Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: We're sharing the screen.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Hold on one second. Well, let me just do the introduction here. It's Friday, January 30. We are gonna spend some time with Vermont Housing Conservation Board. They are responsible for a ton of projects that get completed within the state of Vermont. A lot of projects that would make it very hard for just the public to get done because of the vast arrays of problems that went to a lot of these buildings that they're redoing the face, but also the new construction. I'm not going to steal any thunder. I'm going to turn this over to Gus Executive Director of the Housing Conservation Board. Welcome, the floor is yours sir.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Good morning. For the record, Gus Seeling, I'm the Executive Director, Walden Atooth, Executive Director of the Housing and Conservation Board. With me today is Stacy Scorulio, who's the Associate Director of Conservation at BHCB. She's managing our farm programs since she arrived five years ago and prior experience in Maine and New Hampshire, doing similar work. Liz Gleason, who's the director of the Department of Forest Liability Program. Sometime today, electronically, you'll get our annual report and you'll get the full range of work we're doing. We thought today we were talking about our impact on the agricultural economy. We would be happy to come back to talk about housing work in all of your communities. We'll touch on that briefly today, but not in any detail. We've also, as you'll see in one slide on housing, but as you'll see in our presentation, are in that part of the workshop or tool we have developed over the last three years of programs specifically for farm worker housing. The other bodies committees invited us in to talk about that specifically and we'd be happy to go deep on that if that's of interest to you. I'm going to give a broad overview, but I would say in terms of agriculture, we are acutely aware and I ran a good colleague the other night in the community function of the current problems that are going on in the dairy industry that I'm sure you're hearing about as a committee and the struggles that are going on there. That's not unlike when we began back in the 1980s when a big farm was 200 cows and we had 3,000 dairy farmers. We actually have, I think as much or more milk production today as we had back then. We have a much smaller number of the farmers. What we have is a lot more organic, lot more value added and a lot of consolidation that's gone on in the industry across the state. And the development rights program that you're going to hear about is a key tool in keeping farmland in agriculture. We're still using farmland as a state and the viability and rural economic development programs that Liz will talk about are also part of the infrastructure that help people do better business planning, get better technical assistance and improve their businesses overall. So I hope you'll see the compendium of work that we do is beneficial to this committee's mission. And I guess the other thing I just want to say is we've had a long history in this room. Our programs actually had legislation began in the Ag Committees back in the 80s and the two programs, Liz will speak to the chair's predecessor basically helped write the legislation that created both the viability program and the rural economic development initiatives. So as you have thoughts and ideas, we don't think we'd walk in here with all the best ideas. We're happy to help figure out how to get them implemented on the ground in a way that will benefit your communities. First line that I'm, as an introduction is Coffield Farm in Portland. This is what we call a dual gold project. We actually put two farms together for the actually the applicant stage which is the Cobb Hill Co Housing Community. They built 26 homes at one end of the farm and they used the purchase and sale of the receipts from selling development rights to subsidize two or three homes including a home farmer. Our whole staff go out once a year to visit projects. This year we went to Windsor and West Windsor and we visited the farmer there, same farmer as was there thirty years ago. They make great cheese. They do provide the co op here in the state and they're still doing well. One example of something a little different. Here's our mission statement and it speaks and I think this is important not just to go build housing or conserve land but to do it because it's of primary importance to economic vitality and quality of life. The picture you see here is the development of affordable housing in Putney that's overcome two cases of appellants that went to the Supreme Court twice and lost both times. The applicants also provided full acre as a community garden. This is located right across the street from the Puppy Co op and home to the farmer's market in Puppy. And we're sometimes asked to do that kind of work. There's a big co op down in Brattleboro. We built affordable housing above and then that's a place that provides outlets for I think several 100 farms in Southeastern Vermont. So the impacts of our work sometimes even when we're doing development do have benefits to the ag industry. Very briefly, this slide is to talk about our work on the rural economy and the benefits we provide overall. Mighty Food Farm is a farm in Shaftsbury and the woman farming there had been on leased land for ten years. The Vermont Land Trust who I hope you'll hear from has a farmland access program that we support other entities involved in farmland access. She was able to get on this farm in Shaftsbury because of that program and because of the sale of development grants. She's just a terrific farmer. Site you see here in Brattleboro is a conservation project that had great benefits in the community. That was a site of Sassimo Lumber. And they left the Rutland River's Conservancy in the town basically did floodplain restoration here. We moved a burr and took down a lot of fill. There's another site over in West Brattleboro where similar work has been done when the wet stone rises. David Dean used to call it Dinky Little Brook, but with tropical storm Irene and other flooding, it make huge amounts of damage. So this is conservation work that's going to help Downtown Brattleboro, the surrounding counties. From the rural economic development, we've been involved in six or seven community supported enterprise in these Callis General stores. One of them, I know it well because I've been a Dallas resident for more than forty years. I've lived across from this store to 30 of them. And it closed in 2019. And at that time, it was refuted to be the longest operating store in Vermont. The community bought it. It was built on it. Had no capital investment going back at least till the 1980s. Raised its fund of money, restored three apartments, built a kitchen, and leased it out now to an auction. We've been going pretty well for the last several years. And if you're on Route 14 at Senator, I think you probably are, from Hardwick down to East La Coeur. This is the only operating store in that quarter. So it's an important community. Last thing which I'm really excited about is the Vermont Land Trust just recently worked with Vermont Adaptive, which does work to help disabled folks enjoy the outdoors. Their services to veterans are free and we just help them buy a permit both in Rochester. Heard about on public radio or publications. So that's a way that our conservation dollars are helping to do a lot of things at once. But what I think about in terms of our programs is how do we stack and mix together? So this is great for veterans. It's great for the sample community. There's a conservation fund and on their campus will be housing for people on an 18 acres out of 150 that will be housing at other kinds of facilities for people who are working to get back a piece of their lives to enjoy the outdoors, and especially that it's just really heartwarming. This is the one slide on housing. You have been enormously supportive of our work. It includes the full range of homeownership, rental development, value back to home communities. As I mentioned, farmworker housing, shelters. I've got four projects to help aid at covering recovery and providing recovery residences around the state to her in Bennington. Was Senator Major when we broke ground for a new shelter at Hartford last year that should be operational, I think by next summer. So the work encompasses a wide range of activities. Next week, we're going to work and have a grand opening for kids with severe psychiatric disabilities. The bond pathways is doing up in Burlington. But whether it's home ownership or rental development, chair is very familiar with the development going on at Sacred Park in Newport right now. That site had been vacant for close to thirty years, maybe longer. Under construction has been high right now. We were the first dollars into that project and often our work is to help instigate more development. We were not long ago with Leslie Robert. Greg had a comment to that as I

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: know that people will look at some of these projects and say, It's just too much money. It is what it is, but I'm going to defend very much what they did, what Gus' group had done from Newport. This is an old high school, and it was, you want to talk about a nightmare as far as environmental, lead, asbestos everywhere, on eight acres, or so. And I had brought in four different groups of people trying to figure out how we could make that term, how could we make it happen? And it just wasn't going to happen. The numbers weren't just going to work. Not to say that Gus' group isn't able to do even more affordable housing for a lesser cost, but that building would have sat there and just aggregated for years more to come. To see it get turned into something productive and useful is a bonus for all over Vermont, never mind my community.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: I think that's what we're trying to do is have a catalytic impact. So when we were in West Brunswick a few weeks ago, maybe two months ago, what the town manager said it was a site where they had degraded building. But what she was talking about is because this anchor had been fixed that was going to allow her to begin to work with other owners of the surrounding parcels right across the shopping mall, a food market, short walk to the village, great diner near right nearby. I've eaten there. But it really was an anchor to more good stuff happening. In Middlebury right now, there's a developer who is developing a two fifty unit development, mostly single family. We're involved in six of those homes and the multifamily rental as well. And that's catalyzing more development. We've been in the St. Albans District for 150 out of two seventeen homes being built in that district. So we're always trying to have a catalytic impact that's positive for our community. And I would say though, anything you do in housing costs way too much right now. The average investment that we're making is $80,000 What we're trying to do is help developers leverage other money, sometimes private equity, sometimes federal grants, sometimes loan dollars. In some situations, you'll see that we're up 150 to $200,000 in a range. But when you hear that it costs $600,000 we're not putting all those dollars in with your dollars, state dollars, we're using the state dollars to leverage other ones. With that, I want to just say before I turn it over to Stacy that there is a huge opportunity for us to do more good rural community development, to do more housing, to do more farmland conservation across the state. What we hear from your constituents is we don't come up with the ideas in the communities. Groups come to us and say, we really want to fix sacred art or there's a group that met in Crasberry a few weeks ago now that Sterling College is closing saying, what can we do with all this property? We don't want it to sit vacant. In a community like the Upper Valley where the pressures are so high, we're really looking to groups there to tell us what do they need the most. The last thing I want to emphasize is in our statute you gave us this responsibility to make investments that are going to last. They're about ten or twenty year investments. We visited the historic homes of Rumin, which we helped redevelop three historic buildings for elders back in the early nineties. And they were all in great shape when we visited this summer. So when you do stuff short term, that's great today, might be great for ten or twenty years, but if it gets slips to market rate housing, then we all have to look for a sink in it. And that's true of our conservation work as well, that we're making investments that will last through generations. Vermont Adaptive will always have that home. If they someday don't aren't necessary or go out of business, then we'll find a different use for that. We recently converted the Boy Scout camp to a different kind of cadaver over in Benson Orwell. So with that, I'm gonna stop talking and turn over to Stacy to

[Stacy Sebulo, Associate Director of Conservation, VHCB]: Yep. Thanks, Gus. Everybody, morning. Morning. Thank you for having us. Once again, my name is Stacy Sebulo and I'm the Associate Conservation Director at BHCB, and before I became that, I was the Agricultural Director for a number of years, so this is near and dear to my heart. So we thought it'd be helpful initially to sort of set the stage of what we're facing here in Vermont, and you all might be familiar with this report that came out from our partner, American Farmland Trust. I know that their staff has been coming in and giving testimony to House Ag, and definitely would encourage you to check more into their work because it's fascinating information. But they did this report called Front End of Threat, where they were looking at essentially what do we stand to lose in terms of farmland based on bottling. So they crunched the numbers, did a analysis, we recently, this was a report that came out in 2022, we actually asked them to take a look at current trends of where we're at and how close we are to meeting those predictions that they initially put forth. And what they found was that 41,200 acres, that's what we are predicted to lose by 2040 based on this modeling, unfortunately we've already lost nearly half of that amount. So we're losing farmland in Vermont faster than they predicted through their modeling, 65% faster, which obviously for all of us doing this work is really troubling. We know that on the ground that equates to about 2,000 farms, 700 jobs, there are massive economic impacts to this. So, we saw this and this definitely is causing us to react and think about how can how can we be doing things differently, new tools, working with new new partners, and continuing to do

[Liz Gleason, Program Director, VHCB Farm & Forest Viability Program and REDI]: the the poor work that is making a difference.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Where do you think that that land is going? Where does it be? What's it being like?

[Stacy Sebulo, Associate Director of Conservation, VHCB]: Yeah, thank you. So what they found in their study, and I think you all probably just looking at the landscape would agree with this, because what I see just driving around Vermont, it's low density residential development. It's, you know, the house that's of tucked away in the woods on a back road or like on the edge of a field or sometimes a house smack in the middle of a field so you can't even farm it anymore. So, I mean, that way, for us being a housing and a conservation organization, like, clearly we know there's a huge housing crisis in Vermont, we need more housing, but the little houses here, there and everywhere is not really tapping that at the same time, it's like also feeding away at the farmland. So, have Yes, go ahead.

[Sen. Joseph "Joe" Major (Vice Chair)]: You're absolutely right. You know, you just drive along any place of Vermont and see that. I'm always struck by reason, what is the reason why you wouldn't put it in a corner, or put it so you're not affecting You want me to answer that? Yes, I mean, I had a conversation with Senator Happened the other day, he's my go to as far as

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: full farming, so I have

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: Well, lot of it is when it comes to permitting, what septic, where the septic ends up, it's gonna be the most logical Right.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: And then when

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: you go to build your house, septic is gonna, and some people do, seven, eight hundred feet away, then you have to pump it, but that adds an expense. But if the septic field's here, and I can put my house right there, that's often what we see because I'm in construction, and that's often what that's a good we point. See

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: And that

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: is part

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: of the problem.

[Stacy Sebulo, Associate Director of Conservation, VHCB]: Yeah. Yeah.

[Sen. Joseph "Joe" Major (Vice Chair)]: So it's infrastructure.

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

[Stacy Sebulo, Associate Director of Conservation, VHCB]: And planning, you know, for minimum lot sizes. I think there's just also, and I can understand this, there's a sentiment, especially people are moving here from somewhere more developed, they want to come to Vermont and maybe have a homestead or they want to have that rural living experience, so I think that's a factor too, is just preference of how people want them to live.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: We're seeing it on the commercial side as well. You're driving into Burlington on 89, all those that used to be farm fields now, now there's a big building, commercial building, solar fields and stuff like that, and we're trying to make a little bit of noise on that. In fact, we have some language in a miscellaneous bill coming about solar settings and stuff. We haven't really dealt much into that. But the committee has spent a lot of time talking about that without their own bill. They are concerned about the loss of the land that you're talking about, the $41,000 and at some point in time we're going to be looking for partners to write some more language to figure out how we can protect this farmland.

[Stacy Sebulo, Associate Director of Conservation, VHCB]: Yeah, thank you. Appreciate that very much. And this is just scratching the surface of the data they have, if you're interested, I would encourage you to ask them to come to this committee and testify. We can give you contact information. So moving along, how do we do this work? And Gus gave you some background on this, but I'll go into more detail. We, through our farmland conservation program, the bread and butter of what we do is the acquisition of development rights. So through that program, we are able to provide grants to acquire development rights on farms, and so basically what that's doing is stripping away the or restricting the rights on that property to develop it for commercial or industrial use, but it's allowing it to continue to remain on farm, be used for forestry, recreation, all those types of things. So for many farmers, it's a win win because most don't want to be in the position of having develop their land anyway, and in many cases it's allowing them to transfer the land to their kids or to an incoming farmer if they don't have a successor. So it really, in many cases, is a lifeline for that farm operation. And I'll talk more about that in a minute, but we also, and Liz will share more about this, but we have a wonderful farm and forest viability program that's also crucial with a lot of our conservation projects, where they're coming in and providing business planning support, succession planning for these farms and helping to keep them more economically viable. Also, through the viability program, the Rural Economic Development Initiative, and they're helping a lot of rural communities and working land businesses on grant writing and other kinds of support to help bolster the economy in those areas. And then last but not least, we're doing a lot more with water quality work, and we know water quality and how it relates to ag is a big topic and has been for quite a while. We recently became the clean water service provider up in the Mount Bramagos Basin and through that have a grants program that a lot of farmers benefit from because they're getting grants to do infrastructure improvements and make other upgrades that help buttercrawling. Okay, so on to more data, I geek out about, but I think this table is quite telling. This is showing you farmland values before and after conservation. So the bars in blue are showing the average for that particular year, so it's between 2020 and 2025. These are raised values of farms that we worked on that eventually became conserved. The blue is showing you the value of the farm per acre before it has a conservation easement on it so that, you know, has that full development potential and you can see some pretty high values here and again this is your community might differ from this. It's, you know, an average and it's about 20 projects a year that we're planning, so not a huge dataset. The green is the value of the farm once it's been conserved, and so you could see that that big differential. It's really the conservation easement is reducing the value on average about 60%, which is helping, and that's why when I talk about farmland access, this is a huge part of our work is when someone puts an easement on the land and then they can transfer it to a new farmer at that lower value, that's huge. In many cases, it's the only way that next generation or beginning farmer can afford property. So with that, and I'm sure if you're preaching to the choir here, might be things that you're already aware of, but just to highlight, we already talked about the affordability piece and how finding development rights can support that and facilitating farm transfers. On average, the projects we fund in a year, I would say between a third and sometimes up to a half of the projects that we're funding are farm transfers, so it's a huge part of the work that we do and I'd remiss if I didn't also mention Vermont Land Trust as being a tremendous partner of ours and their Farmland Access Program is amazing. They have funding to go out and acquire farms and they hold onto them on an interim basis and often do a lease to purchase with a new farmer, so they've been doing great work in this area as well. A lot of the farms that we work with are using the proceeds from the development rights to reinvest in their business, pay down a lot of our paying down debt, being able to buy new land, all those types of things. It's really an economic engine for the farm and for the rural economy. Also, a lot of the farms that we're working with have a lot of co benefits in terms of ecology, and I'll talk more about that in a minute on a different slide, but we know farms in Vermont have a lot of other it's not just cropland, there's woods, there's sugar bush, there's wetlands, it's this landscape of different features that all benefits the natural environment. Last but not least, you know that doing this work is helping keeping working lands working, which is the reason why we're doing it. And I'll just mention this project up on the screen, Windsor Plateau, that was one that we partnered with the Upper Valley Land Trust on. It's a 140 acre property just outside of Downtown Windsor. This was a farmland access project. The owner was an out of state landowner who wasn't using the land or he was leasing it out to a local farmer for hay, but it was sort of underutilized cropland. This is all Primax soils by the way. It's like 40 acres of this amazing flat plateau that is all Primax soils. It's incredible. This amazing view of Mount Muscoffe, which someone would love to plop a house in in the middle of. Things like that didn't happen and the farmers who ended up on the land are at Water Farm, they're actually based in Plainfield, New Hampshire but work a lot on both sides of the river and they're a vegetable and berry application, and they needed more crop land, so this was a way for them to expand their business, and I hear that they're doing really well. Okay, so here's another farm in that neck of the woods, Sweetland Farm, and this is a great example of a farm that I think exemplifies what we mean when we mean farms have a lot of full benefits. So, this farm was recently recognized, I'm not sure if you all heard of the Leopold Conservation Award, it's named after Aldo Leopold who's a renowned conservationist, and there's this award that started to recognize landowners and farmers who are demonstrating exemplary land stewardship. And every year, you know, a new farmer is recognized. We've had a couple in our area, a couple of conserve farms recently that got this distinction. The other one was the Schwannier Farm up in Highgate. This is Nora Lake here from Sweetland and she and her family were recognized just this year for that distinguished award, which also comes with a cash prize, which is always wonderful when you actually get cash money to go with the award. And they were noted for all the work they've done with expanding the buffers along their streams, like eight acres of forested buffers to protect the riverfront. They're trying to get to 90% renewable energy on the farm within the next ten years, they've really leaned into that. Solar panels and a wood fired boiler for the greenhouses. Been on a lot of farms, I have to say this is the most impressive operation I've ever seen, both in terms of how they're leaning into environmental stewardship and just all the work that they've done around trying to be diversified. So they do chickens, pork, turkeys, vegetables, berries, they have a three fifty member CFA and they have tons of heirloom varieties of apples and all of that, I think just one of those things on their own would be kind of a mind bend to figure out. They're doing all of it really well. So, very impressive operation that Upper Valley Land Trust conserved.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Stacy, if I could just start up for a second and just say we visited this farm about five years ago and Liz's program, the viability program, has worked with it. At that time, this woman was really struggling. And we'd also visit the shelter that day. And what she said to us is, my husband doesn't want me to work so hard so that people can get work this hard for people to get the best tomatoes in the world and we lose life. And our housing director said to me, who would have known out on a visit that our hearts were gonna get pulled on the farm visit as opposed to the shelter visit? And her hard work. I mean, this this is about Vermonters and and their willingness to really put their sweat and their risk of their own capital to work and how do we partner with them. And it's been a combination of a bunch of things that have helped make her successful and win this highly prestigious award as a great story to play out. So really moving story. The other thing I just wanted to say as a kind of background, when we began, as I said in this committee room, you know, close to forty years ago, lots of people said, cynics said, oh, all this land's gonna grow up to pucker crush. Why are we doing this? And what the Vermont Land Trust does every year is to survey how whether the land's in production or not. And most years they're telling us 95% to 97% of the conserved land is in production at some level for another. So there are a lot of struggles going on in the farm economy. There always have been. We wanna make them better. But I think Vermonters really see the value of living in communities where you can buy local food. It was not long ago at the height of the pandemic that a lot of us in the early days, when we were afraid to go to the even be in a grocery store, we're going to our neighbor, who buy some chicken or pork chops or whatever out of their freezer. And I think we really want to support that kind of work, and that's exactly what this woman is doing for her community.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: You, Jeff. While you're figuring our language. Zee spent a lot of time talking about how we were going to be farming in Vermont, and it's not starting out as a large farm operation. It's starting out like this. They've got to get a toehold and they've to get started. Then quickly after that, there needs to be some form of help because you can only go on your own energy and what limited resources you have for so long before you start to lose everything. Thankful that you folks went in there.

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

[Stacy Sebulo, Associate Director of Conservation, VHCB]: Okay, so more farm stories and then I'll be turning over to Liz to talk about one one of these farms. So this, again, like I said, we we work a lot with projects that support farm access and transfers in different forms and have a number of those over the years that are, I think, really exemplary. So we've got the the goat project in Bennington Bennington, which is back in house, and she had bought this land about ten years ago. It's about, I think, 80 acres or so, and had a small herd of goats and was doing some soap making as part of that and wanting to expand and do cheese making and be able to really fine tune her business. And so she worked with Liz's program viability team to come up with a business plan and do some financial planning and other things that helped enhance her business. And then another big piece of it was selling the development rights on this farm through Vermont Land Trust, which gave her money to

[Liz Gleason, Program Director, VHCB Farm & Forest Viability Program and REDI]: put back into her business.

[Stacy Sebulo, Associate Director of Conservation, VHCB]: The Clearfield Farm in Granville, that's one that our board recently approved. It hasn't yet closed yet, but it's heading towards that soon. So, this is one actually that they had worked with Vermont Land Trust probably ten years ago to get their home farm through the Farmland Access Program, and they said,

[Liz Gleason, Program Director, VHCB Farm & Forest Viability Program and REDI]: oh, we were really nervous, like we were at the open house and there were

[Stacy Sebulo, Associate Director of Conservation, VHCB]: all these other farmers and we didn't know if we'd end up on the land, and they were really floored when they did, and thrilled to be able to continue to farm there over that ten year period. They recently had the opportunity to buy the adjacent property that came on the market that was land that they weren't already using. It was being leased to a dairy farm. And they again came back to Vermont Land Trust, who they have this great working relationship with and said, How can you help us? We want to be able to expand this other 50 acres because our business is booming, we do a lot of wholesale, we find their stuff in the co op and local grocery stores, They also sell direct through Marmors Markets, and so BLT came to the table again and through funding from PHCB, working with them to conserve this additional 50 acres to expand their operation. And then Lucas Dairy Farm, so John Lucas is kind of a rare person in that he's a he didn't come from a farming family. I don't think there's a lot of people going into dairy, conventional dairy who did not grow up on a farm, and so he was from New Hampshire, went to a technical college there and just completely fell in love with dairy farming. So I wanna go, I wanna do that. And he found, you know, got partnered up with the Outdettes, who you folks may know, big farm family over at Orwell, and at that time the Odets, I think they said something to the effect of, we've run out of family members to transfer this to, you know, like basically so many farms just didn't have the next generation that wanted to move forward with it. So John leased the farm from them for a number of years and then through the sale of the development rights was able to actually acquire the land. This is a phenomenal piece of cropland. It's like 400 acres, 80 to 90% of it are prime ag, so it's just like drool worthy, bland, it's beautiful. It also has a number of other great features that we're excited to conserve, like a big archaeological area with native artifacts that now, because this land is conserved, will never be disturbed. There are wetlands. There's a clay flake forest, which is a rare habitat. So, really, really cool project. And then, the last resort farm, I have to admit, I don't know as much about this one. Get the napkin. You wanna take it over

[Liz Gleason, Program Director, VHCB Farm & Forest Viability Program and REDI]: from here? Okay. I'm here, Danielle.

[Stacy Sebulo, Associate Director of Conservation, VHCB]: Yeah. I think that covers it from my end, unless there are questions.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Thank you. Okay, thank you.

[Liz Gleason, Program Director, VHCB Farm & Forest Viability Program and REDI]: Great. Morning, everyone.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Good morning. Good morning.

[Liz Gleason, Program Director, VHCB Farm & Forest Viability Program and REDI]: For the record, I'm Liz Leeson, the program director for our Farm and Forest Viability Program and rural economic development initiative, and I just heard a crazy story about Eugenie and, I think it's Sam, who are in this picture. My uncle's ex girlfriend's sister lives next to them at their winter place in Florida. Small world. Many steps removed. I don't know how they figured that out. Yeah, so Last Resort Farm, stand in Moncton. I'm going to tell a little story about them because this is such a great operation, and I've known them pretty much since I started this job fifteen years ago. And then I'll talk a little bit more in-depth about some of the other programs at BHDB that touch agriculture. So last resort farm used to be a dairy farm. I believe you were saying that Sam was also an interested council at some Yeah.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Talked with Senator Westman and others who've been around a while. Sam for probably a decade, maybe longer, was at Lynch Council and Surface Committee. Tag was his people.

[Liz Gleason, Program Director, VHCB Farm & Forest Viability Program and REDI]: Yeah. He, so he ended up deciding to move away from dairy. They conserved their farm, and they turned it into an organic strawberry and straw farm. So it was pretty specific operation. They have twin sons. One of them came back about ten or so years ago after working in sort of ag tech around the world to come and run this business. It's a really, really beautiful farm. They employ a lot of young people, and it's just a great story of an intergenerational transfer. We do a lot of work on farm transfers pretty much every year. About a third of the businesses we're working with are at some point trying to either plan ahead for a transfer, either to their kids, family, or to other partners, or actively in the midst of really working through those complex legal and financial and often really complex emotional transactions. So, we work, we do a lot of transfers with the Farm and Forest Liability Program. Also, a lot of our conservation easement projects provide a really important infusion of cash at that extremely expensive transaction moment that can really help either make it financially feasible for the exiting generation to retire or financially feasible for the entering generation to actually be able to afford the farm these days.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Liz, I'm just gonna jump in because Sam is the sweetest guy in the world, really easy goer. And like lots of fathers and sons, this was not an easy transition. I heard about it from him and he was just lots of families, he really appreciated the support because sometimes communicating with the family is the hardest thing any of us ever do. We can push each other buttons without thinking about it, without even knowing it all the time. So it's a really important part of your work, I think, is that And in most difficult circumstances, a terrific ag mediation program, that kind of thing. Even the people who seem to us to be the easiest going people in the world, family stuff is family stuff.

[Liz Gleason, Program Director, VHCB Farm & Forest Viability Program and REDI]: Yeah. Yeah. There's there's policy. There's sort of the financial framework, and then there's that emotional piece. Most people who are carving are doing it because it's not just their livelihood and their job. It's like a really important cultural and spiritual thing too. It is a really big deal and we're so happy to be working with a lot of these projects that end up succeeding. So, the Farming Forest Liability Program was created about almost twenty five years ago. We've been doing farmland conservation for fifteen years, and we're seeing a need for another sort of mechanism to help. Basically, the point of this, we're a small business development program here at VHCb. We do really individualized one on one technical assistance to build management skills with farm and forest businesses. Generally, come into our program when they're a couple years in business, they've gotten a little bit of their feet under that, they they have some data on what's working, what's not, and they really need to build their skills up around management, basically. The farm and kind of forest economy is so tight, it's such a global market. You really need to be a good manager, a business manager these days in order for it to all come together. You have to have the production skills, you have to have the right land and infrastructure, and you have to be able to make really conscientious management decisions. I'll talk a little bit about the structure of the program, but I just want to say a little bit more about the impacts first. So like I said, this is a small business development program, and it's one of the biggest working lands business development programs in the country. We are really well established. We have some of the most consistent and supportive funding environment that comes down through the Vermont legislature to do this work. Most other programs in other states are having to change their programs all the time to chase funding, like don't have consistent or sufficient funding to really be able to get into the details with farms and other businesses. And basically, because we have this really stable program with sufficient funding, because of your support, we are able to work really in-depth. Last year, we worked with 110 businesses really in-depth, and funding from the legislature, from a congressionally directed spending award and from some other places also led to another 100 plus people getting more lighter touch support, whether it's classes as you're getting your business started or anything like that. And we have really proven results. What you see down here is really the economic indicators that we track. We also consider this to be a program that works on quality of life as well. So we do get really great feedback from folks that this is like, they can finally take a day off with their partner. They can finally go see their kid's baseball game. But in terms of those economic indicators, last year, over 70% of the businesses we worked with increased their sales, and on average, those sales increased by over $50,000 We're working with a really wide range of scales of business from pretty small to multimillion dollar dairies. We're helping people access capital, whether it's grants or loans. Last year, those that added up to about $5,500,000 specifically for the farming forest business operations. And everyone that we worked with said that they self analyzed whether or not their skills in various management areas improved. And everyone we worked with felt that they had improved some of those relationship management skills. And a bunch of people added jobs also, too. So, in this economy, we're feeling pretty good about these results. You see this little map icon up here. Land access is also just a really important issue for farmers right now. Beginning farmers are struggling to find the right land at the right price at the right time for their business. If we often work with people who are in that search process and then supporting them with the business planning through that, though, usually about 10% that we work with in a given year are really in that phase. They might have been operating a lease life or something like that, and then

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: they need to put an effort in.

[Liz Gleason, Program Director, VHCB Farm & Forest Viability Program and REDI]: Structure, I know you've had some of these organizations in this room already this week. I know John Ramsey was in from CAE. The Interval Center is a big part of the Farm Security Fund, which I think is coming in right after us pretty soon. I should wrap up. We really think that's a really important initiative and having been through so many disasters recently and seeing how long it takes to piece together emergency support afterwards. I'm just really impressed with that broad coalition's work to try to make a more efficient system around that. So, we partner with these five organizations up top to do this collaborative program model. The Farm and Forest Liability Program is a really specific program that farms enroll in at the right time for them. And then we also know that people need all different kinds of other support. So, we also partner with other organizations who are delivering other technical assistance to. I'm gonna breeze through some of this because I wanna get to questions, and I wanna make sure we have time for ready. Please stop me at any time if you have any questions. Just a couple more examples. I want to talk about dairy a little bit right now. We're in another period of really, really low conventional milk prices. I heard from a lender the other day that they were looking at numbers and it looks like about 80 to 90% of farms on average have cost of production higher than the price they're getting for their milk right now. So that is really, really tough. We are also seeing really strong demand for organic and all the organic buyers are actually taking on farms right now, which they haven't been doing for a while. So we partner a lot with the Northeast Organic Farming Association. We've enrolled a ton of dairies recently, whether they're trying to figure out how to keep their conventional dairy going, and if that makes sense right now, whether they need help transitioning to organic, something else. The demand has been really, really strong right now, and this is shaping up to be the biggest year of this program ever. Just quickly touching on the forest economy side of our work. We've been doing, we added forest, gosh, about ten or twelve years ago in an effort to sort of align with, for example, the Working Lands Enterprise Initiative and just recognizing that a lot of our farms are also forests, and that a lot of the issues facing the working landscape are similar, whether you're a farm or a forest business. These These are a couple of examples. Morgan Maple Works up at Morgan. We worked with them on business planning a couple of years ago. Best Wood Customs Sign down in Putney. It's a small local sawmill. We're losing a lot of our sawmills right now, so it's really exciting to have this one working to grow. One of their areas is that they saw a lot of black locust, which grows locally and is extremely strong. They use it in a lot of local outdoor recreation projects, like trail projects. So you have these small nonprofits working with a small sawmill for community projects, and it's just a really great community enterprise. In addition to our business planning program, we run a couple of grants. One is the water quality grant program that's funded separately with bond dollars every year to help work towards the state's clean water goals. We have our implementation grants, which help people who have recently done business plan implement that plan. So for example, Lincoln Peak Vineyard here in New Haven, we help them This couple just bought the business about a year and a half ago. They needed to make some really major investments in the infrastructure and the processing. So we helped to pay for some wine, like grape and wine processing equipment, including this beautiful stack of crepes that you see behind them that they're so excited about. We're working with more and more vineyards, and this is a really neat one. We started working with them when the previous owners were trying to potentially sell the business to their kids who decided not to do it. It went to a different owner who decided not to do it also. And all of a sudden, we were almost going to lose this really amazing vineyard. And this couple who had been working in wine in California and I think New Jersey moved up here with their kids really got this business back off the ground. So it's really exciting. Any questions before I move on to the Rural Economic Development Initiative?

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: In fairness. All

[Liz Gleason, Program Director, VHCB Farm & Forest Viability Program and REDI]: right. Really excited about the work that the Rural Economic Development Initiative is doing. We call this Ready, created in 2017. The idea was that we had all these small communities who had really amazing ideas for great projects that would help community and economic development in their town, and they just didn't have the capacity, whether it was time or skills or municipal staff, to actually draw down the dollars that needed to make those projects happen. So, obviously, that's something that BHCB does in a lot of different ways. We help bring down dollars for housing, for conservation, for farms. We have been helping farmers write really complicated, you know, 100 page long value added producer grants from the USDA for years, and we've been helping small communities for years, and this sort of, this program helps bunch that together. We work with, for the most part, communities under 5,000. We're trying to do really important community, economic development projects, working lands projects, historic preservation, outdoor recreation. Those are some of our focus areas. We also do a lot with childcare centers, because we really consider those to be critical drivers of small town economic development. So this is the Norwich Grange in Norwich. This is, I think, an opening that they had. This is both a historic preservation project and a rural economic development initiative project. A group of volunteers came together to say, We really want to save this building and we want a community gathering space, Redi helped them pull together the right funding streams to actually make this happen. So, still a little ways to go is my understanding, but it looks like they had a bumpin' party this summer. And just a couple more examples from Ready about funding we've helped pull down. The Alice Ward Memorial Library in Canaan is a really amazing, a little, tiny old library that needed some major infrastructure investments in order for it to be accessible to people using wheelchairs or needing other mobility help. They needed to invest in some of their tech, big projects to help the library. Question to answer? Yeah. Go

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: ahead. How do you get a payback on something that is like the library? I understand some of the others, but like the library, so is that coming back from the town?

[Liz Gleason, Program Director, VHCB Farm & Forest Viability Program and REDI]: It's not so much about a payback.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: What we're trying to do is invest some money to support community or a business that has an objective. So when you see that there's $35,000,000 that's come back, it doesn't come back to us, it comes back in the form of grants to the libraries or the entrepreneurs that are involved. So what we're saying is we're helping communities that would or businesses that would not have had the capacity to even apply for funds. I think the library is a great example there.

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: That is just usually a grant that is given by

[Liz Gleason, Program Director, VHCB Farm & Forest Viability Program and REDI]: We'll use a small amount of money to hire a grant writing consultant who then works with the client to in help draw down much larger dollars.

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: All right, so you're providing the service of grant writing to take it from the Fed government or maybe the state or even a

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: nonprofit? Correct, okay.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Yeah, that's what the leverage is. It's not

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: about It's not actually going You made it.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: It's not we're not in the business of making money. We're in the business of trying to help enrich the communities that you represent. And you what you do is you provide funding to us through the budget and through some through an allocation of property transfer tax revenue. We spend those dollars, and we have this discussion with the appropriators every year on housing and on conservation. In terms of ag, we're spending about 2 to $2,500,000 on business programs every year of state funding. She's drawing in other funding to support all these service providers. She's talked about the program Stacy was talking about development rights program. They spent about $5,000,000 on that military tax allocation, and we're getting matched dollar for dollar. It's the feds through a federal farmland protection program, and we're we're sometimes getting local money, bargain sales, also to leverage the dollars. So there is leverage happening, but it's not about We're not a proper paying institution. We're quasi public art of state government trying to help your constituents do what they wanna do.

[Liz Gleason, Program Director, VHCB Farm & Forest Viability Program and REDI]: So glad we touched on that, because yeah, this, Ready is a small but mighty program. So we're doing a small technical consulting project for the towns that's really helping draw down more of those towns or those working lines businesses to the dollars that they need to do work the community. I wanna wrap up just by saying that going back to the dairy conversation we were having earlier, there's a lot of challenges going on in that sector. There's a lot of really amazing dairy happening in Vermont too. There's a couple examples of projects we've supported recently. Sweet Cow Creamery is this little family run yogurt business. We help them get a big grant to improve their yogurt production. Maple Brook Farm down in North Bennington. We helped them get a Dairy Business Innovation Center, which is a federal grant to make their mozzarella more efficiently. And making mozzarella was my first job out of college. So I deeply appreciate that grant and the delicious teas that they make. Yeah, so we've talked about a lot of our programs here today. VHCD obviously has a really wide number of ways that you've sort of set us up to invest in communities. I'm really excited about our work and about all these projects, because I think it's really about how we take care of each other, our communities, the land, make sure we have food, we have places to recreate, and that everyone has really safe and dignified affordable housing. Thanks for having us. I'm thinking that Gus might want to say a few words, but I also just wanted to let you know that if you want to dig into this presentation more later, we've also left these two sort of synthesized, here's the numbers slides at the end here. So, we're not gonna talk about these, but they're in the presentation if you want them, and your annual, my annual report came to you yesterday and this morning if you wanna dig in there.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Thanks. I guess the last thing I'd say is, I think I said early in the presentation, is you folk, I've never met anybody who's serving here who doesn't know their communities better than those of us sitting at the state level. So make our phones ring, tell your constituents to call us when they have a great idea, or even just you're not sure if it's a great idea, but maybe it could be. And they wanna figure out with a program like Ready, is there some support for that idea out there? It might be a childcare center, it might be a library, it might be somebody who is trying to figure out how to take the next step in their business, whether it's somebody like Carl Cushing who's pretty sophisticated and was building it for a long time, or somebody who's really at the entry level. I don't know which of you represents Brandon because I don't track of that, but we had a great visit to the Brandon Library. And, you know, one of the things that happened there was there was a fellow had been a library customer for years, but it wasn't accessible. And now because they were able to put a lift in, he can use the whole library. It's just wheelchair bound and up till then have to go to the door, ask for something. Now he's got the use of it. Think that's a wonderful outcome. So make our phones ring. We're here to help your constituents. And if you have some ideas about programming as members of this committee had in the past, which is why REDI exists and why there's part liability program. Maybe we're not the right people to implement, but we're happy to brainstorm on who would be. So appreciate your time. And last thing I'll say is if you like what you're hearing, please tell your colleagues and appropriations because I know it's gonna be a tougher budget this year than it's been for the last five, and they will wanna hear what you think.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Yes, Gus. Well, I'm Gus, and I've worked together for

[Sen. Joseph "Joe" Major (Vice Chair)]: a bit. I just want to say I appreciate your work exponentially, because it's a balancing. We need housing, you know, we need a tremendous amount of housing, but we need our farms too, and how do we balance that? And I think that you are doing a tremendous job in trying to facilitate that and work with us to do that. So so thank you. And I think I should be first in here that that we're available for you. And I I, for one, seeing a lot of Windsor pictures up there

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: makes me feel good.

[Sen. Joseph "Joe" Major (Vice Chair)]: So anytime that I can beat out Addison an

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: hour or two,

[Sen. Joseph "Joe" Major (Vice Chair)]: when it comes to farming, I feel good.

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: I'm gonna have to have you

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: eat more.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: We can

[Liz Gleason, Program Director, VHCB Farm & Forest Viability Program and REDI]: come back and drink Addison all like we did.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Yeah. We I like the way that it covers all forms of the state. Gus and I have had some very frank discussions, very easy to talk with, and to say that he didn't have to win me over, he has. I do appreciate the work that you do. I think the thing I appreciate the most about it is it just gets done. Gets done. It doesn't whether you agree with the project or whether you don't agree with the project or whether it's too much money or it didn't go far enough, it gets done. I'm a firm believer that sometimes you just have to move one way or another, even if it's wrong, and it will figure its way out and it moves forward. That projects get done, and people are benefiting from it. I don't think there's anything that you've ever done that people haven't benefited. Again, people can argue one way or the other whether it's a right or the wrong, but somebody's getting the benefit of it. We appreciate that.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Well, again, thank you for those remarks. Again, we are an instrument of you. It's really your constituents. So it is Cornerstone Housing that built that housing in West Brooklyn, not us. We supported them. It is the Haven and the Twin Pines Housing Trust. It's an entrepreneur doing the best high school. It's Patrick Shattuck and his crew making Sacred Heart House. So the ideas come up from the community. Our thought is it's our job to help them get as far as they can go and hopefully over the finish line. You know? And that happens all over the state, whether the initiator is the Vermont Land Trust or a group like the group at Stone Crop and Middlebury. That began with a phone call among the town manager, the National Bank of Middlebury, and the college, and the Addison Housing was told saying, what can we do to meet housing needs in Addison County? Just a brainstorm that I was on three or four years ago. Now there's you're on the way to two fifty homes on that site, Fiddlebury. So it comes up from your constituents, and that's really the magic of what we do is we're getting their tax dollars back to them to use the positive way. And if we get it wrong sometimes, please tell us when we got it wrong. We're here to listen and here to be effective. So appreciate your time very much. Happy to come back if you wanna talk about housing in-depth, or if you wanna get a half hour on farm worker housing.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: We've talked about it a lot here, and I think it goes to the remarks that I missed in my opening remarks, or about the served lands, but I think a lot of people understand that that's what you already do on the land part of it, where the housing is really on the course right now. You've certainly shown us plenty of projects where you're knee deep involved with that.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Yeah. Just so you know, because you didn't ask today, of our appropriation, historically, we've spent little over 50% on housing, a little under 50 on conservation. Last year, this year, we're at about because the one time money is gone for housing, we're about 65% to housing, about 35% to conservation.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: What's your ask for to appropriations this year?

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: The transfer tax formula and the governor's ask is a little over $37,000,000 Okay. So it went down for the governor on that.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: It's down from years past.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Well, what you've been able to do since the pandemic began is to give us ARPA and one time funds. So we are just finishing our very last ARPA project, in another month. It's a $119,000,000 all spent out the door in a thousand homes all over the state. The one time money will be all we spent the ARPA money first because of federal deadlines. The ARPA the one time money being all committed before this fiscal year is up. There's about 2,000,000 left to be allocated.

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: Question on that. So you knew it was one time money, as you, and it was a boatload of money that you got, but did you always keep in mind that it was one time funds that, like some other things that have come through the State House, we started this, we need to keep doing it. Did you realistically be when you were sitting down looking at it, that it was just one time?

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Think the rationale for why to put it into capital projects is that, and we do get a little funding out of capital budget as well, is that when you invest in a capital project, that it's done. So it's your choice about whether it's gonna get allocated or not. I would say to you, and I've said to other people across the state house, that if we are gonna meet our housing needs, the current budget is not adequate to do that. We will continue to attack it incrementally as best we can. So I view it as a policy decision for you and the governor to work out of do we wanna continue to invest more because the returns that you'll get and the needs that'll be met should be met. And we'll what we will continue to do is spend the $37,000,000 that is in the governor's budget as effectively as we can. It's not enough to meet all the state's housing needs, which is a much huger proposition, but we'll do the best we can. If there is any one time money, and I did make a request in three areas for the go to the governor, and he put some one time money. It's directed to the agency of human services, but they have been contracting with us to do sheltered work. So there's some of that in the budget this year. There's been a parents group of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities that some of you may have come across in the middle of project in both of them right now that would continue to be active, that they report that you asked them to do last year. They have recommended ongoing funding because there's a little over 600 Vermonters who need housing from that group. So there are requests. The river group or the Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At The rivers. So they're you know, if there's one time whether we can put it to work, we will speak to what the needs are, and the needs are greater than our budget, but we will manage our budget to meet as many needs as we can in a range of areas, as I said, for the housing agreement. That will include the need for more recovery residences because we have a real struggle with addiction in Vermont right now that will include more shelter capacity, will include more home ownership, will include more rental development that we hope is gonna have the catalytic impact that I've tried to describe in my opening remarks. Once a one time project is done, it's done.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Well, thank you. We could be here all day, but that's for another time, as you've said. The groups are coming in up here, five ninety three, and we'll get the rate going again. Thank you.