Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: This is Bennington and it is Thursday, April 2. Good morning. We are starting this morning. Vermont Housing Conservation Board, getting an update from them. Welcome, so glad to have you.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: We're delighted to be here. For the record, Sewing, Executive Director of the Board. I'm Trey Martin for the record, Director

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: of Conservation and Removal Community Development.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: And also with us is our policy director, Colin Major. We'll do the testimony, the two of us are going do the testimony today, but welcome to questions. Our goal is to give you an update on our work, to talk about our budget for the coming year, to hear your thoughts about how the program might be able to be improved, questions that you have. So those are our goals. We'll touch briefly on Act 59, but if you want to dive deeply, we should do that at another time or we spent close to an hour reporting on that and the other body, but we'll touch at least briefly. I'm going to begin the presentation. You guys like us stand at the crossroads of land use, where should we build or should we develop? Where should we protect open space, natural areas, natural communities, historic sites. And I'm gonna give a presentation in my knee because this development really speaks to our mutual, our dual goals, which are called for in our statute to pay attention to both sides of the equation. And what you see here is the development of about 24 units of affordable housing taking place in a designated village center. An acre is being left permanently to the community. This is right across from the food co op and it's a place where the farmers market meets in the South. So all of our goals are being achieved in one project. That's not a normal course of events, but in our strategic plan this year, we've decided we wanna lean into that whenever we can. This is also a project that took three years to permit, Despite the fact that the community said we want to have this as a village center. And that was a democratic decision that went to the regional planning commission and got their blessing. And when then to a state board and got their blessing and a single person basically made up to take two trips to the Supreme Court. Act two fifty was not a problem here except that the second appeal was that Act two fifty had wrongly ruled they had no jurisdiction. And that took another nine months for the Supreme Court to resolve. So as you think about the overlay of what I really think of as local control, the community deciding they wanted more intense development in their village, and the permitting process. That's an area that I think peers work and should ask those in general, the appeals process. But we will open this project this spring.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: Do you have a question? So why wasn't active the the initial guess?

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: It didn't have jurisdiction and that's what the natural resources board said is we have no jurisdiction here and the accountant challenged that, that they had no jurisdiction. That wasn't just like absolutely clear to everybody. And so that issue made a trip to the Supreme Court and made a force in that capital resources where it was right. This slide speaks to our mission and when you look at our statute, you'll actually find it doesn't just say build or preserve housing with conserved land. It says to do it for the purposes of economic vitality and quality of life. And this is another recent project Buddy Booths in Morristown, which has a first. The natural resource features of this project include protections of the Loyola River, about 150 acres of natural resource protection. The project was brought to us by the SOA Anthros. But there were also eight vacation homes, vacation rental buildings that went to the property. And they could have said, let's just offload this to somebody who wants to make money that way. And instead, because of our dual mission, they and we got in touch with Dash Street Housing, which has now taken on merger with the Wild Housing Partnership. And we're actually, for the very first time that I can think of, converting rental housing vacation homes for visitors into year round homeownership opportunities. First two buyers include a mental health professional and a teacher at People's Academy, both are single parents with two kids. So I think a great example of the value of the Bloom mission.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz (Member)]: How do they get possession of that? That they would eat the kitchen. It

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: was part of the whole conservation. In order to buy the land to be conserved, it came with the eight homes on it. So that's being subdivided off and downstream will stay in possession of one parcel. There's a possession of those eight homes and the land around it and repurposing them as year round permanent residences rather than vacation rents. This is our budget for the year. The capital bill is not resolved with the other body, but this is the governor recommended and the house is supporting that. And we hope you'll communicate to your colleagues on the other side of the hall that this is a good idea. The capital bill funding is all for clean water related conservation and is recommended by the water. A few words about the pictures you see here. And again, a piece of our dual mission. We have sponsored the thirty years of AmeriCorps program. The AmeriCorps volunteers do environmental education. They work at shelters, at facilities for the homeless. They work at home ownership centers. They're a leadership development program. One of the ways that that leadership got expressed is that a number of alumni decided there ought to be a statewide mentoring program for kids who were living in affordable housing all over the state. They created a program called the Dream Program. After doing that for two years, about fifteen years ago, they said these kids needed an outdoor summer camp experience. We helped them buy some land up in Fletcher to establish that summer camp. Last summer, we helped them buy an island in that valley of water. So kids who otherwise don't have access to those kinds of experiences might not have had access to the mentoring programs or getting. So we just opened an apartment building in West Rutland. The town manager spoke at the opening and this is a site not across the road from the food market. There are a number of other distressed sites in that neighborhood. So when we think about our houses and think about the catalytic impact and she felt strongly that getting this site cleaned up because it was environmental contamination was gonna lead to three or four other sites right in that neighborhood being able to be redeveloped in a way that would not have been possible with what was there before. It's also about a fifteen, ten minute walk to something called the West Rutland Marsh. And if you're into birds, people from all over the country go to the West Rutland Marsh to see birds. And it's a property you can serve probably about twenty years still. So

[Sen. Seth Bongartz (Member)]: the recommended,

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: money from Gentleman for?

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: No, all from the transfer tax this year. Last year we over the course of the pandemic, have appropriated lots of both part of it and general fund one time funding. Last year was the worst. We got about $7,800,000 in general fund beyond transfer tax recommendation. This year, the governor has not made that recommendation and we understand that that's a much more scarce opportunity. Okay. We'll to normal. We're back to normal. Yeah. Yes. I'm gonna turn this over to Trey in a minute, but I just wanted to run down for you some of the ways that conservation serves rural communities and one urban community, one more urban community. Senator Beck, I was not able to join you when the Danville Train Station was reopened. It's nice of that. But the building was being used as a recycling center for many years. It was not in the best condition. And it sits right on the Memorial Rail Trail and provides an entry point into Danville. And about three years ago, former representative, Katie Toll called me up and said, we really, we need to raise a lot of money for this. And it needs conservation part of our mission that speaks to supporting historic sites. And we have a process of historic gathering places, places the whole community would be. So we helped them with a couple grants. I think they said we were the first dollars in and then when they, as costs went up, we were the last dollars in to get the building refurbished. And if you're cycling on that trail, it's either an entryway into Danville or a great place to stop and have a premium on update and the community's quite excited about it. The most important learning project over the last year for me was when Vermont Adaptive came to us. They provide services and programs both in the Wagefield and at Killington for people who had mobility impairments, summer and winter. Their services for veterans are free wherever they come from and they needed a permanent home. With the help of the Mont Blanc Trust, have a site in Rochester. This will bring economic activity to that little village. When they build out their campus, they'll have housing for 18 interns there. So they're gonna be bringing people to Rochester both for their services and as employees in a way that's gonna be really positive. And then I think in terms of an outcome for people with mobility impairments, it's just a wonderful thing that they'll have a permanent conclusion. The Westso broke in Rattleboro, former representative and Senator David Dean called the Westso and Dinky rule book. But when Irene hit, it roared and caused huge amounts of damage. This is a site that was 12 acres that was owned by Sarsophila lumber. And what's happened here is it's been transferred to the VA of the Vermont Rivers Conservancy and us and ANR to the town of Brattleboro, a burn was removed, lots of pill taken out, and it's just gonna create much more flood resilience there. And another project like this in West Brattleboro, where about 50 units of housing have been removed, we rebuilt another location on the high school. We're gonna this year restore 30 units that are out of the floodway. We're also in a couple of weeks gonna have a big celebration at Tri Park where we move people again, out of the floodway to higher ground. But this is part of, I think our resilience work in a way that we're supporting and reducing flood risk in Brattleboro's Panacea. Thing here, again, going to the rural economy, visa approval is somebody farmed on this plan in panel for a decade. And then the Vermont Land Trust through their farmland access program. And with our support and purchase development rights, she's able to get on a permanent plan in Shaftsbury. She's also somebody who's been enrolled in our farm forest viability program, which Trey will talk about in a couple of minutes, but I think has been knocking it out of the park in a decade since she was able to get a permanent home for her operation. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Trey to talk more about conservation. I'll come back and talk more about housing as we move through the presentation.

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: Oh yeah, we're definitely, this works better if

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: you don't have to

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: try to remember questions. The last thing I know, Senator Bongartz, don't if you know John Graft down at Brevard Burton, the history teacher there. He was the first person who introduced me to adaptive sports And he was the adaptive ski coach that he did with Jess. And then he would take all the free tickets he got and he'd give it to all the other teachers for their kids. So it was like this amazing proliferation of people having access to the outside, which when we did this project, was, you know, couldn't be back a long time. Anyways, I am so excited to I mean, you can see here, there's just a I'm afraid of things. Teacher.

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: Oh. Yes. I need to speak. Sorry.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: It's had a lot of fun meetings in Vermont. A lot of fun to see fun.

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: After I was at law school, moved up here and I've been doing this kind of land protection and land use and land access work with Gus and others. One of the most exciting things is the impacts we have in individual wellness. But just before I talk about the floating classroom, just looking at the range of conservation programs we have, this is how we have the breadth of impact that we have and the way that we create collaboration in communities. It's by having so many different doors to think about community development through land protection and conservation. So whether it's protecting those natural communities and connected forests, protecting on the farms and the food systems that make them work in Vermont, protecting the viability of those enterprises on farms and forests, production of both products from the land into products that we all consume every day. Love our Vermont food, but we also consume like three pounds of wood per day, per person. And so, you know, all those industries that bring those plants to us from here in Vermont are just super important. Let's say more about water quality in a minute, a few years ago with respect to classroom, but a few years ago when Act 76 passed, VACV was asked to participate as a clean water service provider up in Newport. Mostly regional planning commissions did that work along the Champlain Basin, but the planning commission there asked us if we could help out. Basically stepped in even though we're centered in Montpelier, we were able to work with the partners up there and develop a really effective program to save money to do extra phosphorus abatement work. And then because we're so efficient, we do lots of other things with that money as well. So we're hitting our targets and then thinking about all these co benefits. But just to go down the list, thinking about rural economic development is where we sort of start and end, but you all formalized that a few years ago by rating the Ready program, which is up till now has worked with towns smaller than 5,000 on an inordinately large impact and bringing out extra funding into their projects. But now if we talked about that, we're committed for all rural communities. Then by the historic preservation, which is, as Gus said, where we see intersectional people, built infrastructure, then often getting outside or getting connected to nature. By the teasing it for long enough, floating classroom project was one that we did not with the crisp dollars, which are pollution abatement, but because we realized in that community that we couldn't do the Act 76 work without building the capacity of the workers. We went to the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission through a congressionally directed spending earmark, and we were able to use that earmark to provide mostly operating funds to the watershed groups and people up there, including the folks at the Metro Bay Dog Science Center, who have now got the next generation of scientists out on the lake, learning how to take water quality samples, use SACI discs, measure the turbidity, it's all the things that we want them to throw up in the energy. Amazing impacts there in the Northeast. Staying with how water gathers us, as we think about our natural area projects, we often think about public recreation through those natural area protections. This is the former scouts camp up in Benson and Borewell that when the scouts decided they were gonna sell, they asked the state FBR if they wanted to take it on as a state park or as another key up for fish and wildlife, something like that. The state wasn't able to take the project. There was so much preferred maintenance around the dam and then built infrastructure that it didn't work for the state to take it on. That turned out to be the best thing ever because Outbreak Vermont and Vermont Land Trust and the communities came together and formed a partnership to keep this land open. The forest is still open for hunting and walking, There's trails through there. The waterfront access is still open for the community, but there's also now a camp for LGBTQ youth. One of only a few dozen in the whole country where kids can go from vulnerable communities and be safe in a summer camp experience. So combining that with this like continued public access with protection of great water and forest resources, it's like, these are like us on our best day. And it really fun to be able to do this work. So farmland conservation is as big or bigger a part of the financial work that we do every year is taking state dollars and using them to draw down natural resource conservation service dollars from The US Department Of Agriculture. We're able to bring in money in a one to one ratio with this program to protect our best farm and farm farms and farm acres across Vermont. We've done hundreds of farms with VLT and other partners over the years, protecting those communities, protecting that way of life, that impact on our local economy. You can see the way that just in fiscal year twenty five, the very old leverage almost 5,000,000 federal dollars to bring them into Vermont. And that those funds go to unlike other conservation funds, they end up going through our partners to families, to private owners of land to help them with their enterprise and with the viability of what they do. Sometimes when it's going from one generation to the next in a family, or if it's going from one operator with no kids to a new operator, and this is what happened down in West Pollok. This berry farm was operated by somebody who was ceasing operation, had no heirs, it was up for sale. One of the proposals coming in was to do a set of storage units, which I don't know if I knew after my dad passed storage unit, I really needed some storage units. So it's not important, but this was an amazing farm out of the Pollock community where there's over 25 conserved farms along the Meadoway River, three quarters of them have worked with me HCV, thousands of acres protected over the last thirty years. So getting us protected was a goal. And then a law enforcement officers stepped forward who wanted to, in his spare time, take this on and do a respite farm or a sanctuary. And so we were able to help him get on to feed the dead from the Missouri Jew people. And now he has, I have just have to look at this, nine acres, 30 acres of primate soil and on that grown 500 to 600 pounds of berries every summer, which is then helping to subsidize the animal sanctuary. So what an amazingly fun story to have this. And one of the reasons why we're doing Act 59 is that there's a lot of development pressure in Vermont. As we were talking about the long term planning for conservation in Vermont last summer, we asked American Farmland Trust to help us tell the story about what's happening around New England and especially in Vermont with the conversion of farmland, is often the flat, cleared, well drained lands that are easy to put houses on and easy to develop. And sometimes that's what makes sense for the community. Sometimes the agricultural resources are strong, fight to protect it. But what we worry about is the conversion towards low density residential housing, where we're not we're not meeting our housing goal needs, we're building really expensive homes, we're doing them on 10 acres of peace and taking agriculture and productivity out of communities.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: You. I have two general questions that have just been brewing in my head over this session. So Go ahead, I don't know, they're indirectly related, but one is when we were talking about Act 181 and the mapping and everything, I talked to a lot of my towns and a couple, several of them, more than I would have expected, in the area that is potentially 1B, the sort of area where they're gonna wanna build housing, there's protected, conserved land, and so it's sort of off limits. And so a couple of the towns I talked to were asking me like, is there anything we can do? Is there like a way to swap land or do And these are in the downtown areas of small towns that should, you know, where they would like to build houses. So that's one question I might, I just want to pick your brain about that. Maybe that's a longer conversation. It's

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: a bit of a longer conversation, but generally consternation in perpetuity means forever.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Yeah. That's what I was

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: like, yeah.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: I don't know which But sometimes side there's flexibility don't of know the in any the details

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: of the land.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Really This came up a couple times in my towns. What

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: I can tell you and have a longer conversation at a different point is that whenever we are asked to serve a farm, we look at the local plan and the town plan, and we ask the community whether or not the conservation is consistent with it or not. So I can think of at least one instance in one of your communities, I can't remember which one now, where they said, and I remember the name is the Connor Farms. So you may know where it is, but that was might have been the Connor Farms twenty years ago, it's a different name today. And I said, we like the idea of serving this farm. Would you please leave us 10 acres out because it's a choice to the village. Yeah. And that's a place for future growth. And we said, well, when that's happened, we've had to go to Newport Town. And on one occasion, we've been respectful of community's wishes. So that's how we try to operate. I think the one D mapping is probably gonna provoke some new questions and new challenges. Then undergoing constipation easement is a very difficult Right.

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: Sometimes sometimes there's flexibility built into the ease.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Yeah, don't know the details of the, but I

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: can talk to you more. Yeah, I mean, other option is condemnation, which a community has the rights to if there's significant public meeting. Yeah. And I know we hate the idea of condemnation in Vermont. Yeah. But that is an option.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Okay. Well, maybe I can talk to you offline about these specific instances. I have no idea if it was conserved by the HCV or any, I don't know those details, but just in general, that was, came off a bunch of times. And then the second, it related to farmland loss and add 59, is farmland, I've gotten various people asking me about this, about how farmland is counted in Ag 59 and wondered if you could help explain that.

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: Do you want me to? Go ahead. Yeah. When we did the first inventory, so the one thing that's confusing about I-fifty 9, the thing to keep in mind about is that it's not a destination goal, it's sort of like a every other year let's say, let's repeat this inventory and see our progress. So our initial inventory, what we did is we tracked the reserve areas, biodiversity conservation areas, and then the question came up of how to do natural resource management area. And what we did is we did count conserved farmland. Then we counted conserved forest land that was working this collectively. Applied a map layer to that to distinguish between areas that had forest land and natural cover, and then areas that were in agricultural homes or open. We didn't distinguish between areas that had annual crops in the meadows, so that's

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: how we broke it out, but

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: we take accounts all of that in the initial inventory by breaking out those areas that have annual crops, grazing, or hay going on as opposed to the parts of farms, almost 50% of farms that's forested, wetland, etcetera, which would have automatically, sort of that is natural resource management, forest land, and then the farmland we just counted, but we counted it sort of distinctly and separate.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Okay, but it was four It's about 2.7%

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: of the landscape is conserved agricultural and of the land.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Okay. So that's what we reported back.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: And it was farmland that had specifically had a conservation easement on it? Yes. So not necessarily farmland that was just in current use.

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: We did not, in this inventory, we did not count the lands that were just in current use. There's a lot of it. Yeah. Maybe 25 to 30% more of the state is in current use but not conserved. But that didn't, what we were asked to do was to determine the perpetually conserving land. Got

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: it, okay.

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: In Act 59, the 2050 goal, asked for a plan of permanent and non permanent, and that's sort of questions about how to include both those kinds of lands, but also other incentive lands. Like there are plenty of buffer programs or other things out there that are for a short period of time that also might be counted towards that 2050 goal.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Okay, and that those might be counted in future? We're on the cusp of

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: answering all the questions sort of at once, this is one we're really debating is like, know, current use is super important. It's the gateway for a lot of people into conservation or part of the, what we talk about is the conservation ladder. It protects millions of acres in the state. It's part of the stewardship ethos that's been really effective. But the act, the city law is for perpetual or long term enforceable. And it's hard to make, you definitely, I don't think you can make the argument that current use that can go in or out on a particular parcel is perpetuity, right?

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: I think And whether it's long term,

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: it's only, the land exchange tax is pretty minimal as a check against development, but it's been very effective as a program to keep all the slammed in. Parcels were in and out all the time. So how do you count that when linguistically it really doesn't line up with the access? But as a program, it's been extremely successful in protecting over 30% of

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: the landscape. So as we wrestle with this issue, there will certainly in our report be back to you the shout out of support for the current use supervise by its vital role. There's a farmer who eventually conserved and he would describe current use as the bridge that got into conservation. It is for many landowners, it is durable and it's what they want to do and they're not interested in conservation easements or they're not interested until events in their life change. And that's fine. And that's why it's so important that we maintain permits. As somebody who is long in the tooth and has been through in this building at least two, if not three recessions, there's been at least one occasion I can remember where the legislature either changed or underfunded current use and waived penalties and people were able to withdraw. So as you, and I think ultimately we're going to lay it back on you of how much you want to count its durability because it's not just what is the intent of a landowner at a given moment, It's also what is the intent of public policy to support current use as an ongoing investment that you make. But absolutely, we think it's a vital tool that supports the conservation work that Act 59 can support.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Okay, I mean, wasn't in this committee when we did act 59, so I didn't hear all this stuff, but I just get a lot of questions about how farmland is counted. That like that is

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: I would also say the act's language is very broad in its purposes. That includes farmland and food production. There are many people, including chairing the other body of the field, actively specifically focused on biodiversity and specifically what are the most special areas for biodiversity we ought to protect. That's about 3.5%. I think most people would really want to grow to 10%. To get to the goals of Act 59, whether it's around food production or around biodiversity, we have a ways to go. And we to continue to do all those things. We want to do it in a way that is in conjunction with what local communities need.

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: And not to over stress it, but there's been a lot of, I mean, we hear about current use and we hear about Act 181 almost more than we thought Act 59 when we go out to talk about Act 59. So this is really on people's minds and it should be. And we're glad to hear these questions. It's nice to know, I mean, as we work towards the kinds of programming that we'd like to see extended out of the communities and kind of like taking the work at

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: the statewide level to help

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: local communities think about conservation, land protection, resilience, farmland, etcetera, knowing that at any one time so many people are in gold and current use, value and current use, etcetera, it helps us take a common sense approach to this, which is that a lot of Vermont is protected through these other mechanisms. So we really should focus perpetual conservation where it makes the most important difference because it's expensive to conserve and it's expensive to steward the conserve acres, but it's really important because then that is really, that's something that you can invest in forever. If you want to do farming, you want to invest in that knowing that it's always going be a farm as an external funder helps to draw that in. That's what brings USDA in, is knowing that they're helping us to perpetually protect that. But that's also true for trail development and outdoor recreation. Doing that on conservative maintenance is a big draw to invest in those things knowing that the landowner's not going to say no more trail next year. And same with resilience, if you want to do a culvert and reestablish fish passage and road resilience. Doing that where the land is conserved on either side helps you to have a much bigger impact that lasts as opposed to having management activities that are out

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: of your control. So that's what we hope that people will see as

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: the distinction between these two things. Current use

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: is great because it's not permanent. Yeah, mean, I'm mostly asking because I want to understand this and things are like very raw out there, right? And all of these things are all being merged together in people's minds in a way that isn't always,

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: I

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: don't know, it's hard.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: I think the other thing that I would just urge you as you talk with your constituents in a way that we don't have the opportunity to is, from our perspective, conservation work that we have done historically and that we'll continue to do is about willing sellers and willing buyers. There's nothing about Act 59 that could cause anybody to do anything that it's not a regulatory program. It's a plan for how we get more of protecting the parts of Vermont that we all think are of most importance to protect, whether it's for recreation, biodiversity, whatever the goal might be. So was your constituents who called us about one of the scouts with the camp up.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Yeah, know, I know. I love the project.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: I mean, simply just find a way to protect us now that the state is turned down first. Yeah.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz (Member)]: And I think that's you point about that. Nobody's being forced to do anything. Mhmm. It's it's a goal, and then finding the money does what happened to make it happen. It's also important to keep the planet. Losing force and to keep the So and I also agree about way that I I say we've done two really brilliant things in the last fifty years in Vermont, one that's current use, the other's best in conservation. And that's huge positive impact on my life. And it was a lot. Agreed. I

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: think you get it. There's pressures on lands and we've lost a couple 100,000 acres of forest land over the last twenty years

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: as well, on top of

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: what we're losing and farming. So, but I'm gonna keep going because we've got a little bit more to tell you about this morning. First of all, this is just illustrating kind of Farm and Forest viability program there. Can see that it's, again, we're touching dozens scores of businesses every year. So successions, financial management, land search and access, profitability and quality of life. These are the businesses that are working often on the conservative lanes to make those, to create the value of the communities that keeps those, it maintains the community support for conservation and for the protection of land that's just so important. So it's, we do a really great job of working with

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: folks who are in the

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: farm budgets and the annual nature of farm economics. We have a really good program, but we're doing more and more to think about how to create that same kind of economic support for silk culture and forestry and logging. So the best way to custom sawing and putting is a race story. He's a sort of niche processor, he takes black load risks, he turns it into the kinds of timbers and building materials that support trail development and access into the woods. So really interesting practices in terms of how we harvest, how we processes, and it goes right back into getting people up into the woods. So that's been a really fun project for us and I don't know the last resort farm in months and gusts.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Well, I'll just say a few words. Don't know if any of you maybe Senator Beck served when Sam Berg was in Lynch Council. Sam Burr? Sam Burr. He was an LA council pre med, he might've retired from there before you started.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: I know Sam. He was- chatted with him and tell me me in Hampton.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: He and his wife conserved their farm in the early nineties with our support. They divided off a chunk of land that they think about 20 houses were developed on including a few might have to have humanity. And so we helped them in, but more recently they were viability participants. If you know Sam, he's a suitiest guy in the world, but like many families issue of addictions for his farm to the son he loves so much was not an easy one. So viability program supported with some consultants who helped them figure that out. And they've been able to successfully meet them. So they participated in the range of programs that we offer. And they've been, again, that are dual roles of hazard conservation.

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: So we mentioned Rural Economic Development Initiative earlier. This is the program that you all helped to create. And it would, again, the focus here is on working with communities and outdoor enterprises, doing economic development work that brings money into town. So helping with grant seeking, fundraising and doing the projects that our special focus is helping to move you forward by accessing the funding.

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: So you can do all

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: the planning you want, but Renny comes to town, you can see they have this unbelievable, our investment in that program has led to returns that almost look silly 35 to one in terms of the way that that's bringing money into communities. Not, I don't know what about four means, but this is definitely something that everybody asks for more of and everybody thinks that they're ready for more. So there's been a lot of pressure on that to grow and we really had great luck with it. And you can see like the community center in Bridgewater was a school that closed that Freddie Grant was able to develop that into a community center and a childcare, which has been a real big focus of readying sort of doing early economic development is helping with that. And then down below, the months from being a pharmacist is just terrific. And that was ready supported them to get a value added producer grant from USDA, which really helped them to sort of take the next step forward in terms of developing their facility and their ability to get that wonderful cheese out to market. So I'll only believe briefly on this because we sort of touched on it, but I think everybody here understands that the act, what you asked us to do in Act 59 was to develop a plan to achieve this vision and these goals. The goals were sort of nationally and globally sort of like part of a movement. They weren't specifically set for Vermont, but they're really good ways of kind of targeting as we go forward. Whereas the vision is a very Vermont specific vision. Like this is the way we think about doing conservation and community development, built infrastructure, people, and thinking about how all those things go together, right? So that it's, as you can see there, that speaks to the way we want to think about it. It's not as like setting aside half of the world to not be touched and lived in, but protecting the landscape that people are a part of. That's the key to the way we read this and the bias we bring to the work is that this is about seeing yourselves into the plan and into the work. That's a picture of one of the most interesting ecological parts of it, but of course it's totally related to the built landscape, is connecting places that are divided by major infrastructure. So Route 100, Route 89 or Interstate 89, the Zooski River, the railroad has separated places in Central Vermont. Route 100 growing up into Stowe separates places and bringing that back together, doing conservation that helps to connect those three different forests for the passage of not just animals, but actual flora. It's not like the Lord of the Raiders march at York, but like the flora species move over time in response to changing conditions. And when the forests are connected, you can see that that will happen, will shift north. If the forests are disconnected, they die as islands. So that's the idea of connectivity that's,

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: It's at the center of

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: what ANR is recommending in our work back in 'fifty nine as connecting up places through the streams, the weapons, the enforced foreigners. And then these are the board planning criteria that you gave us. I won't get into the, I don't think today is a good day to go too much further than this, but you asked us to take a balanced approach to this plan, right? You can see that Vermont Conservation Design, the ANR framework that describes all of

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: those important places for protection and categorizes them

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: and maps them from interior forests to like carrying corridors to connectors. They've got different map layers for all of it. You can see it for your town, you can see where your parcel is on it, you can see what you're part of. That's a big part of this at the scientific side. Also increasing access, not just more parking lots and trailheads, but the cultural supports that get people out into nature and the supports that get people onto land and into enterprise. So access means a few different things to us.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: And then there's these

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: two different goals that ask us to think about building on the existing programming, the way we think about conservation in Vermont, and then enhancing that by bringing these new, that really overlay strongly ecological connection and social connection into the work we do. So how can we enhance farmland access and enhance community forests, enhance projects like Outbreak Vermont or Camp Dream, by also thinking about and measuring multiple goals that those achieve for ecology, for cultural access and for sort of community development and economics. So that's, it's not a theory of the quite of everything, but I like Senator Bongartz's approach to these two things, current use and housing, it's done a lot

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: to protect the way we

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: see ourselves. And there's a long way to go. We can make this work better for small communities, small groups, etcetera. So I'm gonna pass

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: it back to Gus in just a second.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: Another question. Of course. So what could you do better? I mean, it was nice to see you. Yeah. Think a lot of people are waking up to what's what you've been doing. I mean holistically when you sit back from 30,000 feet and look at what you've done it's pretty amazing but when people realize that oh what's this tier three stuff? And why is my land in it? And, oh, I can't tell you because we won't do that. It's and they're all connected. And that's what I've been trying to do is to sit back and look and find all the connective tissue to answer my constituents part of it. So I think more the best thing you can do is is provide more outreach for the public to let them know. I mean, the I see it now as I look after I talked to you and became and the people that are there, is a good thing. And my my own property is affected by it too, but I don't look at it from my standpoint. I have to look at it

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: from my constituents. Well, I'll give one example of something we are thinking hard about and Gus, you could

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: give an example, but you know, often state government programs are not designed with a like universal charging plug access port. And people get really good, organizations get really good at working with whether it's AR or VHCB or the Department of Human Services programs, develop specialties. So land trusts and others that have had community support for a long time are really good at that. What we're hearing is that we maybe didn't keep building other ports for other kinds of communities. So you said this yourself, Senators, how can we connect more to local conservation commissions, conservation districts, smaller communities, smaller land trusts, people who have been trying to do this work, but it hasn't always been easy to connect all the way up to the mother ship directly. So maybe they've been working through a larger organization who works with us, and there's filtering that goes on and telephone games that go on in terms of what's available. So we'd like to do a better job of maintaining that network and access of a clearinghouse of information and know how and best practices both about how to get in touch with us, but also how to work with your local conservation district Or how to enroll your lands in current use, or if you're in current use and you're interested in an ecological function, how to how to access the ESTA designation and work with your guiding force. Your land trust funders are talking about how to do all of those things as part of this. You know, think of all the different conservation programs and all the different types of impacts that we can have.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: I think it's important that the people, the public facing people, like the clean water providers that work with, you know, the more that they understand the program and they can answer your questions from the public. So I get it from the gold stars. I get it you know, why aren't you doing more for conservation? The more eggs might have been affected by this. And I'll give

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: you just a different kind of example and not try to get into the tier three discussion, but we met when I was at the covered annual meeting. And one of the things I heard that day was it's really hard for land owners to even donate a conservation easement even though they want to. So we went back to the board and we said, how about we set up a fund and when somebody wants to donate, we'll pick up half the costs of that transaction. And we've done that. We just did a had somebody come in with a 988 parcel and they donated 90% of the value. So we're in all this listening, these listening sessions, asked us to do 12 in the act. We've done many more than that. We're trying to listen and figure out how can our own programming also improve and be responsive to what we're hearing and we're happy to continue in that work. I appreciate it. Go ahead. So we're near time. I'm going to run through a few things but again interrupt me if I'm going maybe I have questions. One of the things we've always focused on are big lay elephant buildings. On at least a dozen occasions now, I think it's been old schools. And right now we just finished the very first phase of the Newport Sacred Park where the convent and a new building have been converted for providing housing. Phase two in school will get underway this summer. And Bennington High School is under construction. It'll be 32 apartments. There's going to be a childcare facility. There may be senior meals there and other community program. Bennington, both these buildings have been vacant for more than three decades. Bennington was so committed to this, they used $10,000,000 of local money to support what is a $50,000,000 redevelopment, two different kinds of tax credits, one for housing, one for community development. I know there was a recent tour of the legislators from Williams County and everybody in Newport's excited about redevelopment at St. Hart. So that's a cornerstone of work we've done, but it's not the only place we've been involved in with steel buildings. And white wizards have to be more of that in the future. This is just

[Sen. Seth Bongartz (Member)]: to speak to you. That my project is transformative. It's down down. It's not going to be flooding. So that's a lot of interesting.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: And often our role is to be the first people to show up and give a product credibility. We don't bump up like 30, but it lets it move forward. And that's what my board visited St. Jay this fall, when we were at the railroad station, for Katie Cole said, which he gave us the first dollars that gave us the confidence to move forward. I think we were the first dollars in the big project in the downtown as well. So this is a range of housing programs. I'm not going to read them all to you, but a number of them are new since the pandemic began, including the Career Tech Ed program, bar worker housing program, shelter improvements with double the state shelter capacity. The woman you see pictured here is a homeowner who is contributing her sweat equity in conjunction with Habitat Humanity. Built about 170, maybe 180 homes with Habitat all over the state. We're working on how to ramp that up. Rutland chapter has just bought a new facility and they're gonna be catalyzed construction with a couple of service organizations indoors in order to speed construction. This particular parcel was divided off of a conservation project because it was close to the road and not important. And that's happened on about five occasions. These three of them were the nature conservancy. There's a new one happening in Walcott along with 15 right now. We get asked a lot about housing supply and housing needs, cost of the average home in Vermont, according to Zillow was about doubled in the last six years. But where do we need? What price points do we need to hit? Who needs help? And what this chart is telling you is whether you're looking at rental or home ownership, half the need is for people who are below 80% need And the market can't produce housing at a cost that those folks can afford. It just is too expensive. And even when you get to the next range of 80 to 120, people are really stretched. If you folks above that like we can find things in the market, they may not like their choices. They may think it costs too much, especially if it's somebody who relocated from the Heartland, but they can find their way. So when you think about as our budgets tighten, where do we need to invest? I think it really is gonna be focused on the workforce that's in that, in those blue in this chart. A word again about your mission and density. This is a development and the catalytic impact we can have. This is the old Catholic Diocese in Burlington. This is not built out yet, but we funded the first two buildings that happened on this site. But it's also okay. If we could build to this density, which is 70 units an acre, we need 500 acres to meet the state's housing needs. You say, well, never doing that in St. Johnsbury or Middlebury or any place else in the line. If we built that at one tenth of that density, 5,000 acres, and if you cut it in half and we're talking about quarter acre lots, still gonna just need 10,000 acres to meet our current housing needs. So you don't have to have a huge negative impact on the landscape you love to meet our housing needs. We need to do it thoughtfully. The other part of this story is again, housing and conservation. Eric Farrell bought the Catholic Diocese for about $6,000,000. He could have put 12 starter castles on that property with wonderful views of the lathes and gotten his money back. But he said that our community needs something more than that. There was great opposition to dense development until the Vermont Land Trust got together with Steve Burlington and raised a little over $1,000,000 including some funding from us for the 12 acres that sit along the way and turned into a public fund. And then the opposition against development went away, we were able to get this done. And we've seen that on more than one occasion. Again, we were the first dollars in that helped Eric invest in more buildings. We're gonna have affordable housing sitting next to, I see Ireland just put up condominium project where it costs 1 to $2,000,000 to buy a home. And with an alpha policy of equality and affordability, if you just time limited how long housing had to be affordable, this would become an economically gated neighborhood. So we think that that policy has a huge amount of merit as does the marriage of housing and conservation.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz (Member)]: Is that some of that mixed income or is it all?

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: In this development, there are going to be three buildings of rental housing, one of which is senior that is entirely affordable. But the buildings next to it are market rate, including one being built by SDR and that had been built by SDR and where we can spend $2,000,000 on a condominium. Probably that means you get the view of the lake. This is where your dollars have gone for housing over the whole event. You've invested in us since 2020, since the pandemic began when we finished the year, I think top 6,000 households. I'd ask you to take a few things away from this slide. One is for every dollar you gave us, we leveraged about $2 The second is that while it is true, and you've heard a lot of people say that a home today costs 500 or $600,000 and that's too expensive, our average investment across all kinds of projects is just $80,000 When we're doing new construction or substantial rehab, like those schools, we're putting in probably twice that amount. But what we are doing is leveraging private investment, federal grants, philanthropic grants. So we're trying to push the save money to do as much as possible. The third thing I'll ask you to take away from the slide is on the right side, you see a whole bunch of housing for people with special needs that includes having doubled shelter capacity. The first four recovery residences in Vermont, people struggling with addiction, other kinds of sports.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Before we leave that slide, I just want to make a note for the future unless I forget that I would like to, at some other point, have a conversation with you all about lead abatement and asbestos abatement and

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: the kinds of home repairs that are physical in nature. I have a lot of

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: questions about funding sources. Just had

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: a grant renewed despite the changes in Washington. So there's another $5,000,000 to floor to remodel over the next four years for weather paint.

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: That's right.

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: More on that. This

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: is of a program for

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: citizens, so you should talk

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: about it.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Okay, would love to chat.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: The purpose of this slide is to tell you who we house and what professions in the workforce we're able to house. And so you see, it is what I often call the essential workforce, people who cannot work remotely, but have to show up to drive a truck, to be in childcare, to teach, to maintain a building, to provide social services. And our statute lets us go to median income. Federal tax credit, which is our primary federal source, limits us to 60% of the units. So when we're doing tax credit housing, generally 60% of meeting, we usually take 20% of the units and have them not be tax credit units and at a higher level in order to have an extreme pump. The photo you're looking at is another one of those catalytic projects. We funded four projects in the Tift District from St. Olives. In total, about 150 of the two seventy minute build out. This is an elderly development. It's being heated by geothermal. Many of our buildings are all electric. That's gonna get harder unless we get some relief from Washington because of the new Buy America, Build America standards and it's harder to just find air source heat pumps built in America. But this one has geothermal, it's an elderly project, 33 homes. And one of the people who moved in is somebody who worked in healthcare her whole life, then had her own healthcare crisis, found herself homeless, and now is a permanent home here in the Vanskin. In home ownership, we do something called shared equity. We recently opened a 26 unit condominium in Shelburne that's part of a 94 unit redevelopment, the balanced budget housing. Among the homeowners was a state trooper. One of these fellows is a chef at Shelburne Farms. Two people work at Wake Robin. So in terms of housing the workforce, Shelburne, think is feeling really good about this development. We've also taken a look at what happens over time to these shared equity homes. And the last 55 sales of a home that we subsidized many years ago, where the original investment averaged $27,000 allowed without any further public funding for somebody to buy a home on average $136,000 below market value. So the value of the state's investment, whether it was made in 1990 or in the box has grown significantly so that these homes are able to transfer even as interest rates have doubled in the last five years to people averaging 83% a median, with half the buyers below 60%. So I think your investment is going well. One of the things you did a few years ago was to create Act 186, which provided feasibility and funding to help parents who are folk whose kids have developmental or intellectual disabilities. We've now brought six projects with 37 units of housing into development. Some are already have been built like the one building in Moncton. That's an intentional community for people whose disabilities require lots of support. They've just given us an application for a second building on that site and their plans for two beyond that. Champlain Housing Trust has taken on a more independent set apartments in Burlington with some apartments set aside for support staff as well. So that's underway. So it's one of the ways we're trying to respond to people who have some very specific needs. And I think you'll see more of that in the future. I want to assure you that there's lots I already described, Putney and Newport is things that are coming online this spring. And here are a number of other projects in Rutland in Waterbury in Burlington, and Stonecroft and Middlebury that will be open by August. And the Middlebury project, another one of those were the first dollars in and the plan is ultimately a 200 unit mixed income neighborhood with lots and lots of single family home ownership. We have a huge pipeline ahead of us. It is down a little bit because developers look at does the state have money or not to support our developers. So as they're seeing the debate you're having and seeing the fiscal projections, they're not going out and spending as much money, optional properties, getting engineering done, doing all those early work, but it's still a very sizable pipeline, larger than we can fill. And if you want to see what opportunity looks like, you can take a walk down Elm Street and combined a metal building is a parking lot. The Commission on Resilience has done some early feasibility work. They believe 70 apartments can go on that parking lot. While they also try to figure out how to get that building back into operation. It's a federal government who's got it on the market.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz (Member)]: Building with the elevator, I think, the apartment. Yeah.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: I recall that it's a proption at this point. Is that

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: That letter is saying it's to an auction.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: And do we know when that's happening?

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: We do not. Okay. And just to get back to conservation and just closing out, is the Burnside Wildlife Management Area. We've got two different deals conserving a total of 2,800 acres. And when I first showed this to the other body, representative Caledonia was spot on the landscape, tell us where he'd gotten a buck one year. So we know it's good hunting habitat. And with all that you hear from a variety of constituents, we are supporting a hunting community, a walking, a hiking community, the ride of bike, watching the community, all those things are all important for all part of life for modern security and at this stage. And we look forward to work and we will do more. And I know we're now all the time, so maybe you should

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: probably stop. Go ahead. Put the comment and question. So you guys are kinda like at the center of a lot of things that are going on. What do you do if somebody comes and says, I wanna do this with my land or I wanna do this with a building or house? I said it as well, most every agency in the state. We ought to have a navigator in every in every county that we can come to and say, I want to do this. What's the best route?

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Is that eligible applicants for our funding are municipalities or nonprofits. And we generally work through a series of nonprofits who bring projects to us. So we often, we're about to fund, we're about to break down on a building in Mary City for flood recovery, a 31 unit apartment building. And we got down street together with the city of Mary after the flooding twenty three. They identified the location and down street went ahead and got an architect to do some drawings and they began their feasibility work. So we often are tying people together some years ago. We had a fall as the state colleges were going through their financial problems from the president. We went and visited with them and we did a tour of several campuses and we identified McClellan Hall as a building that on the Johnson campus that could be previously converted to housing. And that should probably get under construction late fall this year. So we got an application to tie them together with an organization that looks at that that comes and in. So we try to make those connections wherever we can, but you've often the nonprofit so the people we direct folks to with an idea, whether it's a conservation idea or a housing idea. So again, when Senator Hardy's constituents call and said the state won't buy a boy scout camp, we call them Remote Land Trust and they look around for a partner to help buy that land and rely upon.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: My community is Green Mountain College. A lot of opportunity there. Did I

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: just read that there were there was gonna be

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: a new buyer on campus? So they put our our piece out looking for they also donate it to a nonprofit. So

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: yeah, that's, I'm happy for us to go to funding. Think the other group that has done a lot of this kind of work, they just posted an event at Sterling College is the preservation trust in Vermont. And so we'd be happy to make a visit to Putney.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: And there's a group there's a group of private alumni that actually live still live there that more of get involved in it. Okay. Alright.

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: Well, Grace.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Thank you. And I just want to back up

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: to the money real quick just to make sure that I'm understanding that aspect of it. So you're in the governor's recommend at the full PTT amount.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: There's no extra, we're recalling that one slide. There's extra allocations from the general fund.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: No, is a recommendation for capital bill above the PTT amount for clean water exits. Okay. Great.

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: Can you, sorry, go ahead.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: I was just going to say, we often hear people say, Fully fund BHCD. Do you consider this fully funded?

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: This follows what the statute requires. What I would say to you is over the last five years, you've been able to over fund us with one time dollars. And I can promise you that if you found any one time dollars,

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: would need come at

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: me because we didn't work. We didn't make a pitch for the governor. The governor that was not successful. One of our requests, there's actually another, it was the Act 69 study with the recommended non voting fund for folks with intellectual and developmental disabilities, because there's a need to find housing for that subsidy folks. And as I'm sure you've heard from the parents, number of them are getting to be not my age and near my age, and they're worried about the future for

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: the group. Yes, yes. That would be great to work with more money into that. Just to follow-up on this too, so it was in the governor's recommended, and this was also supported

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: by the House? Supported by the House. So Senator Westman says we're boring this year.

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: I think that was a- That's insane.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Appropriations plan, that's a good thing.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Yes.

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: All right, thank you

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: so much, really appreciate it.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Okay, well thank you for making the time. Yeah. Glad to be with you.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: And I'm thinking that now might be a good time to take a quick break.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: So let's meet back at

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: Because he hasn't. Thank you, Trent. Oh,

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: we are live. Okay, this is Natural Resources and Energy coming back from a break. Joined by Michelle Monroe from the Conservation Districts

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: and I think I don't know.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: It's Dan. He hope you accept the invitation.

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: I'll I sent it to him. I forwarded it to him.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Did you and he just told

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: you And he said that he had gotten it.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Do you wanna take a break until

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: He said he was waiting for someone to let him in. He had tried to log in and didn't. Yeah. But Dan's having some exciting times, but we should get it first. We can get it on. But I can start on a couple of quick things before Dan comes. Sure. So just to talk a

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: little bit about our- Oh, he

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: may have had to leave me kind of perfectly. Oh, But one of the, you know, all of you are

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: familiar with us, we were

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: in earlier, you know the work that we do. And when you mentioned, there should be somebody you can call. Well, we're actually the people you call, but you say, I've got a flat land, I want to do something with it, or you're a farmer, I've I I've got got regulatory pressures on the agency, because we're the people that folks call. And so I don't want to go too much into work. Do think you've heard about that point

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: of view.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: People navigate.

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: No, we do have a lot of navigation, A lot of navigation, particularly for farmers, but not only for farmers, for towns and for residents. So our budget request this year was for 942,000. The house has put in the budget 912,612 in base, which was in the governor's budget, and then 300,000 in one time funds. That is the amount that state agriculture also supported in their budget letter. And that is the amount that both, that the house agriculture also supported that and house environment supported the nine forty two unit cost. And we're hoping that you all will also support the nine as well. Is there a slide?

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Didn't have time to prepare slides, I'm sorry. Oh, these are not your slides?

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: There are older slides from our testimony in February. But I did not have applied slides today. Okay. Yeah, I am not out of person. Was doing

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: the same thing. So,

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: I wanted to talk about some of the pressures that we're seeing from the federal side, because there's a lot there's a lot going on on the federal side that I don't think that the state's aware of and that we just wanted to make sure that the legislature is aware of. So we were created in the '30s. In Vermont, we were created in 1939 to be partners for the Natural Resources Conservation Service at USDA. So we work very closely with NRCS. And most of the work that we do with them is funded by what are called cooperative agreements. So we sign an agreement with them to do work that we are working in their offices, on their computers, we drive their vehicles, and we do their work at a lower cost than it would cost them to hire a federal employee. And so we see why we're employing about 20 conservation planners between the AZD and districts who are out on the ground helping landowners and farmers apply, develop plans for what they wanna have, they're gonna manage their land, and then use those plans to apply for funds from NRCS to do work on their land, to identify whether that's, they're going to conserve a wetland, they're going to plant a buffer, they're going to fix a gully, they're going to install fencing, we're going to help them with grazing wetland, so they can flotation graze, whatever farmers want to do on their land, basically, that touches on conservation. We help them. That includes installing irrigation systems. So right now, NRCS cannot enter into any cooperative agreements. They can't extend any existing cooperative agreements. And so this is endangering partner relationships across the country. We have lost two foresters in Vermont that we're working under a cooperative agreement, a national cooperative agreement with the National Biotherapy Federation. This has cut the capacity to enforce tree planning. We're not gonna have the wrong four employees and to NRCS and to partners and then some private.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: It's just a broad defined cooperative agreement. So

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: have an agreement with NRCS. NRCS says you have X amount of dollars to employ a person to do weapons of these reserve needs network for NRCS. And that I have a cooperative agreement that lets me employ that person who then is out doing all kinds of wetlands work. So she's the outreach education outreach person. She helps explain to interested landowners how to involve in governance. And she does some monitoring and management meetings as well. Have, so BECD has 14 staff who are just working embedded in NRCS offices, providing technical support to NRCS, doing NRCS work alongside them. And they're really appreciating and conservation work done across the city and to their opinion is cooperative agreements.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: So you're an extension of the federal program, boots on the ground.

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: Yeah, boots on

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: the ground.

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: Yes, and then we also use some of those cooperative agreements, we're also funding district staff who are doing the same thing.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: So are you that answerable to the agency bank?

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: We have some agency backed funding and we often combine it. Like we employ, because NRCS lost a bunch of engineering capacity, already been coming up engineering capacity and then they lost a lot of engineers over the last year because they employed a lot of young engineers throughout college and then those who staff at the beginning of their careers were the ones that we lost along with, it was either people at the beginning of their careers or people at the end, and we lost engineers at both parts of that spectrum in Vermont and NRCS. So we hired an engineer, funded 50% with clean water funding through the agency in Vermont and India Bag and 50% through a cooperative agreement. And that person is based in Rutland and is doing primarily irrigation systems on farms in the southern part of the city for drought and the ocean. So those are the kinds of staff that we've been employing to try and address these needs. If we're in touch with the federal delegation, there's nothing that that state can do, but we wanted to make you aware of pressures that we are seeing on the conservation workforce across the state. And it's not just a virtual manner. Yes, US Fish and Wildlife has the same problem and their cooperative agreements are a little different. They aren't employing staff so much as they're giving us funding. They give districts funding and it's unfortunate Dan couldn't do this because he has held these cooperative agreements for the Munuski District, which is Washington District Counties, but also watershed groups have them. Other, sometimes state agencies can have them. But the ones you can use as Fish and Wildlife are how we soak and do initial design on culvert upgrades and dams. So this is a whole chunk of money that is now not accessible. And I think if you want, I can probably get you exact funds, but now this money that is really how we get these projects in the pipeline for upgrading our culverts and taking out our dams is gone because US Fish and Wildlife, they weren't able to do any cooperative agreements in the last fiscal year and they aren't able to do it in this fiscal year for the federal government. So it's newly endangering that pipeline of projects because this is how we get them off the ground. And it's really essential for clean water and flood mitigation and wild habitat. So there's this whole that is developing in multiple aspects of conservation and state as a result of essentially the office of the budget being decreased suspicious of these agreements and we put a

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: letter about a length of scope and

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: use these to release funds for new months. So the other piece that's happening with the federal government, with NRCS specifically, is that they have payment rates or set payment rates that are set nationally for every practice that they have, which is hundreds of practices that farmers and forest landowners and others can put on a landscape that NRCS will pay part of the cost of. They've reduced those payment rates for almost daily practice. And so farmers are pulling their applications. They're putting applications on hold. Farmers applied with last, when the applications were due January 15 and the new payment rates weren't out. So they applied with the old payment rates. So now they're gonna go and get a contract to say, Hey, here's your contract for cover cropping. And they're going to find out that the payment thing has dropped dramatically. We're particularly concerned about forest rates, rates for some of the forest rates for things like freshmanagement had dropped. There was one forestry practice where you get, currently, you would have been paid under a contract from last year, dollars 1,600 per acre over three years. The payment rate for that practice is now $90 an acre over three years. So if you wanted to plant, if you wanted to do some agroforestry, a lot of our farmers are finding that they need, if they're pasturing animals that they need to get some trees out there can provide some shade as the days are getting hotter in the summer. STEMs were costing us, NRCS was reimbursing at $40 a STEM, now it's $13 a STEM. So it's a whole wide range of practices that we aren't, that landowners and farmers just aren't going

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: be able to afford to do.

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: So we're really concerned about how this is gonna play out over the field season. We don't know yet because NRCS is still They have a ranking People apply and then they go through and they rank the applications and then the top applications get funded. We don't know how people don't have their funders contracts and that's so we don't know what's going to happen there. Is one

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: of the practices that they have been able to get funding for, at least in the past,

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: Is there- Yeah, grazing rates also have gone down, although virtual fencing has gone up. If you want to buy equipment to install virtual fencing, that payment rate has gone up, but other payment rates are gonna be gone down.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Okay. And is the deadline already passed for this?

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: The applications for ECLIC, which is the largest NRCS program, will be in January, maybe.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Okay, so I just spoke with a farmer in my district recently about the, and I don't know specifically if they had applied, but they were talking about some of these issues, so. Yeah, then do you- is there a farm size that is, are there requirements for farm size? In terms of numbers of livestock or numbers of acres or anything like that.

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: No, they're not. Oftentimes larger farms can feed better in the process because they're just putting the practice on a larger That's exactly

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: right. So that's- And

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: sort of ties into the next thing that I was going to talk about, which is this grant that you all heard about at the beginning of the session, the $8,000,000 in financial assistance for farmers and landowners that we lost. One of the advantages of that grant was that it was targeted towards smaller and mid sized farms that often don't compete as well in regular NRCS programs. And so that funding was $8,000,000 for flood mitigation practices and clean water practices, and then wildlife habitat, because often those three things go together. So that was targeted towards that type of work. And so we're very concerned about what the loss of that is going mean for small funds being mobile access and the practices on the ground. And that grant came, it was 8,000,000 in financial assistance, but it was 2,700,000.0 in technical assistance. The conservation districts were one of the subcontractors on that technical assistance, as well as Red Surf. It was just for Red Surf Forestry, which is a private company. And so now we have lost the funding to do that technical assistance. And so that has been another blow to the technical assistance provision, on the forestry side because we just don't have the the foresters to do the work. NRCS only has two people who do forestry lending. The districts have some, you know, there's kind of there's a few private companies like Red Star Company just don't have the capacity to meet the forestry project. So this resulted in like 90, more than 90 stranded forestry applications and they pulled that funding.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: Well, yes. We have the programs out there and the requirements, who picks up the slack in the meantime for the foresters? Yeah, that's a

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: good question. How many foresters pick it up?

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: The county foresters can do some,

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: but not, they're not really doing like the kind of project planning that NRCS needs to fund work on the ground. They can help with forest management plans and advise people, but they're

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: not really doing Because federal requirements are

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: different than the state environments or

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: I think, you know, I'm not, I cannot speak completely to what the county foresters do versus what our NRCS and NRCS are co located foresters do, but that is certainly one of the challenges. I just wanted to highlight for folks this week. Yeah.

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

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: we, we were asked by owners, yes, to hire two foresters, but we can't do it without funding and they can't get funding. And this is sort of, it just is a bit of a crisis. And we also are concerned that there's gonna be a lot more demand on the state programs because of the the cut in federal immigrants. So the state does have smaller versions of, they have programs that they run with clean water money to assist with things like cover cropping and other practices on farms, but they don't have the capacity to pick up what energy has to be dropping. But I mean, energy is just plenty of money. They're just paying at such a low rate that pharmacy may not be. So I wanted to bring those things to your attention. And then I'm happy to talk about anything else you would like

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: to talk about. Certainly, we

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: need my baptism center in our work because unfortunately, wasn't able to join us at center right at ten.

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: And I

[Sen. Seth Bongartz (Member)]: just got one newsletter from the Academy Conservation District.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: Yeah, so

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: the practices have also impacted what we've talked to you, I think, in the past about our local fund goals, where the districts run a process every year, public process where we engage with our local landowners and residents to identify what the top conservation concerns are in the districts. And then we take those concerns to NRCS. This is a stat Actually, it requires that this process is in federal statute that districts do this. And our NRCS here in Vermont is one of six states where they will then take and set aside money from their general overall budget for practices that address the concerns identified in each district. And so last year we were able to burn $4,400,000 focused on specific practices. And then not only the person competing, the only barns competing for that monthly are in the district. So it's been very helpful with Bennington, which doesn't always compete as well because it doesn't have impaired water chance in command. So people are going all that, but it just doesn't rank as well. So they've had a It's been really helpful because then the only farmers you can be put on the street is farmers. And so they're not competing with Franklin County farmers who are in highly impaired watersheds. So that has been really helpful in this year to stay 5,000,000 in local fund roles across the state. Awesome. Great. Yeah. So I'm not sure I

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: know I know that county forestry were stretched pretty thin too. So I had to contact one of the actually, I had used the Bennington County from Forrester to deal with my issue.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: A couple of things.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: It would be really helpful for you to lay out the funding situation more, like where you get your funding.

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: Sure, where we get our funds.

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: What are

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: the, and maybe you've done this in the past and I just don't remember it or whatever, but having a visual would be helpful for me. Okay. This is where you can get funding through these sources, and these are the ones that are impaired by what's going on at the federal level. These are the ones that still exist. That would be helpful to see because trying to figure out that is a little complicated. And then I do want to ask you, because I haven't read the whole thing because it just came in last night, but we received a sort of listening session report from the Conservation Districts about Act 59. And I'm wondering if you're prepared to speak to that. I have not

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: looked at what people put together. I was in the state house all day yesterday, so I have not seen math that came from one of the districts, but districts received funding from, several of the districts received money from the HCV. Am a little, yeah, several districts received money from HCV of all these active 15 out of the suite sessions that are laid out sort of in HCD provides the information. So I have not looked at that. Okay.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Could be something that maybe we can have a lot Yeah. Of that time where - Some time to dig a little deeper into that.

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: Yeah. In general, what we saw at the listening sessions, it's been that there's a lot of Canadians who have 15 and have 181. And so people think that they're mad about

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Act 59, but they're really mad about Act

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: Act fifty eighty one. One.

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: And so that has been

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: a recurring theme. Or vice versa. Yeah. As

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: I'm talking to Vermonters, our district, some of our district staff and district manager that I had to really carefully explain the difference between the two bills. So I would not be surprised if there is a lot of at 181 sort of resentment in there or concern or fear. There's a lot of fear going back to 181. And I think that we'll see that we'll be in those listening sessions. And I think the fear from Act 59 came more from that 50 by 50, like, oh my God, we're gonna conserve, permanently conserve 50 of land and not. And so people explained that 50 by 50 is not permanent conservation for all 50%. Was permanent conservation for 30% and then another form of conservation for the remainder of 20. So, once you explain that, people seem to relax a lot more about that. But I not, I saw that when I got home last night, but I was here about office hearing, so I did not.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: I mean, still- I heard it. It's pretty, I don't know, it's strongly worth it.

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: I have no doubt about that and consider it

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: that the people wrote it. And also I would say that that document has not gone through a consensus process in most of the Conservation District.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Oh, that's very interesting because it was sent legislators as said

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: it was a consensus doc. Yeah, we have not had a consensus discussion about that.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Oh, interesting.

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: Yeah, sorry for that little peek into my internal politics, but yeah, we did not, so we will be discussing that on a day to day.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: And I told you that related to 01/1981 that you all get in to testify in the house to talk about S-three 25?

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: Yes, when I spoke yesterday at the rural caucus, I expressed our support for S-three 25 that we want to see a pause on TIER degree in particular, that we can have a time to run a process where we really get it. Yeah. And really hear kind of the monitors about what is the best way forward for balancing these competing interests of we do need conservation, right? We need to stop, we need to reduce forest fragmentation. We need to protect headwaters of our rivers and streams. We need to protect wildlife borders as wildlife is moving in response to climate change. We need to protect rare and vital habitats and native species. We need to do those things, but how do we do that in a way? How do we do that and also allow monitors to make a living from the money on it and to have use of the client. And so I think that is the question that we need to address and we need to do it by talking to the monitors. And that's a place where I do get to start a stand by your role because of that long history of having this role of engaging with the local person and bringing back.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Yeah, that's great to hear. Because I mean, I think that was our intention with the pause was to allow more time to talk about it and see, how it can be changed or, because I completely agree. There's just a lot of misinformation out there. I think 03:25 was meant to do that pause and people were like, yeah.

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: Anyway, so I hope that

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: you get in to testify now so that it. Yeah. Yes. Thank you. Well, so I just wanna make sure that I am understanding

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: the ask that you all have, which is because it's 612, or sorry, 912. 612 b. Total, 612 b's. And then how did that bear with

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: the governor's recommend in the house? The governor's recommend was six twelve base. Just that.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: And how did it end up in the house? It ended up in the house at six

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: twelve base and 301 time. We've to increase the base, but we'll take the one time.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Do the governors recommend having one time?

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: No. No one time. Okay.

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: Yeah. But it did not reduce us, which they have done in the past, that they would reduce us. And then he would say, then we can come and ask for more and then they like we play that dance for a few years in that.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz (Member)]: So it was around time. They didn't reduce us. So your request to us would be to support the one time plus the basic plus the

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: one time. Yes. Supportive hours. Yes, the support of the house budget.

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: And I'm asking for more, but you know what

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: it's like, but also wanted to

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: make you aware of sort of the federal

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: issues Yeah, that are like I said, it would be helpful because I'm hearing from people this funding ban. It was confusing to me whether this was a state issue or a federal issue. And it sounds like it's federal money that

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: this

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: is Yes, the

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: and we also, we are funded through the Agricultural Clean Water Improvement Program. If you don't remember what the ads stands for, actually, but it's one of the largest sources being funded TA dollars that comes out of the Clean Water Fund under the agency of that. And so we, some districts did receive, there was just a new brand, they just learned how much they received and some districts are receiving less than they have in the past. And so that obviously they're unhappy about that. That would be helpful to include in your- Yeah, so it's not everyone.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: You. Super. Thank you so much.

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: Happy and never to Denise. Sorry. Jess.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Okay, good morning everyone. This is the Natural Resources and Energy coming back from a break and we are joined by folks from the Rutland Council on the Forum. Yes, welcome. And the HCG. There it goes. Right, welcome.

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: Thank you. Thanks for inviting us, I appreciate it. My name is Gary Holloway. I'm the Downtown Program Manager with the Department of Housing and Community Development partnering with Vermont Council of Development for this initiative. I'm here to talk about today. So the Vermont evaluation from rural technical assistance actually was something that was started in this committee. It's part of Act 181. And really the purpose of the study was to evaluate, assess how Vermont supports its role in communities and how that system can be strengthened to better deliver housing, infrastructure, climate resilience, economic development.

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: And

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: the task was to assess the technical assistance system, identify the challenges and barriers we got to the strengths and then recommend practical improvements. So this work was done over the course of 2025, and we put together a report that I had made available on the link to the he assistant. I had copies here of the condensed report, which was from the steering committee and UVM who was a partner in this initiative with us for the Center for Rural Studies. This sheet here I'm happy to pass around, it's kind of like a snapshot of the recommendations, kind of bite size, so I'll pass that around to folks as well as the report itself. There is a longer report, it's 100 plus pages and you're welcome to read that as well. We've had really all the data information we gathered through the site. But this is a 17 page condensed report with high level recommendations that I'm going to review today for you all. So we put together a project steering committee which we've made up of organizations around the state that provide technical assistance and resources to municipalities around the state, including the renowned councilor development. And you can see, I'm not going read them off here, but you can see a wide range of folks that you're familiar with that were part of steering this project along and are continuing to lead the strategize on an occasion. So you know at the root of it, know we're looking at challenges in rural communities across Vermont. Know there's a lot of expectations for volunteer run boards and committees and towns with small staff that are expected to do some really big things, addressing everything from housing to infrastructure to climate resiliency, economic development. I think they have part time staff and limited volunteer hours. So it's a complex system for them to navigate at the state level certainly, as well as just trying to understand like where are the menu options for us to choose from. So that is you know kind of at the heart of this challenge, capacity constraints. So there's missed opportunities or delayed projects, there's higher costs, and quite frankly inequitable outcomes. So the approach of the study was to really ensure that the miners had a chance to kind of weigh in, particularly focused on the folks that are being impacted on the municipal level. So there was a lot of listening sessions with regional planning commissions, with staff and volunteers from planning commissions and select boards and councils across the state. So we had 190 participants in those listening sessions. Folks that weren't able to attend the listening sessions, had surveys that they filled out of the public's input. We met at five different states and how they were looking at providing technical assistance and getting these resources. We also, in your behalf, had students investigate a number of different other states, 11 states really kind of dove in and pulled some of that data that you can find in a larger report. And then we had a statewide summit that pulled together a lot of these folks and we welcomed people from all across the state. Some legislators were able to participate. It was really an active, it was a game show format. Rebecca Sanborn Stone, a lot of credit to her, she's very creative, engaged tables all around the room to kind of really dive in, come up with some solutions and some ideas. So those all those are also in the larger report that you want to see some of the outcomes of the game show that we participated in. It was

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: very very

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: fun. Right? That was good. So anyway, of that all of that fed into this this report, these findings. So the findings were consistent across the region. Technical assistance, there's lots of it, but it's fragmented and how it's communicated or accessed is broken. It's not always consistent to charge for folks to figure out how to access what they need.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: And

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: sometimes we insert and we address something short term, but then that goes away and it's not sustainable. So don't we really have a mechanism to kind of keep that, you know provide that assistance in a sustainable way at a local level. So they continuity in these simpler programs. So some of the summary of the findings, you know capacity is certainly low binding constraints, having the administrative burdens, coordination as I mentioned or communication is systemic, And having program design that really works for them and not just, know, works for us, we're delivering the program, but does it really work, are we listening to folks where they're coming from to make sure it's matched where their needs are at. Evidence from other states points to coordinating solution. We don't necessarily need to reinvent something, we have it, but like how can we better coordinate together to deliver these services. So there was four high level actionable priority areas here, I'm going to touch on these in the following slides. But increasing state agency participation in solving local challenges, municipal and regional shared service tools, local engagement and leadership development, and increasing local capacity to collectible resources. So the priority one, municipalities face fragmented state systems and inconsistent state involvement. And so how can we better once again look at the systems we've had and re evaluate them from like agency to agency to department to department, right. I've you know I manage these programs, We recently went through downtown transportation fund, for example, and figured out like what are statutory requirements? What are things that we've just asked for all the time that maybe we don't need to have them do? And really try to kind of boil down what it is that we're asking for in an application. Like that's an example of like a very very small little program but can we do that and look at state programs and how we're coordinating with each other to make it a little simpler and digestible for folks who are going on these applications and trying to access the grants. And I'll also mention, well I'll mention that later. So priority to municipal shared, regional shared service tools. So there's a lot of examples of communities doing good things, but are they sharing that information, that knowledge with other communities? You know I think of an example when we were on a call post twenty twenty three floods with folks in Marshfield and they said, know wouldn't it be nice if we had kind of a shared service model for you know to have engineers on their container, you know so that you know we're not all going through this process of trying to rebuild bridges and hire engineers so we can all kind of have this pool already kind of baked out and available for us. So everything from that to having shared service agreements, legal agreements that can share equipment or to share different types of services of municipality. They don't need to kind of reinvent the wheel. It's an easy way for them to kind of feel better from a legal standpoint, have things sought out for them that they could just kind of implement and partner with neighboring towns along certain services and shared equipment or whatever ability. Priority three, local engagement and leadership development. This is something that you know obviously we have providers like the Loudoun Council of Rural Development and others that are providing this you know this service and helping to engage the community through facilitating discussions. Know maybe you know providing them some skills to kind of build that leadership in house so it becomes more sustainable at the local level. We can't just expect someone's going to scoop in and solve their problems. They need to also figure out at their level on how they can kind of build a solid base of volunteers and leadership development that can be sustainable. But it is our responsibility as you know at the state level as well as other partners to kind of help provide those resources and at times embed maybe a fellow or a multi year person to kind of help develop that system and walk away and have that in place. Then priority for increasing local capacity and flexible resources. What we heard a lot is, a lot of our funding is tied to very specific things and communities have kind of myriad of challenges that they're facing. Can we provide communities flexible funding that can help address kind of multiple needs as opposed to just like I have to apply for this one thing for this specific transportation project and then I have to find another source for this very specific thing. And it is complicated between federal and state money and it's easier said than done, but is there a little bit easier of a way that we can provide some flexible resources to communities to kind of give them a bit of a break And then they certainly have to apply for these bigger funding to address some larger needs. But they lack sometimes like oftentimes lack of capacities even know where to start. We have some good existing programs like the Ready program through the HCB that provides assistance to help kind of do some of that grant writing and to help kind of leverage additional investments. And we've had some, you know, MTAP Municipal Technical Assistance Program. Can we reimagine that when we, you know, is that something we can continue to look at to see how we can continue to provide those level of services to municipalities? So just

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: a

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: couple more slides here and I'll pass it off. Recommendations coordinated together can help improve coordination, reduce administrative burdens, expand capacity in the low staff policy around towns, and help them figure out a sustainable way that can be a little bit more long lasting and impactful. Promoting equitable access so that everyone feels like they have a place to access these resources. Maybe there's a portal or there's a common communication place, you know, at the state where they can go to to get information and not have to maybe I'll assign to the other areas, I'll just call him and he'll tell him again. So maybe there's more of a central place where this can be coordinated together. Better aligned public private and loan for up in investments. And one thing I'll say one thing I'll say is that, you know, where does where does this all live, right? Like if you're going have a centralized hub, it better to be done at the regional level? Is it better to be done, you know, more local and better than local level? Or it's a combination of like, we need something at the state, we need something, things to be regionally allocated, but then we also at times we do need to embed some additional support in specific communities from different things.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Yes, but can I ask my question?

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Did you look at all about

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: improving county government in Vermont

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: and whether that would be a model that could actually do pretty much all the things you're listing here?

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: Yeah, it was certainly, you'll

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: see that as you read through the report and you'll see that, you know, the idea of the revisiting of the conversations that's happened in the past around new governance structures including, we don't have county government loan, is that a form? We didn't guide, our job was- There was

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: another committee that was doing that work, and they unfortunately failed to do that work, but it's so stark that pretty much everything on your list, if we had functional, accountable, transparent, and competent county government or regional government, whatever you want to call it, that they could do all these things and take a lot of the burdens off our small towns and also the burdens off our state and have more effective reach for our services. It's too bad that you didn't actually include that in your recommendations.

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: It actually, if you look in there, looking at region, it doesn't call out county, it calls out regional governments. So what is regional governance? I mean that's kind of a it's a big topic right? Like what does regional governance look like? So that is called out and was brought up you know through the you know through the surveys and through some of the findings. So I do want to hit on that, but it was called out in terms of looking at regional health infrastructure.

[Trey Martin, Director of Conservation & Rural Community Development, VHCB]: So we still have this group, this

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: steering committee, we had a little bit of money left over to keep Rebecca Sanborn Stone and Community Workshop on board to kind continue facilitating the discussions. It's not going to last long, know we have it for a little while longer, but we are meeting and we're trying to identify A, how are we how are we structuring ourselves so that we can we can best you know deliver some of the action items and findings and we when we have a you know a good amount of things that are from low hanging that we could do without a policy changes only funding. There's other things in medium or to the high you know the longer term categories that are going to need additional resources certainly attention and time over the course of you know years. So we're trying to continue this momentum going with this steering committee, but obviously we need to build a bigger batch of folks beyond that committee that can actually start to break off and implement and make some action. So that's kind of where we are right now. We're continuing to meet on a monthly basis. And yeah, I'm happy to answer any questions now or if you want to take questions at the end after Denise presents. Super.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: I'm gonna have more questions, I think about this table, how we can be taking some action, which is very exciting. I would love to transition to the ditties and maybe we can, unless there's questions, other questions.

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: I'll just add one thing, it's like these recommendations were not something the steering committee just came up with. These came from the actual data and the information that was gathered to kind of like you know and then look through it all and say like what were we actually hearing and that's where the high level recommendations came in. Something isn't there it doesn't mean it's not important it just maybe wasn't near the top of the list of recommendations. Certainly you can still find that in the deeper report and some of things you might be thinking about.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Well, I'm looking forward to digesting this more and thinking about timelines for how some of these things can be able to get done.

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: Anyway, but let's, yeah. I don't have a presentation. You don't know what to there. I'm low tech, but I think that's okay. Super busy, I mean. Yeah. Yeah.

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: Morning. Morning. It's nice to see you all. For the record, my name is Denise Smith and I'm the executive director at the Vermont Council on Rural Development. I'll explain who we are in just a minute. I wanna thank you for inviting us, Senator Watson, and for having us come. I know it's a busy time of year right now for everybody, so I really appreciate you taking time for this. And I'm really excited to kind of follow-up on your question. I know a lot of you live in rural areas, so you probably know exactly what kind of town that Gary presented up there. We all have them in our communities, and some of us live in those towns. I'm excited to have the opportunity to present the collective work we've been doing to support investment in rural Vermont towns. I say collective because of all the work that's happened over the last few years with the MTAP program that AOA had for a couple of years, as well as the Virta work that's been happening for the last year, which was commissioned through ACT 181. So my organization, the Vermont Council on Rural Development, has been around for a third of years. We're actually the state rural development council that was created in the farm build in the '90s. After a couple of years, they didn't give us federal money anymore through USDA. So

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: we became

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: a 501c3 in about 1995, 'ninety seven. Some of you may know us. We are the community visit organization. We go to small towns all over the state. We just did our planning meeting in Brandon, which is the next town we're working in. We've been up hoping a couple times and have done the work of the community visits around the state. We, at this point, have been around for thirty years. We've done about 100 communities. So we're halfway there. We have like two thirds left

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: to go,

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: so it may be a third done.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Let's

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: see. We're also an organization that helps to build leadership capacity at the local level. We provide coaching. We started during COVID the Vermont Community Leadership Network, which offers online trainings, resources. And then we every year put on a leadership summit for community leaders and rural adult people. At the same time, we are a state and federal partnership is how we describe ourselves. Our board is made up of agency heads. So we have secretaries from different agencies on our board, as well as leaders from community development organizations like VLCT, and we've had the HDB on the board in the past and preservation trust. So we are like this partnership of people. So when we go to a community, we don't just go alone. We go with a lot of other folks. Let's see. Oh, one other thing, we're we're invited as an organization. So this lab board actually has to write us a letter and invite us to come. And we have a waiting list. We do about three community visits a year, and we have a two year wait list for those at this point. So we're pretty over, like, we talk about over prescribed programs in the state of Vermont, this is for one of them. But today I'm here to talk about the evaluation of rural technical assistance. We were one of the steering committee members and actually attended all of the meetings as that report was getting drafted, as the work was happening. And really kudos to the University of Commerce and Community Development for getting UBM involved and doing really data informed work so that it wasn't just their ideas. It validated a lot of what we already know, but it also was really effective in getting people's voices, Vermonters, to the table to what talk is happening in communities and where the barriers are and what types of solutions need to happen. And the summit was a lot of the table on regional governments. We actually had a big group of people at the summit that started thinking about that, because that was definitely one of the recommendations. All the findings from that report really resonate with VCRG and what we know. And we do have a follow-up action that this body could take, surprise. Does it involve money? Oh my God, Think it might. Well, money creates capacity, capacity comes to support this work. And so after the report came out in November, we quickly moved into action as an organization with our partners. And this is really inclusive of regional planning commissions, regional development corporations, us, the LCT, Vermont Ways of Cities and Towns, Preservation Trust. It's an inclusive group of people, LIOB, the Land, Access, and Opportunity Board. What we're asking for is, how I describe this to representative Greene, it's like a bridge right now, right? We had this MTAP money that came into the state that we were able to do a lot of great work. We were working together, we were starting to coordinate. We had this burden steering committee. So everybody was like coordinating and working together. And what we're asking for right now is a bridge to continue that work, to keep this coalition working and to provide coordinated services to towns. And then the other thing that it will do, it will help provide some navigation support, which is what towns are asking for. And the reason might not, there's a lot, it's a complex system, right? And any complex system needs people to be able to navigate their way out. But also because towns are volunteer run and somebody might be there for a little bit and then they switch and then it's a new person. So every time it's like re educating another person on like what systems and things are out there for them. And so we really see that as kind of like a role that this group of people can serve in. And then the third thing that we'd like to continue to do, because it was so effective, were these flexible grants that we were able to give to communities. AOA was just such an easy process. If somebody wanted to hire a grant writer, we could be like, yep, here's the money. Or if they wanted us to do a facilitation, we could pay. We had capacity and staff to be able to go and do that. I use Wyndham as an example. They weren't on our community visit list. It's a two year wait for our community visit. Witness a ton of 400 people and they really needed help. And we were able to use our MTAP resources to be able to give them a two step, we call it three steps like a dance. Instead of doing the big three step process, we went in and had a process to really help them identify some action items that they could take. It was the community as we're seeing a lot right now of community who had just closed their school. And we're seeing that a lot, we're getting a lot of requests from towns whose schools are closing to come

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: in and help them.

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: It's a catalyzing moment for our community. And it's an opportunity for us to be helpful, right? In helping them figure out what it is that they wanna do next. I'm totally not off script. So I I don't get any age from older, so we may, I was gonna pass them around. I think the other thing I'll just say, and I am off script, but as things and systems get more and more complex, the need to be able to support small towns is increasing. The other thing that we have been working on is civic participation, right? It's declining and how do we get our young people more involved in our communities and governance? So that's another piece of our work is like, we're always thinking about, what is it that towns We listen to what towns are telling us about their struggling with them. That's definitely another aspect of it. And so how do we build systems to support them? Dave, let me just make sure I didn't miss anything. Oh, I know what I wanted to say. This sounds ambitious, right? This one year, we will come back to you with evidence, we hope. But this is really a continuation of the work that's already been happening. And so that's why we're saying this is like bridge funding to really, so that we can get or continue to get organized. The MTAP is a two year pilot to do some of this coordinating and organizing and navigating work. And so we really want to extend, like we're trying to extend that funding to be able to contribute to that work. And this money would go not just to these CRD. So I cleared this is also gonna go to our other technical assistance providers, but mostly if we get the full five would go in small grants to communities. For your knowledge, the house did put us in their budget for $250,000 So in case you're-

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: Clearing the house for two And what was the deadline to recommend?

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: Nothing, but last year he recommended 3,000,000 to continue MTAP and it got taken out of the house. Yeah, that the MTAP program. It was ARPA money. So that was So last year there was a $3,000,000 recommend. This year we all know his ideology on the budget. And so he's not typing in, but we did get the house sees this as a need. And I think they were navigated a lot. So the fact that we're in the house budget, it was good. Yes, go ahead.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz (Member)]: So talk to us about the difference between $2.50 and 500.

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: I think the difference between $2.50, we have not done the budget for February. When we did the 500, we really thought we could probably use that 300,000 to get to towns. So maybe cut that down less. And some of it's staffing and some of it would be in grants. When we provide technical assistance, we consider that like part of the TA request, but we have not run a budget on the $2.50 yet,

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: because we're hopeful. So maybe so that's helpful

[Sen. Seth Bongartz (Member)]: for us to understand the difference.

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: Lauren might have something to say.

[Lauren Brady, Vermont Council on Rural Development]: I'm Yeah. Lauren Brady. I work for the Vermont Council on Rural Development supporting our community visit program and policy work. Our community visit program works with all of your communities. And then we try to support with follow-up technical assistance, but the community visit program itself can't sustain that. So for $250,000 we think would certainly cut the small grants to communities. We could continue a degree of coordination, which has been building up and is sort of gaining traction more and more. We could continue some small grants to communities, but it would severely limit what we're able to pass on because the coordination work takes a certain amount between the different, there are a dozen or more TA providers who are trying to work together and make sure we're providing customized, specific, coordinated support to the communities.

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: Hope that's helpful. Yeah. Yes.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz (Member)]: And so what you did in Wyndham

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Yes, a thematic of

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: exactly. Yep. Exactly. Yeah, it just gives us that capacity to provide more technical assistance that we, and I'm just saying, as we've been around for a while, right? That's other groups that we're getting a lot of And things are complicated and volunteers don't have They can't do it all. And so we're getting We're seeing an increase in the number of requests and opportunities that TAMs really need support with.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: I guess I do have a logistics follow-up question. So might, whoever it does, would be to VRCD or would it be to MTAP? So MTAP is gone. Yeah,

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: I take the house, put it in through ACCD. Okay. We do get a small grant right now from ACCD to support our community visit program, but this money would go through ACCD. So they would

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: be the community Okay. Of

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: And then they'd quote and subcontract us to do the coordinating navigation and the facilitating, which is what we do, right? That's what we do as an organization.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: I think your connection, your example of Wyndham and your connection, your comment about how you're increasingly helping towns who've had to close their school is really relevant to the broader conversation that we're having in this building. I say this with the chair of education sitting here thinking, you know, the increase in funding, we've heard this in the education conversation of we should be providing some kind of funding to tenants who are in a position where they have to close their school or merge their schools or work with the town next to them to try to figure out a

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: path forward to potentially, you know- We just met with the district yesterday. Exactly. And having met like, how do we do this? What does education look like for us?

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Exactly. And I mean, I just think in my district, the towns you've worked with, they're raw in those conversations right now. And whether they're in the future or in their past or right now happening. And I'm wondering, to justify the other two fifty, if we could make a stronger connection to that idea of you working with towns that are going through those conversations.

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: I mean, it's not just us, right? We used to be PTZ, like all of our partners are also working in those towns as well. And sometimes it's us coming in. We just did it in Roxbury, right? Right. Where we, it's a great example because it just happened. We did the community visit soon after, and there was a purchase made by the town of the school right after close. And then they created, after our community visit, they identified it as their priority. They created a school committee. And so it was, and from that, right, then bringing the resources, Now they're working with Preservation Trust and Preservation Trust took us all, them and their select board, the school committee, and on a bus tour to look at what other communities are doing with their school buildings, the middle of their town. And then They did go to Rochester, that high school there.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Yeah, their favorite school. I was there,

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: that was so cool.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: And Addison. Addison. Yeah, because so there are these towns that have been Well, working for now Ripton is going to be one and Shoreham potentially. So these towns really need help to try to figure out what to do. And there's a lot of sadness and loss that accompanies it. So just trying to help them see the possibility too. And your process is so great. I mean, I'm familiar with the work you just did, New Haven, and yeah, and they were so excited. Like, and wanted to tell me all the things that, you know, so I think that is a need that is gonna be more and more as our communities are having these really hard, really, really charged conversations and they need help getting through them. So if there's a process that already works, that's tested and yours is, I think that could helpful.

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: Yeah, and I'll just name New Haven, we were just in housing as the other one. So they identified housing and community gathering spaces. So since COVID left loneliness has been really a big thing in communities and some of them have lost their churches, their third spaces are closing. And so that's another one that's coming up.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: I'm getting some of these work.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: You sure that's on our list?

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: Yes. Yeah, we actually, we can

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: have it

[Sen. Seth Bongartz (Member)]: on when that's happened.

[Lauren Brady, Vermont Council on Rural Development]: It's on the list of places that BTI would like to work with. There's obviously a process that has to happen, but.

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: Well, yes, preservation trust, we're actually We just have some conversations happening right now. So I'll let you know if they're

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: happening when we go. Yeah, reach for us another month.

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: Yeah. I think that's a great idea. Yeah. If that's what makes the most sense.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: I mean, it's that's like yeah. That's what we're saying. Yeah. It's

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: And you break down the you you ask for $500 Can break that down for how much is for administration? How much I know you have a lot of volunteer people that work with you and your board. So do you have full time employees?

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: We're a Sabbath eight. So we do all this work with a staff of eight and you're right, we do use a lot of our board and other partners to help us facilitate when we go to communities. So the way to do broken down the 500,000 would be 30,000 for our staff to help with the navigation services, about 180 for a rural TA. So if we're gonna do a process in Reedsboro, for instance, we would have to pay our staff to do that or other TA providers that might be providing TA that don't have the flexibility in their budget. So it just provides a little bit more flexibility. And then the 300,000 is what we're identified for grants to communities. So if a community wants to work on something, we would say, here's $20,000 or you need to do something and there's no because a lot of these grants are prescribed for specific things. And

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: so it would

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: be flexible funding that goes to communities.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: Do you have a brick and mortar location that require a grant or a key?

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: Potentially, I mean, it could be a match to something. I think it'll depend. I know Newport's having a lot of conversations right now about what's happening in their downtown. We were, we actually did a movie visit with them a few years ago. So they're bringing that community vision to life right now.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: Are you asking- I'm asking where you're physically located.

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: Oh, I'm at the end of this road. I'm physically located in St. Albans those days, so that's

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: where my kids

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: and But my family the organization is right here next to Yeah, we rent a small blue house on the corner. It has a little fortune in front of it. So we're ready to

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: mount the leader. You got on donations too for-

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: Donations, foundations, we have an NBRC grant right now that came into question a couple months ago, it's still there. And so we have that for another year and a half. Yeah, we

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: have multiple funders. There's companies. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah,

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: we're any, we're scrappy. We're like any nonprofit in Vermont where we look for money everywhere. It's part of our model.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Any other questions?

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: We can. Okay. Okay.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Great. Thank you so much. Thank you.

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: Yep. Nice family.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Thank you for having us. Okay. Super. All right. Well, we have a little bit of time left. I wanted to switch to, starting to think about a letter. So I did, this is not pretty yet, but this is like a structure. So it's pretty bare bones right now. It's basically what we talked about the other day. I was doing this weather late, I didn't get the, to look up the amount of money that was in 02/19 or 02/23. Senator Hardy, do you remember how much money it was

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: in 02/19?

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: I think it was 35,000. It was a tiny little amount.

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: Oh, okay. Oh, okay. Yeah.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Okay. It was, I think it was 25 for the department and 10 for

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Oh wait, whoever collaborates. Yes. Department and then time for the collaboration. Sounds But the center of equity, depend on Yeah, I'm fine. Yeah, that sounds right. And then 02/23, or yeah, 02/23, was a study, I'll have to look up if there was a fiscal note for that, that might have some estimation. This was the water? Yep.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: And the first one is Saltville, 218? Yeah, correct?

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: That's right, yep, that's Salt. Maybe I should put in a little note, like the short names for each of these. February, yes. Yes, I've got salt in at 200. Oh, I'm sorry. Here you go.

[Unidentified committee staff (legislative counsel/analyst)]: So it looks like beef before the Senate script, Vermont you you described it for money. Yes. Before they script it, it was 15,000 with general fund two efficiency Vermont for the NAD program. Then we also had 150,000.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: That's the original bill. That's as introduced. That's what's introduced. You got to do as passed from our committee because there was not 100 and Yeah, 50 because stripped it. I made sure it's 35 ks.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: We Yeah.

[Unidentified committee staff (legislative counsel/analyst)]: Go time and I'll apply the calendar.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: So I was just also filling in this chart with what the asks were. I'm not, you know, not to say that that's what we're deciding to do. The other thing that I want to note is Senator Pritchard has indicated that for anything that we put on our list, he wants to know the priority order. So, yes, right? So I've listed the last sentence in this, the blurb at the top says the proposals below are in our priority order. I didn't want to make judgment call about this. This is, yeah, I did put our bills at

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: the top and I listed them in numerical order just to try to be,

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: you know, your own business. And then I did zero organization on the things below.

[Unidentified committee staff (legislative counsel/analyst)]: So we were 25,000 general funds with UPS and 10,000 to the climate and combatants. Okay. Both in the general. Okay.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Have $2.23, and that one might not have an amount of money explicitly listed for 02/23, so I think we'd have to get an estimate. Is there a fiscal, there should be

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: a fiscal note for it

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: that would say. Do you remember if there was, we've made a because I don't think I asked for

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: a fiscal note on 02/23.

[Unidentified committee staff (legislative counsel/analyst)]: I got

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: one. We did. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Great.

[Unidentified committee staff (legislative counsel/analyst)]: 02/20.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz (Member)]: It's all the only thing in there in the expense is premiums

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Yes. For lettuce. Yeah. For for

[Sen. Seth Bongartz (Member)]: the For lettuce or for a page.

[Unidentified committee staff (legislative counsel/analyst)]: For the physical that we got on

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: our version of $3,114

[Unidentified committee staff (legislative counsel/analyst)]: for the second. 14. For a pretty.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Okay. That is helpful. 2019 was 25,000 for Department of Public Service to extend their study, then 2004 Climate Action Center, collaborating with them. Then, what I have at least as the ask for conservation districts was to match the house 9 12. In Maranana, that's 9 Yeah, 912, which is broken down into 612 base, 301 time, it matches, that would match the house.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: And then

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: VHCV was 37,600,000.0 from PTT.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: Yep.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: And they also had 2,800,000 in the capital bill.

[Unidentified committee staff (legislative counsel/analyst)]: Right.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: And that also matched the

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: house and the governor. That was stupid.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Well, I'm not sure.

[Unidentified committee staff (legislative counsel/analyst)]: I think the governor just let the, you know, let the property tax flow.

[Gary Holloway, Downtown Program Manager, Dept. of Housing & Community Development (ACCD)]: Yeah. Yeah. Know what to

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: do with the capital.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Don't know what they can do with the capital. I think I remember them saying that it was as recommended that that everything in there was in the government's budget, you know,

[Unidentified committee staff (legislative counsel/analyst)]: It was One time.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Don't recall that that was for. It was just part of their Early. Clean water. Oh, yes. That's right.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Was a piece of the dry water. Clean water projects? Yes. I

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: am anticipating that we will hear more about the Farm Security Fund actually Tuesday. So putting a pin in that one. Remote Rural Technical Assistance. Again, I'm just putting in like what was the ask, right? So, 500,000. But this would really be for ACCD for this purpose. And we can hear more about these other items. I did add one, I know there's this other bill seven forty that's on which our I think we're going walk through tomorrow. I think that's what's on the list, but anyway, know that there's money associated with that. So I just made a note of that. Dam safety? No, no. So there's, well, we talked about dam safety, the dam safety bill yesterday. Inventory bill? It hits this greenhouse gas inventory bill. It's the one that I H740? Yep. Yep. That's H740. And then the dam safety bill is H778, which we have not taken up yet. But we'll do that on Tuesday.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: Yes, 07:40, walk to the gym. Yep.

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD)]: Okay.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: And I think we might get one other ask about a program that has to do with forestry.

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: So I think the

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: The slow slow can, yeah. Which means, yeah. And we did also get an official word from Senator Pershlich that he wants these by, not tomorrow, but next Friday. So,

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: have a

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: little bit more time, getting to it, but I'm

[Sen. Ruth Hardy (Member)]: glad that we've started this process.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Yes, okay. Okay, great. So, again, she's thinking about what we might do for priority order.

[Michelle Monroe, Vermont Association of Conservation Districts (VACD)]: She makes it even trickier, but there we are.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Any thoughts or comments folks want to share at this point? No, it's fine.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: All right, I can start. Okay,

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: great. Senator Williams, anything you wanna say?

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: No, ma'am.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Okay. All right, super. Then with that, we will adjourn for the day. Thank you.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz (Member)]: Oops, sorry.