Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: You're welcome. Great. Welcome everybody. It's Friday, April Yes. Is that possible? Yes. Is this? Welcome. And we're going to begin with some updates and requests as we consider our general budget priorities for appropriations. We welcome people who've been working hard on the Vermont Evaluation of Rural Technical Assistance. It's. And so, Gary, how do I take it away and welcome? You know all of us. Right?

[Sen. David Weeks (Clerk)]: David Weeks.

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: Yeah. From the. Okay. Great. Randy Brock. Right. Yeah. Nice to see you. Now. Oh, good. Good. Kesha will join us on shoots. Okay. Great. Well, thanks thanks for having us in. We really appreciate your time. For the record, my name's Gary Holloway. I'm the Downtown Program Manager with the partner for Housing Community Development, and I was one of the lead staff along with a couple of my colleagues on this Vermont evaluation for a little technical assistance. I'd like

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: to first Can you ask for Provide me for the origin of it, but gonna

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: and explain real quickly.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Right, because it's been a while.

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: Wanted I to acknowledge UVM and the Center for Rural Studies, as well as the Leahy Institute, which funded the initiative. Really, UVM and the Center for Rural Studies led the research efforts. So I just want to really thank them for their efforts in helping us get to this point. So this was initiated one back hundred eighty one, and the purpose of Virta was to assess how that system can be strengthened to better deliver housing, infrastructure, finer resilience, and economic development. Early on, we put together a project steering committee of folks who participate actively in technical assistance and resource these four municipalities. So as you can see, a lot of familiar names on this. And we also advise with others that may not have been directly surveyed on the steering committee, but this made up the group that we met monthly to of guide the work that UBM were doing with their study. And a special thanks to Rebecca Sanborn Stone from the community workshop who really helps facilitate and kind of keep us on track.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: I can't remember where you had a Crestview there. I was there. Was terrific.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: The summit? Yeah, the summit was outstanding.

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: Summit was terrific. Really, I'll bring that up in another slide and talk a little bit more about that. So the study was really designed to listen, listen to folks from municipalities, from regional planning commissions, from the technical assistance system, how things were working, what's working well, what's not working. We had 190 participants participate in listening sessions, in person and virtual. We had surveys. We had over 195 folks participate in online surveys. We touched on about 114 different municipalities during the research, as well as a review of 13 states. UVM had some students that really dug deep into some of the data that you can find in the longer, you know, 100 plus page report. And then we interviewed and did a little bit more deeper dive with about five states, rural states across the country, really understand how are they approaching this, how are they reimagining supporting communities, what's their structure? Is it at a state level, is it at a regional level, Is it embedded at a local level? So that really helped County level, which of course we're in

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: the process of at the SGO Center.

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: Yep. And then, as you mentioned, we did have a really good turnout with the summit. Had 125 folks attend this in person event, and really, it was designed as a game show. Sounded a little funny, but we, but Rebecca was really creative in getting us to engage in conversation, a and so we broke off into different tables throughout the day and really looked at particular issues and got creative on how we would design different approaches. And then all of that, once again, is captured in the longer report, and you can see some of the photos and some of the ideas that were baked out of that summit. So all of that information fed into the report and led to some recommendations. Some of the summaries, the recommendations, a patient with findings, obviously capacity is finding constraint at every level, whether it's at the state or the regional or municipal level. There's a capacity issue that allows folks to consistently and accurately get to the resources that they need in an effective way. Administrative burden blocks, access to resources. Coordination failures are systemic, so we have a lot of different partners moving in different ways in this system, and sometimes the communication or the silos are such that they're not coordinated enough effectively to really provide effective services consistently. Program design matters as much as funding levels. So how are we, are we really listening to folks at the local level designing programs that are easily accessible, that are meeting statutory requirements or federal requirements, but not making overly burdensome?

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: So I'd like to put

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: a pin in this at this moment because actually we're experiencing this in real time right now with Act 181 response to some of the local requirements that are that are in Act 181. And so I would I would argue that that that we failed to do the work that I think a lot of us thought we were gonna be doing, which was engaging low of each town at its at the local level to help plan and then advance enough of the mass, but where we're gonna grow, where we're not gonna grow, how we're gonna do it effectively. I would argue that you're identifying this is a key reason that we are where we are at the moment. So this seems abstract.

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: Yeah.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: But actually at the moment we are suffering failure because of the failure of those things. Just I think that's a fair illustration.

[Sen. Thomas Chittenden (Member)]: I agree completely and I guess, and I don't want steal your thunder if you're gonna lead this way, but what else keeps percolating for me in my side is doing this is the lack of county government to see that as a role where we could have better planning and municipal assistance if we weren't leaving it to all these really small towns and villages when the counties and other states sort of provide more of that

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: shepherding role.

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: Yeah, I think that's a group, some of the findings, that's the question at hand. We recognize there's an issue. The question is now, what is the structure to do that? We have some things within our structure that are working really well, not necessarily blowing up what we have. We have regional planning commissions that are serving their communities really well. We have, in some cases, we have embedded support at the local level that works well, but oftentimes that's project specific, and then that goes away. And so are they really designing systems that are sustainable and not just we have the funding now,

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: we have support, and then it goes away? Well, we

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: hope Virta will be present as we go forward, Tom, with the county and regional governance task force, which kind of ran to a halt with the change of leadership in DevOps. But that was supposed to be a two year task force to address exactly this kind of work. And, you know, why are we using that on by not having a more robust county governance? Anyway, keep going because we have limited time. But to go to Tom's point, that is why we

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: need to continue that governance task force than county and regional task force. I the key is we need to

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: be willing to collaborate together. Right? I mean, think without that, we're doing things with good intentions, but they're not always coordinated together, and that's the last point here that we're finding from other states is really that coordinated approach and willingness to play in the sandbox together, right, and not just say, I'm staying in my lane and this is what I do. But that takes time and effort, and it takes, oftentimes, takes somebody who's not running a program to actually coordinate that, right, because we're often, I work for housing development, run different programs, and I'm supporting this Ruta effort, but that's not my job responsibility to lead this, right? I'm doing it because out of necessity. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Would always wonder, though, as I look at Vermont and I look at these issues of coordination, that we have so many people. We have the largest number of nonprofits, for example, in any state in the country per capita. We look at all the people who are involved in coverage, we look at all the people who are, like ourselves, involved in government. I think we're quite tough having because that perhaps is part of the problem. We had so many people, mean, boarded with so many agencies and individuals on per capita basis. I don't know if you've ever looked at those measurements. I know I've looked at them briefly, but not in a coordinated way.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: So that's something for,

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: I think, common good food's been in a year, and that's

[Cameron Wood (Legislative Counsel)]: a good question for common good.

[Sen. Thomas Chittenden (Member)]: I don't

[Cameron Wood (Legislative Counsel)]: know if I agree with top

[Sen. Thomas Chittenden (Member)]: heavy, more inefficiently fragmented Yeah. Because it's, like, redundantly off of the

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: same exact place.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Not well coordinated. Anyway, keep going because we're

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: I'm gonna get to the next slide relatively quickly so we have time for rates. Hold on a couple of them. So these are high level I should have done this before. You can digest this in your own time to look at it as well. This is shortened report that we saw from the steering committee as well as the HCV staff that put into this. I'll pass these around. If you want to flip to the back page, just for the purpose of what we're discussing, there's a menu of ideas that came and recommendations that came out of this report. I'm gonna briefly just touch on the high four level buckets that we identified.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Whoever can identify this town gets to be a gold star.

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: Yeah, do you know?

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Just saying.

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: Okay, so first off, and I'm gonna go through these in individual slides, but increasing state agency participation in solving local challenges, municipal and regional shared service tools, local engagement and leadership development, and increasing local capacity and flexible resources. Under each of those, you'll see some specific kind of next step, low, medium, higher difficulty tasks, And then in the report, you'll see some more detail under those tasks or terms of the box, how we might be able to approach that. So priority area one, increasing state agency participation in solving local challenges, which is really kind of one of the charges of the original Act 181, what we were trying to look at. The municipalities face fragmented state systems and inconsistent agency involvement while relationships are strong and coordinated during informal, uneven, difficult to sustain due to staffing constraints and frequent turnover among elected officials and volunteers. It can also result in state agencies producing resources, materials, even technical assistance programs that are too siloed or restricted to be helpful to municipalities, especially the smaller rural ones. Priority ID two, municipal and regional shared service tools, many Vermont municipalities face similar challenges but lack the tools, incentives, and governance structures needed to share services, staff, and equipment across town and regional boundaries, as well as the capacity to engage in shared services constraints. And then priority three, local engagement and leadership development. Vermont's reliance on volunteer governance is increasingly strained with limited pipelines for new leaders and uneven access to training, education, and support for engagement. Primary report is increasing local capacity and flexible resources in the province stating that municipalities lack sufficient staff capacity, flexible funding, to move projects from concept to completion, particularly in small rural communities. So I think the idea is to kind of look at these four priority areas. As you can see, some of the identified suggestions on where we might be able to move the dialogue list. And once again, the question is, probably not a one or the other, but how can we strengthen the state system, look at some regional approaches, and possibly even embed some local support to build sustainable systems at the local level while we're also providing maybe a hub of resources at a state or regional level that can easily be accessible. Someone picks up the phone and answers the call and says, We're working on a water wastewater project. Where do I begin? And they don't have to try and figure out who to call. There's a central person, once again, whether it's at the regional planning commission level that's doing that and or there's a state hub office that could simply help serve that purpose as well.

[Sen. Thomas Chittenden (Member)]: I just wonder if I may have

[Sen. David Weeks (Clerk)]: had them share.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Yes. You

[Sen. Thomas Chittenden (Member)]: know this better than I, but is that further propagating the issue that we have too many distributed redundant services? Should we focus more on that centralized capacity and then not

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: the local capacity? I don't think it's for me in this seat to answer that question. I think that's what we need to kind of grapple with as the system exists. That's the steering committee, where I'm gonna go with the next slide, my last slide, is the steering committee has done its work in terms of getting the report together, but there's a real interest in continuing to meet to really look at the report and find ways that we can collaborate together and identify some of the low hanging fruits that maybe isn't gonna take any money or much money. Where are some areas that we can align that might take us a little bit more time to work with some money? And then where are some areas that are gonna take years to do, and let's coordinate together an approach that can that can work? So where do

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: you need you don't actually have a specific budget request. This is in

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: is the governor's budget. Not in the governor's

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: And so what do you need to keep going? Because I don't know where you've embedded and if it's in a bill at the moment that's in active play. Are you

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: in the house, medic? Budget nine fifty one?

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: I'll let the Continental Development speak to There is a recommendation out of the House of $250,000

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Okay, because we're in the process of

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: deciding what in house budget we prioritize. So $2.50 and who's it go to, DHCD? Your office?

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: I believe it's called out to go to ACCD. Yeah, yeah. Fortunately we do have some money left over in the grant that allows us to continue to pay a community workshop for Bekka Sanborn Stone to facilitate the discussion, keep this group moving together. Unfortunately, that time is limited. Nearly, we had just a few more months with her, and so it's gonna be upon us and our willingness at this point, without additional resources, continue these other conversations and where can we work on templates together? We're already doing some of this work through the Mod Council of Development, which does community visits. So is there a way that we can strengthen and support that process better?

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: And work, maybe, with the governance committee, the task force, which is on track to And it would be great if you engage with that because that'd key key. So given our time, I'm gonna turn who would like to talk next? Jessica or Denise? I'm gonna

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: go next, I'm gonna bring Jess with me. Great.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Gary, anything else before we No, I just That was great to teal up.

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: I'll extend by saying this is a case for it, I think we need the legislature, we need the administrative, we need the PA system all working collaboratively together to solve this issue.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Remind me, in 01/1981, what was the allocation of appropriation for this?

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: I want to say, don't quote me on this file, I want say it was somewhere around $600,000

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Yeah, it was a lot, it was quite a bit

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: of money, because we put a

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: lot of I can't remember in the top of

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: my head. I just want everyone to appreciate that we invested a lot.

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: Quite a of money, too.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Okay, Great. Thank you, Gary. And Jessica. Well, Brooke, can I come up? Great. Hi.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Thank you for having us.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Good to have you. And you heard us introduce ourselves. Yep, I did. Because I don't think either of you

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: have been in front of

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: this committee before this year. Not this year. Right.

[Denise Smith (Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development)]: I'll go first for the record. My name is Denise Smith and I'm the Executive Director of the Vermont Council on Terrell Feldman. And I'm Jessica Savage, I'm the Director of Programs and Strategic Initiatives at the Vermont Council on Rural Development. And I just want to name Jessica was responsible for implementing the MTAT program at the Vermont Council on Rural Development, or one of the recent MTAT. We love MTAT, I know.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: There's another, you know, all these assistance programs need to be coordinated also. I mean, the

[Denise Smith (Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development)]: thing about MTAP is that funding has ended for most. Yes. All of it wasn't funded last year. Right. So We are asking for funding for

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: this year, we'll see what happens.

[Denise Smith (Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development)]: Okay. So thank you for your time and opportunity to present the collective work that we've been doing to support the investment in Rural Vermont Pounds. Now, more than ever, it's critical that we and others can provide comprehensive supports to communities who are navigating incredibly complex issues, as you noted, Chair, with the Act 181 rollout and how communities are feeling left out of that process. VCRD, so who we are, we call ourselves VCRD, I know it's a acronym, and there's a lot of acronyms in Vermont. But for the Vermont Council of Rural Development, we are your state rural development council. We were formed in the Bartville in the early 90s. But we are an independent, neutral, non partisan nonprofit now. So originally we were part of the state government, and then open years was less funding through the federal government. We, our forefathers saw Paul, me it was Paul. Was It it was was Paul, think was the year, which was an all executive director. And then Paul came in soon after. He was there for like, yeah, for a long time. Yeah, so Paul Costello was the executive director. And the work that we've done and have curated over the years, thirty years, we've done over 100 communities now.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: I bet we all represent communities that have gone through this process. Yeah. And I think everyone loves us to participate in this process. Katie? Oh, gosh. Mean, we're frustrated. So, we now need you to come back and do an update, which is the problem is once each community sets its priorities, then you need to see twenty years later, well, how are

[Denise Smith (Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development)]: you doing? Yeah. Mhmm. Yeah. We're actually so that's an aside,

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: but we are doing We should we're really happy to help you on that.

[Denise Smith (Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development)]: We should oh, good. That's great to hear. So we also convene another thing that we do is we convene statewide policy initiatives. So the broadband initiative, creative economy, those are all statewide policy initiatives that stemmed out of the VCRD that work statewide with a council that pulls those together. And the other thing that we do that is sort of silent, guess, not violent, but when we go to a community, we bring resources with us. So as Darren was alluding to, already are providing early coordinated services around technical assistance for towns. And then we do a lot of leadership follow-up and follow-up with the communities after they've started their action teams. And that work is a little bit less visible for people, but it's something that we do a lot. And then NTAP funding really helped us for that work in our organization. We were also, both of us served on the steering committee. I was new, so learning a lot, but we both served on the steering committee for the Virta report and helped to inform that process. And the findings from that report, what Gary just presented, really resonate with what we've seen in small towns that we've worked with in Rusty City. And they need us, right? They need Vermont's technical assistance provider network is what we're calling it, ecosystem, whatever word you want to use, to work well together, to talk to each other, and have the time, staff, and financial resources to do that. And MTUC was the beginning of that for us, for that happening. Not that it wasn't happening, but it was happening in a much more intentional way with people that had the capacity to do that.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Just remind everybody, MTAP, Municipal Technical Assistance Program, and

[Denise Smith (Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development)]: it came out of AOA, Agency of Administration. And Justin talked more about that. But it was really, really valuable. Anyways, we are here, so the murder report came out in November, there was nothing put in the governor's budget, and so VCRT To continue. Yeah, to continue to work. Exactly. Last year there was money in the budget and it was removed.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Which End of the session. Which committee in the house invented the budget? Or advocated for even the budget.

[Denise Smith (Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development)]: We had GOV ops and Economic Development. Right. Votes were gonna send their budget letters. Yeah. And we approves we were putting about 500,000 votes as those make appropriations, but it's two fifty for the Sears request.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Two fifty is what made it through.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: That's what made it through. Yep. Yes.

[Denise Smith (Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development)]: So, I do have a handout that kind of outlines what we're requesting why we're requesting it and what it would do, But I'll just read what we've written here so I don't forget. We're here to ask you for $500,000 in our FY twenty seven budget to make good on what rural towns and oldest they need. You know, when you go out and ask people for opinions and information and then don't do anything about it, that's also not a good look. But our proposal is simple and allows for the implementation of some of most impactful recommendations of the burden of the report. It would, one, provide some backbone coordination support to implement TA funding programs that directly benefits our underserved rural towns. Would provide some resource assistance to some of our staff, our consultant time to provide custom resource teams for each community selected program. And then the most of

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: the funding that we're asking for would go directly to towns and small grants. So help me understand because is this in addition to the two fifty VERTA itself? Is this CRDs?

[Denise Smith (Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development)]: This is VERTA does not have a request right now because there is

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: no request.

[Denise Smith (Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development)]: So what's in the budget? Virta or BCRD? BCRD. Going through ACCD. Yes. The money would go through ACCD to continue the

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Virta. Yes. Helps. Continue the work that's happened through the

[Denise Smith (Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development)]: BRDIP process or the MTAT process. Jess, am getting that right? Correct. No, yeah, you're right. So it sounds ambitious because we're only asking for one year of funding right now, but the thing is it's not It's a continuation of something that's already started, right? With bridge funding, it's not like Because what's gonna happen this year is this money's gonna go away, and then all of these people have been working together, coordinating, talking to one another, that's all gonna end.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: There's no more resources to do the work.

[Denise Smith (Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development)]: But this is a bridge to get us through this year, to really come back, and if there is this regional governance, whatever is happening, but for us to continue all of these regional hyperbilical systems providers to stay engaged in this collaboration, which is what rural promoters are asking for. You know, because they're confused, like you're saying. There's a lot of

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: things out there. So, how

[Denise Smith (Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development)]: do you navigate a system that doesn't feel like a system?

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Well, yes. That's a And Jessica, you've got five minutes. Five minutes,

[Denise Smith (Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development)]: Any of that. No, I just wanna maybe emphasize a question that you brought up earlier. I can't remember who asked about sort of local capacity. Think maybe it was you. We're all concerned. We're all concerned with it, and I think, you know, the question that I always ask myself as we do this work in a bunch of different ways is, you know, what do towns need in the long run, right? What are those abiding capacity constraints that they're experiencing? And they can tell us, right? And it's different in every town, I would say. If you think of the town's capacity in your districts, they're gonna have a different answer to that. One town might need, well, if we just had a part time town administrator, that might do it for them. That's the advisory capacity they might need. Others might need something more significant. And I'm bringing that up because this whole funding ask is really about listening to towns, and they told us they need us, these TA providers, to really be responsive, customized, navigable, easily accessible, and the funding that they have to do their project work to also be flexible and easily accessible. And so, the concept here is to take what we all worked on through MTAP, which was a great pilot program, and make sure that we take those lessons learned and all these findings in the verdict report and really make good on what towns are asking for. There's a lot of demand out there. A huge opinion.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: We see it and that's why we established the Beetle Small Resilience Fund, SGO two years ago, and we just need to keep adding that because there needs to be an accessible place for them to access to ask for money. Randy, did you have a question?

[Denise Smith (Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development)]: Great. Well, thank you for listening. And I'll just note if you need anything from us or Yeah. Right now. So

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Thank you. Yes. Yes. We've noticed. And we appreciate this and appreciate this aspect. That's Joe. You did a good presentation on SGO. It's a valuable supported

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: that. Yes.

[Sen. Thomas Chittenden (Member)]: So that's I'm not sitting here silently. This is incredibly important. It's the highest priority to me. I think that's what we were materializing around yesterday when we were going through the budget. I I definitely as well. Yeah. The rural parts of Vermont need the attention of the resources that help. Yeah. So to grow and apply with all the rules that we keep bring coming up with, here in the hall of New Year's. No. It's a big thing.

[Cameron Wood (Legislative Counsel)]: It's a priority.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: This is when all the things are broken and towns need to recover and towns need to grow and immigrate to the state. Goes from helping towns with CHIP to helping recover from disasters. It's like the whole how do we coordinate response on a whole range of issues? Right. Yeah.

[Denise Smith (Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development)]: And going back to your question about, you know, the follow-up, we're doing the storytelling project right now. So we're reaching out to communities that we work with. And I just have to say, it's just awe inspiring, the resilience and kind of this hope that small towns have and how much they love their communities is, you know, right, that you live there. We all live there. It's just, you know,

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: so I think one of the things that would help us look at that data, I would be very interested for you to be tracking the towns you have done these town visits with Mhmm. And how they're succeeding. Yeah. And how are they doing how are they doing as a result of your work and your helping them prioritize and plan for the future? And are they doing better than the towns that didn't have because this was an initial municipal support. And are they doing better than towns that have not yet benefited from one of your site visits and and your work helping them prioritize their future. Yeah. What they're doing in the future. Planning into the future.

[Denise Smith (Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development)]: That's a hard that's a harder quote, like, the control town might

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: be able to That helps us fund raise. I mean, that helps you do your work. Yeah. And I think it's something all of us are looking for. It's Oh. Be great. But

[Sen. David Weeks (Clerk)]: what impact? Is your help with towns, is that impacting their success into the future? David? Is it possible to to give us real examples in towns or in our districts that I can go to and say, these guys are asking for funding. What do you think? What was your relationship? What did what was the

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you. Absolutely. They could do that

[Denise Smith (Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development)]: very impoverished. But,

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: also, if you could get and you'd be kind enough to get in each one of our districts which towns you've done site visits with so that we know and and we can also Yes. Work to build on that. That would be great.

[Denise Smith (Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development)]: Yeah. And I just wanna say one thing. We're saying us, like VCRD, this funding request is is very minorly going to affect our budget. It's really about We appreciate it.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Take you or all your partner.

[Denise Smith (Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development)]: Yeah, it's really about the system. It is the system. And 100% we can give a lot of examples of, I mean, MTAP allowed us to work with about three times the amount of towns around the state that we have been able to. To be able to say yes to people looking for support or something that's really impactful for them is, you know, that's what

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: they wanna be able to do.

[Denise Smith (Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development)]: So, you know, we were just in Putney last month doing a celebration event after three years of being of being there. And that, that, the MTAP funding helped to fund that possibility where they were looking for more volunteers and recruiting people and also giving everybody in

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: the community an update on the work that they've been doing there. So yeah. So we we we need to shift to no one because we need to work hard so much in 1,500. We're gonna shift over to some big issues that we have, and then we have to do our work of

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: Thank you.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Doing this prior year. Thank you, guys.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: We really appreciate it. Thank you for being here. Yep. And for all your work. Well, we're getting there. We're getting there in a minute. Yeah.

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: In Senator Brock, we're having a downtown historic preservation conference in St. Albans, June 4.

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: Oh, great.

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: I know that's your district, it's for everybody. If that's you should mark it down, there's like, I don't know. Yeah. I agree. Thank you,

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Garrett. Yeah. Maddie. Oh, not Maddie. Jess. May I? Yes. Oh, Jess. Fine. We have Maddie help her down as the other She would update it. That know from. And

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: how should I load up slides? Yeah.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: So No. We have them in front of us, I think. It's okay if you like to send it to me.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: In my email. Yep. And then

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: That's something. Yeah. You just join as I'll join you,

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: and then there. And then you

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: just hit that share button at the bottom of

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: your screen, and it will show your screen and the slides at the back. Alright. I have no. Just wanna welcome her to

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: talk your Okay. Great. Thanks. Bye. Okay.

[Jess Hayes Lucas (NOFA Vermont, Grassroots Policy Organizer)]: Thank you all. Thank you, Sheriff Clarkson, and all of you all for having us in today. My name is Jess Hayes Lucas. I'm with NOFA Vermont. My colleague Joanna Doran is gonna be joining us in just a bit and is ready to go regarding NOFA Vermont's request for the 2027 state budget. I'm the grassroots policy organizer for NOFA, which is the Northeast Organic Farming Association. I wanna thank you all for your vote's for Senate 60, which is now Act 78, the Farm and Forestry Operations Security Special Fund, and we're asking you to please include an appropriation of 15,600,000.0 in the 2027 budget memo to support the funds implementation. I will also say that the Senate Committee on Agriculture is including a $1,000,000 appropriation in their recommendations for the 2027 so why? I'm just curious why

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: I mean, yeah, for me, economic development. Why are you here? Because, I mean, we have a much bigger jurisdiction than ag. Yes. Grace at ag is supporting you. That's the appropriate place for this. You have a lot, you're more competing for your attention in this committee than you do in Ag.

[Jess Hayes Lucas (NOFA Vermont, Grassroots Policy Organizer)]: Okay. Just saying. Let's get right to that. Right. Would it be helpful if I went through some of the slides that demonstrated Sure. The impact

[Jessica Hyman (Associate Director, CVOEO; Vermont Tenants/Fair Housing)]: on just giving you minute.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: If you've already been included in Ag's primary letter, you don't need to duplicate efforts,

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: is I guess what I'm trying to say.

[Jess Hayes Lucas (NOFA Vermont, Grassroots Policy Organizer)]: We're hopeful that duplicating efforts helps to get us in the appropriation So about, and you all can decide, I know you all have a lot of really tough choices to make, so I wanna present you with some information to help you make those choices, and you'll make them. So these are some of the impacts on how extreme weather has impacted working lands from 2023 to 2025. I'm gonna go through just where we're getting that a little bit. This is the impact on 2023, which was the biggest hit from the floods, of course. We're getting this data from VGAP applications and also from surveys to loggers and farmers over the last three years. It's a snapshot. It's indicators. We know that this is not a comprehensive impact that we're seeing on extreme weather from working lands, but it's what we've been able to gather with the data that we have. One of the advantages of the Farm and Forestry Operations Security Special Fund would be that if it's implemented, then we're able to better track these impacts and how they're impacting our work and business. So the 15,600,000.0 comes from the average of the last three years of documented loss. It's exactly half of that because the bill would cover 50% of documented vet covered losses.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: So

[Jess Hayes Lucas (NOFA Vermont, Grassroots Policy Organizer)]: I'll leave that there for a minute and we go to what I hope speaks a little bit more clearly to your question, although I don't think it's a complete response to your question. But this is just from data from Farm to Plate. So this is some of our reasoning about how our working lands are economic drivers for Vermont. This data is only about the farms, so it leaves out logging. It doesn't speak to logging, and it only talks about the economic output in the farm to food system alone, so it doesn't account for things like veterinary services, machinery repair services, tractor sales, farm equipment sales and servicing. It doesn't include that whole world, but it is a really integrated part, especially as our rural economies, which is why we were really thankful to be able to present this information to your committee today. So as you can see here, we have, let me cut a slide, have notes on this one that I want to make sure so I don't make it up. Okay, so this is, in 2022, the sale of Vermont Farm Products, we're going quote, is over 1,000,000,000. 1,000,000,000 in farm gate sales was the foundation for $11,500,000,000 in total economic output when accounting for food system wide activity, and that activity alone, not including those other things. So ensuring that our farms can rebound with extreme weather events is one thing that we can do to protect not only the Park, Seoul, and Vermont, but also our foundational and really pivotal working lands economies, especially in early areas of the state. And it's part of the reason that so many young people are inspired to stay here and move here and be a part of the life culture in Vermont. We feel like it's worth protecting for me.

[Sen. David Weeks (Clerk)]: Just curious.

[Jess Hayes Lucas (NOFA Vermont, Grassroots Policy Organizer)]: Yeah.

[Sen. David Weeks (Clerk)]: The graph on the left side, that bomb from 2017 onward, is that the cannabis bomb?

[Jess Hayes Lucas (NOFA Vermont, Grassroots Policy Organizer)]: Would not think so, because this is farm to plate, and so

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: cannabis wouldn't farm to plate is more impactful, because cannabis didn't hit till 2020. Yeah,

[Jess Hayes Lucas (NOFA Vermont, Grassroots Policy Organizer)]: yeah, so I don't think that this game fine. If I'm wrong, I'll check. It

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: can't be because we didn't

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: do it, so. Yeah, it's

[Sen. David Weeks (Clerk)]: the difference between 2017 and 2020. Oh, right, yeah. So it's whatever happened. Yeah. There's a lot happening outside the cultural sector that sort of reshaping except for that.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Yeah. That was a that's a major addition. And it's well, and I think it's our specialty foods. I mean, as farms diversify, that has also been a huge bump. I mean, you know, where we are in the cheese world and the brine world and the yeah.

[Jess Hayes Lucas (NOFA Vermont, Grassroots Policy Organizer)]: Will definitely be my sense of it. And then just regionally, you know, the the 30% of local food and for all of New England and by 2013, I think there's just been a lot of regional attention too, and Vermont has a very, the unethical impact. Okay, so the other point that I would like to make, and before I close it up and hand it over to Joanna, is just that farmers are always responding to their environment. This is not just a run of the mill, bad weather event sort of situation. These are for events that are beyond anyone farmers control. As I've been talking with farmers across the state to make sure that this fund would be useful to them and how they would like to see it implemented. I have been really stunned to learn about the things that they do daily on the regular, just as part of their routine to account for weather and even extreme weather and be nimble and be flexible, so we're just hopeful that Vermont can do the same for them given their role in our state and our state economy. And I will hand it over to Joanne. Oh, I'm sorry. No, that's great.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Joanna, I'm on. I believe it's yes. No, you could stay right there.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Does Joanna also have you visited?

[Joanna Doran (Local Food Access Director, NOFA Vermont)]: Hi. Yes, I am here. Thank you, Chair Clarkson and committee for having us today and for accommodating me online. I am Joanna Doran, the local food access director with NOFA Vermont. And I am here to just touch on quickly our request for $500,000 in the FY twenty seven budget for our food security programs, Crop Cash, Crop Cash Plus, and Farm Share. And I know that you heard from Carrie Stoehler yesterday about multiple requests in the Food Security Coalition priorities for this session. This is one of them and I know that you are a little bit familiar. So I'll just give a brief overview of these programs and why we're requesting your support in this committee. So Crop Cash doubles SNAP dollars at farmers markets to be used on purchases for fresh fruits and vegetables. Crop Cash plus Crop Cash, I should say, is a federally, in part federally funded program that does require a local match to draw down those federal funds. So we do need state funding to continue drawing in those federal funds. It's basically a one to one match. Crop Cash Plus is funded entirely through the state and it expands the Crop Cash program to any SAP eligible food. So this benefits low income shoppers so that they can buy, you know, the full span of groceries at a farmer's market. And it also supports hundreds more producers at farmers markets so that they can receive these coupons as income at the farmers market. And then finally, FarmShare is a CSA or community supported agriculture program that supports low income Vermonters in affording local food for the duration of the season. So these programs are incredibly impactful for revenue for our Vermont producers. This graph sort of shows the impact of how when we, as NOFA, are providing funding for these programs, they bring in additional revenue. So the blue bar is all of the fundraising and including the state funding that we have received for these programs. The green is showing additional spending that comes as sort of collateral when folks are using these programs. So when someone goes to a farmer's market because they know that they can get additional dollars through the Crop Cash and Crop Cash Plus program, they will be more likely to spend their SNAP dollars at the farmers market and shop there at all. It might not be accessible to them otherwise. Also included in that green bar is through our CSA program, the Farm Share program. When we pitch in money through NOFA, we are also leveraging community support from folks in the CSA community that are wanting to support their neighbor in buying a CSA share. So it's a cost sharing program. When NOFA invests, when the state invests in these programs, it leverages about twice as much overall going directly to our local producers. I know we're short on time, so I just I'll skip over It's this just showing the interaction between NOFA's food security programs and the Foodbanks Vermonters Feeding Vermonters. But all of these programs work together to ensure that Vermonters can get the food that they need while directly supporting our producers. So please support the request for $500,000 for these programs in the FY '27 budget. And I'll stop there if there's any questions.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Well, I think our first question is, did Senate AG I know they included some what did Senate AG include in their priority request?

[Joanna Doran (Local Food Access Director, NOFA Vermont)]: Great question. Senate AG did include the full $500,000 in their priority request And the house did as well.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Yeah. As and what came through the budget? What came what made it through on in September or whatever it is?

[Joanna Doran (Local Food Access Director, NOFA Vermont)]: In the house version of the budget, the full 500,000 did as well.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Okay. Great. So I know it's an axe request. I know it's also a senate cop ops request. So Yes. So you you are well you are well supported. You have some big fans of cash crop and cash prop cash and

[Sen. David Weeks (Clerk)]: crop cash plus.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: It's a tongue

[Joanna Doran (Local Food Access Director, NOFA Vermont)]: twister. Yeah. And we are so appreciative of that support. And we, like Jess said, we just want to make sure that this committee sees the economic impact of these programs as well.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Yeah. No, no. And we appreciate them and we appreciate the, you know, this is just the integration of our economy is, it's just that we're so dependent on our food systems. I mean, this goes right to also why we wanna reestablish a culinary institute. Yeah. So that all of our specialty foods and all our factories we produce has the avenue for being created, you know, great things created up from it. The one thing I'm missing is your support for the Working Lands grants. I assume you're supportive of those?

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Yes, we are part of that work too.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Right, yeah. Thank you, this is very helpful and we really appreciate David. Just one quick question on your 15,600,000.0

[Sen. David Weeks (Clerk)]: for the Farm and Forestry Operations the Social Security Special Fund. I'm just curious, rationalization for the fund in relationship to business owners' insurance obligations versus the stage responsibility to provide a recovery fund. Does that

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: balance out?

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: So there are a lot of crop insurance programs nationally. There's a couple of ways to answer your question and I'll

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: try to be very, brief because

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: I know we're short on A lot of the national crop insurance programs We're over done. For Vermont, I'm sorry.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: I'm sorry. I don't know if could finish the whole question,

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Don't then we're gonna move work well for Vermont farmers, because the crop insurance works like you have to do the premium per crop. A lot of Vermont's farms are very diversified, so that it doesn't make economic sense for farmers to get crop insurance in the way that it's structured now, and that's really something that we're working on federal level with the farm bill. Right.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: And and that's hopefully being restructured so that it works for farmers, because who the hell is it supposed to work for if it isn't working with

[Jessica Hyman (Associate Director, CVOEO; Vermont Tenants/Fair Housing)]: them?

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Yeah. And it works for farmers out in the Midwest. It doesn't work for Vermont farmers. So while we're waiting on that to, like, not waiting on it, we're working on that as well very aggressively on the federal level, but we think that we have an opportunity in Vermont to be more nimble, to be faster, to really address the need that has existed for the last three years and will continue to exist. So this will cover uncovered losses if farmers do have insurance and are able to take advantage of their programs, then they would not be eligible for this. This is only for otherwise uncovered losses.

[Sen. David Weeks (Clerk)]: Just a very quick question. Is your accent Virginia?

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: It's Kentucky. Kentucky. Well, good to have you here.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Thank thank you very much. And thank you all for your time today. Oh. And for leaning in. We appreciate it. Really appreciate it.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Listen. We look at all things that impact our economy, and we have explored transportation impacts, and we certainly explore impacts in all sorts of ways.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: We appreciate it.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Thank you so much. Thank you, Joanna. Good to have you both. Now we're going to get

[Jessica Hyman (Associate Director, CVOEO; Vermont Tenants/Fair Housing)]: to

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: housing. Friday is housing day, except when it's also appropriations deadline day. And so we are going to so I don't quite know when we're going to just return to our larger house budget priority setting. And I I'd like to have us take end at, like, 11:15 on the our landlord tenant stuff and figure out when we might if we could go into a little bit into the lunch hour to do the oh, we right. We're they need to come back. Let's just figure that out because we need some further time to do that. So we're gonna end landlord tenant about 11:10, 11:15, wherever we naturally find a good ending point, and we're gonna start with Cam, our legislative council to tee us up on today's conversation.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Right? Isn't that what you wanted?

[Cameron Wood (Legislative Counsel)]: Yes, ma'am. I do. I have just five minutes to correct.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Good

[Cameron Wood (Legislative Counsel)]: morning. Good morning. For the record, Cameron Wood, legislative counsel. I just wanted to take a few minutes. We've done a walk through of the bill, but I wanted to take a few minutes to answer a question that came up last time I was here. And then I also need to correct or clarify two pieces of information. So I'll start with the quick answer. There was a question about whether or not a landlord can charge a different security deposit to different individuals based on risk factors. And as I have mentioned in in my testimony and I've kind of thought about it further, there's nothing that I'm aware of in federal state law that would just outright prohibits a landlord from doing that. If they are being based on some sort of objective factor that isn't discriminating against an individual based on some sort of protective characteristic, I think the landlord would potentially be trading into some risky grounds by doing that because they're kind of opening themselves up by treating certain individuals differently. They're potentially opening themselves up to an argument that they're discriminating against a certain, you know, type of individual or somebody based on a protected characteristic. Keeping in mind that a landlord cannot discriminate against someone in house because that person is the recipient of some sort of government assistance. So if you're having a threshold whereby certain individuals that may be of lower income that could be receiving government assistance and the landlord is charging them a higher security deposit because of perceived risk, there could be an argument there. So I'm simply wanting to make sure you're all aware, as long as it was entirely objective, an individual within this credit range gets this security deposit, an individual within this credit range may get a lower security deposit. There's nothing that I'm aware of that would prohibit that.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: As long as it's based on an objective Right. Measurement.

[Cameron Wood (Legislative Counsel)]: And and as you all know with these things, it's going to then depend on what are the facts on the ground, what's actually occurring. And so but just as an objective matter, kind of there's nothing in the law that's going to forbid someone at this point from

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: from doing. Thomas, did you have a thought?

[Sen. Thomas Chittenden (Member)]: So for the advocates, I'll be curious if in practice that actually is happening. And then the thing where you both gonna ask about credit ratings, if that's objectionable or that it is nondiscriminatory. Similarly, references. So if somebody can't provide references for previous places they rent new landlords that would vouch for them as good tenants, do you would you expect that to cross any lines as a as a discriminator for a larger

[Cameron Wood (Legislative Counsel)]: I don't think so. But, you know, when you when you get into conversations about discrimination, you can have multiple different arguments that are made whereby, you know, a a practice, an individual you know, a practice that a landlord puts into place may not on its face be discrimination against an individual, but it may have a discriminatory impact against a certain subset of individuals. And so that's where I mean, you know, as you all know, we have to be careful and condition our comments here of saying it's going to depend on what the facts are on the ground and how is it actually being implemented. And so Yeah. You know, it's just as the the highest general matter. There's nothing that, you know, is illegal about it.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: It sounds like it seems to have an objective measure or an objective and and is consistently applied.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Right. Right.

[Sen. Thomas Chittenden (Member)]: But then keep in

[Cameron Wood (Legislative Counsel)]: mind your bill, this the proposal, at least in front of you, would limit the security deposit to two months rent at this point. So a landlord wouldn't be able to go above that if this were to to go into a fenced. Right.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: So that's one of the pluses.

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: Right. Okay. So that's

[Cameron Wood (Legislative Counsel)]: the answer that was the answer to the question. Second thing. I need to pass out a new one of these. Oh, good. Apologies for this, but I noticed this week that one of the cross references here was in the incorrect line. Yeah. And so Right. I'm wanting to make sure that you have the corrected version of this. If the the issue is you have written rental agreements or no written rental agreements, and there's a question of what's the termination notice period for those. And as I've discussed in the past, it depends on whether it's in writing or not, and then it depends on how long has the individual been there. Have they been there for two years or less, or have they been there for more than two years? And I realized that there was just an incorrect line on themselves.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Can I ask the surgeon's question? Sure. I just wanna make sure I understand. Right now, a landlord could could charge

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: That's true.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Higher they could ask for more money than first and last month's rent. Like, a security deposit law is pretty it's pretty strict. But right now, they could ask for anything on top of that.

[Cameron Wood (Legislative Counsel)]: Right. So it it's not

[Sen. Thomas Chittenden (Member)]: strict in the sense

[Cameron Wood (Legislative Counsel)]: in Vermont. There there's no cap. So a a landlord, at least at the state level at the state level

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Yeah.

[Cameron Wood (Legislative Counsel)]: A landlord could say, you need to give me six months security deposit because there's no statutory Right. Listen. Limitation on what a landlord can charge. Mhmm. There are some municipalities that have time. Inactive ordinances Okay. That currently limit caps. If you remember, I made a comment that that discussion came up on the house floor.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Mhmm.

[Cameron Wood (Legislative Counsel)]: So if you move forward with seven seven two of having the two month cap in the statute, you may also want to add some tweets to that section to clarify that a municipality can have a lower Right? Then there wouldn't be any conflict So there are municipalities that have been in in put in place ordinances with security deposit cast. There's no cap in the state level.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Right. I'll just say this, you know, my sense and maybe some of the experts around the room can weigh in when they speak. The better practice to not I mean, we're seeing articles, right, around the country of you have to have three times the amount of money in the bank as the rent they charge to sort of be considered a worthy tenant. And that is, right. It's giving landlords the way to say this is our objective measure is having a very high income, frankly, an income that most people don't have to then make it through our screening process to be eligible for this apartment. My sense, and I'd love for experts to weigh in, the better practice to not price people out of the market before they even get a chance to to walk in the door is to have a cosigner. So to to basically on the one hand, you're saying, okay, you don't have great credit. I'm not gonna say no, but I'm also not gonna say you have to fabricate a $150,000 of income out of nowhere. They'd say, I need someone else in your life to vouch for you. That's what banks do. You know, you have a cosigner. So while people still may bristle at the notion of a cosigner because their bad credit comes from medical debt, etcetera, someone may have medical debt and then you're saying you have to have two months rent and a security deposit to overcome that. I personally don't want to send the wrong signal to landlords that we're telling them that's a more accepted practice than finding a co signer. So that is

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: an option. Put it down as a note, it's something for us to explore. Anything else before we move to our witness?

[Cameron Wood (Legislative Counsel)]: So one other quick thing I wanted to just kinda clarify that came up in our conversation about, are there any notice period obligations on a tenant? So Right. We talk frequently about the notice period in 04/04/1967 where the landlord is going to terminate a rental agreement and for what purposes. Right. How much notice does the landlord have to give? And Exactly. What feel like what I said last time was there wasn't a notice period for a tenant, and what I was thinking about was more in the context of the end of a lease agreement, so when the lease agreement is written, is set to expire. There is a section, It's under the tenant's obligations, and within that section, it does require that if a tenant is going to, you know, terminate a, you know, rental agreement, then they have to provide at least one rental period's notice, so a month's notice, essentially, unless the agreement states otherwise. So if you have a written agreement, your written agreement could say you need to provide the landlord two months notice. The tenant should follow what is in the written agreements because if they don't provide that notice, then the tenant could argue that they've abandoned the unit, in which case there's a statutory section that says that the tenant has an obligation to continue to pay rent during the life of the rental agreements unless the landlord's able to find someone else to take care. So separate from that, we talked a little bit about, you know, practically what happens on the ground if a tenant isn't complying with their, you know, terminations notice period that they've agreed to with the landlord. It may result in a bad reference. We talked about that. But just when the lease ex you know, the lease term is set to expire, you have a twelve month lease term. Current law requires the landlord to provide a notice period if they're not going to continue to rent to that tenant at the expiration of that written term. It's one of the lines here on the sheet that I gave you. Is the tenant obligated to comply with a similar notice period? It's probably in their best interest to do so, again, for the reference accounts that we were making, but what are the legal consequences if they don't? If a tenant just moves out the day before their twelve month written lease expires and then goes to the landlord the next day and says, I'm ready for my security deposit back, is the landlord gonna be able to legally hold them accountable to anything? Not that I read in the statute. So just wanted to kinda clarify that one point that I was making the other day. I don't want it to be understood that the tenants aren't required to comply with any notice periods at all. If they don't provide a notice of terminating agreement when it's in effect by giving at least a month's notice or giving longer if their agreement requires, they could be held accountable to paying rents for that next month or for the remainder of the written rental agreement if they've obtained the property. Risk reference issues too. Yes.

[Jessica Hyman (Associate Director, CVOEO; Vermont Tenants/Fair Housing)]: Yeah. Thomas.

[Sen. Thomas Chittenden (Member)]: So that all makes logical sense. That's why you take first and last month rent. So you give notice that you get back that amount. Right. If you don't give notice, you just leave. And, like, I believe the landlord just gets to keep that that rent that paid by paying at the start of the period. I I think I heard you say that our current statutes, the the state that you have that tenants are obligated to give a month of rental terms notice. Yeah. But it's differential to any other contract agreement. So our state law currently has that default where one rental term, which is usually a month. Is that correct? So your honor, that is a month of

[Cameron Wood (Legislative Counsel)]: In this section. Right. It says in this section, four four five six, it says and and this is where it has other tenant obligations. Know, You the tenant cannot create noncompliance within the dwelling units. The tenant has to conduct themselves and require other individuals to conduct themselves in a manner that will not disrupt other tenants' peaceful enjoyment of their property. So these are obligations of the tenant. Statute. It is in statute, yes, sir. And then there's a section that says, unless it's inconsistent with the rental agreements or otherwise provided by law, a tenant may terminate a tenancy by actual notice given to the landlord at least one rental period, one rental payment period prior to the termination date specified in the notice. So that's saying that you need to give one rental period's notice. And there's a question, though, about, okay, under well, what circumstances are we talking about? Are we talking about in the middle of a written rental agreement? Are we talking about at the end of a written rental agreement? Or are we talking about in a month to month rental agreement? So I think your takeaway, I think, should be, yes, a tenant has obligations to provide notice. They should provide under the statute at least one rental period's notice. Usually, that's gonna be a month. Unless the written rental agreement says otherwise, then they should follow their written rental agreement. That's kind of how I would would leave it at you as what the statutory obligations are.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: I'm gonna move us into our witnesses because we have

[Cameron Wood (Legislative Counsel)]: an incredible amount of time and a lot of individuals.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: I just wanna flag I just wanna flag one thing that I think everyone should be familiar with because you started to touch on. Any tenant's right to enjoy their premises free from harassment, etcetera. Every tenant also enjoys that, right, vis a vis their landlord. So a landlord can end up being charged with harassment of a tenant if they're looking in their windows and standing in the hallway waiting to get them for something, that's also not considered quasi permeable in them. And

[Cameron Wood (Legislative Counsel)]: the last thing I'm just saying, one thing that is in July, it added in to the section that prohibits retaliation of the landlord against the tenant, for the tenant, you know, take, you know, make taking certain actions, notifying a government agency that there's a habitability issue, for example, that's in the current statute. If the landlord can retaliate against an individual for that, one thing that the house added in was a line that says that the landlord can't retaliate against a tenant for taking any legal action against a landlord that's law. Right? So if they feel they're being harassed by a landlord, you know, senators, kind of the circumstances you were identifying, and they were to take some sort of legal action to, you know, limit or further prohibit that harassment, then the landlord could never target against the individual because of that.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: More to follow. Nodder and I had further conversation, and and the bill was coming to us as soon as they're done, and they should be done hopefully next week or so because they're only addressing their areas. Okay.

[Jessica Hyman (Associate Director, CVOEO; Vermont Tenants/Fair Housing)]: We have an incredible group

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: of advocates, pro and con, this bill, and some of whom have worked with us as we fashion the bill. And I'd love to begin with Jessica Hyman. It is good to have you. We have them online. Welcome. If you would be kind

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: enough to introduce yourself and Can can I just ask a question? Because I feel like it it should help me understand the scope of the scope of our work as we might get this bill. What do you consider our section as opposed to judiciary?

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: I think the whole bill is ours, but judiciary has weighed in as they did in the house with the ejection ejectment sections. So, that, those are the, I believe Cameron- So, no trespass orders,

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: the length of time in court.

[Cameron Wood (Legislative Counsel)]: I walked through the ejectment sections, so the sections related to, titled well, related to court procedure and ejectment, and then we also talked about trespass as well.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Okay. Because trespass has a lot to do with whether or not a sheriff or police officer will enforce a no trespass. Yeah.

[Cameron Wood (Legislative Counsel)]: And the the trespass is a criminal trespass. Exactly.

[Jessica Hyman (Associate Director, CVOEO; Vermont Tenants/Fair Housing)]: Yeah.

[Cameron Wood (Legislative Counsel)]: So, yes, ma'am, we talked about that and sent a judiciary.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: So we're gonna be talking less about no trespass and the length of time in court.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Right. That is pretty much mostly hopefully. I mean, that was pretty settled in the house, but the senators were viewing it. Jess, let's do Jess full screen if you can, and let's go for it.

[Jessica Hyman (Associate Director, CVOEO; Vermont Tenants/Fair Housing)]: Good. Thank you so much, chair Clarkson, and to the rest of the committee for having me here again. It's nice to see you. I also wanted to thank Cameron for the clear fair housing related clarifications at the beginning of this. I agree with everything he says and also would like to add that in terms of the security deposit provisions, they would need to be applied would need to be objective and also applied equally for all for for all tenants under certain criteria. So thank you for bringing that up. So Jacqueline consistent. Good. And so for the record, I'm Jess Simon. I'm the associate director of CBOEO statewide housing advocacy programs, including our fair housing program. And as you all know, CBOEO is one of the state's five community action agencies, we work to advance economic, social, environmental and racial justice. And we support people in achieving economic independence. While most of our programs are in the Champlain Valley region, our housing programs are statewide, and we support renters, people living in manufactured home communities and individuals experiencing discrimination in their housing. Through our statewide education and support program, we respond to more than 3,000 calls and emails each year through our helplines for renters and manufactured home residents. We provide rights responsibilities education for renters, for landlords, for municipal officials, and also service providers. We offer housing stability and eviction prevention support. We deliver services to and support organizations that work with asylum seekers, and then we also administer a temporary housing voucher for families exiting homelessness. So I'm here today to make two critical funding requests to share our deep concerns about H seven seventy two and and to talk a little bit about why early education intervention matter for renters and for landlords and why things like that can help address some of the problems that h seven seventy two was intended to address. So first off, we respectfully urge the committee to restore the $200,000 in housing housing education appropriations that were originally part of seven seven two, but but were removed at as it moved through the house. So this this funding is really essential to sustaining fair housing education and also support for both renters and landlords. These these educational offerings, include workshops like tenant skills, finding housing, and sustaining the rent, all part of our preferred renter certificate program. They're offered in various formats and languages. And together with one on one coaching, they help prevent conflict, reduce evictions, and promote housing stability by making sure that everyone that tenants understand what their responsibilities are and their rights, and also that landlords understand what their rights and responsibilities are. These are proven proven methods to help stop problems before they start. Also announce a prevention. No,

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: no, 200,000 worth of prevention. Agree.

[Jessica Hyman (Associate Director, CVOEO; Vermont Tenants/Fair Housing)]: Exactly. And especially in light of limitations that we spoke about last week during the Fair Housing Month testimony about limitations on what we can do with funds provided by HUD and how that limits, how we can teach and educate the public about Vermont protections. This funding would be especially timely. We also urge you to support the $600,000 in landlord liaison appropriation included in

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: the house general bill. Yeah.

[Jessica Hyman (Associate Director, CVOEO; Vermont Tenants/Fair Housing)]: So these these the landlord liaisons are these really important positions that it's a proven strategy that can help build strong and trusted networks of landlords, providing education and tech technical assistance and also problem solving support, helping

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Are they Jess, are they what we considered housing navigators earlier on? Yeah. No.

[Jessica Hyman (Associate Director, CVOEO; Vermont Tenants/Fair Housing)]: This is a different different position. So the landlord liaisons were created with one time pandemic funding. And so all the community action agencies at one point had these positions. And right now, I think there's only one position existing in the state at Franklin Grand Al Community Action. And these are, like, connection relationship building positions that really help with communications between landlords and tenants. And we've seen so many times how just having that extra person to help navigate those relationships makes things so much easier. It it get gives people more access to information, helps the landlords have a direct line of communication with the tenants, and can really stop problems before they start. And so when when these landlord liaisons are strategically placed, they just create these bridges, and it's especially helpful. And this is something we hear from both tenants and also from landlords all the time, that especially the smaller landlords really appreciate having this extra bit of support. And this work, of course, directly complements fair housing education and is foundational to reducing evictions. So what the proposal in the house general bill is to have six landlord liaison positions, one at each of the community action agencies and two at Capstone. So that's the money part. Now we can get into Yeah.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Where was that 600,000 in the house budget?

[Jessica Hyman (Associate Director, CVOEO; Vermont Tenants/Fair Housing)]: That's a good question that I don't have the answer to, but I can find out and

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: send I'm it to not

[Jessica Hyman (Associate Director, CVOEO; Vermont Tenants/Fair Housing)]: Okay, great. Thank you.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: From the original

[Jessica Hyman (Associate Director, CVOEO; Vermont Tenants/Fair Housing)]: H772? Separate from that. Yeah. So H772.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Wasn't in H772 originally? I don't think so.

[Jessica Hyman (Associate Director, CVOEO; Vermont Tenants/Fair Housing)]: No. It was not. So let's move to H72, H 772. So we have really big concerns about this bill. We recognize the very real and very serious community safety challenges that are caused by a small number of egregious situations where there are significant threats to health and safety of neighbors, of housing provider staff, and others. We know that this is a big problem, and you're gonna hear some some really heartbreaking stories, I'm sure, from from our housing provider friends later about these serious conditions. However, this bill, we don't believe is the way to fix that. The bill significantly reduces due process protections for all of Vermont tenants. We have 700 no. Sorry. It's not 700. 70,000 renters. And also these changes would really disproportionately harm people with disabilities, people with limited English proficiency, and those already subject to discrimination or harassment. Shortening these these eviction notice and response times will make it harder for peep for tenants to access support to get help from us in a timely manner, to get legal representation or even emergency rental assistance. The bill also makes multiple changes to landlord tenant law that we believe weaken existing renter protections. You know, some provisions we know were intended to strike a balance, but overall, we feel this the bulk of this bill is really harmful. So if if the issue is the length of time that eviction takes move through the courts, then address court capacity, increase that court capacity, or maybe establish a housing court, some other way to get these types of issues move for moved further quicker in an expedient way rather than erode due process for all renters. CVOEO would would support a a separate approach if we could pull out something from h seven seven two that would allow for expedited resolution, in these truly dangerous situations. If they're paired with tenant protections, right to counsel, and funding for legal services to make that possible. And, you know, any expedited process for landlords should be matched by expedited process for for tenants, especially in cases, involving habitability or landlord and compliance. We we we also have, really serious concerns about some a lot of the other provisions in the bill. I'll mention just a couple. And now I'm I'm I'm I'm guessing that Jean will mention more of them in just a few minutes. We we have concerns about provisions that would codify landlord fees such as background check and credit check fees despite existing statutory limits on application fees. These are the cost of doing business and shouldn't be charges that on fees, especially in this constrained market where renters might have to apply for dozens of apartments just to find a home. Other provisions such as posting notices on the door as actual and listing that as part of actual notice, or including an undefined other reason for expedited evictions are also really problematic. We feel that the current statute has maintained a good balance between landlord and tenant rights, and responsibilities and and the seven seventy two disrupts that balance. So those are some of our concerns with seven seventy two. I just wanted to end just to talk a little bit more about why fair housing education and early intervention matter. We know that these rental relationships are more successful when both landlords and tenants understand their rights and responsibilities, when renters have access to financial and housing education, and when neutral supports like landlord liaisons can help address issues early. These are investments. They're investments that can actually help with the current housing crisis. They can prevent evictions, reduce homelessness, strengthen landlord participation, and save the money over time save the state money over time. We spend so much time here in Vermont putting Band Aids on problems and addressing crises as they come up. But investing in some of these foundational supports for both landlords and tenants can help stop these crises before they start. So regardless of the outcome of h seven seventy two, we really strongly believe and know that fair housing education and landlord liaison services are essential. And if if seven seventy two does pass, which we hope it doesn't, if significant law chain if these significant law changes move forward and if they become effective July 1, that's just not enough time to educate renters and landlords and the courts and service providers statewide. And it makes these educate the need for education even stronger. So in closing, we we respectfully urge you all to restore the 200,000 in fair housing education support funding, fund the 600,000 landlord liaison initiative, that's in part of the house general bill, and overall protect due process for all renters while finding creative solutions to address these really serious and real safety concerns. And we hope you'll invest in solutions that strengthen housing security and stability, landlord participation and community trust. So I really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today, and we look forward to collaborating in any way possible. And I welcome your questions.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Great. Thank you, Jess. Really appreciate, and we have your testimony here. Just in terms of time, unless anyone has a pressing question for Jess, I'm gonna just keep keep us moving, and then maybe we can have time for hopefully questions at the end. But anybody have a pressing question for Jess at the moment? Okay. Is that the whole group? Yeah. Yeah. For the whole group. Gee, would you be kind enough to join us? Thanks so much. Really appreciate your your work generally. It's terrific. Thank you.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Hi.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: I was It's a black and a white day. Look at even Brenda's. I I was looking back at my testimony that I've given to this meeting last year and now today. So I think that would be worthwhile to look at what I've been saying. And we actually have your testimony today, kindly provided by you.

[Jean Murray (Vermont Legal Aid, Attorney)]: For the record, my name is Jean Murray. I'm an attorney at Vermont Legal Aid. I've been at Vermont Legal Aid for twenty eight years, two days ago. Congratulations. And before that, I also practiced housing law in Massachusetts. One of the reasons I wanna talk about who I am is because when when it pertains to h seven seventy two is I'm a practitioner. I go to court. I know how the court court works. I'm actually on the supreme court's civil rules committee. And so not only that, I looked at my own personal numbers. And in the last three years, I have talked to me personally, talked to 350 tenants and giving them advice about how they what their options are in preserving their rented housing. So when I talk about where we are in Vermont with landlord tenant law, landlord tenant relations, court process, I hope that this committee would regard me as an expert. Because these things have come up in the state house lately, I've also done a lot of research and data gathering on issues that should affect Vermont's housing policy. So one of the things I want to make clear to people is that 30% of Vermonters are renters. 30% of our households are renters. Half of renters in Vermont pay more than 30% of their income for rent fully. 25% are paying more than 50% of their income for rent.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Can I just add something that's important to me, is we have one of the largest homeownership disparities between people of color and white people in the country? So when we say 30% of folks are renters, it's more like 75% of black residents and

[Jean Murray (Vermont Legal Aid, Attorney)]: it gets it's just way worse. For

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: people who probably

[Jean Murray (Vermont Legal Aid, Attorney)]: And I wish I could recite all the home ownership statistics as much as I can the renter. I can't.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: But But you always have to see. It's the opposite. Right? We have this huge home ownership gap, which means our renters are largely brown and black. And Jean, if I ever don't treat you like the expert that you are, it's because I still look for Randy Morgan, like, every day of

[Jean Murray (Vermont Legal Aid, Attorney)]: my life. Well, we work on a golf course. No. I know. I'm just

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: like I'm like, who is it if it's not Wendy?

[Jean Murray (Vermont Legal Aid, Attorney)]: Who is right there, also black and white day, and we also welcome I

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: just can't stop looking

[Jean Murray (Vermont Legal Aid, Attorney)]: for Wendy Morgan. Yeah. Please wish her well. Right. She worked with us on this. Great. Anyway, so median rents in Vermont have increased 40% in the last five years. Vacancy rates have been very low for a long time. They're about at two point one percent. Before the pandemic, they were at four point five percent, which is actually an okay vacancy rate if you try and find new housing, but at 2.1% and even lower in Chittenden County. And lower in the Upper Valley, right? Lower than even It's impossible to find housing. We're less than 1%. Vermont's rate of people experiencing homelessness is the fourth highest in the nation and continues to increase. The numbers of people who are homeless in Vermont continue to increase. I don't know if they are sliding up to scale or not. And the number of evictions filed in court has increased 9% since 2019. And there's an unknown number of tenancy terminations that have caused Vermont tenants to move out in order to avoid being taken to court. But if there's any indication of how many people are getting termination notices, we could look at how many people call Vermont Legal Aid. And, I don't know if you've ever heard from Sam Abel Palmer from Legal Services Vermont, but it is in the tens of thousands a year of people saying, I've gotten a termination notice. I've had these problems. I need to figure out what my options are. And so we heard that CBOEO gets 3,000, you get tens of thousands. Tens of thousands. I I mean, I think the number is actually 60,000, but that also includes people calling about foreclosure and other housing So so Vermont is in a housing crisis, and the crisis is in availability, affordability, and instability. It affects Vermont's economy because rents have increased, but Vermont incomes have not increased. Vermont needs workers and consumers, but they can't afford to live here. They can't afford to move here. So then we have a bill that suitably addresses landlord tenant issue. It doesn't address this crisis at all. There is my gosh. I'll go away. If there's no evidence of any kind to explain why evicting tenants faster is going to address anything about Vermont's housing crisis. Vermont Legal Aid, I'm gonna say that upfront, does set it at the end. We have closed this bill. This is going to increase homelessness. This is going to make it much harder for tenants to have secure and stable homes. One person who came to House General and I heard her testimony was Kaya Morris. And she told the committee not about how she thinks about things generally, but what had happened to her, where she was compelled by no cause eviction to move three times in five or six years because of landlords' ability to get no cause eviction.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: I just want to underscore your point from a completely different angle, is that having a little bit more time often allows a legal service provider to say, if you have an eviction on your record, it will be very hard for you to find another place to rent and work on a more more expedient and satisfactory solution for everyone because someone can explain to them that while you might enjoy having three months in this place while the court process is taking place, if it results in an eviction at the end, it is much more likely to result in homelessness. Yeah. Yeah.

[Jean Murray (Vermont Legal Aid, Attorney)]: One of the things about time and attorneys is if you have enough time to get to an attorney and the attorney can look at your situation, the attorney can give you options. Tenants should have options. It doesn't mean that eviction should never happen. It just means that there are ways to solve landlord tenant problems that are not fast eviction. One of the things we've been asking for, I came back, I was here in 2023 asking for not only that rent program, which Vermont State Housing Authority has, and it started in this bill and it is currently in the budget, Vermont State Housing Authority backed rent program.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: We love that. Yeah.

[Jean Murray (Vermont Legal Aid, Attorney)]: Like the availability of funds to pay rent so people can stay in their housing. Back rent is a really important thing to address the housing crisis, and we also ask for eviction diversion, which the judiciary at the time couldn't were they were downstaffed and they needed to restaff. Yeah. They couldn't put eviction diversion in the judiciary, but that's one of the things that would really take the time, senator, you're you're talking about to give people options so that housing is not so destabilized. H seven seventy two doesn't do any of this. It doesn't balance any sort of benefits to landlords and tenants. It One of the things that this bill has made me do is made me review what the balance in our current law is. Our current law is already tipped in favor landlords' interests. Then we know that in the past five years, market forces have tipped the balance in favor of landlords. Then H-seven 72 comes along and does a lot of things. It gives landlords a lot of things, or it says it's going give the landlords a lot of things, like the ability to charge fees at the time of application, the continued ability to raise rent by any amount, the continued ability to evict for no cause at the expiration of a lease term of time. It gives an expedited eviction process that doesn't require testimonial evidence in court. In other words, the legitimate goal of our nonprofit housing community partners to ask for help to deal with the incidents of the opioid epidemic that have fallen on people where drugs are sold is at home. Nonprofit housing providers, their mission that they worked on very hard was to house the heart to house and they have got more problems than they could deal with, and they need to have those problems solved. This bill doesn't do that, but it's stabbed at doing that, this expedited hearing process, which it is, as a practical matter as a practitioner, completely unfair to tenants. It doesn't it's not going to solve the problem that they want to solve. Thank

[Sen. Thomas Chittenden (Member)]: you. So I want to preface my question by saying I am seeing the concerns of this bill and I can share any of the concerns. My question and then sort of building on the previous testimony as viewers here, I am interpreting the intent as for tenants that fail to meet certain circumstances, meaning not payment of rent, rate your rent will agree that I'm looking at this chart, that they this bill is attempting to shorten the amount of time it takes to eject them from the the property, And it's trying to I'm not saying it does, trying to balance that by board tenants where they're not, breaking any conditions or so on to give them longer periods of time. Do you see any merit in the second half of this where it's extending the ninety days for owned and property is sold? And and also from your expertise and experience with this, is this more common? Is this when, when tenants are being asked to leave in the the times when it's being sold or repurposed or that there's a a determination of the rental agreement? Is there any good or merit that you're seeing from your perspective in the white paint part of this chart?

[Jean Murray (Vermont Legal Aid, Attorney)]: So I was on the Land Rover Tenant Study Committee, and one of the things that, tenant advocates brought to the the study committee was this idea of just cause eviction, which is right now the law allows eviction for no cause at all. And ninety days has been the standard. Ninety days is in our current law. Ninety days for tenants who have lived in their places for over two years and don't have a written lease. There are lots and lots of tenants that do not have a written lease. I'm a tenant who does not have a written lease. I have lived in my apartment for twenty one years. I get ninety days notice because of course I'm not going to

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: be evicted for anything I did. Anyway,

[Jean Murray (Vermont Legal Aid, Attorney)]: the idea that this bill suddenly gives people ninety days notice, notice, people have had ninety days notice for no cause for a long time, and the tenant advocate said it's time to not have any no cause notice at all, but rather if it's the landlord that needs to change something, like put a family member in the unit or to renovate or to sell and the landlord needs to do something, have them state their reason of what they want to do. Do I see any merit in that? No, I see sort of a, what was it, the diversionary tactic by saying, hey, we're giving you ninety days, I'm like, we have ninety days, so this isn't giving us anything new, You are continuing to allow no cause eviction, which is not what the people told the landlord in the study community. Right, but more limited, in all fairness, limited, and for cause is more fully articulated in this film. Not just cause, but for cause, and reducing no I would really like people to read the actual bill because it put in all this just cause language, but it also retained the sections that says no cause. Both no cause with a not a written lease and at the expiration of the lease time. By the way, our nonprofit housing provider friends, they cannot evict for no cause. And so do I see landlords using no cause? That's a really big problem actually from my point of view with H seven seventy two. H seven seventy two said, let's have two procedures. One procedure for people who are gonna be evicted for nonpayment of rent and they had bad behavior. By the way, the bad behavior evictions are actually the smallest number of evictions statistically. It's like maybe 70% and often the behavior that people have missed, the least violation that they did, was not being able to keep up with paperwork. Anyway, as Jessica was saying, the real, but very small number of people who need to be evicted because of their bad behavior. Nonpayment and bad behavior would go in one process and no cause would go in another process, which is totally not cognizant of the fact. It was one of my first cases when I got to Vermont. Somebody sent a termination notice that said, here's your termination for not payment of rent, which is this day, but if you pay, you won't be terminated for not payment of rent. And then later down the page it said, but you will be terminated in ninety days for no cause. That has that's been part of the landscape for the entire time I've been in Vermont. Before that, landlords send two notices. Okay, under $7.72, where does that go? Which, does it go to the faster process in the brand new subchapter four to Title 12? Or does it go in the current process? So, from a practitioner point of view, this bill is incredibly flawed, is going to inject a lot of chaos into landlord tenant law on the no evidence that the courts have been inefficient. Yes, the courts, the pandemic threw everything, creating remote hearings and online filing. There was a huge thing that's happened in the last five years with all of that, the pandemic and online filing and remote hearings and the court being downstaffed, especially for judges. But ask them. They've caught up. There aren't inefficiencies in the court. Carrie Coursons, the Chief Administrative Judge, came in and told the committee that most evictions were already being disposed of within one hundred and ninety days. And we know from the data that 76% of evictions are disposed within one hundred and eighty days, which is the aspirational goal for the judiciary for civil process. So why are we doing this? Why are we injecting chaos? Why are we saying that it has to be effective July 1? Like Jessica pointed out, how in the world are people going to retool? This takes away any predictability that we've had about how things are supposed to work. It doesn't give anything to tenants that no real thing. It allows them to be charged fees at the time of application, which is a huge barrier to finding housing. It sets the standard for security deposits at two months, so now and it also says two months and first month's rent. I don't think the words first month's rent should be in the security Exactly. Deposit But it's Sorry, don't wanna wait. It basically says anybody who wants a partner Who knows landlord cut them. Has to come up with three months rent. There aren't, I'm somewhat familiar with the HUD programs, the Rapid Re Housing programs and the cash that HUD gives our agencies to help tenants. And they have limits to them. I'm not sure that they would be able to come up with three months rent to get a tenant if or allowed. Maybe we should call Jessica back because she'll probably know better. But so it's not going to work to achieve the purpose that the people who were asking for it. You know, one of the things So, just need to keep moving because we have a little Landlord bit of tenant relationships are relationships. They are complicated. If we thought that there is a production line that you put in a little of this and you put in a little of that and you're gonna get that result, that is never the way a landlord kind of relationship works. The nature of the disputes for each person involved are unique and the expectations of these parties are different. Vermont needs human services programs, including attorneys, mediators, evidence based landlord liaison programs, navigators, and other workers who solve problems so that housing isn't destabilized. H seven seventy two does nothing about that. It doesn't do anything to incentivize landlords to rent more. If people were actually talking about landlord incentives, maybe we'd be talking about tax policy. Maybe we would be talking about risk to help landlords rent to lower income people. None of that is in H-seven 72. There are so many caramacall things in it. It's not a good bill. I really want you to not have it. Thank you, Jane. We have Jane's testimony.

[Sen. David Weeks (Clerk)]: And we have a brief hold.

[Jean Murray (Vermont Legal Aid, Attorney)]: And I would just also remind us that we have the landlord tenant task force report on our website. It identified problems we need to resolve. This is not a perfect system. I would remind us, or we wouldn't have begun work on this So you will help identify a lot of the problems that the task force wasn't able to make recommendations. Didn't have the time take the problems and then make recommendations. And so this work, as you know, was an attempt to try and resolve some of the issues raised in the landlord tenant task force. I'm not sure if I agree. And they Or allowed

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: to disagree. I mean, a lot of the landlord tenant task force, whether or not I agreed with

[Jean Murray (Vermont Legal Aid, Attorney)]: the landlord tenant task force before, a

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: lot of it did point to the kinds of solutions that achieved this much.

[Jean Murray (Vermont Legal Aid, Attorney)]: I almost forgot what I was gonna ask.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: But the first, the thing that I you're an attorney, right? And you've been doing William Lieutenant Block for so long. And I have this I had this back and forth with Senator Sears two years ago because I think the reason there is much of this that is not necessarily our jurisdiction is because and and whether or not senator Sears and I agreed two years ago, this notion that we're just saying, we just need to get the drug dealers out quickly, is is absolutely a judicial matter of who we mean, what we mean. For our purposes as a housing committee, I want us to remember that drug dealers can live in really nice housing also. If we feel we have drug problems in the state and people who are taking advantage of homeowners or landlords or tenants to to put them under duress and use their property for illegal activities, we need to deal with that in a better way, first and foremost, through the courts and the judicial process. Okay. The idea that we're just saying we have to get drug dealers out

[Jean Murray (Vermont Legal Aid, Attorney)]: is very problematic for landlord and tenant law. Agreed. I will remind us that we had a joint hearing with judiciary in the senate chamber on Decker Towers and this part of this challenge. But right now, given our time and Friday and appropriations needs, I'm going to thank Jean. This is great. This conversation is just beginning in this committee. So we are we are off to we're off to a good start. Thank you for your input. And Elizabeth, we're going to bring up Elizabeth Bridgewater.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: I I put my email on

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: my written testimony. So And

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: we already have it.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: It's already up on our website. You can email me questions. We'll be very happy to have you back too. And you're not far away. Have all Karen has provided everybody's testimony this morning for us at our places. So thank you.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: We never see you in person. I know, it's

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: been great to have you in person. Welcome, Elizabeth.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Thank you for coming all the

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: way up from Windham County. Yeah, this is an important topic. Thank you for inviting me to provide comments and insights on H772. My name's Elizabeth Bridgewater, I'm the executive director of the Windham and Windsor Housing Trust. We are a thirty eight year old nonprofit located in Brattleboro, but we serve both Windham and Windsor Counties with housing programs that provide rental homes to over 900 households, shared equity homes to over 150 homeowners, and home repair services to both single family owner occupied households and also privately owned properties through the BHIP program.

[Elizabeth Bridgewater (Executive Director, Windham & Windsor Housing Trust)]: We also have an internal team of supportive services staff through the Staff for All program that help residents with eviction prevention and health and well-being support. I'm here today because I too care about tenant stability, especially for vulnerable tenants that we provide housing to. I have a responsibility in my role to provide safe and decent housing to low and moderate individuals and families. I also have a responsibility to provide a safe working environment for my staff. And I have a responsibility to protect the sustainability of our affordable housing communities so that they're available for future generations, which is the vision of state investments in perpetually affordable homes. Unfortunately, it's getting harder and harder to fulfill those responsibilities because of some of the challenging dynamics that have emerged over the last five, six years. And while I respect my colleagues' experience as a practitioner receiving eviction notices, from my experience, as a practitioner working directly in communities and with renters that we house, I don't feel like the legal tools that we have right now are effective in addressing some of the challenges that have emerged in Vermont in the last five to six years. These trends began coming out of the COVID-nineteen pandemic. You know the virus impacted people that contracted it, but it also had other impacts beyond the physical health, and that's isolation, loneliness. For a lot of vulnerable people who had struggled with substance use, they went back to some of those behaviors. This was right around the time that fentanyl hit the drug supply. So we had an opioid, we had a pandemic of the virus, the COVID-nineteen virus, paired with the introduction of a very highly addictive drug, about 50 times higher, addictive than heroin, and it has a shorter cycle on the body. So you have people that are really struggling with substance use that need to access this drug more often in order to basically avoid feeling like they're gonna die of the withdrawal symptoms. This dynamic created a very compelling business opportunity, right, for people that have no problem predatory, a predatory business opportunity, basically profiting off of other people's needs to raise. And as Jean said, these activities don't happen in public, they happen in homes. And they're happening in some of the homes that we provide in our community. What these predatory drug dealers do is they identify a vulnerable person. It's often somebody that is very low income. They may have a disability. We see this a lot when these situations occur. Or somebody that has low capacity to advocate for themselves, to stand up for themselves. In these cases, these homes are being completely taken over by often people that are out of state that are coming up to do business in Vermont. That target person's home, they don't have to control over their living environment anymore. We've seen situations where a formerly homeless tenant who was in a stable home was sleeping in the backyard in a sleeping bag because they couldn't even access their home anymore. In other situations Can

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: I ask a question from Yes, absolutely? Did you help them get a relief from abuse or exploitation order?

[Elizabeth Bridgewater (Executive Director, Windham & Windsor Housing Trust)]: We help them, you know, get those folks out of their unit. Right.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Not that system. Okay, because, you know, I mean, that's like, I'm, I've seen a lot of victims of violence. Relief I strengthen the relief from exploitation order because it doesn't always have to be an intimate partner.

[Elizabeth Bridgewater (Executive Director, Windham & Windsor Housing Trust)]: Right.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: That is that is the quickest way to get someone out of property they may even be on the lease of or may own? Do you use the relief from abuse or exploitation orders to help people? Do you point them to victim advocate?

[Elizabeth Bridgewater (Executive Director, Windham & Windsor Housing Trust)]: So in this case, the landlord, we tend to either try to work with a tenant to ask for help. We work closely with our police department to make sure the tenant knows that they will be protected. They could get within twenty four hours in order to have sub life out. Often the tenant is so intimidated that they can't interact with us, and they won't interact with us, and that's often the barrier. And I'm gonna talk about why I think the, you know, crespass law will actually address Because what we see are people that are so intimidated. I mean, we had one tenant that we worked with for months who refused to really work with us, and we kept offering help and offering help. And then finally she felt a moment of grace and came down and asked for help. She was actually in the building where our office was. And we called the police department right there, and she left the building with a blanket over her head. That's how frightened she was. And her being seen with the laboring with her. So, people are really, really frightened in these situations. Often they can't say yes. They can't say yes, I need help. Sorry, keep Yeah, think, yeah,

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: I just wanna get back to where my comments were.

[Elizabeth Bridgewater (Executive Director, Windham & Windsor Housing Trust)]: So I described that, I think the other impact of this is on the other tenants that live in the building. So when somebody is taking over a unit in somebody's home, they are basically setting up shop to sell drugs. So they've got a lot of customers coming and going. That happens all throughout the night. It's happening at all hours of the day. There's lots of noise, lots of intimidating behavior. If people can't get in the building, there's property damage. We have one building in Downtown Marlborough where the front doors were tried helping with Pro Virus probably 10 different times, and we're trying to replace the doors over and over again. It's very expensive. There's a lot of damage to the common spaces, and people are terrified. So what are our options? And I appreciate you bringing that option up. I feel like we have very limited options because people are so scared. And so we either have to Our tool that's the most effective right now is actually evicting the tenant. And in most cases, the tenant's actually the one that's being taken advantage of. But because they are so terrified and can't ask for help, we can't use some of the other tools at our disposal. So this is why I feel like the no trust plus provision in H-seven 72 is a really great tool for us. I'll share a story of what happened last week at one of our properties. We knew a tenant was in this situation. We brought the Broward Rock Police Department into the unit. They have embedded social workers right in the police department. They brought two of them with them. And the tenant seemed really hesitant. They were really trying to offer help support and they couldn't get a clear answer for what was going on. The sergeant left and left the two social workers in the unit. And the drug dealers were hiding behind the couch the whole time. And they stood up and were fairly intimidating and the social workers left. If we had had the ability to get a no trespass in that moment, we could have gone right back to that sergeant and said, hey, we want to expel these people from the whole building. And right now the current law doesn't allow us to do that. Right now the current law needs to have everybody that lives in that building sign the no trespass order, including the tenant who's being intimidated and victimized. And so they don't, you know, they're too scared to do that. So we would like some levers that we can pull in order to deal with it very quickly. Okay. And also protect the tenant being found victimized. In other cases, and this is actually less common Can I ask you a question on the trustee? Yes.

[Sen. Thomas Chittenden (Member)]: I've been reading the trustee passage, and I'm not seeing that affecting any of the eviction timelines. Am I not interpreting that correctly?

[Elizabeth Bridgewater (Executive Director, Windham & Windsor Housing Trust)]: Yeah. They're separate provisions. So

[Sen. Thomas Chittenden (Member)]: that's a part of the bill that's not related to this that seems reasonable.

[Elizabeth Bridgewater (Executive Director, Windham & Windsor Housing Trust)]: Yeah, it's an update to the current law which the tenant themselves has the ability to press pass on their home themselves. They can do that. If we want to, as a property owner, barge somebody from the building because they are intimidating the tenant, intimidating our staff, which has happened. We've had our staff surrounded by bad actors in the hallways and pretty frightening situations. We have a protocol now where we send two staff members in, is highly, you know, not very cost effective or efficient to have to have two staff members go at any given time to certain locations. So it's really drawing on our resources in a way that I don't think we're physically envisioned. Can I ask the question? Yeah. And we normally just need to keep ourselves moving. Well, and and so much of what we have been

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: talking about is judiciary's jurisdiction, but this specifically, I'm writing to Nader right now because the I feel like there's a bigger question for the landlord tenant relationship about something I introduced a decade ago, which still does not exist in law, that it is a legal requirement that a tenant notify their landlord of a subletter, let's say, or somebody living on their premises for a certain period of time that makes them otherwise a tenant. That doesn't exist. Right now, I believe it's just a breach of contract if you because most contracts, right, some landlords may not if you don't have a written contract, but some landlord probably having their written contract, you can't just have someone live here without notifying me, etcetera, etcetera. That seems like an important precursor, is having it be a legal requirement to notify that you have another person living in your house long term or however you want them buying it before they can be considered an unlawful occupant for the purpose of a new track pass.

[Elizabeth Bridgewater (Executive Director, Windham & Windsor Housing Trust)]: I'm not sure I understand what Like,

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: do you or in the situations you're dealing with, it's they they probably never the tenant has never told you, by the way, I have this person living with me because I don't think it's really legal. Right. So how do you all currently I mean, like, you all currently have the ability to say this person is not on the lease. They cannot be here. You're saying that ability is stymied right now to get a no trespass because because law enforcement will require that every tenant sign onto this. They're not recognizing that you've already determined this is an unlawful occupant.

[Elizabeth Bridgewater (Executive Director, Windham & Windsor Housing Trust)]: Yes, that is exactly true. So, especially in affordable housing cases, we do have embedded regulations because of the funding sources that we use. Right, our debt to shelter. Right, people need to notify us. It may not be the current Vermont law, but it does apply to us. And so, a tenant has to let us know because there's full income requirements and household income requirements. Right. And so, it's a whole thing that we're monitoring all the time around who's living in But a the remedy for that is the court system. If a tenant refuses to comply, we're still back to the court system.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Okay, but before there's a problem, like there are drug dealers with guns and, you know, they're making a disturbance in the hallway or something, you do have the authority if you know someone is living there. That's not a lawful occupant. Because they you are not legally allowed to be here. You don't necessarily have to involve the tenant in the decision to remove that person.

[Elizabeth Bridgewater (Executive Director, Windham & Windsor Housing Trust)]: I don't believe we have that legal right to do that other than an eviction order. We don't have the legal right to put a no trespass an unauthorized tenant that's living in that apartment, the way I understand it. So, we'll get to this as we discuss those sections, I think, I'd just love to, given we have two more people to hear from, I'd love to have you finish if you could. Yeah, absolutely. So that whole area of focus is on the no trespass situation. It's really designed to deal with guests, and not just the guests that's taking over the unit, but also the guests that are coming in the middle of the night and trying to partake in this business and are intimidating people and threatening people and there's a lot of desperate behavior that goes along with that. So there's a lot of challenging behavior that we're seeing. So that's what that's designed to

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: address.

[Elizabeth Bridgewater (Executive Director, Windham & Windsor Housing Trust)]: The other of the carve out around master of lifting timeline is designed to address the tenant themselves. And while it's less often, we do see sometimes tenants that have a lot of risk of the problem. And we had a situation that happened in one of our units where a tenant didn't have anything on their record. We rented to them, and within a few weeks they invited their boyfriend to come and live with them, and they set up shop. So they were, she was one

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: of the

[Elizabeth Bridgewater (Executive Director, Windham & Windsor Housing Trust)]: issues. She wasn't being taken advantage of. She was the one that was running the business. It took us over a year or two avenge her. And during that time, this was one of the really egregious cases where common space got taken over, people's doors were being knocked on in the middle of the night, they set up shop in the outside, they took over the driveway. There was just a ton of activity going on all at once. There were two arrests by the police department. The tenants in the building watched them take guns out of the units. And those tenants were back the next day running their business because we didn't, we were in the court system and we couldn't speed it up any faster. So, there was a lot of trauma that happened for everybody living in that neighborhood, in that building, for all this

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: time period. Can we talk more about what were the details of what took so long in court, right? This just says you get a hearing within a certain number of days. That is a problem we probably need to solve through greater resources to the judiciary where there are hotspots as we heard for this issue. But barring getting a hearing in the first twenty one days, what else took so long in that process?

[Elizabeth Bridgewater (Executive Director, Windham & Windsor Housing Trust)]: I don't know whether it was the court system just taking control. I know at first we went for a strategy of non payment because that tends to go faster, and it's got very objective criteria that's easier for a judge to review and verify. And so that was our initial strategy while we were gathering evidence on all this other stuff much harder. And that's the other thing, there's months that go into building that kind of case before you can get to the court system.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Need Would you go feel like you got help from our legal system to, like, our local police, etcetera, to stay in touch about how you built that cave and how? Absolutely, yeah. Rutland Road Police Department is really progressive. Mhmm.

[Elizabeth Bridgewater (Executive Director, Windham & Windsor Housing Trust)]: And the fact that they did two police raids on this apartment, they gave us that objective criteria that was visible and documented, and so this was a case that we were able to make it to the end, right? Right. But the end

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: just took over a year. And and

[Elizabeth Bridgewater (Executive Director, Windham & Windsor Housing Trust)]: and a bunch of people on I

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: guess what I would what what we have to balance, at least judiciary does, and we have to balance, is if they're ejected from the apartment, that doesn't mean the problem goes away. Correct. Right? So then maybe it moves to another street in the community or another community. I remember the police chief in Hardwick saying, this is like cracking a walnut shell. If you don't do it right, the pieces just fly into the smaller communities that have left oversight and support. So we as lawmakers still have to think about what happens if you eject those folks before investigation occurs, then some criminal penalty is applied if they're just still in the community.

[Elizabeth Bridgewater (Executive Director, Windham & Windsor Housing Trust)]: I agree that there is a bigger picture strategy that needs to be employed, I need to be able to restrain to my tenants. I want you to have a safe environment and I'm doing everything I can where you live right now to address this. And that is the biggest conversation we're having with tenants when things go sideways. And so I want them to know that I'm doing everything I can to create a safe environment for them. Elizabeth, I'd love to have you finish, don't rush, just finish as you can. Those are the focus of my comments around age 72. I also just wanted to address something just education wise that Jean said that they see a lot of evictions for paperwork, people struggling with catching up with paperwork, and I just want to educate the committee that that's actually a requirement of the tax credit program, that if somebody's not doing their paperwork on time, in order for us to comply with the regulations, we have to submit that notice to them. It doesn't mean that we're actually gonna evict them in the time frame, we're always willing to work with somebody that got caught up on that paperwork, but we need to have that notice in our file for a whole another regulatory kind of set of responsibilities. So I just wanted to add that piece because I think that is a common thing and I just wanted to add that as an educational component.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Right.

[Elizabeth Bridgewater (Executive Director, Windham & Windsor Housing Trust)]: So anyway, I really appreciate, this is a really complex issue. There are other strategies and other things at play that need to be put into place, but from our experience, I think these two tools that are in the bill would really help us solve some problems right now. Excellent. Thank you very much. And we will probably have you all back because you're all sort of expert witnesses on this.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: I think we're gonna shift to Angela Zakowski, who I think is online. To get none of your thoughts, though. Okay. Then if Angela isn't, then I'm gonna actually call on Chris until Angela's available. Could you let her know we're ready for her? Yes. There's Yeah. Chris happily is a regular in this building, and if Angela shows up, Chris is kind of like I he would go and follow her at another point.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Chris Dolley, the Chittenden Trust. Yes. And if you see her pop up on the screen, I'll just interrupt, and I'm happy to come back. Right. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you for hearing from folks today on this bill. Not sure we've seen more of it following this bill through the whole process. And the reason being is that along with the list we've just said, that we really need to support our tenants with Better Way.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: So Chris, she's got it to come today. We'll just keep going, and we'll read both Angela for maybe Tuesday to figure out. Just

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: to let you know how we operate and how the profit for the next property, if you have a lease with us and you're paying your rent, you're invited to the lease, you can be 10 for life. We won't kick your eyes. We have rent stabilization. We want the rent increases each year a smaller set. So we have a lot of the things that are encapsulated in what people think of as just cause and action.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: So just cause evictions. Sorry. I was just trying to figure out what we're gonna get to

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: answer

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: that. Cause eviction just mean it would mean that at the end of the tenant contract, the lease, they're able to stay forever. Automatically renewed. Automatically renewed. With a, how is the rent increase enabled in that if

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: It's there's not regulated. We put the state requests to our regulators, VHFA primarily. And it's just a, you know, it's a 3%, something like that. I forget the exact amount, but think it's small enough. So, just cause

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: isn't, we think of is having a reason to be evicted. It's a process whereby people can just stay forever?

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: We just don't engage in no cause eviction. So, that's kind of flip side of the form. So, we always have a reason if we want to pursue a termination of a lease or an eviction process. We've also been asked to house the most vulnerable ones. In the last several years, we've been asked to house more people moving out of homelessness. Those people need protection as well, as Elizabeth mentioned. We have increased our resident services staff so that when there is a bump in the road for people, our first offer is for help. Connectional support, whether it's financial resources or other kind of services in the community from other partners. So we do that. We have 12 resident services staff now that works throughout our portfolio of 26, 2,700 homes. And you connect people to services, but also engage with people. For example, I saw a notice, one of those going on to a tenant last week. Their kids were hanging out of their roof. They said, Don't do that. That's a use violation, but we're gonna have our residents sweep this off by. It's not a reason for us to terminate. We will always offer help. So our priority is to protect our tenants, to protect our staff, and protect our properties. And protecting our tenants, our staff of one A and one B, protecting our properties leads us to priority is really people. We need to keep them safe. Right now in our portfolio, we have a dozen of 15 properties that we will not enter. We will not let staff enter. Have. Don't know.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: How properties do you manage? About 2,500.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: About 2,005 So this is twelve five hundred properties? Apartments. So are

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: There's some here basically are too dangerous to enter.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: We will not enter. We not, 12 to 50. Geez. Small number, really, these are the ones that we just, we can't, and those are scattered to the portfolio. So those are- Are

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: those units or are

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: those Those are units. And so those are impacting all the other tenants in the building. We have, it's hard to retain our staff because of these conditions. There's another 60 or 70 that have kind of a red flag or orange flag on them. So you need to go in with at least a couple people and go in. You need to make sure that you're safe. So in the last year, we've increased our spending on security. We have sheriffs, contracting the sheriff walking in the halls of some buildings at night. We have one of those portable blue light flashing things that we're able to put in different properties. So just, it has camera on it that allows for more eyes or at least video on sites. We have hired a director of security, a small time staff person that just deals with security issues in her portfolio. So, Kesha?

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: I think those are good ideas anyway, right? That's been recommended to BHA. BHA's concern was they didn't want to do any rent increases to pay for security to protect the tenants. Security is important for your tenants. It doesn't necessarily solve the problem to eject people. They could go right outside. They could still harass your tenants. So I'm sure you're seeing, I mean, they could be playing loud music. That's what we deal with in Burlington a lot is infractions of the law are not necessarily pointing a gun at somebody. There are a lot of things that disturb the peace that probably do require security when you have that many tenants.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: So the issue with the and summary, they could not increase rent in order to pay for these extra rent. They actually had to fund website resources. What I'm saying is that It's not that they cannot. It wouldn't be enough to actually do what they needed.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Well, sure, and we wanted to try to support them with that, but the tenants were asking for the security

[Sen. David Weeks (Clerk)]: Yes.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Too. And security is kind of important nowadays. I mean, condo buildings have security. You know, you that isn't necessarily going to be solved. Like, you don't all of a sudden not need security if people are ejected from your buildings.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Some of the most egregious things are really threatening the health and safety and welfare of everybody else in the building. And if we didn't have security, then people would not feel safe in our office. And our property managers, I agree with you, but our property managers will say that a penny will tell them, At least you get to go home at night. And we have to go home to this happening next to us. So that kind of security, yes, it's necessary. But this is $500,000 that we spent last year that we didn't spend five years ago. And that's money that we're not spending on other things to support tenants or do other work. We have increased amount of rental arrears because of the time that it takes to go through eviction process when it's done. Payments, If it's six, seven, I mean, Marla was quoted earlier, 76% of the evictions meet the aspirational goal of one hundred and eighty days. That means 24% jugularity, leading the aspirational schedule. So one hundred and eighty days, it was six months of now came to the front. Last year we wrote off $900,000 worth of practice. Currently we have $550,000 back rent to accept. Eventually have to those are resources that we are not able to use. The time for eviction, as I touched on that, I thought was brought up earlier in the example of Kai Morris' testimony upstairs. Had a no cause eviction, three hives within five years. When the House General heard that testimony, that's when they decided to move to a ninety day time period across the board. Ninety days only, the termination of a lease, that only is for people right now that have lived in a place for two years or more. Anyone that's less than that or anyone who lived through the rental agreement is actually a shorter time period right now to ninety days. So this bill actually extends that time period from ninety days. And I think what she testified upstairs, which is a critical piece, gave it stating the bill actually allows for more money in their hand. But you can ask for parties to charge the back early. So cash and more time is really what's, if we're not gonna get to a full getting rid of no cause eviction in a bill, which we would support that, I just don't see it passing this body. We're not gonna get to that. I guess we can give people more time, more attention. I have a question. Yeah, Grant. Do you feel that your policies, your requirements for policies

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: to screen tenants in different ways, in a more conclusive way, is a factor in the evictions that you do have to do or want to do? Do you have sufficient information about the tenant, if you will, to know that this tenant is a high risk for being in the category that would cause evictions? I wouldn't say screening

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: is always the best tool. What we have often times when we are tasked with asking, when we're being asked to house people coming out of homelessness, whenever we have a vacancy, thirty five percent of those people moving into those apartments have been homeless. And so what we ask for is a service plan from a service provider that says, This is what we're gonna give back to us to help them succeed. And if that service plan isn't robust enough or if it's just checking boxes, then we ask them to do it again. And so we try to manage who's come down on the inside. But as Elizabeth mentioned before, sometimes it's outside of things later on. Just

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: on service supported housing for your residents, how has that increased? You talk about security increasing. How have you embedded more? You've increased service supported housing prior for the last several years, that's also quite expensive, but so helpful.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Prior to the pandemic, we had two resident services people, social worker staff on staff. And we had 12 now. 12?

[Sen. Thomas Chittenden (Member)]: Senator Brock's question, that's where my mind keeps circling, is I wonder how many of these problems might better addressed through more rigorous screening processes, but once a landlord engages with a tenant, there is a relationship there and there is due process. It is a tentative thing to eject somebody from a place where they have a right to live based on a So I'm curious if there's more things we could do to give you the tools you need to be more thorough in your pre screening so that you don't end up causing these problems, those that are more deserving and ready to live in the environment are the ones that are getting the housing first.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: I hear you. I, with all due respect, I bristle a little bit that deserving, the words deserving, but point taken. I, we are tasked with being a bit of a house or a glass resort, just like insurance Yeah, this

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: is our partner. I'm rehousing. We'll have to do that. We'll the homes.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: And you fund us, and you ask us to do this work, and this is what we do, and we are most, five, whatever percent of the tenants are fine, you know, easy. Pay the rent, great. It's just a small number, I'm not saying it's 5%, but just a small number that are really causing havoc for all of the other people. And those are the people that will really keep us up at night, we need to protect their safety. So I hear you. And we also tasked with doing, in the last several years doing more. Yeah. Yeah. And

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: we are grateful because part of our exiting homelessness strategy has been our affordable housing partners, that partnership with us, it 90 enabled four people moved out

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: of homeless systems to one of

[Sen. David Weeks (Clerk)]: our businesses. Correct. 91. Last year. Last year.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: And Elizabeth, the same for you, you had quite a number too. Yeah, out of all the turnovers that we did last year, 46% of them went to people exiting from this.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: We have a stronger than that.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Sorry, Chris, finish. Oh, sorry, David, you have a

[Sen. David Weeks (Clerk)]: Well, I'm just curious if you're getting to the punch line.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Yes, so we support this bill. I have several things that I think would improve the bill that I'm happy to walk But essentially, you do need a faster process. We need this no trespass in order to expand the ability for us to protect our properties. And I've had several conversations over the last few months with tenant advocates. I can hear your concerns, my families, who operate under a lot of the stuff that they're asking for. I get that. But I also feel like we're in the middle of this, we're in the middle of road. We're also a large property owner and management. In the bill itself, I think in the actual notice sections, you you have, even on the first page, have hand delivered or delivered by the insurance service. Hand delivered is the same thing as being delivered by the sheriff's service. Having a sheriff, and I heard this from advocates, having a sheriff show up at your door can be intimidating. Yeah. Do we need to, you know, inject that kind of situation into the relationship? On hand chart, this is the old one, so don't look like I'm falling apart. You guys have the list. It has the distinction between the car statute and the change statute. One of the things that's also on the first page is that it changes the rebuttable presumption that the notice was achieved. So under current law, you've mailed something, and you have to set the termination notice fourteen days after they receive it. So that's seventeen days. Fourteen plus 30 is seventeen days. Under the revision, says you mail this. You have to set the time at the presumption of receipt five days after the receipt did. You can set it ten days, so it's ten plus five. So we're actually talking in this new kind of regime, the reduction of two days notice when something gets mailed. So just wanted, there are certain things, I really just want people to understand that aren't as, I don't think as much as sky is falling as a lot of testimony as, or at least I've heard personally. I think, and I think two other people have mentioned this, charging for a background check and a credit check is just, it's unnecessary. I don't think a tenant shouldn't charge for that. I think that's something that property owner has sparked their risks. They can decide whether or to charge for it.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: They're usually not.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: We don't. Right. And we process 2,000 applications a year. You don't require funding, you mean? We don't charge for it. Yeah. So I just think asking a tenant to come up with that money when they're applying for several apartments, it's But

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: I guess the, so the rub we always have is we have to balance big landlords and small landlords. People who know the law and people who don't. And a lot of what you're talking about really seems to be what comes with being a large housing provider. Like UVM has these problems, you know. Anyone who's housing, a lot of people in close quarters has programming they need to provide, security they need to provide, systems they need to have at least. I understand that the difference is UVM can charge, you know, frankly, more than the market to live in UVM housing, and you can't do that with a lot of your tenant. That is a great way to advocate that, like, that's why it costs more per unit for you. That's why you need more money from the state to keep service rich housing. But I think we do have to make sure that we're not creating landlord tenant law simply for large housing providers that could hurt a lot of other people because you also then are supposed to then have the coordinated resources to handle these situations in different ways than one landlord who might just say, yeah, I'm just gonna say person's doing illegal things and get them out of here.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: This is this is why I've wholeheartedly worked with Jess with Saki Monthly for less resources so that we can do that landlord independent education so that people understand Right. What the law is.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: But the rest of this is, like, not the sky falling, but a huge upending of landlord tenant law for things you're talking about that that do come with being large housing providers in a time of despair for people.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: I would say that all landlords, no matter what their size, experience some of these issues.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: We're talking about your problems on a larger scale.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: No, no, appreciate it, but I would say they're not the only I mean, think all landlords are affected by all these issues that are affected. As our tenant.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Yep. And you would hear from other people that smaller landlords may be going out of the business. I talked directly to them, but I've

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: heard that. We've heard that. And we'll hear from Angela Zekowski, who's the landlord runs the Landlords Association. She'll be in next week, and we will obviously continue this conversation. Anything else, Chris, before you Ash, you know And you're here, so we'll

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Yeah, I can always come back and, extending the effective date by three months to give people a little time to get used to this.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Yeah, I hear that. That's fine. Was

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: the effective date upon passage?

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: No, it was July 1.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Which is upon passage. Yeah, life of a day.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Saying think we would entertain the notion of it being

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Go to September. Turn to September 1. Just give people some time to, you know, that's typically when a lot of leases are signed. Right. There's a handful of other things, but I don't wanna do it.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Right. Well, you wanna talk about budget too, right? We need to just briefly talk about that. But I hear you on the support for the 200,000 for million for tenant landlord education piece, is so critical. And CDO does such a

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: good job. I think legal aid said several years ago that half red shoes in Vermont can be solved with them. So I think 1,000,000 for the back of

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: the silver nest in the move. Yes. In the house budget. It's in the house budget. That is one of the pluses in H-seven seventy two. Is one

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: of the

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: pro having pieces of wood.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Can you remind, who is Vermont fencing now?

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Is it gone? I don't know what Vermont

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Vermont Tenants Inc. Used used to be up legally.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: No. Oh, it's Jazz now.

[Jessica Hyman (Associate Director, CVOEO; Vermont Tenants/Fair Housing)]: I can answer that. So Vermont Tenants Inc. Is the precursor to the statewide Vermont Tenants Program that is housed within CBOEL.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: Okay, I was like, my brain is switching to a lot of stuff still, so.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: The millionth paper program, VRAP?

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: No, it's the Vermont State Housing Authority's Rental Affairs Program. That's right,

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: it's the rental arrears. Yeah. And we talked about this yesterday, think that's the highest priority for this Awesome.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: And then just, I know there's been some discussion about creating a housing court. I'd love to study that and think about ways

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: think implement housing diversion, which Jean talked about, and the housing court discussion I think are pieces that may be good additions for us as we count. It would be a judiciary.

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: Yes, but I think we could meet together. Yeah, yeah. Terrific.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Thank you very much. Thank you everybody. We are trying to balance this conversation. And if you know people we haven't heard from, we would appreciate. We are clear on the people we who wanna speak who we'll have next week. We're gonna be dealing with this. It's a major bill that we're gonna

[Chris Donnelly (Champlain Housing Trust)]: be working on. So I know you wanna speak for mean, there

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: are lots of so thank you very much. This was a good start. Thank you for And coming all the team.

[Gary Holloway (Downtown Program Manager, VT Dept. of Housing & Community Development)]: Are we done?

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Question. Yep. I don't have a question for you because we have to be done in a couple of minutes.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (Member)]: But are we going on?

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Fine. Are we? She had care assessment. We could go offline because it's just a scheduling issue. Okay. Thanks.