Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Senator Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: Hey, Lynn. Hey, Chief Melissa. Okay, we are back with the final portion of our meeting today, on Tuesday. We're gonna talk about budget request, and I would like to welcome Holly Major up to the table to talk about service supported housing funding. Thank you.

[Polly Major]: For the record, I'm Polly Major. I'm the director of policy and special projects for the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. It's nice to be with you all. I think it's my first time in front of this committee at some time, so it's lovely to be here today. And I'm gonna be speaking today about a proposal to broaden the eligible use of funding with FY 24 source to help meet the needs for housing for providers with intellectual and developmental disabilities. I wanna be clear. This is not a VHCb proposal per se. It's of however funds appropriate to VHCb, so that's why I get to take the chair of this. This is a proposal that really has strong support from the developmental disabilities community. Kirsten Murphy, the executive director of Developmental Disabilities Council for Vaughan, is here, and broadly from the group of parents that I'm sure you all have heard from who are working to find homes for their children as they age, homes that are safe and affordable. And this is work that BHCV has been partnering with this community on over the years. Going back to the closure of Brandon, but more recently, we've helped community projects six community projects around the state, create 36 homes for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and keep on caring for communities like Middlebury, like Williston, that have future opportunities to develop this housing if there is a public funding source that could help help with that capital cost of building that housing. That's what this proposal is about, is can we identify a source of public funding to continue to advance these projects? As a way of background, last year at Act 69, the legislature tasked a stakeholder group with creating a report that would create a plan for creating the roughly 600 homes we need for providers with intellectual and developmental disabilities. That plan is called the Road Home Report, and you may have heard about it earlier in this session. But one of its key recommendations was to create a fund, a capital fund, that developers of communities could go to to help subsidize the cost of building this housing. That cost is not born in the hub by the residents, ultimately, who do not have the money to sustain that housing. Senator Clarkson was a member of that committee, really passionate about this work, and so when her committee put together their housing bill, S-three 28, they included a fund for developmental disabilities housing. Unfortunately, though she worked very hard, she could not identify at that private source for that with the constraints of this year's budget. She worked for the treasurer's office and wasn't able to find a source there. And so she came to BHCB and said, is there a source that BHCb administers that could support this work? What I've included background on the memo I submitted to your committee is about a source. So what happened was 2024, the legislature appropriated $10,000,000 to BHCV to support the shelters building out shelter capacity and creating homes for people exiting homelessness, permanent supportive housing. We fully committed all of those dollars to community projects, and those units and shelter beds are being built around the state. However, there was one project that is gonna be permanent supportive housing for people exiting homelessness that planned to utilize a federal source, the HUD Continuum of Care funding, to provide the operating subsidy to allow that project to cash flow. The federal government this winter changed its direction in its housing homelessness response policy to shift towards treatment and away from permanent supportive housing. And so that source could no longer be used in that project, making it infeasible as designed. It couldn't move forward as a project serving specifically for the support of housing for people exiting homelessness because it didn't have the operating subsidy to make it cash flow. The projects can get moved forward. Homes are going to get built, but it's moving forward as low income housing, traditional low income housing rental development with utilizing the federal low income housing tax credit program, which means that $3,900,000 that the agency had committed to that project is coming back to the board. And so what we flagged for senator Clarkson is that if language is if the f y twenty four budget is amended to broaden the eligible use of that fund to be not only permanent supportive housing for people exiting homelessness, but permanent supportive housing for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. That would enable the board next year to keep the momentum going, fund one or two more projects as we continue to look for a long term solution on how we're going to ultimately build these 600 homes that we need for these highly vulnerable. I recognize this is a policy decision in front of this committee, in front of this body of broadening this eligible use from specifically targeted towards shelters and people exiting homelessness to this other highly vulnerable population. So I just wanted to flag that. We've certainly let AHS know that this proposal is getting discussed, and they haven't provided feedback on it yet. But what we think we could do is use a portion of these funds in a project that AHS has flagged for us for shelter and then have a portion of that created funding for community housing next year. So that's the proposal in front of you.

[Senator Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: Thank you. I do want to just talk about this briefly because before the pandemic that this is not the pandemic, except before the pandemic that I invited Beth Sealy to come in. I'm not sure it was before you would have heard. It would have been before that. Yeah, it was. And at that time, we felt that any kind of housing for folks with disabilities that the people of parents is so controlling. So they they can talk with me about what can we do. And I asked, asked, you asked Millic at that time, is there a way that you may see if they can partition off some funds for this type of housing? And yes, you could do that. So since that time, I think everyone has been trying to really try to that initiative, that is the mission. I for one will very much support this understanding that it is a deviation from what we're looking at with the homeless relation, but also know that these folks could very easily and as a preventive misinformation. Then finally, gave up my seat on that fifty nine crew so that Senator Clarkson could do her work, but she's really amazing. Great. Thank you for coming.

[Polly Major]: Listen, do have any questions? Yes, Senator, that's a question.

[Senator John Morley III (Member)]: I'm just trying to understand how this works. Is it that they can't afford to purchase a home, and that is what's really driving this? Is there anything special about the home itself that it needs to be part of helping them help these individuals to try and understand how this works?

[Polly Major]: And if you would, like, risk them to speak, that would also be fine.

[Senator Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: It's up to you. I need to.

[Polly Major]: Oh, well, since we have an f so VHCb, we're on the financing side, but maybe I'll speak I'll ask Kristen Murphy to speak to the needs of the population. So for the record, Kristen Murphy, executive director of the Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council, federally funded entity within the state that works on policy for people with intellectual developmental disabilities. I was chair of the Act sixty nine committee and the lead author of the report that Roseville. So pretty familiar with these issues. Most of the people that we're talking about, if we're talking specifically, not about everyone with an intellectual and developmental disability, but about those people with what we say IDD who are eligible to receive developmental disability services.

[Kristen Murphy]: So in Vermont that's a fairly narrow band. It's people with an IQ of 70 or below, plus or minus up to five points, or people with a certain impact from Autism Spectrum Disorder. There are roughly 3,400 Vermonters in that pool. That pool, we are aware that 80% of people in that pool, almost eighty percent, in almost equal numbers, either live with family members who are aging, often in their 70s already, parents who are in their 70s, or people who live in what's called shared living, which is an adult foster care model. Those are the two least stable and least sustainable residential arrangements for this population. Most people do not go on ever to own their own home in this population. This is a population that largely lives on on SSI, Social Security Insurance, which, you know, is I don't know. It's around the $880 or something like that now. They may earn some limited wages, but I think the average amount of work hours for someone in this population is under ten hours. So and it would be a low wage job. So not a lot of other income sources. The reason that those two sectors of residential services are not sustainable is a lot fewer people are willing to become shared living providers or adult foster care providers for a whole range of reasons. That worked great thirty years ago. And it works great for some people now, but there are not a lot of people stepping up to fill Those are folks who are aging too, so people retire out of that. It's not a very stable situation for anyone. And then the parents that have come to us are largely parents of individuals with high support needs, and these are parents in their late sixties and seventies who are still supporting a son or daughter, and are very frank with us that they're maybe siblings, but siblings live in other states, have their own family. You know, the American family today is very, very stressed. They're not necessarily in a position to take on a sibling's gains again. So then a parent and I am a parent. A parent's greatest worry is what happens to my adult son or daughter after I can no longer care for them or, god forbid, you know, I'm no longer here. And so they want to know that there's something stable, affordable, where services where they're receiving their services. But it will be a rental situation almost always. And that could look like renting a group home. It could look like renting your an apartment. It could rent an apartment, a portable apartment. It could look a lot of different ways. But a bigger percentage of it needs to work other than living with parents or foster care Does that help, Yeah.

[Senator John Morley III (Member)]: I I I just wasn't sure exactly what the end result are developing at almost like a assisted living kind of facility or or how

[Kristen Murphy]: Yeah. Assisted living is usually at a larger scale than what our folks experience. It might look like a small group of three or four people that wanna share a life together. It might look like a group of three or four apartments within a larger affordable complex. But there's an arrangement with the service provider. Because these people come with their services already kind of built in. Okay. But the housing piece is and we've not done a great job taking advantage of existing affordable housing programs either for this population because we were so reliant on these other types of arrangements. We we aren't necessarily looking at building 600 new units. We are looking at building some new units and also getting people into the pipeline for existing affordable housing programs that that all the Vermonters that qualify these.

[Polly Major]: That's very helpful. Thank you. Do you

[Senator Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: have any questions from us? Very much. So are you looking to have us endorse this a committee perspective? I think economic development is all new.

[Polly Major]: So I think what it would take to move this forward, the CRX Journey sponsor next year, is in this committee, we already have a chair asked to have this included in the budget this year. Thank you. Okay,

[Senator Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: committee. Think we are Senator Benson. It's already in this line which would be budget. It would be part of.

[Polly Major]: We have a nice liaison. So, Doctor, I

[Senator Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: think you can take it over. Thank you. Thought of that.

[Senator Virginia "Ginny" Lyons (Chair)]: Yeah. All right, wonderful. If no one else has anything to add, then we can adjourn for the day.