Meetings
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[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: All right, welcome. This is a committee of conference of the two institutions, committees of the House and of the Senate, And it's 03/10/2026. And we are here to discuss age 50. The Senate has some changes to it and we received it back from the House with additional changes. And we're here to discuss those changes together. And I just want to say to the staff who is here, I'll just, give you an opportunity if you want to say something, but if you do have something to say just raise your hand if you don't mind. Okay? Alright, let's introduce ourselves. Wendy Harrison, I represent the Windham District.
[Representative John Benson]: John Benson, the Orange District, and Rocklinic City District.
[Representative James Gregoire]: James Grandmark, Franklin Six. How are you folks, Connor Tennessee, here in
[Representative John Benson]: my throat. And Sean Sweeney, Shelburne, and St. George.
[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: All lovely places. We are all of our students that live in Vermont.
[Representative John Benson]: Yes, we are.
[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So let us start with the house explaining the changes that you made, please.
[Representative James Gregoire]: All right, we'll do the best we can. So our first change, we believe, is on line 13 of the new bill. You guys, the Senate had state owned or state leased buildings and land. We took out for state leased. The reason we did that, twofold. One, we weren't really sure what you meant by state leased. And if it means what we think it means, which is that we lease it, we don't have any control over turning it into a house or a property. Right? So if we don't own it, we can't convert it. Because we're just leasing the space. The second thing we did was change biannually to annually. And that was in conjunction with conversations with the administration and what is current practice. So then we moved down to line like nineteen and twenty. We changed one requested by the commissioner back to annually for the same reason, just to make it in practice with what the administration already does, whether it's VGS or now with the Department of Housing and Community Development. So then on the opposite page, and on page number two, we looked at your language which is on line five through seven, but on your bill. I don't know because I don't line numbers in your bill, but we changed it from commissioner whether any building is vacant or whether any land is necessary for the statutory purpose of the agency. We took out for the statutory purpose and made it for just unnecessary for state purposes. And the reason we did that is talking with Legis Council, if I remember correctly, that not all state agencies have a clearly delineated statutory purpose that might fit this. So we made it more vague intentionally to better help the agencies comply. So then we have the effective dates, which were pretty, they're the same, of each new biennium, which you guys had, but that was all safe. And then we added section two, which is the reason we added section two, which is it's language that is mirrors basically the governor's executive order, what they plan on doing right now. And we had discussed this with the commissioner Fair and he felt that they were amenable to that and that it worked for them. So we try to make everything as mirrors mostly to what the administration has done and is doing and plans to do, but making it rather than a one year executive order, making it a five year thing so that we can have some tracking mechanism, if you will, for these properties and then we can relook at it at a different future date. Didn't want it to go into opportunity and just have it be another report disappear. We felt if we looked at it for like a five year period until 2030, it would give us an idea of what's out there. That's basically why we did it and of course the reason we asked for our conference committees, we felt that it would be a lot easier for three on three to talk rather than having the whole House versus the whole Senate to be done on bills.
[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: I think you're right.
[Representative James Gregoire]: That third story, we're second part of it.
[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Okay, good, good. We're not far off, which is good. So, I'll just go down the list. So, the state owned buildings and land, I think I had suggested that the least be in there just so that we could know what resources the state required to do the operations of the state. That was the intent of that. Looking at the buildings as an expense and leasing is just a different type of expense. So that was why that was in there.
[Representative James Gregoire]: Can I ask you a question?
[Unidentified participant (likely staff or member)]: Yeah, sure. Yeah, sorry, Senator. So was the intent, we were under this, that the inventory of sort of office space that the state would be leasing with a private entity? Or was it more state owned offices that were being leased The to somebody first one.
[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Because right, If we lease it, then it's a state owned building. So, right, right. Vermont Life, there's a couple of buildings in Berry because I just have concerns about how we use our space. I wanna make sure we're using our space well before we lease because that can be more So
[Representative James Gregoire]: like a comparison of when we were releasing all this space but we're trying to get rid of the space we own, would it make more sense to move them into something
[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Exactly. Right. So that was the point there. Next one, we did, we also talked about the statutory purpose of the agency and talked about it quite a bit with Wanda. I were fine with leaving that the way that you changed it. Because it's, I mean, the intent is still very clear. And then on the inventory, which talks about the section two. Senator Benson has some suggestions about other items that we might want to include, not necessarily in this document, but that we want to at least bring to your attention because we think they're important.
[Representative John Benson]: So just like Zach Brown, I retired civil engineer, I spent fifty years doing projects throughout New England and Vermont, and as I looked at this bill and I said, What is our objective? And if our objective really is to identify lands or buildings that could be converted into housing and done fairly quickly, this bill leaves a lot of pieces out that we would need to know. And so as we talked, it's not something that we can necessarily change in this bill, but looking forward, you know, if we look at a companion bill in the next session or that may charge to say, what do we really need to know, and should we be trying to focus on maybe a half a dozen pieces of property that could be brought forward to both bodies that vote on to say, yeah, this has got the right zoning, it's got water there, it's got, proper lands, it's not all wetland and so forth, we need A and R to weigh in a little bit, and so that there's a real desktop analysis done of the properties, so that we could then bring forward and say to both of our respective bodies, here's five properties that we believe and they're not necessarily in a place that doesn't need any housing. So there'd be a companion bill, so to speak, that really started to dive into the detail, to get properties out there and that a developer would really be interested in purchasing from the state and converting to housing. So that was just something I wanted to bring out as as maybe a next step because this kind of creates a list but
[Representative James Gregoire]: who knows whether any of these properties really are conducive to. We had that exact same conversations with literally somebody saying, you know, can we get to I don't know
[Representative John Benson]: if it's you or not,
[Representative James Gregoire]: when talking about getting the top 10 or something properties and then doing a deeper dive into them. So the intent of this bill was to get a list deep and start from and then they can go to what you're talking about. So it's interesting to say, yeah. It's great. Yeah. Absolutely. It's great.
[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Alright. Well, that's good. So what do you think about the lease language that that's the only topic? Yeah.
[Representative John Benson]: I don't really give it I I like the intention.
[Representative James Gregoire]: Yeah. It makes sense when So we're brought from that
[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So maybe it needs to be described better.
[Representative James Gregoire]: No. We we know what it means. We just we we maybe we should've just asked
[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: you. I don't think we're allowed to do that. Okay, so then we could vote. Can you help me work on the language of this? Because I believe it would be that we vote with one edition of
[Legislative Counsel (unidentified)]: Yeah, mean, could just make the addition and then you'd have something to vote on.
[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Oh, so we have to have it on there to those.
[Legislative Counsel (unidentified)]: Probably helpful. Alright. Also, John Gray, let's have a cast.
[Representative James Gregoire]: My question to you is can you do it now or do we have to have meeting to come back and do this?
[Legislative Counsel (unidentified)]: I can probably do it now if you let me
[Representative James Gregoire]: run from the room briefly and
[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: for us, it's a mean, we'll be here tomorrow too. Mean, we hate to make everybody I do lots of running.
[Legislative Counsel (unidentified)]: Just running this job.
[Senator Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Yeah. If you don't mind, that would be great. So then we are adjourned.