Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Hey, welcome. This is Senate institutions. It's Thursday, 02/26/2026. And we are. Sorry, that's me. Thank you. We go. Okay, we're good. And we have one item on the agenda today, which is to hear from forest parks and recreation folks about the capital bill items. So we can introduce ourselves. Well, Wendy Harrison, Windham County.

[Senator Joseph "Joe" Major (Member)]: Joe Major, Windsor County.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Senator Russ Ingalls, Essex County. John Benson, Orange. And on the screen, I'm Robert Plunkett, Bennington County.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Afternoon. For the record, I'm Danielle Bitsko. I'm the Commissioner of Forest Parks and Recreation. I do have two colleagues here with me who want to make the decisions.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: I'm Frank Stolling, project manager.

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: I'm Nate McKean, the director of state parks. So

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation)]: we're here to give you an update and what's in the proposal for FY '27 capital. So we have clean water funds in the FY '27 capital budget proposal and parks infrastructure, and then give you an update of where we stand with FY '26 capital dollars in three different areas. I figured I'd give you sort of the three buckets of capital funds that we receive so you kind of have an understanding of how it sort of works through our system. The first big bucket is parks infrastructure and rehabilitation. This is really funding to, within our designated state parks. So we have 55 state parks across the state. People don't really recognize us because when you go to a state park it's meant to be chill, we want you to be chill and relaxed, but we had about $280,000,000 of assets across state parks with over a thousand structures and 40 miles of piping on the ground. Like, when we are full on a busy weekend, we are the fifth fifth busiest municipality, like, in the state. It's there's a a lot of infrastructure that's not really recognized within state parks. Also have, so that's one line item. Then we have public lands access infrastructure, and we like to call that play. So if you think of the designated state parks beyond that, FVR overall manages for the state about 200,000 acres. So think of those all the infrastructure that's there for mostly outdoor recreation, parking areas, trailheads, trails. This fund supports play, those outside of designated areas. And third bucket is through the clean water appropriation, and there's about 600 miles of roads with on falls, A and R lands, and we strategically invest in updating some of the best management practices to reduce sedimentation into waterways. So the strategic investment to support water quality. So those are our three buckets. I'm going to go over the clean water piece now and then I'm gonna pass it to Frank and then I'll come back on and talk about the updates. Okay, so this is in section 10, which is clean water funding line 91 and proposed for FY '27 is $200,000 for those VMP investments on our state forest highways. You can think about, let me just actually show you the next one. So what we have done across our road network is very similar to what they did in municipalities when they did road erosion inventories, where you walk the roads, identify, we actually walk roads that are hydrologically connected, so they can actually cause an impact of waterways and then identify if there's a need for improvements to reduce sedimentation, and then we prioritize them by very high, high, moderate, low. And then the types of projects we do could be culverts, it could be bridges, and so then we invest these clean water dollars for those projects. So it's $200,000 in capital dollars, but we also have additional clean water general fund dollars that are going into this as well. So I think the total is about $1,200,000 for FY '27. We estimate we have about 45 to $50,000,000 need on our State Forest Highway System to get it up to the standards that it should be at. So I'm sorry, what was, how far along are you in the total do you think? So we've only been doing this about three or four years, so I think we're probably fifteen years out before we, years before we actually catch up all the way. Okay. And then we need to make sure we're doing the ongoing maintenance as well, just to make sure we're not deteriorating the investments that we're making. Thanks. So that is clean water proposed at 1.7 is 200,000. Then I will pass it to Frank for him to share all the funds that have go fund with parks. Nice.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Next. Again, for the record, I'm Frank Spaulding, Parks Projects Manager at Moss State Parks. I'm gonna take you down the road of how we break the money within the state park system and then I'll talk about our status of 26 and then think about 27. I'll cover all that in my next few minutes to rambling here. So we we take the the the money that goes to the parks infrastructure, we break in basically three buckets. There's smaller scale infrastructure for us, you know, for us a smaller scale for the rest of the city government is miniscule scale, but that that takes care of, like, the sub subsystem components like roofs, like refurbishing a toilet building. And the example that show up on list here is an example of a small scale infrastructure that's an accessible water launch at State Park, it's a gem, gem of a location, this actually provides access for everybody to access that water body now, and that is a great example of a small scale project, it's not huge but it's a separate one. And that generally consumes about a million, little extra million of the budget each year. And that's divided up into the four administrative regions for the park system. Projects are managed locally, they're smaller scale. The next bucket of money, it's not a lot of money, it's $250,000 but I like to talk about it because it speaks to how we manage our money, and we take about $250,000 and we set it aside for about six months. We have hundreds of septic systems in the state park system. We have, like, 112 buildings or whatever, each one them is septic tank, hundreds of systems. They fail. At some point in time, something's gonna happen. So we set a little bit of money aside that if we have a smaller failure, we can quickly repair without digging into another project. And then if it turns out we don't have failures, which has happened a little more and more now because we're doing a better job keeping up on the renovations, We'll take that money, we'll roll it into work for larger systems sources and projects that are going on. So we kind of hold that aside for about six months and usually about six months time we're through the season, we're by December, we're off bids for spring work for for other projects, and we can move that money if we don't use it. And the last cat last category is major capital projects, and that is the bigger ones. That's like rebuilding toilet building, building a structure, and what I wanna do is focus on those a little bit. Hunter? Down. Down, thank you. I see a lot of folks from the Southeastern part of the state. If you get a chance to swim by the Gifford Woods State Park, there's a new facility we just finished. That was actually funded through the big bill a couple of years, but institutions approved the work. We just completed that project this year. That's an example of a large scale project. It's a new facility, we're very proud of it. This is taking care of the people that take care of the parks and take care of the people. So this really represents a large scale project. We have another, when we did the design for this, we hired an architect that did a two for one for us essentially. Well, they designed two facilities, but it's the same facility by and large. We are funded, the Groton project is funded with 25 and 26 money. We are working actively on pulling a trigger to get that one now under contract for construction in the coming summer. So we will be building a second one of these. We pump the brakes a little bit to finish different woods so we could learn from different woods and make the need to change some design for the Groton project. So that's very good bit.

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: Okay. Yes. And that's offices as well as So it's a multi

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: it's a multi purpose flexible maintenance facility for all the parks in the South Southeast Region. I think it's 14 points, right? Yeah. And so all the maintenance staff cluster out of there. Okay. But it's also an operations hub too. So we call it an operations and maintenance support facility, if we wanna give it a longer name. Like all the materials that go out to the parks, like the equipment that comes in for the winter because we're all seasonal, gets stored there in the winter and gets farmed back out, all the equipment goes out of there. This building does have offices attached to it because it the offices were integrated with the old maintenance shop, which was defunct. Groton facility is actually they actually have an office structure. It's more of a campus in Groton. So since if you take if you take the this this building at the small window and to the left, that's where we're building in Groton. It's less of a structure at Groton because they already have an office space. So we only have to rebuild the office space. Gotcha.

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: Yep. Thank you.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Well we're particularly proud of this structure, not only is it made of, it's a wood structure, but we actually have a pellet fire boiler system, this facility is heated with a combination of heat pumps and water pellet boilers, pellet which makes the heating and cooling of this facility entirely faucet free.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: That's great.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: So we're very proud of that, I should have bring that to your attention. Yep, you can separate the hydrogen out, then you can do that.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Thanks.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: That goes beyond Ben's

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: working on that. Yeah.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Do you have

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: you have When you have facilities like that, do you ever put a sign up saying that? Because I think the public would like to know that.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Hollywood never sees a facility, unfortunately. It's in the back, kind like the back of Disney World. They really don't see it. We're very proud of it, we'll tell anybody to listen about it.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Maybe a sign at the

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: bakery Yeah, or The

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: other thing, I'll talk about toilet builders, but we have other things that we are doing in parks that are public facing and we probably could talk about more. But so, yeah, that's toilet buildings. We're using the hybrid heat pumps now. Hot water heaters now. And I'll just jump around. Don't care. The the cool thing about that is that if you think about when we use our toilet buildings, it's in summertime. And those buildings are sitting and baking in the sun and all that attic space gets hot. So the building we the system we put in it, D A R or Maidstone, which I'll show you a picture of later, there's actually ductwork that goes up into the attic. So it's sucking the hot air out of the attic and making those things work even better. Isn't that cool? Because it's at prime time to make hot water out of air source heat tanks. That's great. I love it. And we used to do hot water panels to heat shallow water, but now we're the last time we did solar panels, we actually use PV now, make the electricity to run the heat pumps as opposed to heating the water because it's a lot lot less from That's great. Problematic for drainage and stuff like that. So that's so little things we do. And that's fully to do with our work, except for the water heaters.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Yeah. So if you had something telling people about that

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: That'd be great.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: They would love it.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Yeah. We're yeah. We just we love making us creative things happen. I'm not sure I'm going for time alone.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: It's fine.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: All right, sounds good. The other thing wanna bring to your attention, another large project, because it's not only impacts what's been going on recently, but also is a future looking thing, is three eighty local plants. We have about 19 parks, not about, we have 19 parks that are under the influence of three acre regulation. We we received about $2,000,000 of our money, prior to that we actually received planning and engineering money from the institutions committee through the cabinet corporation to start the design and permitting of them. ARPA came along and we had $2,000,000 with that with which we were able to make four for four parks fully complete and two parks partially complete with work we did, and two of the parks we did were kind of extreme cases, North Yarra State Park and Kingsland Bay State Park. North Yarra we actually decapitalized the park. We took down all the structures, moved all the asphalt and turned it into the day use area because it was the park that we hadn't operated since 2008. And so that's returned it to a wonderful day use area with and we reduced the impervious enough to take it underneath to to meet three acre compliance rule. Great use of the funds, restores the park, actually rehabilitates the park to a great day use area. At Kingsland Bay, we actually rerouted the traffic. We took away the out road. There was a one way road system at Kingsland Bay. The out road literally ran top of the bank over the lake, we removed that, we revegetated that, restored it to natural, and then moved the road inland, and provided storm water treatment for that road, so those are really good spends, corrected some pretty egregious errors of the past and had true true impact on water quality, we're proud of those two projects. We took a one year pause because our facilities engineers did that work, of got pulled into that two acre or to into that spending melee that we had spent like. They they they met our goals. We spent all the money. It was great. But they they put a they put a they put a delay on the three acre implementation now. Mhmm. So we actually took a one year pause. We're gonna be using 27 money. This one is using 27 money. We're gonna kick off again. We have we have, like I said, we have 15 parts that still require some intervention. Next up, little river and and can you read that? Branberry?

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: Sorry, got a

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: thing on the note. That we're gonna have to start using our capital funds because we don't have any more special appropriations for it. We're gonna have to start eating that out of our capital appropriation. And then the planning estimate, we've we've mapped these projects out to 2035. I will not be testifying on them at January.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Don't be so sure. We see a

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: few people in here that say that.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Like, what? But

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: our planning estimate's $5,800,000, and and that is that is a number that's been run up for inflation at this point in time, but we're unsure what that will actually fully cost. But that's the program right there, so that's going to end up impacting our future operations.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: It's good that you have that estimate.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Yeah, it's, hopefully it's close,

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: but it's kinda hard to tell until we

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: get the permitting of these things. And that doesn't, and that's just construction of them, and what we were coming to realize now is the question I mentioned with the road, is that we're creating a whole bunch of storm water systems that we will forever have to maintain and at some point in time have to be capitalized. So we're aware of that burden as well. And I just want to focus like, just a few focus points. These are the restrooms are obviously a significant feature in our state parks. This is the example of in in Maidstone. There's solar panels in the background. They're PVs. They're they're not metering the power to run the air source heat pumps that are at the end of the building or the gable that you're seeing. And on the campground or These are not campgrounds. They're campgrounds, yes. Yep. I think we have a 100 coiled structures, shower structures in this campground in the park system.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: We have a pretty much continuous cycle of trying to keep them improved and up to speed. The small scale infrastructure folks will do more aesthetic or cosmetic improvements on the inside. The large scale money goes to when the structures fail and so we will keep on this process. The 26 money is paying for its funding Grand All State Park, that's going be a replacement because the old structure's defunct. That is matched with that LWCF money, which the federal grant, and then we're going to, because of the federal grant availability, freeing up some capital money, and the budget adjustment approach '27 we're going to expand that to Saint Catherine gets 12,000,000 too. But it's a continuous process for us and we're going to do again a lot of architect design, one structure going to places. Great. Now keep going to the spreadsheet.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Yeah. I think we just wanna mention that there was additional 400,000 for FY '20 Yeah. The 400,000

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: is in the budget adjustment that's coming to you, and I'll cover it. Okay. So this is Right, so the balance of the FY '26, our balance fluctuates almost daily. We actually, every Wednesday, when we're together in the office, print out a spreadsheet of where we are with the spending, and we talk to ourselves, what are we gonna do to get this number down by next week? So that's our focus. I do wanna talk about the flexible funding structure that comes through with the capital budget appropriation, allows us to move projects around so if a project is proceeding quickly, can get it out the door quicker. If a project is stuttering or stumbling on something, we will shuffle that around and bring another project up because we understand that when you allocate these funds to us, you want them deployed, and that's our mission is to get them out the door in two years. Yeah. And so we work very hard at making sure that happens. So that means that when we move projects around, we can respond to incidents and really get that done. We have six current funded projects that are actually matched with federal funding totaling $2,900,000 and that's a land and water conservation grant through the National Park Service. They they can finance up to 50% of the project cost has to be met with non federal money, so that state money has to be available. Like I said, we have currently, in hand, $2,900,000 grants to the fourth projects that are going down the road. Now that looks like an archaeological dig. That's an expensive piece. So I was like, why does that have good show there? Now you remind me why I asked. Yes, so the thing about federal funding is, you know, the the we you know, there's there's like about a four to six month delay when when federal funding because you can't get the project out till get the grant in hand. And the the the way National Park Service wants, they want you to pretty much have the project ready to go where you applied. So we we applied for significant amount of the grand building and actually some water and sewer systems that we had on on the dock to do. We probably would have bid those last spring, but we had to wait for the federal funds grant to be approved. We had to hold off on bidding them. And there's a season to bid water, wastewater projects and it's not in the middle of summer because you're going to get a really high price. So we try to plan our stuff, plan our bidding for the most economical time. But this archeological dig of sandbar was about, I don't know, three years in the waiting process for the lake to go down, but it was a real interesting concept. And that that and we waited a year for the feds to give us an answer on that dig, you know, to give us give us the go ahead on the so that that that is that is an interesting thing, but it does that was the you know, I I actually was running an excavator when they were doing the test pits, and we were on the last hole, and I was like, oh, we're almost out of this. We're almost done. We're almost done. And all of sudden, saw archaeological students running by me. Oh. And I was like, no, they found, they literally dropped their tools and

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: took off running, I'm like, oh, they found something. They were happy.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: And they did, they found an amazing piece of pottery, almost an intact, not an intact pot, but almost an entire piece That was just really cool. And as painful as it might have been, it was really it's interesting to see that going down. So, but that was basically digging digging for a storm water system that was in that park so it takes a little bit of resources to do these things right.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So how much of the state money do you use as match? It's 50%

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: so if we get 2.9 federal funding we have 2.9

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: But federal the money that we provide to you, because it really doesn't have any strings attached.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Because we're looking down the road now possibly up to 3 more million dollars over the next few years, so we're already thinking about the projects that are in the pipeline and just because of the flexibility that the communities provide us, we actually have a queue of projects that goes out five or six

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: years. Okay.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: We have a new partner with the facilities engineering division, which is housed in DC. Have a lot of sewer projects under different design phases going out five or six years, and we know what we're doing. You know, that same old three acre, but we know what's gonna happen. Yes. We never take a project off the list, it gets you bumped down the queue. And so we're talking about now what is it we can match up? What projects do we have to select in order to capitalize on that money? Because if we don't use it, you know, we don't want to send it back. We want to leverage this money. So we're thinking about total funding, we're thinking about large scale part and you don't want to pull these federal grants for small projects, there's just so much work, it's not worth it. So, I mean it's always worth it but it's just a lot more work, let's get that done. So we work, we're always thinking about how to match that up. But, you know, forget, if we have a $3,000,000 coming down, need to find $3,000,000 projects to match up and have the state funding to protect that and make that happen. Well, we don't have to, but it would be helpful if we didn't.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Yeah, yeah, it's just good to hear that what this committee provides is helpful, because you can do all different sorts of things with this.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Not only the amount, but the, and I don't want anything I say here to preempt any discussion about any future by any means. I just want to make sure I'm not doing that. The, but there's two things that allows us to to really to really make this work well. One is the flexibility of of language in terms of allowing us to be within this these side walls of operation and move the project around and match it, that's really important for us, and I've always said consistency is king.

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: If we know the plan for it, we can

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: do really good things and keep that pipeline moving along, but I don't want to pre guess what the future financial systems they say on those papers, so. Thank you. It's good, it's helpful. Yeah. And then so this is, because of way we run our projects, it's a continuous, like it's a conveyor belt of projects, you can see that we use money for like the Grout and Shop is financed out of a variety of funding sources. You know we're constantly moving these balances around to make sure that we're getting them out the door and spending them as efficiently as possible. At the bottom of this table, we can provide this probably more readable format, you'll see that the budget adjustment for '27 includes $400,000, additional funding for the FY '27 appropriation. The bottom of this list is what is slated for spending on that 400,000. They're and now I'll quickly go through them and just explain the kind of weirdness about them. The supplemental cabinet money for Lake Carmine, we have two older corporations that are slated for cabinet construction. We are going to act we we have a construction manager contract that's sitting and purchasing right now ready to go out to bid. We're gonna build as many cabinets we can to do discovery, and if there's finances left over in the pile of money, we're build more of karma. My guess is that we're gonna do really well with discovery, probably not have enough to

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: do a lot of karma.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: And I think that by supplementing those funds of carmine, we get an economy of scale that makes carmine more efficient in terms of spending. And these cabins increase, and these cabins are slated for underused sections of the park. The visitation, I think the occupancy rate for these cabins is 78%, even if not higher, that's an incredible occupancy rate for any kind of overnight night facility.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So are you looking at I know the trend, I mean, did some work for the US Forest Service and their campgrounds, the trend was moving towards providing actual little cabins in the various campgrounds, so is that what we're talking about here, and moving that forward into several of the facilities? Right, we currently,

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: I don't have the count in my head right now, but I think we have at least eight parks that have cabins at them already, at them already.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Sure, it takes away from my thought of camping, but anyway. I know that's the trend, but

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: One of the things we're purposeful about with these cabins is they are not, they're dry cabins. No kitchen, there's no bathroom. You cook outside at a campsite, you use the communal bathroom, you use the central bathroom at the Blue, so it's really just, it's only, it's like an RV, it's an RV, they dump the dragon in the park, essentially. And so it allows that sheltered experience, I think the visitation occupancy is, the occupancy rate really testifies to that use and that desire. And we have parks like Queechee and, we got a lot of places. But and and Stay away from Maidstone. I like that one being as rural as it is. See, we don't have any cabins. We we did do a land ranch plant for Maidstone. Good. It does not have cabins in the barn. Does. A lot

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: of front sites in that barn. But

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: I'm doing something unique with this contract is that we've provided them a profit loss spreadsheet. Because we know how much revenue we take in. We know how much we can estimate how much it costs to maintain them. And and and we we can annualize that cost. And what we're telling the contractors, they can bring these in a price where if they annualize that construction cost and they can make us a profit. We will we will write them a check for one year as a profit and then we will glean the 19 rents you know that's the life of the bond but it keeps going and the whole idea is to incentivize bringing these cabs under a price point that makes the taxpayer back the most money. Are they stick built on-site or are

[Unidentified Committee Member]: they pre fed? Because I have to take the size of them you could pre fed them and actually bring them in and set them on the site.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: So we've done both stick built on-site, we've had contractors panelize them and bring them in the panels and assemble them on-site because that's how the design works and we've had log kits done and we're giving them the, that's the beauty this contract I think is that we're giving them the flexibility as long as they meet our aesthetic standard and our durability standard. If they can bring them in on dimension on aesthetic and durability and whether they prefab them or they stick, it's up to them. Don't care as long as they turn out looking good and good enough to receive that rent. We have other standards about site size and space from the ring and all that stuff. We have other standards that we'll have to meet, but really it comes down to how much is the actual hospital cost and how can they come on set to the point that brings returns and annualized cost that makes these continue to be profitable for the taxpayer. That's how they can help. So it's a fun exercise. But I think we'll need a little more money for Carmine to make it effective. New discovery, that's where the cabins are going go. As part of that cabin project, we're going lay a blank conduit in because we have to redo the utilities in the loop because they're horribly out of code, horribly out of date, and these cabs need electricity for minimal lights and and firearm. And while they're digging the trench, I'm gonna have them lay in a conduit to bring power to this meadow sites we have in New Discovery, a very underused portion of the park and we were contemplating our lead plugging hookups to start thinking about how to make that more, for that and so we put money in the 400,000 extra dollars to actually electrify some sites at the Discovery to continue that program and try electrified RV sites in New Discovery. St. Catharine toil building, I just need more money to make that financially viable, that's $130,000 And I'll skip to the duplexes. We have two housing units at one at Albert, one at Albert Dunes and Grand Island. Sorry. Need glasses on. Those are single family residents that we're gonna convert into into duplexes and create so we basically cover our hogging capacity there. We hire four fifty seasonal employees every year, many of them come from out of state, to basically try them out for a year. And what makes them able to do that is housing and so we've identified these two sites as allowing us to provide that seasonal housing for these staff members which really when you go to a state park you're not meeting a full time employee, you're meeting a seasonal employee. We don't run the system without our seasonal employees. This allows us to attract more people to the park system and allow them to try to monitor if they stay away.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Yeah. That's very cool. So what have you been doing for those folks?

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: You could explain. Well, we,

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: I mean, it's fundamentally it's a recruiting tool, about half of our park managers come from out of state, and many of them really do stay. They get jobs at ski areas or whatever. We do have a housing, some housing, but we're just trying to fix up the housing that we had and then add more capacity. That just allows us to have more people living on-site, which is a big asset because it's really a 20 fourseven operation during the summer.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Right. That's great. So how much housing will you have?

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: I think each park has at least one house and this is when you come and work for us, you housing is included during the park season. Mhmm. And then we have some housing which is winterized, and you pay rent if you wanna stay there during during the winter. Mhmm. But the number of houses I

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: have a spreadsheet that has an information if you'd like that. Yeah. I

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: would, and then it's how many, four fifty people?

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Yeah. Well, we're not housing all those folks.

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: No, no. We're, yeah, we're housing probably about 30% of those people.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Okay, so but the four fifty are people who are coming from other states or people that you're hiring? Yeah, right. Totally.

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: I contend that everybody in Vermont has either worked in a state park or knows somebody who's working in Yeah. State

[Unidentified Committee Member]: because it I'm just out of curiosity, and I was interested in what you just said, that some are winterized and that the folk then rent from you. So I'd be curious as on some of the others whether there's an opportunity to winterize them because it could do two things. A, it could help the housing shortage that we have. It would also provide an income into your agency for the winter as they work in some other venue but are paying rent, so you know you'd have to work the numbers to see whether the winterization would pay for itself or not, but it'd be something I think that would be worth taking a look at.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: That that is that is a math that is a math conversation. Know, the the don't know the answer to that offhand.

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: Being a landlord is not easy. No, that's right. Also, of these, many of these facilities are, the whole park is just but it's not winterized so that the septic, the water source, all that. It would be outside of speeding this one house and speeding the entire park.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: So we put a lot of

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: eye into this and put some vent control there for more winter use in the winter. And we we we do know that if we can find a place that our staff can rent in the winter, they won't have to come back the next year. So like like Frank said, it's a math problem, but in some cases, it's the return on investment just to Right.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Yeah.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: And and I'm gonna throw Nate out on the ledge here and just say Nate Nate came to Vermont to work at Vermont State Parks and stayed at the Little River Farmhouse, which we will talk about in about fifteen seconds. Yeah. But the but but, you know, we stayed here. We helped the family. Yeah. I worked in

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: the ski area. I worked in the state park seasonally. It helped me be you know, just be able to stay longer and then eventually get a full time job.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Because if if if you think about the people trying to come here and work for summer, like, what's what's the barrier and barriers and place to stay? And the more people we can bring here and and decide to raise a family here, the I think the better off we all are plus 30 plus people.

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: Our our seasonal staff, just an incredible mix of backgrounds, ages, where they come from, it's really a phenomenal group. And

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: the last thing on the list is the planning and radiation for removal of multiple structures. We have about 100 structures in the State Park system if you combine, if you just do a foundation count between VGS, V trains, and Fish and Wildlife, we have more structures in three of those combined in terms of foundation counts. It's a lot of envelopes to take care of, not all them are in great shape. So we've identified the current count of 23, structures around the state park system that don't meet our program needs, either and cannot be reprogrammed in situ, or are so bad off that they need to be either taken down or replaced or replicated. The two of them are in toilet buildings such as, well, St. Gaffam and Grand Isle are both projects where the toilet builders will be torn down because they've structurally failed. They are beyond end of life for the structure. Okay. Like the example, the the Little River Farmhouse is a is a old structure that's basically a sealed family home that was kinda used dorm style. And what it needs to be what needs to it's got water, it's got water and sewer for more people than that. What needs to happen is it needs to be converted into three apartments, but the structure has failed and it's important to do so, we would have to tear down and replicate that. So that's an example of of of starting and starting the reinvestment to try to bring that back online as as housing. But that that takes care of where we're at with 26 money, where we're going with 27 money. I think the next slide's yours. Yeah.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Let's just more questions. Do have more questions? No?

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: No. Is great.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Yeah. Just listening to Brian talk and reminding you that this brilliance and how fortunate we are at NPR to have someone who's really overlooking our capabilities and really planning out and really being smart about how to go forward.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: I'm gonna talk to you over here for another fifteen years.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: I know. Know. Know. Still the three. Yeah. I mean, it's complex from the housing to, like Yeah. Toilet buildings to clean tos. And how many toilet paper if not. Wait. You don't you don't deal with our commodity.

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation)]: You should deal with toilet paper we buy. So I'm gonna just go over sort of the other two funding sources and our plans for FY '26 and FY '27. So our play funds, get we have 700,000 in FY '26 and 700,000 in FY '27. This is FY '26. We had 20 active projects. We actually have what we call project pipeline. We have our field staff identify projects and we run them through a set of criteria, like is it a hazard, does it increase access, environmental stewardship. So they run through the criteria and then that's how we match funding sources up. I mean, we actually have a $13,000,000 list of projects really that just came through this past year, but we prioritize based on the criteria. 20 projects, five of them are complete, three of them are in historic preservation review, and 12 active. And you can kinda see the types of projects. We have everything from master planning at Hamilton Falls, road assessments, bridges, trail projects, parking. So, that's the type of projects that are outside state parks. For FY27, we just ran our pipeline assessment and we had 17 planned projects. They will get finalized through what we call an annual stewardship plan. So once they get assigned funding, they run through a series of experts, water expert, forestry expert, recreation specialists, wildlife biologists, ecologists to make the final check off. But similar types of projects, boardwalks, trails, road access, parking lots. So that's sort of plan for play projects. I hope you all get out there and play. Yeah. Plan. And then for clean water funding, like I said, we have $200,000 in FY '26 and then proposed for FY '27. These are road projects and they're prioritized, but this $200,000 also coupled with some federal dollars and also general fund clean water dollars. And these are the type of projects that we're doing. You'll see at the bottom, we have a bundled roads contract. And so we we are learning from parks on the forestry side because they've been they know how to use move funds quickly through the process. We now doing, like, what we call a bundled roads contract where we put out to bid all the road segments that need work, and then we we have a larger contract for project management implementation. So in FY '26, we've got 7.7 miles of road, but in FY '27, we have 25 miles of those high priority roads being done. So we've really learning how to efficiently move the funds and not let it all fall. Our staff have so much to do. So that's been fantastic to have that amount of money to work with, but a lot a large amount is gonna go out in f y twenty seven.

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: It's true. So

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation)]: that I think that's the last slide. That's kinda just giving you a preview of sort of how we're planning on spending it and everything sort of already attached to a project for FY '26 and FY '27.

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: It's great.

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation)]: We'd love to take you out. Do have a wonderful Yeah, I know. I hope and I'd love to get out and speak for myself. Yeah. Happy to answer any questions. We're always so grateful for your support. It means a lot to be able to invest on public lands and it brings back a lot.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: How did you guys do last summer as far as people coming? Know we're setting some records.

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation)]: Yeah, we were setting some records. We were a little less last year, just under a million visitors. We saw a decline for two reasons. One was Canadian visitation was down. They tend to be long longer campers than, Vermont or than others from others at it. Like, regionally, they would tend to stay a little longer. That was down about 60%. And then drought had a real impact later in the summer in those areas that are water based, like Sandbar, which is one of our most popular parks, has all less attendance.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: There's lot of Sandbar.

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation)]: Yeah. Lot of Sandbar. Absolutely. So our our visitation numbers are driven mostly by day use, and then our camping numbers were down as well. So we're hopeful that we'd have a really good our neighbors come back to visit us, and that we'd have a really good season. But I

[Nate McKeen (Director, Vermont State Parks)]: will

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation)]: say, service wise, I think the State Parks team has done a fantastic job. Our comments coming in have been fantastic. Operations is really great and the investments actually bring in people. So when we have a new toilet building and new entrance at Standbar, not this past year, but we do see a really uptake in people visitation. Yeah. And you take really good care of them. Yeah. That's the then those maintenance shops really matter, but but people care for the parks, have space to, like, really do that kind of work. It's fantastic and that'll mean a lot. Right.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Well, you so much. I really appreciate it. Does anybody have any questions? No. We'll see you when we get the bill. Thank you guys. Happy to come back and have questions anytime.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Thank you.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Yep. Yeah. Did you have any questions?

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Do do you want the spreadsheet of houses?

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: I would like that. Okay. Yeah. Because housing is obviously a priority. So that'd be great. Alright. So we can go offline, but keep the I guess the Zoom is