into the next round. So we never have quite exactly an even number. This is the same information, projects instead of dollars, showing the number of projects, applications that we receive versus the number that we're able to fund. You can see that there are some years, like 2025, for example, we had 49 applications, and we were only able to fund 13 of those. That's a lot of really great projects potentially that we were not able to support that year.

[Rep. Woodman Page (Member)]: Why aren't you able to fund all of the projects that came in?

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: Is it because of lack of

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Yeah, the amount of funding that we have is set at that cap, and so we get more in requests than we have available. And typically, the board that makes the funding decisions on these applications, they want to fund projects at 100% of their apps. So we don't see in theory, you give everybody partial requests. But that has not been the practice, mostly because I think there's a feeling that if people don't get the ask full board, they won't be able to move forward with their projects.

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: How do you prioritize?

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: So there is a scoring system that the board uses to evaluate the applications. It's based on the scope of the project, the budget, and public benefit is the highest potential scoring category. So we ask people to explain how the project provides a benefit in their community. I'm glad I'm not on the board and I don't have to make It's the final really tough, because we've got a huge variety of projects. And I'm going to end here with just some examples to show you the breadth of the things that we've funded that have been completed in recent years. This is a great project. Yeah. It's in the It's in the It's

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: wonderful stuff, Chuck.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: It was a children from Callis. It's Memorial Sloan.

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: So I did choose this year. I chose three projects that all included housing in them. A big percentage of the projects we fund are either solely housing or partially housing. So this is an example, a former warehouse building that had been basically vacant for many years. This project was very on the larger end of the types of things that we see, dollars 10,300,000.0 total. They took advantage of both that federal rehabilitation investment tax credit program as well as the state program, so offset that $10,300,000 with a little over $2,000,000 in federal and state credits combined. This project brought 15 new housing apartments online, and there is also some commercial space in the Ground Floor of the building as well. This is sort of a mid sized project from St. Johnsbury. This project did not use the federal program, but you can see they stacked the facade credit, the sprinkler credit, and then just general code compliance for a little over 120,000 in total state credits. This project involves two retail spaces on the Ground Floor and nine new units of housing. Before this project, the retail spaces had been operational, but the Upper Floor of this building had been vacant for many, many years. And so this was a great opportunity. They had to sprinkler the building in order to be able to put housing units on the 2nd Floor. And so the state program helped to defray those costs.

[Rep. Woodman Page (Member)]: Yelie, can you share as to who the applicant was?

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: This one was done by the Northern Forest Center, which is a nonprofit organization that does housing projects, not just in Vermont.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: The one before is like an immense

[Rep. Woodman Page (Member)]: Yeah.

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: Thank you. From time to time Yes. From ways back Yes. Legislative committee summer study who have looked at upper stories

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Yes.

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: I gather a lot of them are still vacant. There's still a lot of vacant, yes. How do we lose the ball there?

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: I think having more funding More It's always about money, right? I think the other thing that's been interesting probably since the pandemic is that upper floors that maybe weren't vacant but had office space are seeing there's less of a demand for that. And so there's maybe an opportunity for some of those spaces to be converted into housing, which would address the shortage that

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: You're we welcome. Fits. Thank you. Yeah.

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Then the last project I wanted to share, this is a modest sized project in very small community. This is East Hardwick, so not Hardwick, but the village of East Hardwick.

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: This

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: historically was a single family home. It had been chopped up into some not very nice apartments over the years. And when the new owner purchased the building, it's a private owner, he decided to redo the building and put in some nice quality apartments. So this involved three units in total. And again, he used the facade credits as well as the state code credits, so a little over $70,000 in credits to support the project. So you can see the dramatic breadth of what kinds of projects we fund, big projects in larger communities, multimillion dollars, to three units doesn't sound like a lot if it's Burlington. But in East Hardwick, this could make a really big difference. And that's all I have in terms of slides, but I'm happy to take any other questions as well.

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: These credits are given out, and then the user doesn't have to ever pay them back. Is that correct?

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Right. Because we don't issue a tax credit certificate until the project is complete and they've met all the requirements. So yeah, there wouldn't be a recapture or clawback back because we're not giving them the money until they're done.

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: But I'm looking for the way that the state can get back its investment or that fund can roll over. On the grand list, I would think this after picture in Hardwick would be a larger amount than on the grand list in the before picture. What am

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: I missing here? What other ways are there? Well, yes, that's a really great point. We're foregoing some income tax credits, but there's other taxes coming in to offset that, whether it's increase in the grand list, sales taxes paid on construction materials, payroll taxes for people that are employed to work on these projects. I will say that I think it would be extremely difficult to quantify for each project. We'd have to look at a lot of different information to quantify exactly how much. But I think it's safe to say that over a pretty short period of time, the state is recouping any lost tax revenue in other ways. Does that answer the question, Burkhardt?

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: Yeah, I mean, we have ways to do that. It's

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: done. We can talk some more.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: Yes, I'd like to.

[Rep. Woodman Page (Member)]: Do you track what happens to the applicants that are not funded because you're limited as to what happens with those projects?

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Yes and no. I mean, I certainly people do apply more than once if they're not successful. So there is definitely a certain percentage of projects I know that come back and eventually are successful and can move forward with their projects. I also know anecdotally that there are projects that just don't happen at all if they are not successful. But I don't necessarily go to every single applicant and ask them what happened. It's more

[Rep. Woodman Page (Member)]: mean, interesting from our perspective is the but for test, where the project would not happen but for the tax credits.

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Well, another thing that we do is we do a survey for projects that we do fund. When they finish their project, we do a closeout survey. And one of the things we ask them is, would your project have moved forward without this credit? So we do have some data on that, at least for the projects we're funding.

[Rep. Woodman Page (Member)]: Yeah, that's local to me. And they've already had the cake.

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: Yeah, yeah. Thank

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: you so much.

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Thank you. I'm gonna

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: stop sharing this somehow, hopefully.

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: Okay. Bring it up on to the

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: Hi, everyone.

[Ben Doyle (Preservation Trust of Vermont)]: I'm Ben Doyle, Bob. I'm not seeing any of you again. Don't have any questions if you have them, although Caitlin is really the expert here.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Please don't prepare.

[Ben Doyle (Preservation Trust of Vermont)]: So thank you, madam chair and members of the committee for the opportunity to speak with you today about the village and downtown tax credit program and the critical role this program plays in rural economic development, particularly in light of recent and ongoing changes to Vermont's land use policy. For those of you who may not be familiar with the Preservation Trust of Vermont, we're a nonprofit organization founded in 1981 with a mission to build community through the preservation of historic buildings, villages, and downtowns. Our work takes many forms, including providing technical assistance to community groups, offering funding for preservation projects through both philanthropic and federal sources, and engaging in advocacy for Vermont's downtowns. At its core, our approach is simple. We ask Vermonters what they need to help save the spaces and places they care about, and then we do our best to help however we can with creativity, commitment, and persistence. We're often a small town's project's first and longest friend. Last year alone, we worked on 362 distinct projects in a 155 communities across Vermont. Without question, the village and downtown tax credit program is an essential tool for the communities we serve. As you heard in Caitlin's presentation, residents from small towns across Vermont use these credits to revitalize historic buildings that anchor downtown village vitality, leverage additional resources, and protect generations of prior investment. Of the 33 projects awarded a credit for fiscal year '26, nearly one third have also received significant funding from the preservation trust of Vermont within the past three years. This includes $400,000 in committed funding for the Miss Bellows Falls Diner project, thanks to the congressionally directed spending congressionally directed spending award. Dollars 100,000 in Freeman Foundation funding for the Catamount Arts 105 Eastern Avenue Masonry project, and a $100,000 in National Park Service funding for the Norwich Community Grange Hall. In our role as fiscal sponsor for the Stratford Community Trust General Store Project, another tax credit project from fiscal year twenty six, we helped that community leverage nearly $1,400,000 in philanthropic funding. I am not suggesting that these projects could not happen without the tax credit program. I'm an optimistic person. Anything is possible. But from my experience, it's difficult to imagine many of these efforts being successful or even viable without access to this tool. I have served as the president of the preservation trust of Vermont for five years. And every year, I come before this committee and others like it and talk about how important this program is. It serves as a catalyst for additional investment because the credits can be monetized. It's accessible both because of the simplicity of the application and the excellent technical assistance provided by Caitlin. It is the most equitable community and economic development tool in Vermont, one that small towns can actually use. As the demand you've seen demonstrates, communities value this program and actively seek it out. This year, however, feels particularly important to champion the village in downtown tax credit program given the significant work the legislature has accomplished last year with the passage of legislation reforming the designation program through new land use maps as well as the creation of the community and housing infrastructure program. These changes offer exceptional opportunities for Vermonters, particularly in rural communities seeking to address housing needs and strengthen local economies. But their success will depend on whether or not the ethos behind them mirrors that of the tax credit program. Specifically, the effectiveness of these reforms will hinge on whether communities are able and encouraged to strategically use them to foster development and growth and establish settlement patterns in ways that build the tax base, preserve and expand existing infrastructure, and enhance overall community vitality. This approach stands in stark contrast to the efforts that prioritize public investment in places that are merely easier to build in in the short term rather than places that deliver long term value as the village value to the villages and downtowns that define Vermont. That's why as we work together to address a housing crisis that threatens our economy, schools, and sense of community, we also need to remember not all housing nor all public investment is equal. Subsidizing greenfield development may offer lower per unit cost, but the true price of growing anywhere, everywhere is revealed when considering the full picture, increased infrastructure costs, transportation burdens, municipal service expansion, and the erosion of economic activity in our historic downtowns. This may not be an intentional action, but we have seen subsidizing this type of development inadvertently fuel the growth of national chains whose business model relies on disposable buildings and exported wealth as opposed to the authentic place based economies that define Vermont. Conversely, developing housing within our historic downtowns and villages, while not without challenges, leverages generation of existing investment. Consider the potential of a five story mixed use project in a historic town center. It utilizes existing water and sewer infrastructure, reducing costs for all users. It may tap into brownfield funding to remediate contaminated sites that would otherwise sit vacant and likely sits near public transit, safety services, schools, and vibrant local businesses that generate municipal revenue through local option taxes. The village and downtown tax credit program helps even the smallest, most rural communities in Vermont realize that potential. It's also important this year to be cognizant of the more limited federal resources, available for rural economic development. When I worked at USDA Rural Development in 2017, the agency had 52 employees in this jurisdiction and invested more than $280,000,000 in Vermont in a single year. In 2025, USDA Rural Development had just 12 employees and invested $23,000,000. The Northern Borders Regional Commission, an excellent state and federal partnership that in the past three years has led to tens of millions of dollars in infrastructure investment in Vermont was zeroed out in the president's proposed fiscal year twenty six budget. We are fortunate in Vermont to have a congressional delegation that understands the needs of rural communities, and we have benefited from significant investment through congressionally directed spending. But if congress becomes so dysfunctional that it cannot even pass a budget, it becomes difficult to rely on those resources as well. That's why it's essential for Vermont to make its own investments. Five years ago, the tax credit program had a cap of $3,000,000. Today, it still has a cap of $3,000,000. This is despite the fact that for two years in a row, Vermont experienced significant flooding in many of our downtowns and villages, and the tax credit program, which includes a credit for flood mitigation, is one of the only tools available to responsible building owners looking to protect their property and investment. Perhaps even more important to consider is that under the newly proposed land use maps, the areas eligible for credits will potentially more than double. This is a positive development because it gives more Vermont communities the opportunity to invest in existing settlement patterns where they already have infrastructure, where they already have planted a flag. But without increasing the cap, it's unfortunately a hollow gesture. As someone who grew up in a town of less than a thousand people in the Northeast Kingdom, I can promise you it's not land use policy that locks people into multigenerational economic disadvantage. It's a lack of access to capital and investment. I'm so grateful for the thoughtful leadership of this committee and all the legislators who stand up for rural communities facing, in some cases, nearly existential challenges. I ask that you continue to be thoughtful and consider what makes Vermont place where people can find authentic sustainable communities. And then I ask you to provide those communities with the policies and tools that will help them invest wisely in their own collective futures. In other words, please support the village and downtown tax credit program. We should double the allocation allotted to the program, and we should clone Caitlin. One of those is easier to do than the other. I love Caitlin. Yeah. Thank you for taking my testimony, and I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I have a question. So one of the things that I really appreciate about the Preservation Trust and your leadership is that you're not just focused on preserving things the way they were, but in fact, what transformation and preservation can mean for a whole community. And I'm also curious how all of these things fit into one capital stack. So I wonder if you could just tell a story of one project and what you've seen it do for a community. Oh.

[Ben Doyle (Preservation Trust of Vermont)]: Yeah. Like, you know what? I I actually I'll I'll tell the story of maybe how I first learned about the preservation trust and why I wanted to ultimately work here. When I worked at USDA Rural Development, the former president Paul Bruin called me and said, we've got this general store project in Albany, Vermont. And if you've been to Albany, Vermont, you know it's pretty economically challenged town way up in the Northeast Kingdom, very small town. They had a general store that burned, like, maybe five years before and had been closed the entire time. And the preservation trust worked with a lot of partners, but basically organized the community to say, would it take to reopen the store? And they helped form a nonprofit organization, raise money. They formed a community trust. They purchased the real estate. They used all kinds of different funding sources, including from USDA rural development, to renovate this building, turn it into a beautiful general store that's, run by a private entrepreneur. Like, the nonprofit owns the real estate, but then leases the store to a private entrepreneur. And that reduces the overhead cost on the building that makes the business viable in a way that it otherwise wouldn't be. The point of this whole story is that and I mean, sorry. I'm gonna go here. Like, I really feel like our work at Preservation Trust is to preserve the future of Vermont. Right? And so by looking at these historic assets, like whether it's a general store or the diner in Bellows Falls, these places where community happens, where people see something that is a a community hub where they can meet their neighbors. Those are the kinds of places that we believe we need to invest in if we're gonna attract people to Vermont, if we're gonna keep people in Vermont, and if we're gonna grow the tax base to be able to sustain the infrastructure that we've already invested in. Does that make sense? Yeah. So the whole point of this is, like, when I worked at USDA and I saw, like, what the preservation trust was able to do, I thought to myself when the job became available, said, well, that looks like a little more fun than working for

[Rep. Woodman Page (Member)]: the federal government right now.

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: Have you been in touch with the folks from Benson?

[Ben Doyle (Preservation Trust of Vermont)]: That's actually one of our key projects. Maybe three years ago, I went to Benson. I think maybe do we meet there

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: at the wagon wheel? Yeah.

[Ben Doyle (Preservation Trust of Vermont)]: Yeah. So out of that conversation that we had three years ago, we've continued to work with them. Linda and Jean have helped form the Benson Community Trust. And they're actually we got some congressionally directed spending from senator Leahy's leadership to help support community trusts like theirs. And so they have been working for the past three years. They're part of our village trust initiative to, for those of you that don't know, the Benson Village store burned to the ground in 2019. It was a really important community hub. Post office was there, front porch with a bench that the kids would sit on and wait for the bus to come. Really the heart I mean, Jean and Linda told to me that they where you went to find out who had a baby and who died. Like, that there was real loss in the community when the store burned. These two incredible women, one of whom was, like, a thirty year grade school principal, the other one who, like, moved here from New York, they're just like, we're going rebuild this store. We're going do whatever it takes. And so we have been working with them along with others. Regional Planning Commission Development Corporation's been very helpful. Long story short, they've raised well over $1,000,000 to breaking ground this spring to rebuild that store. And it's, it's gonna be kind of community owned but run by a private entrepreneur, and it's happening. And that's the kind of thing that makes Benson, I believe Can walk a viable village. Right? That, like, people can go to Benson and do something there, right, because the store will be there.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Representative Masland?

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: Yeah, thank you very much. Appreciate you're starting with the recognition. It's easier to raise money than phone games. But the reason that's important is what you put your finger on, the fact that it's the people involved in this, in your work that make it happen. Money is our job.

[Rep. James Masland (Member)]: Easy peasy, we're not very, but there's a distinct difference between raising money and getting people engaged in what you're doing, and I think we all appreciate that very much. Thanks.

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Stop here now, so you're kicked out of your

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: chair. Yeah,

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: go ahead, Joanna.

[Rep. Woodman Page (Member)]: Ben, thank you very much. I was concerned about your statement about Northern Borders Regional Commission being zeroed out in the president's budget, so that's been a great boom for projects. Hopefully, that'll change. And also, the Leahy cash train, which just existed for so long doesn't appear to be through the state anymore. I'm wondering about the projects you talked about with capacity. And Chris was here earlier, where he was talking about capacity. Where is it Gina Linda you were talking about? Yeah. Not every community has a Gina Linda. And it's hard for many struggling communities to figure out how are we going to stand up this project. I know, Alice, when they did their store, there was like 20 this funding stack was 27 funding sources. Yeah. Just huge. It's like organizing that is monumental. How do we approach those issues and solve those issues from the small community standpoint?

[Ben Doyle (Preservation Trust of Vermont)]: That's a great question. And I think there's lots of different ways to do it. I mean, I think we do have a rich kind of ecosystem of community and economic development in Vermont of technical assistance providers. And there has been some good work done by Chris and his team looking at how to better coordinate those and have made some series of recommendations. Honestly, I think about the Farm Viability Project through VHCb. If you're a farmer, you go to VHCb and you say, I have this problem, and then they find the technical assistance provider with that skill set to help you. Similarly, like people will come to us and say, we've got this project, we need an architect or an engineer. And we're like, fine, we can, you know, we can help them kind of navigate. But I think that the when I think about the state's relationship to those programs, it's programs like the REDI program, the Rural Economic Development Initiative at the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, that's enormously important in helping small towns develop the project. Before you can fund the project, you have to have the project. And programs like that are certainly at the Agency of Commerce Community Development, Department of Housing and Economic Development. The work that they do is critically important. But MTAP was really important, the Municipal Technical Assistance Program that was not renewed, but for a couple years there was really important, particularly, you know, as communities coming out of the flood, really, helped in that space. But we're gonna need more of that kind of work because the reality is if we think about the uncertainty of federal funding, it just makes the projects become more complicated. Right? And so for Jean and Linda to navigate the complexity of a 27, you know, it's it's too it's too much. But what I really wanna emphasize here is that the the tax credits literally are like the keystone funding source for a lot of these projects because they're the most flexible. They're the first money in. And with that, you can say the state believes in us. You can go to a bank. You can go to other funders. And so not all funding sources are created equal. This one's particularly important.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: For some of the

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: So if it were to double, would that make it easier for us to to do more projects or just to do some project? What what would it do?

[Ben Doyle (Preservation Trust of Vermont)]: I think I think we'd see more small towns do rural revitalization projects that are appropriately scaled to their communities. I think we'd see more investment in our historic villages and downtowns. I think that's what we'd say. I think, you know, I, can let Caitlin speak more to the the nature of the demand and how much demand would increase in those kinds of things. But I firmly believe that it really is about the pitch I'm making this year is that when you think about the land use maps and the fact that we're going to increase suddenly the areas where we're saying as a state, we want to see investment in these areas. But then if we don't provide the tools for that to happen, we're really kind of the investment will just go to where investment is already going. And so I think if we're really thinking about the small towns, the small villages, and we want to see Callus example of the 27 funding sources in the general store, that's really important because that makes Callus a place where a young family can say, there's energy here. There's excitement. I wanna move my family here. I want to have a community that's big enough to sustain a school. Right? That these kinds of institutions that require public investment to happen, they pay dividends in the in the long run. And so if what would happen if we doubled it? I think we'd see significant new investment in our historic centers. Yeah.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I want that to be the

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: last word, but I have another question. It was a mic drop.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I know it really was a mic drop.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: Maybe this

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: will be too. I don't know. Do you have any examples of projects that have transformed a former school building? Yes. Can you tell me about that?

[Ben Doyle (Preservation Trust of Vermont)]: Absolutely. Yeah. We actually did a I can forward it to your committee if you'd like. We did a kind of report last year of just different examples and different scales. Right? Because obviously, you've got something like the Bennington High project, right, which is just massive. But for example, right now, we're working in the community of Lunenburg and specifically the the village of Guildhall, which is an old paper mill company. I think it's like 27% poverty rate. That school was decommissioned by Kingdom East School District, I think, in 2022. And we're working with a community trust group, again, supported through the Leahy appropriation, to purchase that building and turn it into, there's already a head start classroom in that school, but the idea is to do some economic activity, micro businesses, kind of development incubator space, but then also for, perpetually affordable units. So I think, actually, tonight, I'm going to Belvedere to meet with the community of Belvedere, population of two seventy people. Their school was built in 1996, and they've just sold it to the town. It's gonna I believe owns it now. So And they're looking at a way to repurpose it. I think, obviously, with changes transformational change coming to education in Vermont, we're gonna see the potential for that happening a lot more. And frankly, right, we do not have the resources available as a state to handle that right now. You know, when I think about, like, the treasurer put together a task force a couple years ago that I was able to serve on around school construction finance. If we're really and I'm not saying we should, but if we're pushing towards newer and fewer, we also need to be thinking about what does it mean for like, town that I grew up in, Southern Elementary, k through eight. Like, what does it mean if that school closes for that community? And if there's no plan and there aren't resources to deal with that, then you're really you're saying, frankly, to a rural community, like, why would anyone invest here?

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: And what I hear you saying, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, so please do feel free

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: to correct me,

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: that the preservation trust in partnership with these tax credits at ACCD could be in a position to really help with that transformation.

[Ben Doyle (Preservation Trust of Vermont)]: Yes. That's going be one part of a multi effort and solution. But it's an extremely this is what I would say. The village and downtown tax credit program is a vital tool in the adaptive reuse

[Rep. Woodman Page (Member)]: of a school.

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: Thank you.

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: Yeah. Thanks very much. Cool. Thank you. Liam? Could you handle three times,

[Ben Doyle (Preservation Trust of Vermont)]: Honestly, no. I'm, like, completely serious. We would advocate for remove the cap. But I think politics is the realm of the possible. And so we are advocating this year for $6,000,000 or a $6,000,000 cap. We were at three, then it went to five with some neighborhood area. But we believe that it should be $6,000,000.

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: Are you asking for also inflation? You

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: can just add that. Stuck at five Yeah. Yeah. Five years. Why not there? Why are you not asking? Just say yes, Ben.

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: Yes, that would

[Ben Doyle (Preservation Trust of Vermont)]: be wonderful.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: Thank you

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: very much.

[Ben Doyle (Preservation Trust of Vermont)]: Thank you. That's my mic

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: drop. Thanks so much.

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: Thank you.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I'm going to take a brief moment for everyone to re arrange themselves. And then the next step after that thank you. Beth will come up to share a single slide. Thank

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: you. Thanks, Emma.

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: John will get his chair.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: We're now transitioning our agenda items to identifying students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and just sort of broader question of how we count students, particularly for the purposes of weightings. And I asked Beth to come in and just remind us what the statute is on this. Thanks, Beth.

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Beth St. James, Office of Legislative Counsel. Just a disclaimer, I am not your education finance attorney. But John is in the room. This is a way of me getting out of hard questions.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Are you ready for hard questions? Sorry, you don't have to answer that. I don't know if that was a hard question. Anyway,

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Apologies, but I just need to pull up my one slide.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: The break is fine.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: There's no other option.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: No, but we could just feel leisurely about it. Okay.

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: So let me share my screen. Here we go. A very official random Word document here with a portion of 16 DSA, section 4,010, which is our waiting section, determination of weighted long term membership. You'll see in the bracket after the section title, I've just added that this is current law that we're looking at, and it was added in Act 127. And I've just highlighted the applicable language for this discussion. There's a definition of federal poverty FLP means the federal poverty level. I think subsection B is determination of average daily membership and weighting categories. So this is the counting section. And here is the language that governs in current law how peoples whose families are at or below 185% of the federal poverty level are counted. So you use either the highest whichever one or two of subdivision E gets you the highest number. So pupils that meet this definition under the universal income declaration form or who are directly certified for free and reduced priced meals. And then just as a bonus, I've added the enabling language

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: a bonus. Thank you, Act

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: 127 that directed AOE to create the universal income declaration form, because that was not a mandatory form or a way to count students prior to Act 127. So the second two pages on the handout under my name are just the language from Act 127. Section nine is the language asking AOE to create the form. And then I added section 12, which gave AOE some positions in Act 127. Two of them were specifically to help with development and maintenance of the Universal Income Declaration four.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: And that is all I have for you. Any questions for Beth?

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: Yeah, go ahead, Professor.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: So the form is required from all families that are in public schools or in public school districts?

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: So language that I just Let me share my screen again. I'm gonna give you a very lawyerly answer, which is This language does not require anything. It requires accounting in a certain way. And then the section nine requires AOE to develop this form. Let's see. And to develop a process for verifying the accuracy, etc. But there's nowhere in Title 16 that requires the form to leave someone's hands into a family's hands.

[Rep. Woodman Page (Member)]: It's all voluntary, and if it's not complied with, there's no penalty for not Correct.

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I would hesitate to say it's all voluntary because I don't know what the field is doing. It's possible that it is a required form. There's nothing in Title 16 that designates it that way. But I would agree that there is nothing in Title 16 for any sort of compliance checks or consequences for failure to fill it out or even disseminate it in the first place.

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: And it's

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I'm not going say that. Go on. But we are hearing we're going to hear testimony from AOE right after this. Beth was just laying out the big statutory picture. Okay, well,

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: I have a question. I didn't know that we still have who are directly certified for free and reduced price meals. We're giving everyone free meals.

[Beth St. James (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yes. I see Rosie in the room, so I am not going

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: to steal her thunder. But we are still receiving federal funding. The free and reduced price meals involve the amount of federal funds we get. And so if those students are not covered by the federal funds, it's coming out of the Ed Fund. So that is an important number. And some of the conversation when we added this language was around the fact that since we have universal meals, families have less of an incentive to fill out those forms. And we want to make sure that we're continuing to accurately count students so that we can, for a number of reasons, one of them being get the federal money that we want to get.

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: You know the whole speed bump.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Yes, exactly. And so this was moving That's why it's a universal form, was so that we would not have just some families fill it out, but in fact, hypothetically, all families in order to further reduce the stigma. But how that's actually playing out in the field is one of the reasons we have our guests today. Any other questions for Beth? Thanks, Beth. Thanks, John, for your support as well.

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: You're very welcome.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Hi, Rosie and Jennifer. You're welcome to join in whatever order works for you. I would recommend sitting next to each other instead of directly behind Rosie. If I was Rosie, would be so uncomfortable.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: I was gonna stare at

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: the back.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: And representative Waszazak is not he is on the Zoom today, so you could, like, really fully take over his desk. We have two committee members joining us via Zoom.

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Should

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: I pass them out? Yeah.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: You can just take one and pass the along.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: I just didn't hear that whole Yeah.

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: And Rosie, don't think you've been

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: here yet this year. And Jennifer, I

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: don't think we've met before, so

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I wonder if we want to take a brief moment to introduce ourselves. Welcome to the Ways and Means Committee. Glad that you're here. I'm Emilie Kornheiser. We're going to

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: do a little go around, and then maybe you

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: two can introduce yourself before we

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: Bill Canfield.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: Bridget Burkhardt from South Burlington. Carol Ode from Burlington.

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: Burkhardt

[Rep. Woodman Page (Member)]: from

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: I'm Carolyn Branagan from Franklin County.

[Rep. Woodman Page (Member)]: And I'm going to Page

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: And then you Please. Currently, can't afford to talk. It's often overlooked.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Very rarely overlooked. And then behind you on the screen, we have Representative Waszazak from Berry, a representative Holcombe, who shares a district with Representative Esselens.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: Thanks. So for the record, I'm Rosie Krueger. I'm the state director of Child Nutrition Programs at the Agency of Education. I've got a couple of folks backing me up today. I'm Jennifer Hicks.

[Jennifer Hicks (AOE, Division Director for Data Management and Analysis)]: I am the division director for the Data Analysis and Mail, Data Management and Analysis Division at the Agency of Education. DMAD.

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: DMAD. Okay. You need a

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: better acronym. Yes. That is us. And we also have Ted Gates from the agency as well, who does all the calculations once we figure out the low income data. So I've given you copies of the slides. These are on the website as well. There is a lot of text on these slides. I normally wouldn't do that, but I know this committee really likes details. So I wanted to give you all the details that you might want. Are going We cover these topics today. I'm hoping this is what you want to hear about. If this is not what you want to hear about, we can skip over some of these sections, or we can delve into other areas.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I just want to clarify for the committee that, while school lunch is a very interesting topic that we have spent hundreds of hours discussing in this building in the last decade, that is not what we're talking about today. It's that there's a very interesting intersection between sort of how and what Rosie does for her work and how we identify economically disadvantaged students for the purposes of student waiting and or other issues.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: Yes. And while technically, a lot of this does not actually fall into the work that I'm supposed to do. Because the agency is so small, because I've been doing this work for such a long amount of time and been with the agency for so long, I feel very prepared to tell you what we do and what our process is. Are Today, I'm gonna use the term low income to mean students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. It's just easier for our speaking today. In our reporting system for the purposes of the data collection that we use for long term weighted average daily membership, we actually call it in that reporting system NSELG, which is an acronym that comes from National School Lunch Program eligibility, which is something that we used to use. It actually does not mean that anymore, as you'll see today. But you might hear that. There might be some confusion about that. And so we're just gonna say low income today, but just have have that context. All right. So I want to give you this overview to give you a little bit of confidence that although you may have heard, Oh, the numbers are really off, actually, the way we've been counting the data for the last three years has remained very, very stable on a statewide basis. Yes, I thought I was sharing on the screen. Oh, I didn't join the Zoom. I am just

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: We can actually all just take a deep breath while you do that. All right. We can even mute the room while you

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: do it, if you want. I am just sharing. Yeah, okay.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: We're all just gonna look at our phones. We can do other stuff.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: You can look through my slides. Look for your slides. Line up those questions as well. Yeah.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: That's okay.

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: Oh,

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: I need to connect the Internet.

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: I I Is that right there?

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Rosie, if it does feel too difficult.

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: I'm getting there.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: I'm logging in now. So I was just mentioning these are the topics that I'm going to cover today, And then I moved on to this slide. So as you can see, for the last three years, we've been collecting the data in this way. And the data has remained very, very consistent statewide. Almost surprisingly consistent statewide. You can see the dark green bar here is the number of students that we have been determining are low income for the purposes of long term weighted ADM. The light green bar is the ADM. And really, the major thing that's changing is ADM. That's going down. So that is meaning that the percentage is creeping up a little bit. But if you look at the actual number of students we're identifying, it is very, very stable. So that gives us some confidence that we're not varying wildly from year to year, and there's not a massive mistake that happened this year or that.

[Rep. Woodman Page (Member)]: For the sake of argument, what's that chart look like before universal school meals were implemented, same percentage share of low income?

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: Actually, it may have been a little lower. The dark green bar would have been lower. We were counting it differently for the purposes of long term weighted ADM. So you can't We started looking at this and it was dramatically lower, but that's because it was a totally different methodology. But when you compare it to the data that I was collecting for school meals on the number of children who qualify for free and reduced price school meals, this dark green bar is actually a little higher than what we used to capture just through school meals data.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: And I think we'll learn more about how direct certification works, that's how that's a part of And so I caution us to ask questions about Yeah.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: Notice a change with federal changes in immigration and refugee, etcetera. We will talk a little bit about that later, but any changes resulting from that will be very slow to hit this process. So I'll tell you where you might see that, but we'll have some time before we see that.

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: So this also gives

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: you the context overall when we're talking about how many children are we identifying. You can see those numbers right here. It's around 36,000 kids. So there are several sources that we've used to get there. The primary source And on your next slide, you have a nice chart that shows you all these sources. The primary source is direct certification for free and reduced price school meals. And we are going to get into all the details of what direct certification means in just a minute. But that is the primary source. There's two other minor sources that we add into this. One is the National School Lunch Program applications when they're allowed. And I will say that because of the way that we're doing universal school meals, usually schools are not allowed to collect free and reduced meal applications. That's why we're talking about other metrics of poverty. Typically, it's not going to include these numbers. But there are some years where a small number of schools that are doing universal meals through the provision two option do need to collect free and reduced meal applications. That's basically every five years that that's going to happen. So the last time schools collected that data was in school year 2024. And again, it's only a subset of schools who would collect that. But if they did collect that, our data collection system, because of all the ways that we use that information, it does capture that. So that might go into there. And then we also have five independent schools that do charge for school meals, they're still collecting applications. And so not gonna impact this, but that information is still there for that. And then the household income form, which you know in your committee as the universal income declaration form, which is what it's delineated in statute.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: And to be clear, I think household income forms are much better. Just call it for normal humans that you know.

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: That's why. Yeah.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: So if this data is available from multiple sources, and it is available from multiple sources for many students, we use it in this order of precedence. So primary is direct certification for pre and reduced high school meals. Then if we had school lunch program applications, we use them. Then if we don't have data from one of those sources, we're going use the household income form. There's two reasons that Direct Cert takes precedence. One is accuracy. As you're gonna see as we get into Direct Cert, this is very, very accurate data. It's very comprehensive. It's not relying on households to do stuff. It's really good, solid data. So that's one of the reasons that it takes precedence. The other reason is that we use this data collection, as I was mentioning before, for multiple purposes. One of those purposes is for summer EBT, which is a benefit provided by DCF, but we supply them that information. It's a EBT card of $120 per summer that all children who qualify for free and reduced price meals get. And we don't want to do tons of separate data collections from the field. And so we use this system to collect the information on low income eligibility for the purposes of summer EBT. And the household income form does not qualify kids for summer EBT, so therefore we don't want any of that household income form information canceling out the direct certification information, which would qualify those kids. When we collect this information from the field, we are collecting it in one column in our system. Within that column, it says the reason that the student qualified. So there's a lot of different reasons, but it is just one column. And so you can't give us all the different reasons the students qualified. So that's another reason there why it de duplicates, which is great. You're not getting double counting, but that's another reason why it's set up that way.

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: So, yeah. That's

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: a debit card, 120 for the summer.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: And that's a federal program. 100% federally funded? The benefit card, or the benefits to the household, are 100% federally funded. The state administrative costs are 50% federally funded. Yeah. It helps, for sure. And that's why we do it. But it's not a giant benefit, for sure. Just making sure that I didn't want to tell you anything. Oh, I did want to just mention about the universal income declaration form or the household income form. That's a state level form. So direct certification and school meals applications. Those are federal processes and forms that we use primarily for the school meals programs. And then because we have that data, we're then able to use it for other purposes. And so they're very stringently federally regulated in terms of how you can collect it, what you can do with it, who needs to process the data. So we don't have a lot of flexibility with what we do there. The household income form is a state level form. We've actually provided a household income form to schools since at least 2015, because even prior to universal school meals, we've had some schools that were using some of the federal universal school meals options, and so they needed some other form. So we have provided that for a long time. In 2023, legislature directed us to really revamp that form. And so we did simplify it. We did a lot of work on that. And we really dedicate a lot of resources to making that form really as good as possible. And we'll talk more about that later. But I mostly wanna flag for you here that we have some freedom and flexibility around the House of Income form because that is a state level form. There's no federal government telling us you have to do it this way or have to do it that way. We don't really have that flexibility around the other two sources.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: And just for folks who were not in the committee when we passed that, which is, I think, the vast majority of people in this room, there were two really main reasons for it. One was that there isn't flexibility in the other two forms, and there was sort of a need for maybe a little bit more flexibility sometimes that we wanted to provide. And the second is that we wanted to be really careful because so much else rests on these numbers, that in regions of the state where there might be either more stigma about accessing state programs, or there might just be harder to access because it's safe, harder to drive to a state building, we would have other ways of making sure that we were counting kids who were eligible. So it always designed as a backup backup plan.

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: So she's talking about what we know in the tax return for income sensitivity? No, totally

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: Okay, sounds like the same title. So how do

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: the children get it? We will get there.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: That's why Rosie's here. Lots of information for you on that.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: You're mentioning that this is sort of a backup, is well illustrated here. So out of that 36,000 some odd students that we're identifying as low incomes, 93% of those students are identified because of the direct certification process, and only 5% are identified because of the household income form. So we are capturing some students through the household income form, but it's not a huge percentage. So I think that's really important to understand. Direct certification is really a pretty thorough metric, but it is missing a few students. And so that's why we would collect household income form. We're gonna talk a whole bunch now about how we directly certify students. So I'm gonna tell you about all these categories that you're seeing, Medicaid, SNAP, TANF and other categorical eligibility. But direct certification is made up of these portions. So you may wanna refer back to this slide as we go into the next slide here. You can see, though, the vast majority of the direct certifications are coming from Medicaid, with most of the rest of them coming from SNAP and just a few, but still an important number coming from the rest of the sources. So here's all

[Rep. Woodman Page (Member)]: the

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: sources. We do a lot of work to do this direct certification process. The reason we do a lot of all this work is because it helps us draw down as much federal funding as possible for school meals so that the state is paying less for universal school meals. So that's the primary reason that we're doing direct certification. There's a very good school meal reason to do this. And because we're getting this information for school meals, then we're able to use it for other stuff. The federal regulations say that the local level school meals determining official, and the determining official is the position title, is the person who makes a determination of a student's eligibility for free and reduced school meals through direct certification based on one of these sources. And

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: so

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: we get these sources in a bunch of different ways. The biggest way is that AOE gets lists of students who are in households receiving ThreeSquaresVermont or Reach Up, as well as students who are SafePlace Foster and students who are in households receiving Medicaid benefits who are under 130% of the federal poverty level and under 185% of the federal poverty level. This is all state data that AHS has. And we receive that information from them at the agency level. And then we match that to the students who are in the actual schools. So we have a monthly automated matching process by which based on the students that the schools have told are us, enrolled, we match those students against the lists from AHS and send each supervisory union school district a list of their matches and say, These students are eligible to be directly certified based on the state level data. Then the local level determining official takes that information and they can extend direct certification eligibility to any students living in the same household as students on that list from the state receiving three Squares Vermont, Reach Up or Medicaid. And so that's a local step. We're not doing that at the state level. They're doing that at the local level. That local level determining official is also getting several other local sources of direct certification. They are getting migrant students, and that actually does come in a file from AOE, but it's a separate file. They're also getting homeless students identified by the local homeless liaison, runaway students also identified by the homeless liaison, and Head Start students as identified by the Head Start teacher. All of these kids, all these programs will make a child eligible to be directly certified for free or reduced price school meals. I do want to draw your attention to Medicaid. Vermont has Medicaid expanded up to 312% of the federal poverty level, but we only directly certify kids under 185% of the federal poverty level for reduced price school meals and under 130% of the federal poverty level for free meals. And the Department of Vermont Health Access actually pre filters that list for us to just those students in households at those income levels and sends us that filtered list. So just because a child participates in Medicaid doesn't mean they're eligible to be directly certified. They have to be in a household at that income level. Do you

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: have concerns and or plans for the possible reduction in Medicaid and food stamps? Am I slice ahead of Great. The And then I'd love to talk some other times about how the data protections on the electronic file and migrant students, but not

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: We take that very seriously, and we have a lot of stuff in place. Represent Berkhardt? I have a question. So does this work the same way for kids who are tuitioning into other schools that are maybe not in the public student system? How does that work? So independent schools are allowed to participate in the National School Lunch Program, and many of them do. When you participate in the National School Lunch Program, you can get this direct certification data. If you don't participate in the National School Lunch Program, you can't get that data. The primary reason for getting this data is school meals. And this is federal data, and they don't let us release it to people who aren't participating in the National School Lunch Program. So for the independent schools that do participate, so all the academies, many of the therapeutic schools, a handful of the religious schools, there are many independent schools that participate, they do access this data. It is not quite the automated process that it is for public schools. So for public schools, we're able to do an automatic match every month based on their student information system. The kids that their student information system says are enrolled, We, through the Edify process, see that, do the matches, and automatically generate an email to them, a secure email, I will say, with the, I should let you in. It's not a secure email. It's a file transfer. There's But a we do it automatically, is what I'm trying to tell you. They don't have to do something to get that. Independent schools have to submit a file of their enrollment in order to generate that match. So they're able to get the data, but they just have to take a proactive step. And that's because they're not required to have their student information system tied into ours in the same way that the public schools And then how are those counts applied to the district,

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: which might not Slight match type

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: question.

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Ed, would you like

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: to answer that now, do you like us to wait until Rosie's

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: The determination prepared as much for weighted ABN is based on that district of residence for the student. So if they live in that town, they get counted for that town for their tax purposes.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: You identify yourself for the record. And so you are, when you receive those numbers, you're mapping them back to the district?

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: Yes. So it starts at the town level and then from there, we're mapping it to the district.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Okay. So you're mapping from the school to the I feel like I'm being dense here.

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: So that we validate and redetermine the district of the town, district of residents for each student, and we roll that out to the school.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: And if that school is not participating in free lunches, how do we get the data for those students? Absolutely. Become form.

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: Great. Yeah. We set you up for that.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: Yes. So there is a reason to collect the household income form. And that is a case for that, is for those students who are enrolled in independent schools that aren't participating in the National School Lunch Program.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member, via Zoom)]: Chair Kornheiser, can I just follow-up on that? Absolutely. Can you help me understand how you verify for students who are enrolled in out of state public schools?

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Verify.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member, via Zoom)]: If a student tuition to an out of state public school, how would you verify their eligibility?

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: So at the local level, Supervisor Coalition District. Yeah. Thinking about who is doing this work. So at the local level, the data manager who is submitting the file to us for town where the student's enrolled. And I will say we are like this is not my my area of expertise. So I'm I'm looking at Ted here and and Jen. But that data manager where this this child for the the the SUSD where the child lives. That SUSD could get the information from that school where the child attends, or they could try to collect the household income form from those families in their town. People do it different ways. This may be a gap. They may not be doing that, but that is what they could do. And so if the school where the child is tuitioned to, is participating in the National School Lunch Program, they may have school meals eligibility data that they can provide for state and federal education program purposes. It relies on a lot of people taking manual steps. And so I can't tell you for sure that it's happening.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: So we don't do direct cert data matching in those circumstances?

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: We would do it if the child lived here and got benefits in Vermont.

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Oh, okay.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: But we might be missing it because the out of state school isn't getting the data from us. They can get the data from us, but that's

[Ben Doyle (Preservation Trust of Vermont)]: not an automated process.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I'm going to actually I'm realizing that we are already running out of time here.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: So I'm going to cut

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: off all questions until Rosie is done with her presentation. I'm sorry. And we can sure Would

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: you be happy to come back?

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: Certainly. I will say those are some edge cases, but generally, is how it's working.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: We're very interested in the edges this session. I'm not going play it

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: for five, but that's where we are lately. So I will note that as with the overall low income data, there is an order of precedence for direct certification, and that is because of federal rules. And so the Three Squares Vermont data actually takes precedence over the other sources. So children may very likely, are directly certified in multiple or eligible to be directly certified through multiple sources. But the Three Squared Vermont data is gonna take precedence over the other stuff because of the federal requirement, and it's de duplicated. Just not statements. Yes. But just so you know, there is an order of precedence, it does end up being deduplicated. All right. So there is a timeline for this process. And this timeline actually really helps us out a lot. So per federal regulation, direct certification status is cumulative over the course of the school year. So if a child is participating in one of these benefit programs in July or in August, September, and they get directly certified on that basis, they stay directly certified for preamergized priced meals throughout the entire rest of the school year and for the first thirty operating days of the next school year, regardless of whether they're still participating in that program. So if they stop participating in December, we still have them recorded as directly certified because of those federal regulations around direct certification. The direct cert process resets July 1. So the list from AOE that we're doing that matching on. And as of July 1, it only includes the students who are participating in those benefit programs as of that date and time. So that means every year, the sort of matches from the AOE on July 1, the schools will see a drop because it's been cumulative throughout the whole year about kids who started participating and then drop, but they'd stay on there. And then July 1, now it's down to just the kids who are currently participating in that program. And then throughout the next year, it gets added and added. And so sometimes we hear from districts who see that drop and think that there's a mistake. But that drop is absolutely expected, and it's because of the resetting of the list. But as I was mentioning, those school meals regulations allow the school or the SUSD to carry over the student's eligibility from the prior year for the first thirty operating days of the next school year. And it happens that October 1 falls before the end of that carryover period. So October 1 is the date that we use to collect the low income data for the purposes of long term weighted ADM. And because that falls during the carryover period, it includes basically all those kids who were directly certified last year and any kids who were newly directly certified this year. For school meals, we do it differently, but this is how we do it for that data collection.

[Rep. William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: That No question.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Do you mind? Just waiting. No. Okay, thank you.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: All right. So that is what alleviates all these potential impacts of HR1. So HR1 does have the potential to reduce the number of children who are directly certified through grease, fresher, Medicaid. Also, some of the immigration stuff may have the potential to decrease the number of children who are participating in those programs. But because of the cumulative nature of direct cert and because of when those things might take effect, we won't see an actual impact on the October 1 data collection until 10/01/2027. And that will be the number that you'll be using for fiscal year twenty nine school budgets. So we have some time to understand and see what the impact is before you decide that there's a problem. We've also been working really closely with AHS, with DCF and Diva, to determine whether the HR1 impact specifically are going to impact the number of families with children who are eligible to be directly certified. And in general, we're actually predicting that there won't be a huge impact. So specifically, with Three Squares Vermont, those work requirements, those new work requirements apply to households with children age 14 and older. So we're not gonna see an impact on households with kids under age 14. And then for households with older children, there are other ways to be exempt or meet the requirement. And so we're not really certain what that impact is gonna

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: be. And I'm less concerned about reduced eligibility, because it is very much not the population that's school age, but more the churn from paperwork challenges.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: Yeah. So I mean, we It might end it's definitely the potential. So far, we don't think we're seeing that, and we'll keep an eye on it. And if we see something concerning, we'll let you know. Go ahead.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I did it too.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: I'm sorry, Bill. Similarly with Medicaid, most of those changes are targeted at adults. There's not significant changes to children's eligibility for Medicaid. So far, Diva's not thinking that they're going to see a major decrease. The other piece of this, again, remembering that we're just talking about a subset of Medicaid households, not the whole pot of Medicaid households who we're using here. So This is some more information on what the household income form looks like. There's a link here if you want to go check it out. There's a lot of different options for the household income form. Again, because it's that local state form, we have some flexibility here. So in the cases where we don't get direct certification data, we're not collecting that free and reduced meal application data, this is what we're using. And as we saw before, this is about 5% of the students that we're determining as low income. So there are Let's see. We host an AOE, an electronic version. When households submit that electronic version, it comes to AOE, and then we push that data back out to SU data managers. Some SUs also host their own electronic version locally, so they process that locally. And then we also provide a paper version that's translated into 13 languages, including English. And if schools use that paper version, then that paper form is returned to the school building or the central office, not to us. It's really important to note that school meals funding can't be used to process this form because there's no school meals reason for it. And so typically, it's somebody other than the determining official who's doing the form. And that can lead to some confusion. And in general, one of the weaknesses we've seen is that SUSDs aren't really clear on who's doing this, whose work is it. Often it's the registrar, but that can be a source of confusion. We've really promoted the forum statewide. We have a whole bunch of resources that schools can use, some templates and that kind of thing. So the next couple of slides talk about all the different roles that are involved. Because this is a really complex process, and a lot of different people and levels of government are doing different pieces in the process. I realize we're out of time, so I'm wondering want me to keep going? Okay. All right. So we mentioned briefly already that- That fifteen

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: minutes is just like flight buffer. Okay.

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: AHS sends us these lists of children who are in the households receiving these benefit programs. And then AOE takes that information. We are also taking the migrant data. We're matching that to enrolled students and providing that to supervised reunion school district data managers. We also host that statewide electronic household income form, and we're pushing out those forms that we receive to the appropriate data manager. We then get the low income determination data back from the data manager or from the SUSD student information system through the fall and spring data collections, the DCO6 and DCO4. And that's using the Edphi process, which is basically how those systems talk to each other. During that process, Jen's team spends a lot of time helping data managers identify data irregularities. We have a bunch of built in data quality checks. As soon as their data comes in, we're like, Not right. This seems confusing. This isn't what you reported last year. And so we're providing them help through that process. And then do then take all of that information and we're using that to do the low income calculations for the purposes of long term weighted ADM and for the VED report, which is used for some other education program purposes. We provide a lot of training and technical assistance to data managers, determining official registrars, superintendents, anybody else in the school system who wants to know about this process. And then at the local level, there's a lot of different people involved. So the data manager, you've heard me mention a bunch of times, they have a lot of important work to do here. They have to keep that enrollment updated in their student information system, because if they don't do that, we don't know that those students go there. And so we can't do the match. So the match doesn't happen. And if for some reason the student isn't in their student information system, they have to manually submit a list of students, just like the independent schools, and we'll do the match based on that. When they get the matches back from AOE, they have to send that out to the determining official. And then once the determining official and the household income form official, whoever's managing that form, once they do their determinations, the data manager has to make sure that's in the student information system so that it accurately comes back up to AOE. They also have to troubleshoot any data quality issues flagged by AOE. They're the ones getting those notifications that there's something that we think might be off about their data. And then they have to certify the accuracy of each data collection so that it can finalized. So data managers are a really critical role in this process. The determining official, that's a school meals program position. Sometimes it's the food service director, sometimes it's somebody in the central office, like the business manager or somebody else in the central office. Sometimes it is a school building administrative assistant. There's a lot of different folks who might be the determining official. Their role is to directly certify the students for free and reduced price meals according to the federal requirements using all those different sources. So they got the state level sources and all those different local level sources. If that school is collecting free and reduced meal applications because they're in a non base year provision two, they would also process those applications. So they have to do that work. And you might ask, why do they have to do that work? Why couldn't the state just do that for them? We have a lot of this information. And it's very clear in the federal regulations that the state can't conduct the direct certification. It has to be the school food authority, which in Vermont is the SUSD level. So we couldn't just do this for them. We can provide them the information and then they do it. But that's why it feels a little inefficient in this because of the Fed already. Also at the local level, we've got the homeless liaison who has to provide that list to the determining official. We have the same thing with Head Start teachers. And then the registrar or whoever else has been assigned to manage the household income form with non child nutrition funds promotes that form to families, processes any paper forms that come in. And if they are doing a local electronic form, they have to manage that process as well. And then the superintendent is responsible, before we can use the data, they have to certify it and sign off and say, The data manager certifies it and then the superintendent certifies it. So they have a role in this process as well in confirming that, yes, everything is accurate. That's a list of all the training that we provide. I'm not going to go through that other than to tell you we provide a lot of training on this. We are always happy to talk to anybody directly. So if anybody wants to individually troubleshoot what's going on in a particular district, we are happy to have those conversations, and we do have those conversations. This is a list of things that the local level, the SUSDs can do to increase those low income counts. So the biggest thing is making sure that those determining officials and data managers are well trained and understand all the different parts of this process, and then ensuring that good communication is happening between them. And I will say that those are the two biggest failures that we see. A data manager maybe doesn't understand the different parts of the process or their role in it, or they're not talking to each other, or it's not clear who's responsible for some part of the process.

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: So that is kind

[Rosie Krueger (AOE, State Director of Child Nutrition Programs)]: of the biggest weakness of this, is that local level, who's doing what, who's communicating with who. And I mentioned already making sure that their student information system is up to date so we can actually do the matches. In general, encouraging three Squares Vermont outreach, encouraging enrollment in that program always helps with this. We do still see some districts that are not really promoting the household income form. We have one district that we worked with this fall who didn't have it anywhere on their website, had not sent it out, really had not done anything with the household income form, and we're three years in. So we helped them fix that, but it definitely happens. And then I think another huge weakness is not understanding who's responsible for the household income form process. So we had one district this fall where my team was in there for a child nutrition review, and we found a stack of household income forms sitting on somebody's desk because they didn't know what to do with them. So there was just a failure to understand how this all impacts and who's gonna do what. And then just making sure that when we do flag those data quality issues, that they're following up on it. So we will flag, Your numbers are lower than last year. Your numbers are higher than last year. We weren't anticipating that you would submit in this category, those sorts of things, and they should follow-up on that. So these are just some common areas of confusion. I think we've talked a bunch about these already. I think you've heard a lot from AOE about the confusion about not understanding that the preliminary numbers we provided this fall were based on the preliminary data that was reported to us by the schools. And sharing that information was their opportunity to say, Hey, there's something wrong with our process. We're missing a piece of it. And so I think there's certainly not a full understanding that that's an iterative process. And before the superintendent signs off on it, they have an opportunity to fix all those issues. I have occasionally heard folks just blame Universal Meals for this and not kind of go down the rabbit hole of what actually is leading to these lower numbers. It's not Universal School Meals, as I was mentioning before. Medicaid Direct Cert is giving us better numbers than we used to get with meals applications. So that's not the reason. Child nutrition does a bunch of data collections that I have not gone into today. We collect different data, different metrics. When we talk about enrollment in child nutrition, we're talking about who has access to meals, not who's enrolled for the purposes of education funding. There's a bunch of different rules around the data that we're collecting. But we have to publish those child nutrition reports on our website. Sometimes people see those reports, those numbers are different, and they think that must be a mistake, that the child nutrition numbers are different than the other AOE numbers, and therefore we've done something wrong. But those two reports are reporting on different metrics. And so that's not an indication that there's a problem there. All right. Just in closing, I really wanna stress that we think that this is really the most accurate way to identify women's comp students. It is better than the old school meals applications process that we were using before. The combination of the direct certification data, including the Medicaid direct certification data, along with that household income form, means that we're gathering all of that really good data from other state agencies on those households, and we're giving an opportunity for households who aren't participating in those programs to also share their information because there's kind of a wide push for everybody to submit those forms. Sometimes it's duplicative data. Our process cancels all that out. So we're getting every source that we think we could get. And we're pretty confident that it's very comprehensive. While the complexity of the process means that there is a risk of error at the local level, the data validation process and the opportunity to sign off and certify means that there's a lot of opportunities to correct that. So we're not saying that that never happens, but we're really trying to provide a lot of opportunity to fix that. So overall, we think that this is a pretty thorough process and there's not really anything to suggest that it's unfairly disadvantaging one SU over another or one part of the state over another because we're collecting information from multiple sources. I will stop there.

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: Thank you so much.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Think what Unless someone has a very quick clarifying question, I think what I'm gonna do is ask people to send your questions to me, and we can invite the team back to answer those questions at another time. I think there's a lot to digest with this testimony. And I really appreciate all the work that you've been

[Caitlin Corkins (Department of Housing and Community Development)]: doing on this for a very long time.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Good. Thank you so much. So folks, I think many of us are going to the Superintendents Association lunch at Capitol Plaza, and then we are back here at 01:15 or something. Reserve guidance. Thanks, everyone, for remembering the agenda. See you here at 01:15 or at lunch.