Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: We're live.

[Mike Hernandez (Manager, Bennington County Conservation District)]: We

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: are live. Great. Are in Senate institutions and it is still Friday, February 13. And this is our second and last item. We are hearing from Vermont Natural Resources Conservation District. Thank you much for being here and we'll just introduce ourselves so that you know who we are. So Wendy Harrison, I'm from the Windham District.

[Mike Hernandez (Manager, Bennington County Conservation District)]: Robert Plunkett, Bennington District. Joe Major Windsor, Russ Ingalls at Essex District. John Benson, Orange District.

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: Well, thank you. Thank you for having us in today. Always appreciate being here and talking with you. My name is Claire Eyreline. I serve as the Director of Operations for the Vermont Association of Conservation Districts. And we're here today. It was our advocacy day. I hope you got the chance to see us in the car room or our stream table demonstration. But we're here to just give a brief overview of what we've been up to and a couple of projects that have either been funded by this committee or are in the works. I'm going to share my screen and we'll just get started. Vermont has 14 natural resource conservation districts. Conservation districts are units of government. They operate at the county scale. They don't always follow county boundaries, but they do operate at that scale and are governed by an elected Board of Supervisors. They were established in 1939, and along with their establishment, the Natural Resource Conservation Council, which is an agency of the state, was established to provide guidance and support to the districts. Our model, the way we do business, is that we are rooted in communities. Our supervisors live within the districts. Our staff live and work within the districts every day, and so we believe that being rooted in communities helps us strengthen and support the environment.

[Mike Hernandez (Manager, Bennington County Conservation District)]: Really? Yeah, really fun.

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: Quick overview of some of the things districts were up to in FY '25. We assisted 152 farms. We serve everyone within the district, towns, individuals, but we do tend to focus on working landscapes, and so we did serve about four fifty two farms. We also do a lot of clean water work, including culvert assessments. We did 101 culvert assessments last year. We do a lot of outreach and education, so a little over 3,200 participants in public workshops. A lot of this is geared towards providing technical knowledge about how to use and manage natural resources in the land. We hope that participants then go back and implement those practices themselves. We also do youth outreach events, so we engaged about 2,000 youth. We planted almost 30,000 trees and other native plants. A lot of this is our field projects related to either clean water work or to flood resiliency. We do a lot of water quality soil in the newer sampling, collected over a thousand samples last year, and we assess over 15,000 acres for water quality concerns and other land treatment needs. Can I answer your question? Yeah.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Do you do that with ANR? Do you let ANR Are they looking for results and testing that you do?

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: I will defer that to one of our district managers. Well, when it

[Sarah Gonsell (Orleans County Conservation District)]: comes to soil and manure sampling, it's usually related to nutrient management planning and that is you looked at by the agency of agriculture whenever those farms get inspected. Okay. So, that's how that connects with the agency and when it comes to water sampling, mold conservation districts are doing water sampling through the DEC La Rosa program. Okay. So it is connected that way and usually the basin planner oversees and checks in with the districts that are taking the water samples. Great, that is really good to hear.

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: Thank you. So in a lot of cases, districts staff are the ones who are out on the ground doing this kind of sampling on behalf or providing information to the agencies. Big picture, districts work in a variety of areas. They do flood mitigation work, as we just talked about. This can involve things like tree plantings, flood plain reconnections, burr removals, dam removals. They also do drought mitigation. This has become big in this past year. So they can do everything from land management practices that improve drought resiliency to doing more infrastructure type for irrigation system. We work with farm viability and food security. A lot of this is working directly with farmers to connect them to grant programs or other financial assistance that can help them with their needs. We have one district, Franklin County, that produces every year a guide for agricultural producers. It's 160 pages this year, but it brings together all the funding sources available to the working landscape, whether that's federal, state, private, etc. And then we do a lot of clean water work. A lot of districts funding does come from the Clean Water Fund, it goes towards those projects I just mentioned, things like culvert replacements, bridge replacements, stand removals, things like that. That is a very quick overview. Happy to get into the details on anything. Just wanted to highlight that we do have a request for appropriations this year. For every $1 we receive from the legislature, we leverage at least $9 in competitive grant funding. So the majority of district budgets are comprised of competitive grant funding, a lot of that federal, a lot of that Clean Water Fund or other state sources as I just mentioned. So our budget request this year is $948,200 request reflects that in our total request, and that request reflects a continuation of our $612,000 baselines, a renewal of the $250,000 one time funding we received for this fiscal year, and the small adjustment meant for cost of living increases. The majority of this funding does go towards staffing at the districts to help them do things like research and apply for grants and get out and be responsive to constituent needs that are not covered under other grant sources. It also is what helps us innovate and come up with some of the new projects and programs that we sometimes come and talk to you about.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Questions? Yes. The work that you do with DEC, do you get paid for that? Is there a contract?

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: We tend to work under grants. Under grants? Yes. So there are a couple of grant programs that go through DEC. One is the Enhancement Grant Program, another is the Formula Grant Program, and then there's some others that are aimed towards road improvements and more specific types of work. These are all coming from the Clean Water Fund, and the way that the money gets to districts is that districts will apply for a project and then that project will get funded. So These tend to be relatively smaller grants on a case by case basis, project by project basis. This is great because it allows us to do the things like dam removal, solar replacements, etc. The challenge that it presents for our budget is that it means district's budgets can be highly variable year to year depending on what ends up getting funded.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So there's a base amount of funding.

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: Not really, no, this is our ACE funding. Okay. What we have here requesting today.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Do, do some, you get nothing?

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: Yes.

[Sarah Gonsell (Orleans County Conservation District)]: Yeah. You mean per project? Yes.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Or from from DEC.

[Mike Hernandez (Manager, Bennington County Conservation District)]: I can just we're just Oh, morning. Sure. We, the Bennington County, walked stepped back from the project cycle during my tenure due largely to our lack of financial ability to front the DEC project costs. Very often there will be an extensive lag between project completion and remittance payment, and some of these projects can be hundreds of thousands of dollars, and for an organization whose budget very rarely exceeds 100 to $200,000 a year in payroll, that presents an insurmountable barrier for our districts to be able to do those larger scale clean water projects, because we just can't afford to front the state. Right. A $200 culvert.

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: And that's reasonable. So it's highly variable, district to district. We do have some districts who receive quite a bit of funding through these funding sources and others that do not, and it can be for a variety of reasons. These are competitive grants, and so if they put in a grant application that just doesn't shake out in the overall statewide writing system, then they may not get funding just for that reason alone. So there's a couple of different reasons.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Would you be able to send us maybe five year history of what each district gets from DEC?

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: We can limit it to the pile.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: I mean, no rush.

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no. And it is a significant portion of some districts' budgets and again, not with others. So we will certainly work on that. Thank you. Yeah. Happy to answer other questions, but I did want to speak a little bit about our capital needs. Last year, I was in here speaking with you about our need for office space. This remains a need, and it's actually in increasing importance. Many districts have office space within federal buildings. This means that any time there's a government shutdown, districts get locked out of their space. We did have one district this year who had a public records request come through while the government was shut down, and we really had to get very creative on how to meet that request because their physical records were locked up and even the computers they used were inaccessible because they used federal computers. So we're working on that. We're encouraging all districts to have redundant systems, but it does mean that in order to navigate federal uncertainty, is becoming more important for us to have our own space. In addition to that, district staffs are growing. Just the demand for the types of work they do means that a lot of districts are now outgrowing their federal space. The USDA is not able to offer them any more seats, and in some cases has even reduced the space that they have access to. So we still need office space. Senator Harrison, you suggested that I follow-up with building and general services, and I have. It seems that office space is at a premium these days. The Governor's return to office order, I think has complicated our ability to find space in existing state buildings. So we're probably back to the drawing board in most cases in needing to find and purchase independent buildings or rent office space in other buildings. So that's where we're at. I wanted to report back to let you know how that conversation went. Yeah, I appreciate that.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Yeah. So, yeah, you need space. And you know how much you need, right?

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: Do you have that data? In terms of square footage, yes. We would need to compile that. It's going to be different for registers. Right. I have a spreadsheet that gives a general sense of types of needs because some districts also need outbuildings for equipment and things like that.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So BGS knows what you need generally. They do. So, they could be looking out

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: for that. They could, I've sent them a spreadsheet. Okay. Yeah, some data. Okay.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Send us Yes,

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: yeah, we've been going back and forth, but most recently they said maybe there could be some lease options in some cases, but it's been pretty

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: tenuous. Right, and they've been really busy getting people back, this is important.

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: Yeah. Okay. So we do have, I think, some specifics about that. We have Sarah here to present about an opportunity for her district in terms of office space, and then we have Michael to talk about the Veterans Farm. I'm happy to answer the general questions if there are any.

[Unidentified Committee Member (likely a Senator)]: Just a comment. We see you in agriculture all the time, and we appreciate what you do. You guys are

[Mike Hernandez (Manager, Bennington County Conservation District)]: one of

[Unidentified Committee Member (likely a Senator)]: the long longest standing organizations in the state. Exactly. I think it's you have sometimes undersold yourself for how much you guys get done for a little bit amount of money that you get, and you were very Christian boy, you do.

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: He's much. Alright. Sir, for me. Okay.

[Sarah Gonsell (Orleans County Conservation District)]: Hi, Lily. I'm Sarah Gonsell, and I work for the Orleans County Conservation District. I wanted to just go over a little bit about a capital request that we are bringing forward, and I've had a opportunity to connect with Russ a few times about it, but we are kindly asking for a $275,000 allocation to purchase a house at the Orleans County Fairgrounds. Like Claire had mentioned, the government shutdown was really disruptive for us. We got some emergency office space, moved all of our stuff over Pullengrain and Derby, got a grant to get computers that were not federal computers because when a government shutdown happens, we have to leave our computers at the office, and so then, to do our job, we got an emergency grant from the Vermont Community Foundation. And so, then at that time, my board voted to move us out of the USDA office. And so, we're still at pool And green, we're still looking for a place to be. And even before that, we were already talking about moving out of the USDA office, really ever since the beginning of this current federal administration, we were like, things are in upheaval. So, we have been in conversations with the Fair Association for at least a year now. And, but yeah, so before even all of that happened, we're outgrowing our space, like Claire had mentioned. We were already at the capacity of what the NRCS could provide to us, because on average we work with about 40 farms per year. Part of that is doing conservation planning. We generally oversee about 12 contracts per year out of the Newport office, facilitating manure injection, cover cropping, crop rotations, those types of things. We have about, 29 clean water projects. So, the clean water projects that Claire was mentioning, those are like active projects that we're like working on, all in different stages of development. This year, I think we're gonna have about eight projects in the ground. Every year we monitor about 30 acres of tree planting that we've done, and we usually do about a thousand trees per year. So, we're just, the need is growing for filling the hole that NRCS is creating, but then also, there's just lots to do in the conservation and restoration world. And so,

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: you know,

[Sarah Gonsell (Orleans County Conservation District)]: this opportunity that we've been talking to the Fair Association with, there's just a lot of really good community benefit that could come from it. The Fair Association, you all likely know, just from being in your communities, the county fair is struggling. The association that runs the county fair is antiquated. They're super excited about the Conservation District potentially being on the grounds with them to breathe vitality into their organization. So the house that we're requesting the 275 for is directly adjacent to the 61 acres that the Fair Association owns. So it's already a separate parcel, but it's right next to the fair. So the fairground would have constant presence, and because of the nature of our mission, we're gonna help them meet their mission. And we've already been talking with them about they would have a space in that building to continue to do their work and potentially serve as HR so that they could have a staff person to like bring their fair into the current century. That's pretty out of date. And then the other piece I had mentioned is we worked really closely with this organization called NECO, it's the Northeast Kingdom Organizing, and they're basically like our local resiliency hub. So during the twenty three floods and the twenty four floods, they were primarily an organization that was shuttling basements, pumps,

[Unidentified Committee Member (likely a Senator)]: you

[Sarah Gonsell (Orleans County Conservation District)]: know, doing a lot of that emergency release. They have a food pantry where they offer community meals. They don't have office space either. They're currently in the Barton Municipal Building, and so we've been talking with them they would have a portion of the house as well. And so, with the three organizations, like, we could just do so much for Barton. When it comes to flood resiliency and emergency response, but then also just like, you know, the fair association, what that means to community and then the work of the, you know, the conservation district. And the other real huge benefit of being at the fairgrounds is right now we have a fleet of conservation equipment and it's at a variety of farms all over the county. And so if we were at the fairgrounds, we could have all of our conservation and rental equipment right in the same place. So, it's a great opportunity. We're in active communications with them now. And yeah, thank you for your time and your opportunity.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: No, that's great. Is it in the Governor's, budget?

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: It is not. Okay. No. We have a couple of questions.

[Unidentified Committee Member (likely a Senator)]: I think there are 50,000,000 reasons why we can ask for it. I'm sorry. 46,000,000 reasons or whatever.

[Mike Hernandez (Manager, Bennington County Conservation District)]: Does your request include the fit up costs for the building, just purchase costs for the building?

[Sarah Gonsell (Orleans County Conservation District)]: So, it includes the purchase costs plus the house needs work.

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: Yeah. Yeah. Just wanted to

[Mike Hernandez (Manager, Bennington County Conservation District)]: be sure on the board leaving it shy of what you need to actually move it.

[Sarah Gonsell (Orleans County Conservation District)]: Yeah, so the total request would be to purchase the building, to do some repairs, then we don't have office equipment, so part of the capital piece would be like, we need a table. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

[Mike Hernandez (Manager, Bennington County Conservation District)]: What's the square footage of your head?

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: The total square footage, I

[Sarah Gonsell (Orleans County Conservation District)]: think is like 22 somewhere, it's a typical family home. Okay. Yeah, it's a, it's, it was a family home that was gifted to the fairgrounds.

[Mike Hernandez (Manager, Bennington County Conservation District)]: I see.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So, yeah, yeah.

[Sarah Gonsell (Orleans County Conservation District)]: Yeah, and so, the MIGO, the resiliency organization would be stairs, there's another upstairs room that we've identified for interns, we have an AmeriCorps that we could offer housing to, and then the district would be in the Main Floor. And there's a garage, and so we could do workshops, like a conference room, we could hold meetings.

[Mike Hernandez (Manager, Bennington County Conservation District)]: Very nice.

[Sarah Gonsell (Orleans County Conservation District)]: It really checks a lot of our boxes. Yeah? Yeah, it's right

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: off the highway. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. I think the picture's nice.

[Sarah Gonsell (Orleans County Conservation District)]: Isn't that nice? Yeah.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Yeah. That that The designs are really good.

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: Isn't that good?

[Sarah Gonsell (Orleans County Conservation District)]: I know. Right. I know. I think they designed to those colors specifically so that they're really eye

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: catching. Yeah. It works. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Well, thank you. Alright. Well, good luck.

[Mike Hernandez (Manager, Bennington County Conservation District)]: Thank you.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Thank you.

[Mike Hernandez (Manager, Bennington County Conservation District)]: Assume there's another slide in here. Regardless, Mike Hernandez, for the record, manager of the Bennington County Conservation District. Hello again. Yeah. You all saw me a I'm year mostly just here to to give an update on the state of the project and kinda give a little more context on how we continue doing the work around the incubator barn. Largely this year, given that with the start of the beginning, January, lost a significant grant with the Working Lions Climate Corp that underpins all of our workforce for this project. That was in collaboration with the Wright River and our CDs. We had five young folks who were coming out three times a week, we were clearing rushed and getting really good work done over that winter after we spoke, and bing, bing, boom, that grant's gone. All those people, we had to lay off. So that set us back pretty significantly. However, I was able with Suburban Propane of all companies, they came out and did several volunteer days with us over the course of this past summer, and we built the composting, initial composting facilities for taking over the excel contract from the home, and we are going to be interviewing our first round of candidates. One army veteran with a really good background in accounting, produce grower who was an air force veteran, and another produce grower who was, I believe, Navy. At this point, we're just struggling because these folks have such complimentary skill sets that we wanna hire all three of them. I did also apply to the Farming Institution grant program. We were denied on that one, but told to apply again next year after we'd fully hired out and and engaged in production. Where we have found some success is with Surfermont and the AmeriCorps program. We were solicited specifically to apply SIR Vermont to apply for three full time AmeriCorps positions to be placed at the Veterans Hall. So that would support additional funding for the executive director position, which is still underfunded, even though we have three great applicants. Honestly, don't know how we pulled that off with three such good applicants with the amount of money that we're offering.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Let me just stop you. Senator Benson wasn't here last year.

[Mike Hernandez (Manager, Bennington County Conservation District)]: Oh, should we go back just

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: a little bit? Yeah.

[Mike Hernandez (Manager, Bennington County Conservation District)]: So back in late twenty twenty three, the Conservation District began working with the Bennington Parrot Food Initiative project, which was congressionally directed spending request that Peter Welch put got through congress and invested, I believe it was $3,200,000 across the entire project into the Bennington County Food System. This is one of the projects that has come out of that pool of funds. It's $115,000 that was originally intended for veteran farmer education. But we sat down at a certain point with the Vermont Veterans Home, with the Community Development Division at the town of Bennington, and a bunch of community partners, and thought to ourselves, why don't we use this as seed funds to start a long term program instead of just a series of workshops? And that's that's what we've done. We we developed a plan. The district has leased a significant portion of the veterans' home property to be held in trust for the future cooperative enterprise that's formed once we bring these initial cohort members into the program. And we also have one currently and two potential non resident farms signed up to be part of the program. The one who is signed up is a retired Navy veteran, who's a blueberry farmer in the middle of Bennington. He started the blueberry farm as a retirement gig after he retired from teaching. He is now 85, and doesn't really wanna manage 400 blueberry plants anymore. So we're we're gonna go help him out, clean up the plants, harvest from those plants, and then bring that food back to the vet's home, it'll be sold to the kitchen at the vet's home and served through that, served safe kitchen. Big picture, what we're really trying to do here is close a lot of loops on the farmer aging crisis and the workforce development shortfalls that we're seeing in Bennington County and the working landscape. Farmers are aging out, no one's coming in to replace them. So by providing a space where veterans can move into the community or transition careers, establish three years of agricultural activity and receipts from a business, then they will be able, under Farm Service Agency and typical agricultural loan guidelines, be able to acquire farm acquisition loans, capital loans, and equipment purchase loans to go to the Vermont Land Trust or other land trusts where farms that have been conserved that aren't moving on the real estate market, because there aren't farmers moving into Vermont, acquiring those properties, bringing them into the cooperative and expanding over time. So that's, I'll pause for questions because I know Don't go that point, no, that's great, thank you. I'll get a better feel for talking about. So I'm really hopeful that next Friday when we run our round of interviews that we're either going to pick one person or decide that we can't pick and we find some more money to bring all three of them on. A cooperative enterprise, it makes sense to keep it cooperative, but that's a discussion that's still ongoing among the partnership. And we're just really excited to break ground this year. We've been working on this for two years, and it's really good to find DC a finish line. Not a finish line so much as a starting to another very long It's something that I'm really excited to be able to hand this off to the veteran partners and just step back and be the technical assistance person to help them get where they want to go, form their own entity, and get out of under the Conservation District umbrella and just do a small job as they kind of what they're going to do based on who's applying to be joining.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: That's terrific. Are you familiar with the cooperative agency? Okay, good.

[Unidentified Committee Member (likely a Senator)]: Yeah, we've been in

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Hopefully they can help you.

[Mike Hernandez (Manager, Bennington County Conservation District)]: Yeah, we're actually partnered with Vermont Legal Food Hub on a number of projects and this is one of them. Okay. We're working on our easements program and a few other things. Okay. And what I wanted to emphasize here, we had our first and then second round of grant freezes with the new administration, we had the first freeze with the executive orders pausing all grants for administrative review, and then we had the second 45, was 45 a shutdown? I don't even remember.

[Sarah Gonsell (Orleans County Conservation District)]: Oh gosh. Yeah. Yeah, was it longer than that?

[Mike Hernandez (Manager, Bennington County Conservation District)]: We had those two huge gaps in our funding this year, which really, really hurt us, but what we were able to do with this core services mine was I was able to pivot my staff to conduct grant writing assistance for Working Lands Enterprise Board grants or Clean Water grants for individual farms, and then I was able to pivot to finalize the job position to press releases and really focus on this project and our project at the Yellowbarn Community Farm in Arlington, which is another part of our countywide food sovereignty initiative, where we're sponsoring community gardens and through technical assistance and financial assistance, expanding those community gardens so that they can donate significant quantities of food to local food shelves. That's wonderful. Last year, they did about 6,000 pounds to the Arlington area We're hoping to double that this year with the use of our conservation equipment. We have a we used our one time funds last year to purchase a walk behind tractor and some of the nets, and those are really for for these kinds of projects on the smaller scale that are still really impactful to the bottom line of people in the community.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: It's great. Questions, comments? No, you're really persevering. So, thank you. Thank you.

[Mike Hernandez (Manager, Bennington County Conservation District)]: That's the best kind of presentation. Great job.

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: Well, are the specifics we had today. I think we're happy to talk if there's any more general questions. I did, I guess, wanna clarify a little bit about our funding request. So, the appropriations we get from the legislature, that is the only source of general operational funding that the conservation districts get. Even though they are county scale government, they don't have power of taxation fees, fines, They don't have any percentage of a statewide tax or a local tax that's driving for their existence. So, the number we presented to you earlier, we do believe that is sort of the minimum operational, the minimum number for continuing our operations as is, and we do use that money to be able to access some of these other grants that we're talking about. We always are in a position of meeting match on federal grants, and in terms of our staffing, we're often piecing together funding for staffing, and so this funding really does provide us the backbone to be able to do all of that. To exist, is that

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: what To we exist. And then are you in the ad portion of the budget? Senator Ingalls do. Okay, so then you deal with that. I'm sure you're a wonderful advocate.

[Unidentified Committee Member (likely a Senator)]: These guys do a good job.

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: Okay. All right. Any other questions?

[Unidentified Committee Member (likely a Senator)]: I'm good.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: All right, we're good? Thank you very much for coming here. Thank you. Hopefully we'll see you before, I guess they will see you before next year, but I'm glad that we could do this at least this year yeah once a year

[Claire Eyreline (Director of Operations, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: we always enjoy talking with you okay so we are a jerk

[Unidentified Committee Member (likely a Senator)]: are you related to the irresponsible dentist no

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: okay