Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Turn it to stuff. Oh, because agriculture back in action, and now we know where we're at. And now we're gonna spend some time with Abby Williams. We've got Willard, I mean, we're talk about Section 12, Farm to School Program contracts, and, Addison, the floor is yours. Great. Sorry for butchering your name. That is okay. That was all flustered.

[Abby Butler, Agency of Agriculture]: For the record, Abby Butler, Agency of Agriculture. It's funny, I've had other people call me Abby Williams, so you're not the first.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Well, sometimes I know exactly, and I should have just said your name because I know you so well, but I was actually trying to read my head scratching because that was where I got into trouble.

[Abby Butler, Agency of Agriculture]: Yep, no problem. Well, may be a relatively quick update. This is a real, from our perspective, technical correction in the Housekeeping Bill, in S-three 23, that's focused on the Vermont Farm to School and Early Childhood Program. That was created back in 2006 through the Rosa McLaughlin Farm to School Act. We've been making investments in schools and childhood programs ever since. Since 2007, there's been over three fifty competitive primary school grants awarded to just under $3,000,000 to Vermont schools. So it's impacted 121,000 students, about 163 schools, and just over that, and 166 early childhood programs. So a great program that we're proud of, and it's sort of one of our signature investments in thinking about the value of education, the value of our agricultural economy, and healthy food being available to our vulnerable population. So we just produced our impact report, which I'm happy to share with you, or I might even suggest if you want a longer presentation about the program, Gina Cliffordeau is the program manager. She'd be happy to come in when you reach a point in your capacity where you're ready for some just fun, exciting updates. We have these. I can share them with you, I can leave them with you, or I can bring them Yeah, please share them. Okay. Let's do that. Great. The technical correction that we're sort of hoping for, or proposing, is we don't currently have language in the Farm to School Act to provide contracts. So we're relatively limited and have limited flexibility in that we're only able to do granting, which that served us well for our Farm to School arrangements in that investments that they make in schools. We'll continue to do a competitive grant process for schools. But a critical part of the work that the Farm to School Program does is implores technical service providers to provide a variety of services and so what would be helpful going forward is to have the ability to engage in contracts with those technical service providers. Push that out a

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: little bit more for us.

[Abby Butler, Agency of Agriculture]: Yeah, so what we've done in the past is, well, let me say the vision that we have is that if we wanted to solicit all ideas of different trainings or services that we wanted conducted, we would still put out a contracted bid and have organizations apply. If we had a very tailored, kind of known request, then that would give us the ability to do more of a simplified bid, more of a targeted outreach. Thankfully, in the Farm to School Act, it requires us to do collaborative partnership with the Agency of Education, with the Department of Health, and with the entire Farm to School Network, which is a lot of nonprofit community organizations across the state. So regardless of whether we did a competitive bid process or a simplified process for contracts, we would still solicit those priorities in a collaborative way with our partners. Currently, we've done is felt a little, I don't know if I'd say stilted or awkward, in that we've had needs for within the program that have been in the best interest of the state, and we've had to do it through a granting process. Typically, feels more aligned with doing a contract. It's to the service of the state, gives us more control. Contracts would give us more control over the timeline and the deliverables and would allow us to negotiate pay rates a little bit more than we were able to do under the granting process. So that's sort of the vision and that's sort of the way in which we could imagine using contracts. We would still do grants for all the schools and CHOP IT programs. So if the granting program would stay the same, the contracts would be limited to service providers that we needed, either So I could give some examples of the ways that we can Please do, yes. Yeah,

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: I need a little bit more.

[Abby Butler, Agency of Agriculture]: Yeah, okay. So, so there's a, it's called the Northeast Farm to School Institute, which is coordinated through the network, hosted oftentimes by Shelburne Farms, and it brings school teams in to access technical assistance and coaching to be able to establish a farm to school program in their community, in the middle of their school. We would love to be able to, as the agency of agriculture, contract with some of those awardees to cover some of their costs or support them as they graduate out of the institute and go into the school to start their program. They're often at an early stage program development, so it wouldn't necessarily be that we would wanna do a competitive grant for them, but they're a really targeted population that we'd say, Okay, these are the six Vermont schools that participated in the institute. We wanna offer them a little bit of funding to be able to support their team to participate in the institute. Sometimes there's statewide dissemination of local food material, which is, one example would be called the Harvest of the Month program, which is that each month there's food that's typically grown that time of year or available that time of year because it's a storage crop, and we're encouraging schools and school nutrition programs to highlight meals that utilize that product. In the winter, it could be a squash or a potato or an onion. In the spring it could be fresh leafy greens or maple syrup. It would be an opportunity through a contract to be able to provide and disseminate some of the promotional materials around statewide. So again, we wouldn't be looking to individual schools to have to apply to do that, but instead we could make that as a bid available to all schools. Another suggestion or idea is that within the Farm to School and Early Childhood Network, there's been a desire to have increased capacity where they might like to have a coordinating position, a coordinator, and potentially through a contract, we could support a portion of that coordinator position. Again, we could do it as a competitive bid and see what we'd see for responses. I think we kind of know who would probably reply to that bid, but it would give us a mechanism to be able to invest in some of those activities.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Member)]: What were those responsibilities of the coordinator?

[Abby Butler, Agency of Agriculture]: Well, that's a good question. I would guess it's sort of continuing to manage the network. So, the network is a variety of schools, food nutrition directors, Agents of Agriculture, Education, Health, many of the partners across the state, some non profits that are focused on graduate school programming. They host gatherings, they bring people together on an annual basis, they host an annual event. They could be responsible for the dissemination of some of the materials or the education about the different priorities that the programming in Vermont has for both schools, K-twelve schools, or for early childhood. I think that there's a concept behind what that coordinator position would do. It's not a position at the Agency of Agriculture, but could the partner school program have the resources to invest in that, I think is the question for option on family.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Member)]: Yes. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Amy, I guess I'm still not 100% clear.

[Abby Butler, Agency of Agriculture]: Okay.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Member)]: On the Vision grant, it would appear that you could only grant about 25% of what was requested, if I'm reading it correctly. From the five one point year 6,000,000 was requested, 283,000 was awarded, and even on the smaller capacity building grant, 167,000 was requested, but only 110,000 was awarded. I guess my question is, would additionally adding a contract service cost money from the agency's budget, and where is that other money gonna come from if you can't already even satisfy the grant? Demand. Yeah.

[Abby Butler, Agency of Agriculture]: That's a good question, senator. So I probably should have said this in the introduction. In the governor's recommend, right now it's $500,000 for the Farm to School and Early Childhood program for the Agency of Agriculture, and that's been the base allocation for the last few years. There are some requests that we receive through this program that are not ready for investments.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Member)]: Okay, so it's oversubscribed to some degree.

[Abby Butler, Agency of Agriculture]: It's still oversubscribed, as is, so many of our economic development programs. In some cases, they're not proposals that we would choose to invest in. They need more coaching, they need more technical assistance, they need more support, And so in some cases, even if it's oversubscribed, you'd still need the investment that you're comfortable with coming And into a grant could create a capacity for some additional dollars out of the allocation to support contracts. In some cases, we have oversubscribed demand of high quality applications and we wouldn't do any contracts. And so I think that the opportunity of having that flexibility and the language would allow us the opportunity to assess what the demand is in the granting programs. And our goal is, and you can see on the last pages, pages ten and eleven, sort of describes this pretty significant program update and restructuring that happened in this past year, if you look at the bottom of page 11, we had six different funding opportunities that have been streamlined into four. And two of those are related to the one time appropriation of the local food schools and childcare, which which was attempting that this body appropriated half $1,000,000 in attempt to sort of capture the retracted federal dollars that happened the very last minute. So that was where we had, think it was, I'm not remembering exactly, 1,200,000.0 of federal funds in a committed agreement and then they were pulled under the new administration. So this body appropriated a one time $500,000 to sort of like fill that gap as best we could. So, that's three and four of this FY twenty six one time funding opportunity. Going forward, we anticipate that the base appropriation will support one and two, which would be the service provider grants and the Farm to School and Early Childhood grant. Those would still remain the priority focus of the program and it would be that if the resources have supported all the competitive and ready to invest in projects, could that allow for some additional funding to be available for contracting?

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Member)]: Of the contract, you're not asking for additional let me say it the other way. You have administrative capacity to do both contracting and awarding grants.

[Abby Butler, Agency of Agriculture]: Yeah, good question.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Member)]: You're not asking for a new position. No, no, not at all.

[Abby Butler, Agency of Agriculture]: Okay. Yeah, this would just be allowing the flexibility within the program with the current staffing to be able to respond to the demand that exists in the state. The priority would still be to do granting to schools and shopping programs. If the demand was less than the appropriation and there were statewide priorities that would be appropriate for contracting, this language change and this kind of like housekeeping item would allow us the flexibility to do that. Thank you. Which we currently don't have. Yep.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Everybody good? Right till the last end, then you finally got me. Okay. I'm for getting that to understand you.

[Abby Butler, Agency of Agriculture]: It is me again. Yeah. Totally did some of best stuff

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: describing I was, I won't be reporting that section.

[Abby Butler, Agency of Agriculture]: I was

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: a dense on it, I will have to admit, but thanks to Senator Collamore's question, it came clear to me at the end.

[Abby Butler, Agency of Agriculture]: Yeah, they were good clarification questions. And if did want a presentation on the program, if you're of interest, think I Jana Clitherow could walk you through the program, the investment, what fiscal year 'twenty five looks like, and she would also, I think, be able to entertain any questions. She would be able to entertain any questions around the contract. One question.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Rutland, good? Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, welcome. We're gonna see you on Tuesday, it sounds, right? Okay. Yeah, I think we have you going Tuesday? Yeah. Wonderful. Yes. Yes. Okay. So good. Great. I do apologize about yesterday. I always ask if anybody else in the room have anything, and I did feel we'll catch up on Tuesday, but I do feel that I missed an opportunity with you yesterday, and I do apologize. So in the future, if you've got something to say, have her in this room, please just say it. So That's good. So yeah. It's good. Thank you. Alright, committee. Let's see where we're at next. We are 11:00. We've got well, 10:40 with food bank coming back in. So, yeah, we'll take a few minute break unless there's anything that anybody would like to discuss.