Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Energy and it is Wednesday, January 28 and today is a housing day. So we're going to spend some time chatting about housing. Gonna actually turn it over to Senator Bongartz to do a little further intro.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: Yeah, thank you. So I kind of put this day together the chair. Really, we have done, like in the last five years, we've done thirty years of work on housing and everything from the Mac with all of the changes to municipal zoning that really disallows some practices that were making it hard to get multi unit housing or other building downtowns, shelters. We did that, the divide right for housing. And then we did the Plexus Anywhere. We really set the stage for housing. Then in the meantime, we put in about $700,000,000 for housing over the last five years for partnering for infrastructure and support housing. Conveyant program and then with the fact that 50 past two years ago, where it really are in the process of, of course, we do it with the temporary exemptions, then the longer term exemptions we fairly one AM and BO as we said, we going to reduce the funding in those areas. We have taken huge net ground. And so if it's worth stepping back a little bit and seeing what exactly how we can now, like, it's still going to take time and still have the problem with expenses. The biggest is the biggest issue of all in terms of materials and labor, but we need to say we can do around the edges, not more more than around the edges since we can do fundamentally all of that, but and then it's the ao two bonus project. Actually because the worst that ish, it will be difficult. It shouldn't be of the actual cost with the government. So there's just so much going on. It just really made sense. Like, the appeals reform that you can't be a long term in the area. That's why they've been testing in browsing just because it's fully loaded with public health and the government building. Sometimes I think we haven't really stepped back and aggregated all of that progress and have people really understand how it's actually done and how much of a difference it's making the student that they come to. So that's what one of the here today is, what's happening there, what's happening to the that they come to.

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: I'm Yeah, absolutely. Okay.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: And so with that, we are going to start this morning with Nate Bongallari.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: Did I say anything?

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Yes, did say that. Yeah.

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: Okay, very good. Deputy Commissioner, welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: For the record, I'm Nate Bongartz, the Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Housing and Community Development. Commissioner Farrell sends his regards. He was tied up today. So I'm pitching for him. I did some slides and luckily Senator Bongartz did a lot of review there. So I can tighten up my remarks a little bit. But I just wanted to focus in on reviewing as the Senator said the last few years and talking about maybe where we're headed or what we're thinking about heading here. So to start, I wanted to I just wanted to talk about some of the data that's available for housing. Folks are interested, housingdata.org. It is compiled and kept up by the Vermont Housing and Finance Agency. There's any number of dashboards you can dig in there. You can toggle between years and regions of the state. So I just offer that as you're looking at what's happening in your regions. There's great data there. Some of the data that we have put in on over the years and have has helped inform some programs we brought to bear. I thought I'd just start with a few very wide range. One is the age of our housing stock. We have one of the oldest housing stocks in the country with 25% of our housing built before 1940. That number is around 12% nationally. So we go to pretty old housing stock and you'll see on the slide we estimate around five hundred six hundred units are falling into disrepair or offline each year. So even as we're making gains, those are we're also seeing housing loss. The other thing we look at a lot is the mismatch and the type of housing. And I think some

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: of the solutions you're

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: gonna hear about later today are just trying to address these things. But if you look at where on the right side for the new folks, those are the types of households that are out there. So a lot of one and two person households are now dominating the landscape. And then the other chart is our

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: house of stock.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: So a lot of three and four bedroom in the house of stock. So when we look at our housing stock, our downtowns, our village centers, how can we try to right size that to match the reality of what housing people are working with. And then you may have seen this before as well. This is all all kind of US census data that we're pulling from here. This is the building permit data that's released annually from a high of around 5,000 units a year were permitted in the eighties. You see, we dropped and we haven't made that back. We aren't back to where we were in the eighties now. With all the investment we've had, you'll see from 2020 on that is starting to bend back upwards up over 2,600 permits in 2024. Now I'll talk about this a little bit later, but permits doesn't mean something gets built either. So I'm going to talk a little bit about why we're a new tool we have that's trying to track in more real time housing that's being developed and where it's being As Senator Bongartz said, we've invested 700,000,000 in housing since the pandemic started that's CARES Act funding, ARPA funding, a variety of different units have come online somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,000 units in that time with that investment. One thing I'll say is when the federal money came it gave us a chance to innovate and think of new ways to do things with money that we hadn't had before. And that's where you started to see programs like MERD, the mobile home investment program, improvement and repair program, VHIP. We were able to get some seed capital to see if those would actually work as programs. I'm going to talk a little bit more about each later. Homes for all you're gonna hear about today as well. Another program that was born out of some of that influx of money that we're now trying to keep rolling. And then VHFA had a few middle income programs that was trying to address not just the most affordable housing but is there a middle market of housing that

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: would help some stuff.

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: Do have a question here Bennington?

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: So back to your chart previous slide. Yeah. If you started in the 80s you see where that line starts from way up on top why why don't we go back there and start with them? What were we doing back in the 70s? Well they're working so well now we're in the we're in the dip.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Yeah I'd say there's a lot of different theories you could point to there but obviously Acting 50 comes into play. That probably takes a long time to implement. I wasn't around back then. So I I Acting 50 was

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: not not the issue. We had people who were building houses. You know, while while the repercussions from Acting 50 were bad. While the towns to get all ahead of it, they they divided themselves up into two acre towns, and there were a lot of companies out there building kits for people to actually build their own houses on those parcels that they have. You know I think we really need to go back and look at that 70s building cycle. Yeah

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: yes certainly that had some things to do with it. Think there's market forces over the years, recessions, booms, busts that all play into that. You're also gonna hear today a little bit about a new program. Jeff Dube and Ben Winrich from our team are here to talk about bringing back that concept of can we have pre designed homes that people can plug and play and try to accelerate. So you'll hear more about.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: Just can't, it's gonna be out. It's also interesting. It can't all be broken because you had that big spike in 'three, 'five. So it's a couple, as you say, Mark, it was a sort of big part of what's going on. A lot of things in the gut, yeah.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Yeah, and then the two thousand and nine

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: economic crisis that was driven by housing issues in 2016, so that thing took a huge hit.

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: From the crash there. Yeah.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: Thank you.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: So our investment also helped with things like brownfield remediation, healthy homes which helped manufacture home communities update their septic systems. TIF came into play in a lot of communities and I'll talk about CHIP in a little bit. And then of course, as Senator pointed out, these various acts of the last few years have been building on each other, building momentum, creating opportunity, trying to help local municipalities figure out how to build more densely. So BHIP, just an overview of this. This is kind of all iterations of the program. We've had many tranches of funding that have come through this, but essentially we're looking at around eleven hundred, twelve hundred units funded, 45,000,000 total investment. I like to point out that it's also the property owner has invested another 43,000,000. So it's almost an even match in terms of the state investment and then the property owner investment. The average award is 39,000 landlords can get up to 50,000 per unit but we think it's a very cost effective way to bring units online quickly. I would point out that for the last few years the governor's budget has called for making this a permanent program that's being asked for again this year. Question here, yes.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: Thank you and I think you were in the meeting with me and others from the Addison District about this program and others. I mean, as you can see from this map, it's not working the same in all counties and Addison County and Orange and Lemoyle, obviously Essex is not working as well for every county. And I think that we really, probably not this in these jurisdiction, but we need to be digging into why it's not working well and how we can make modifications for the program, because in Addison County, we had seven units last year, and that was it. It just doesn't work for the market and the type of housing stock in my district and others. Can see, Memorial is way down there. And so I know a lot of people love Beacon, but it needs to be really addressed to make sure it's a statewide program, not just for some counties.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: That's fair. And I think there are regional partners on the ground that we can work with. I don't think I was in that meeting, so I didn't necessarily hear exactly.

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: A lot of people say

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: I'm sure

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: they're there.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: It gets hard when it's a Hollywood square.

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: Exactly.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: But yeah, there's regional partners that help us execute these programs on the ground. So, we would be committed to engaging and trying to make sure that we're addressing things across the state. I do think uptake in Rutland and Caledonia, I mean, number of units that have fallen into disrepair in those counties, I think is higher than the other counties, but that's not to say we can't strengthen the regional partnerships to make sure that the landlords know this is an available program to them.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: Yeah, I think that, sorry, I think it also needs, we need to think, look at the whole concept of what's a landlord. Maybe there are people who would like to be landlords or could be landlords that aren't currently landlords. So they have an older house, it's a big house that they don't have kids in anymore. They're not currently landlords, but maybe they could renovate their house to become landlords. And those people currently, I don't think are eligible. So tweaking the program to make it work in all counties.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: It's always basically my fault, because I've got a constituent who's got a duplex that got vines growing up on the side of them. Said, you know, to be that money available, why don't you guys fix this one and put it on the market? No. That's no sons, and he he doesn't wanna go into a grand. So you can't make your money worse. You can't make people who own houses take advantage of the program too. Thank

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: you.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Yeah, I appreciate this feedback. Thank you. So the MRRR program I wanted to touch on quickly. This actually was base funded last year which we were excited about. This helps manufactured home communities. It actually helps people stay in their homes. So helps with foundation repairs or installations, things like leaks and roofs and windows, small grants to homeowners and park owners that help them stay in their homes and keep their homes livable. So we're excited that this is now a base funded program for the department. Senator Bongartz laid this out. I know it's a lot, but it's just trying to show that since 2013, the department and the legislature have been trying to think about land use zoning, how to make this all work. Going back to 2013 with our neighborhood development areas, which started was kind of the first easing of Act two fifty of communities could prove that they were ready to build in certain areas. And I won't take a ton of time talking about all the different legislation that the Senator talked about. I wanted to touch on the EO quickly. I know that's on people's minds. The governor's executive order on housing. I think Wetlands and Energy Code obviously got a lot of the headlines. So rulemaking is underway on those. Not a lot to update there, but I just thought it would be good to highlight some of the other stuff that was in there, including permitting timelines and fees. We're working on how developers could defer fee payments until a project is underway. So we're trying to work across the enterprise right now to make that work for folks. The permitting reform and housing task forces, this is the permit modernization, looking at all the permitting across the state and how can we prioritize housing and streamline it. The agency of digital services is doing that work. A report has been issued to the governor. They have testified in house energy. So I can't dive too deep into where that's at, but the work is underway and there's a big group of people working on that in the administration. State owned lands, there was a recent article in '78 on this, but the various agencies have turned to DHCD, turned over spreadsheets of state land that could be usable for housing. It's mainly AOT and BGS in that. And now that group is trying to determine where to go next with that process. So that's underway. We extended the Brownfields, the BERA program, which is the economic revitalization partnership between ACCD and DEC. So that has been extended. So when we have these high priority projects and there's funding available, we can expedite those kinds of projects. And then on the appeals front, there are recommendations to the judiciary. I don't have a ton of updates on that at this point, but just trying to show that there was a lot in there. Energy zone things and it's all under work, in process, underway.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Before you leave that, just want to note, have a lot

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: of thoughts

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: about the executive order, which I'm just going to put a pin in right now, not going to express those, but lots of thoughts about that.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: And I think if there are specific items, we can have, we can identify the right people to dive a

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: little bit deeper into your order. Okay, thank you. So

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: statewide regional housing targets. This also came out of the two different acts. The home act asked us along with our friends at the RPCs to develop statewide and regional housing targets for 2025 to 2030. And then act 181 asked our department to develop metrics for measuring our progress towards those targets. So I'll start with the development of the targets. We worked again with BHFA, Vermont Housing Finance Agency to develop these targets. You'll see below we had kind of a lower range and an upper range of what we would be looking for the way we're kind of looking at it is the lower range is kind of our status quo if we just want to kind of have the state say as it's going right now kind of have very low vacancy rates you know workforce not able to find housing, that's kind of that up on the higher end would be starting to make movement where vacancy rates are dropping. There's more opportunity in communities for people to find places to live. I will also just note, because it gets asked this, the math or the methodology here envisioned that seasonal and second homes will remain at 15%. It's about at 15% now. So these numbers envisioned that remaining. This isn't just primary residence and lease targets. You'll see, I mean you'll see right now we're around 2,000 permits a year to hit these numbers it's we're going to need between 3,207 homes a year. So we are lagging on pace to kind of reach these targets.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Yes, good.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: What kind of population growth for you this assumes in these

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Great question. It is noted down below. Yeah so the lower targets assume that are so not to get too weedy and I don't want to say things wrong but the lower targets look at the growth from 2020 to 2023 which we saw an uptick in migration due to the pandemic. So we just carried that out through 2030. 2050 is a little bit different because in the 2040 range, our population starts to decline, our growth declines. So we looked at the assumptions on these upper targets of if migration were to grow as it historically did versus during pandemic times. I know that was weedy, I'm not very clear, but we try to account for being optimistic in the higher targets that our population will grow. Okay, it's mid time

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: to foot.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Okay, thank you.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Another question here. And what do you mean, because it says that

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: over on the left, three one hundred and between three thousand one hundred sixty and six thousand eight eighty homes per year, how are you defining homes?

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: That would be, so that was the rationale for putting seasonal second and like summer cottage homes in these numbers so that would include all types

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: of homes. But is a three bedroom house the equivalent of a one bedroom apartment? Yes, a unit, a housing unit. Okay, okay, so because there's a really big difference between those two things. Correct,

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: we were looking at housing units that would be needed across all types. Okay. It

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: doesn't, but if you're not, if you're including a one bedroom apartment as the same as a three bedroom house, One could potentially house one or two people, the other could have housed three or five people or something like that. They're not the same terms of how many people you can house.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Yeah, I agree with what you're saying. That was not contemplated in these targets.

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: All right, let's keep me, Okay. Nikki.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: I say I have like three minutes left, so I'm gonna go really. The legislation also said that as the RBCs are developing their future land use area maps, which they are doing now and Catherine is going to speak to. They in each town, they take that regional target. I guess I should, these are RPC regions that are listed in this blue chart, not counties. So then each RPC region goes into each town, takes that regional number and breaks it down per municipality. So each municipality will have a target that they'll be assigned through this mapping process. We had no tool in existence that could real time tell us where houses are being built. So we worked with BCGI to try to develop a dashboard of sorts that could kind of be as close to real time as we could get it to where are things getting built and what types of things are getting built single family homes versus multi family homes. This dashboard was developed using E911 data so when a unit gets developed it gets assigned an E911 point. The back end of E911 gets shipped into this dashboard and these things pop up. They have what's called a development site versus an active site. So we can see when something is planned and then when something is turned on or built. It's not perfect, we're working on it. We've also got mass appraisal data software that VCGI has been able to plug into the back end of. They're trying to figure out if we could more accurately find housing units or confirm housing units through that data source as well. So it's an ongoing project. It is live. I can share the link with you folks if you want to zoom around. You see you can also once the town level targets are in you'll be able to zoom into the town. It'll tell you how many targets you need on the left or how many units are in the target on the left and what you want to piece to build based on historical I just want

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: to say, I think this is great and I really appreciate all of your department's efforts to have actual, real, publicly available data. It's really helpful when you're trying to solve a policy program, a problem, and I wish other areas have similarly good data

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: and to tackle that. I would love that.

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: I would send it to the committee.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Yes. I would love. We're excited to keep making it more accurate. It's going to take a little while to, and there's actually a reporting function. So if you zoom in on a dot and you know something about it, that's not, doesn't show up there, you can report it to BCGI. Cool. And then they can monitor things out. So where are we going next? I'm literally out of time. You're going to hear a lot about the homes for all. Just we published a toolkit to help kind of break down for developers that are interested in kind of get into development, kind of get started that was published in March '24. Ben and Jeff will get into more after this. I don't want to steal their thunder but we're very excited about this project and we think it builds on everything that you folks have been working on in the legislature and we've been working on in your department. And then finally there is a bill I just wanted to mention it it's in this committee S two sixty seven or it was referred to this committee. This has some of the priorities of the department within it. There is some AC-one 181 stuff in there, but it's nothing you haven't heard before. So I won't go down that road. But I did just want to say, as you hear about eight zero two homes, we think it could be a good opportunity to take these designs you're going see later this morning and make them buy rights statewide so that communities, if you are building to this spec and this design, the community will just say yes and avoid some of the costly delays that happen. So it's phased in that we would let this pilot that Jeff's gonna talk about play out and then we'd be able to maybe go statewide once the pilot communities have said, hey, is working or not. And then the final thing is just incorporating the housing targets and municipal plans. The idea there is that a town would say, we can't meet this target. We can meet this target and here's how we're gonna meet it. Or we can't meet this target and here's why we can't meet it. And that just needs to be part of the town plan so that we really want to make sure these targets are aligning from the town to the region to the state and we're all speaking the same language and using the same data. So that's also in that bill in your community now. And that'll do it for me. Great,

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: super, thank you so much.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Thank you for

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: having me. Yeah, absolutely.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Okay, so we're going to move now to the RPC perspective and Ms. Demetriq, I'm wondering, I'm sorry, are you presenting separately from Devin Geary or are you? Devin's here. Devin

[Catherine Demetriuk (Northwest Regional Planning Commission)]: is being Zoomed and I'll be doing most of the presenting and Devon will be available.

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: Okay. Okay. Good

[Devin Neary (Rutland Regional Planning Commission)]: morning all. Sorry, I can't be there in person today, but thanks for having us.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: No worries. Thank you for joining us.

[Catherine Demetriuk (Northwest Regional Planning Commission)]: So thank you very much for having us here. As you noted, I'm Catherine Demetriuk from Northwest Regional Planning Commission. And with me is Devin New York, I'm Rutland Regional Planning Commission joining via Zoom. And we wanted to take a few minutes today at your request to talk a little bit about what the Regional Planning Commissions have been doing to implement Act 101. And we'll also touch base on the housing targets that Nate mentioned, as well as a quick review to what we did with the housing navigator funding program that was included with the form of Act two. So act 181 required all regional planning commissions to update their regional plans. So we are in the process of developing 11 new regional plans. They will address housing more specifically that will address tier one exemptions from Act two fifty for housing, and will really align plan growth areas at the local, regional and the state level through the regional plans and states designation program. The Mayor's Review Board is in charge of now approving our regional plans and that process is ongoing. We have a deadline by the end of this calendar year for all of us to have our regional plans updated. Right now we are on track to meet that. Act 181 included several new regional plan requirements. From a process perspective, the municipal engagement and public participation sections were really beefed up with more detail and more requirements and more expectations for the regional planning commissions. The purposes of the regional plans were expanded to include these housing targets, climate mitigation, climate resilience, and considering impacts on environmental benefits and burdens from an environmental justice perspective. And then the new element was a future land use map. All regional plans previously did have future land use maps, just like your local plans do. What Act 181 did was required all of the regions to use the same future land use areas. So when we're done, you'll be able to knit together a statewide future land use plan that was built from the bottom up, which is very different than this state land use map that was repealed when active 15 was first passed, which was a top down on one person. So same result, but better process. Regional plans aren't just the future land use path. So they include goals and policies in all of these planning areas that you see here. We require to really combine considerations for all of these policy goals to develop the overall vision of the regional plan. And that vision also helps to inform the future land use areas. I noted that we're on schedule to meet our December deadline. As you can see on Rutland, Northwest, Chittenden and Lemoyle have already submitted our draft regional plans to the Land Use Review Board. The process does require a preliminary review. So the land use review board can give us any potential issues that we might have to full approval later on. And then the remaining regional planning commissions are scheduled to submit their plans through the rest of this spring, summer and early fall. So if you're in a region where you haven't heard as much from your regional planning commission as say another region, it could be because they're later on in the schedule. So just a quick review of the new framework of Act 181, our regional plans and our future land use maps at the regional level now have greater efforts

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: than they did before.

[Catherine Demetriuk (Northwest Regional Planning Commission)]: Once our plans are approved by the land use review board, two things happen. The state designation program, which used to be a town by town application process is now set in place by our regional maps. So once our regional plans are approved, the designated areas where our communities can access benefits and incentive programs for development at the state level, those will be set by the maps in our region. The second thing that happens is actually 50 jurisdiction changes in several growth areas, which I'll talk about in a minute. If a municipality chooses to opt in, the select board votes to do that or the legislative body, then you don't need to go through Act two fifty if you're building 50 housing units, less than 50 housing units on 10 acres or less. So basically in these growth areas, it puts housing on far with commercial development, which you can build up acres to

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: in these areas without going through active 50 already.

[Catherine Demetriuk (Northwest Regional Planning Commission)]: So ACT 181 has a lot of changes and the responsibilities for jurisdiction are really split between the RPCs and the LERB. And we just want to take a minute to really review that. So the regional planning commissions will map these tier one growth areas, these areas that are eligible for different Act two fifty jurisdiction or housing. They don't impact any local regulations. They don't supersede any local regulations. They don't change any other state permitting processes. Tier three and rural are both managed by the Land Use Review Board and those are separate and distinct from the regional planning process. And then tier two is what's left and that is the status quo and that doesn't change. So there's a real difficulty between what the regional planning commissioners and regional plans do and what the LRRR is responsible for implementing under equity. The future land use categories we're all required to use are listed here. CFO are left of the screen, but ones that are eligible for the different active duty jurisdiction for housing and a designation program are downtown centers, village centers, main growth areas and village areas. So that basically encompasses the real compact downtown areas and village centers, as well as the surrounding growth areas that help keep those areas vital and provide areas for housing help support housing development that helps support the centers. Here's a couple of examples of maps. You can see they are not zoning maps. These are really based on conditions on the ground. They're based on the statutory criteria. They're based on local plans and they're based on regional goals. We even are using the same colors. So when they all come together, they will also look the same. I know, we worked really closely together. This was a great group project. You know, usually group projects get a bad name. This one was a really good group

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: project. So

[Catherine Demetriuk (Northwest Regional Planning Commission)]: all the regions are going through this process. We'll all have maps that look like this. And I wanna just zoom in on our region in particular, to give you a flavor of what the exemption and the designation program areas look like in terms of scale. So this is a map of Franklin and Grand Isle Counties. And what you can see is the purple ish to the pink colors on here. These are the areas that are eligible for the Act two fifty jurisdiction change. All said and done in our region, about 2.1% of our land area is eligible for this change in Act two fifty jurisdiction. So if our plan is approved by the Land Use Review Board, as we have proposed, these areas that you see here, you can really see their concentrated development areas will be where you would have a different Act two fifty jurisdiction. So we're not talking about huge wide swaths of areas. I think the regional planning commissions are all doing an excellent job of making sure we're managing our mapping process so that we are not encouraging sprawl, but we're really focusing on Vermont's traditional pattern of development with our compact areas surrounded by our open space.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: So just a question on that. So the 2.1%, I assume it also includes areas that might be tier 1A. You're not separating out tier 1A as a group of two or three because that sort of includes.

[Catherine Demetriuk (Northwest Regional Planning Commission)]: It is inclusive and there are probably, I think two communities in our region that might be eligible for tier 1A and may choose to apply separately, but that's not, we want to support them, but we don't get to make that decision.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: Gotcha. Yeah.

[Catherine Demetriuk (Northwest Regional Planning Commission)]: And then I just wanted to include this as well, this is the local and regional housing targets that we are required to do. And Nate went through this a lot, so I won't talk about it in much detail, but I will just note that in addition to taking these numbers and bringing them down to the local level, we are also required to set targets for the different housing types in response to your question. And we really, there's limited data at a community level when you talk about housing types, just because of the size of population we're talking about, but at a regional scale, we're really able to take a look at the data and show, for example, in Regular and Grand Isle Counties, 60% of our household growth has been single person households, 70% of our new homes have been single family standalone, three of them are better at So there has been this real mismatching. So when we have set these targets, we were able to really think about how we, how would our targets correct for that and try to turn the tide. We don't control what it gets built, but we can at least with these targets and with these local targets and the type, the targets by type, we can really set the stage for what the need is to help inform local decisions and really help policy makers and decision makers

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: move forward. This is where this stuff goes back into the home act where you said that if you're in the downtown and that's the new board, you must allow multifamily housing, where before it was often not allowed. So a huge change that really can Rutland's

[Catherine Demetriuk (Northwest Regional Planning Commission)]: Yeah, I think

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: That direction is probably not worth it.

[Catherine Demetriuk (Northwest Regional Planning Commission)]: The Home Act definitely set a really good foundation for that because the water and sewer areas not always, but primarily aligned with these growth areas that we are aligned in our future land use maps and the Home Act already then has said a state energy say minimum five units an acre and multifamily has to be allowed. And so I think that really will help ensure that at least the stage is set to enable the denser multifamily development path. Go ahead.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you can answer this, but you said obviously you can't require anybody to build any type of housing, but I'm wondering how much interaction you're having or anybody in training with local development review boards. And I asked because there was a development just proposed in one of my towns and there was a big conversation about it as there always is. And a lot of it was around whether the units that were being proposed were the right kind of units. And I didn't go to the DRB meetings. I didn't have time. I had to stay out of local decision making, but wonder if DRBs are being informed and trained on these targets and what kind of housing is necessary. So

[Catherine Demetriuk (Northwest Regional Planning Commission)]: I would say for development review boards relating to the targets specifically, probably not yet, unless they're involved in the planning discussion. Many communities, such as Laurel, the development of New York and planning commissioner and city people.

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: So we would met with them

[Catherine Demetriuk (Northwest Regional Planning Commission)]: to talk about the housing targets, but- I do, it's tough. I know, I know, do think a couple of things I'll say on that is I think that's next, more education about that. Regional planning commissions meet their development leaders to do trainings all the time. And as we update our annual refresher training for development review board, the planning commissions, housing targets will be part of that conversation. And most of us do that training in the spring after your appointments are made. And then one thing I will note in hindsight, I think was missing from the Home Act that did these requirements that you mentioned, is that nobody owns education that followed it. Yeah. And so we had all of this great legislation to find perspective, mine was great, did supersede local regulations, but no one was in charge of making sure those changes were understood and implemented at the local level. Regional planning commissions accepted and done a lot of that, but nobody in particular called it. And so I think in the future, if there are far other changes like that, making sure there's ownership of the follow-up is really important. Devin, did you wanna add anything on that?

[Devin Neary (Rutland Regional Planning Commission)]: No, I think you summarized it super well. And I agree with Catherine that likely that training would be sort of following adoption to ensure that, you know, nothing changes and we're focusing on, the plan as it is, adopted and completed. Yeah.

[Catherine Demetriuk (Northwest Regional Planning Commission)]: And so I touched on this, but because of the expanded requirements for engagement, we have really, it's been really fun to go out and meet with all of the select boards and all the planning commissions and multiple times I went to one select board, it's happened in my hometown, I went six different times to just talk about tier one B to help them make the decision, do we opt in or do we not opt in? And so as of this county, which I think was in December, we've been to almost 500 funding commissions like Barton's across the state and have really focused on this bottom up approach to developing our mutual communities. In addition, we've had really broad public outreach. It hasn't been perfect. We're never gonna talk to everybody, but we have, through the different outreach events that the regional planning commissions have had, we've talked to people who never would have been engaged in the future land use map or regional planning decision making before. So has been really fun and really rewarding. And as you can see, we've had over seven fifty events statewide, by different regional planning commissions. And then I think having us all need to do it at the same time has really helped to build the momentum and the knowledge across the state all at once, which has been really helpful too. And then this got out of order somehow, sorry about that. But going back to the tier 1B, this is, I mentioned for our region, it was about 2% of state of our land use area. And this is the totals for all the RPCs that you can just look at. And you can see overall, it's just about, just over 2%.

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: And that would be eligible for the

[Catherine Demetriuk (Northwest Regional Planning Commission)]: different jurisdiction. Now I'm gonna jump to regional housing navigators really quick to try to get you back on time. This was included in the Home Act. Regional Planning Commission's got, I think it was either 300 or 350,000, I can't remember which statewide to do regional housing navigation work. And each region was able to dedicate a portion of a staff person or hire, in some cases, a new temporary staff person, part time to work on this. And we did a variety of projects and programs state wide that are listed there. Many of us worked together to build on each other's work. In Northwest, we did an accessory dwelling unit pilot where we provided matching grants for homeowners who wanted to go through the accessory dwelling unit pilot program and the accessory dwelling unit design. We provided plans for architectural services, and we helped them navigate the local planning and the permitting processes. We started with 10 who were super interested and we lost all but three because of water and wastewater issues, which made the project too expensive. So I say that only because I think that's partial answer to the knee uptake rates in some of the regions where the soils aren't as good. Because if you have to redo your wastewater septic system, even if you're not adding a new bedroom, it makes the project often cost prohibitive. So we have four that are moving to completion and three of the four are for childcare reasons. So parents are building an accessory dwelling unit so that they can move in, their kids can take the main house and they can take care of the babies. So it was a tie into childcare, which was a very interesting result for us. And Devin, do you wanna touch on your housing resource guide?

[Devin Neary (Rutland Regional Planning Commission)]: Sure, yeah. We took a different approach in utilizing our, housing navigator funds, and one of the main focal points for us were was just aggregating, all the resources available to potential developers with an eye really to our smaller scale developers, looking at those duplexes to four plexes who are really trying to enter in the space that maybe have not been before. So we collated this, the guide, and we've heard directly from several developers in the region that without this guy they wouldn't have pursued multi housing units, which is really exciting. So we've seen, probably about 10 to 15 units come online that they say were directly related to resources listed in this guide. The other sort of area we, focused on was, standing up the Rutland City's Mayor's Housing Task Force. He's laid out a really aggressive housing target for the city. You know, we're still chipping away at that, but that's been awesome. And you know it'd be great in the future if ever an opportunity to see dedicated funds again, because it is a challenge to keep these really intensive programs and projects going without that dedicated funding. You know, we're sort of pulled in many different directions with our general fund. So it was really helpful having that dedicated funding.

[Catherine Demetriuk (Northwest Regional Planning Commission)]: Thanks, Devin. And then for future issues, I wanted to mention water wastewater. This is an ongoing issue where we do need more infrastructure in our state. We need to be able to upgrade our infrastructure. The regional planning commissions are in conversations with DEC, the new commissioner and staff, which we started late this fall to really talk about the system for bringing water and wastewater projects online to see if we can add some streamlining to that process so that they can go from seven to twelve year projects to maybe three to seven year projects, that would be great. So we're ongoing work in that area. Then just a quick note of issues to consider. Moving forward, these are issues that have either been identified by regional planning commissions or that we have heard through our public engagement. We really in title 24 could eventually use some clarifications to the different future land use areas, as well as providing a shorter path to doing regional amendments and tier one B changes. Right now it's about an eight to nine month process to just go through the adoption. We think it would be helpful to clarify some of the designation benefits in the future. For an appeals perspective, we're agnostic on where the appeals go, but do think there could definitely be some work on what is appealed and how that appeal is heard and some limits on discovery and the issuance of starting de novo in the appeal process. There's a draft bill that representative Olson is working on related to water and wastewater that we think has merit related to both infrastructure and the water and wastewater rules. And that ties back to our ADU experience where we had people drop out because of that. And then we do think that there continue to be streamlining opportunities in the state's preservation office in DC. And then we heard in multiple regions

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: heard in

[Catherine Demetriuk (Northwest Regional Planning Commission)]: our public meetings, a real concern about the future of Vermont housing if private corporations are allowed to do the level of investment that's happening in other states.

[Paul Conner (Planning & Zoning Director, City of South Burlington)]: Great.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Super, thank you. And you said these, I just checked, you've sent these to. Super. Well, thank you so much. Any other questions?

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: Stone checks.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: I love how excited you are about this. So I love Erin and your presentation.

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: Like that it's a fun group project.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: Especially as a smart girl. Room projects aren't always that.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Right, well thank you so much. Okay, all right, so we're going to move to

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Connor,

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: welcome. Good morning.

[Paul Conner (Planning & Zoning Director, City of South Burlington)]: Thanks everybody for taking opportunity to speak.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: My name is Paul Bongartz, I'm

[Paul Conner (Planning & Zoning Director, City of South Burlington)]: the Planning Zoning Director for the City of South Burlington, been in that role since 2008. Prior to that time, it was good to see Devin there and see some maps that showed Rutland County, the Regional Planning Commission for six years before that. I'm here to sort of round out the conversation and speak from a local perspective about Act 181 housing, how it's all been tying together, at least from our perspective, how we've been deploying it. So we were fortunate on the timing that first of all, that this coincided all this work of Act 47, Home Act, Act 181 was right in line with when we were updating our city plan, and it was a really transformative city plan for us. So we were already oriented to be thinking along these lines, and this really gave a boost. At the local level, we've organized our city plan around four key principles of climate resiliency, inclusive, being inclusive, fair and just being people oriented with sustainable built environment and being collaborative and engaged, which means both locally, regionally and statewide. So that is an important component for us. And these key principles, we aspire to hold them all in all of our work. Our city plan clearly presents future land use maps, our own local future land use map, there'll be some updates of course, but it aligns really closely with the work that the Regional Planning Commission has done. It's really, it has gone in both directions, both they have helped inform us, you know, helped inform them, it's been a very collaborative process, and fundamentally there's a lot of alignment from our perspective, I think having sat on committees that have worked around Chitney County, this is rooted in good planning periods. And so it's all of the Act 181, the goals of having these 11 different future land use categories, the objectives of housing, these are all things that reinforce one another and have been, like I said, rooted in good planning, good long term community development. We took the opportunity upon passage of Act 47, which created some new requirements for local zoning to really take a look at our full slate of policies, and one of the areas that I'm really excited about in our community was that our city council updated our water and sewer ordinances to be really clear with mapping perspective about what are the areas that we have planned that already exist, but also planned for water and sewer infrastructure, and what are the areas that we are not planning for water sewer infrastructure, where our objective is natural resources agriculture. And for us, this helped reinforce a bright line where as a community in Port Of Tipton County, meet and accomplish folks. We can be both stewards of the environment and working land, and we'll talk about the housing targets in a minute. We believe that we can achieve, it will take a collaborative effort for everyone, a housing target that is the highest one in the state, and we can do both of these together. Our policies line to Act 181 and Act 47, as I said, the same shape between rural and urban areas. And then just to note to the first presentation, in the years 2021 through 2025, we permitted a little over twelve fifty new homes in South Burlington, a big chunk of those in our third main city center. So that is somewhere in the neighborhood of double digits percentage of the state.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: Dude, how many of those went up? That's a big move, just single family.

[Paul Conner (Planning & Zoning Director, City of South Burlington)]: The majority of our new housing for the last twenty years has been in the multifamily, has been in multifamily. We're seeing about 75% on average is some form of multifamily, which I described to be more than a duplex, so it might be a triplex to fourplex, in a lot of cases it's been larger ones. Do they

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: often go up as opposed to out Yes,

[Paul Conner (Planning & Zoning Director, City of South Burlington)]: I mean, I think we're starting to see, we'll talk about heights in a minute, but we've seen a lot of four or five story buildings being built. One interesting component to this, just a slight aside, is that when I started in South Burlington in 2008, we were about two thirds single family homes in the city and about a third other types. In the time since then, we have crossed the threshold where we are a majority multifamily housing community. That's something we pay a lot of attention to, and we're excited that we're helping to meet a housing need, and we are also looking at it from what does that mean from the needs for reparations department and providing access to the outdoors? What does it mean from libraries? What does it mean for services in really positive ways? These are conversations we have all the time with our administrators and our leaders.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Yes, Ben.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: To your point about aligning or meeting the local environmental priorities and the housing priorities, there's obviously a sort of tense discussion about wetlands. How have you managed around wetlands and floodplains when you're trying to balance those two things?

[Paul Conner (Planning & Zoning Director, City of South Burlington)]: Sure, so our regulations, we did a major update to our environmental protection standards in 2022, so just before all this work, We updated our weapons standards, they largely match the pre executive order standards of the state, though in some cases our standards are actually a little bit more restrictive. We have minor buffers in some areas and we have some additional limitations on when a wetland buffer can be impacted. For us, as I was describing earlier, it's been important to draw a bright line between the areas that we see as important natural resources to conserve, whether it's a wetland or it's a habitat block, and areas where we foster development. And knowing that these two, we can't, the community has really chosen to not do half measures on either, to say these are truly our areas where we don't want to see development, and where we do accept development, high density is exciting. This is a two part equation.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: Yeah, okay, so you've been able to manage, even with the stricter wetlands, buffer zones, and things, you've been able to manage high density housing? Have been able to On do current and even stricter regulations.

[Paul Conner (Planning & Zoning Director, City of South Burlington)]: Yes, I think, you know, there are always times when the two subject areas come together, right? So we work very closely with private sector, for example, in our downtown and city center, there was a significant wetland that was cutting right through the middle of what would be all of the downtown, and we worked with the Army Corps of Engineers, private sector, the state to come up with a mitigation program, knowing that in that instance where we were putting in tens of millions of dollars in infrastructure, that it would be important to make sure that the density is achieved in that area. We acknowledge that there are times when we can stop and escape from again. Good. Thank you. Senator Bongartz spoke briefly at the beginning about some of the areas which zoning Act 47 and Act 21 provided a new direction to municipalities. We took all those pieces, saw that as a floor and went up from there. And so a couple of the areas, missing middle housing, we eliminated altogether units per acre density. So we have instead, we set a minimum lot size, which we reduced by half in our residential districts down to 5,000 square feet, and on that you can put anywhere between a single family home and a floor plan, or an accessory dwelling unit. We eliminated minimum lot size in our mixed use areas, and so you can build on a smaller lot, can build on a larger lot. We did some soul searching and evaluated why were we measuring a number of housing units per acre when we had also already regulated the size of the building. So if somebody was building a four story building and it was going to be x size, why does it matter whether we are eliminating them at 20 homes instead of 25 homes? It's the same box to the outside. And so we eliminated those kinds of steps to foster new housing. We have some tools in our community, inclusionary zoning, which mandates a portion of new housing be affordable. Some of the updates that we did were to make sure that that was aligning the Act 47 bonus structure, so we weren't putting developers into this, you gotta meet two different sets of standards. In City Center, most recently, this was adopted September, we're very excited. We've had a form based code in place, which is a type of regulation that focuses mostly on the form of the building. We adopted it ten years ago, we've seen nine fifty homes built in that area in 20 new buildings and mixed use. It was capped at four to six stories. Our city council took the bold step of this year adopting new standards that allow for 12 to 14 stories in the city center across the board. So we're pretty excited here's a rendering of what that could look like on San Remo Drive, which is off course the street near to you all. What's next? We've been working very closely with the CCRPC on the regional plan, proud to say we're the first community in the state, we were told to opt into tier one status, tier 1B status. We are preparing for a tier 1A application in all the different parts and pieces of that. There's certain things that we have to do to make sure that our regulations are meeting a minimum as laid out in Act 181. We're working very collaboratively with the Land Use Review Board representatives and our state partners at ANR and others on meeting those requirements and doing a way that it works for everybody. And working on the administrative components of this. All of this aligns to our local a variety of local plans we've been working on. One that I'm excited about and we'll talk about another day is we just completed our first economic development strategic plan and really sets ourselves up. We're talking about housing today, but that's another component of good jobs in our community. Lastly, just key takeaways, we've embraced Act 47 and Act 181. In our minds, this really sets the stage for the next twenty five years. This is the beginning of the work, not the end of the work. How will we collaborate together to achieve these housing targets and the investments that will be needed to us that sets a roadmap to then say, to have a conversation about how do we achieve this across the board. We have implemented in a manner that aligns to our own principles instead of Burlington. We have a couple of recommendations as we're moving forward as we've reviewed this and happy to talk more detail about this another time, but Catherine spoke to the 11,000,000 use categories. We have found that as a community that has our housing target, our mid range target is 7,500 additional units by 2050. To achieve that means that we have to look at all the areas that we've had that already have infrastructure like Sheldon Road and Corporal and build thoughtful centers in those areas. The legislation doesn't have a lot on emerging centers. We wanna make sure that we're not just doing growth to just add housing, we want to create communities. So that's an area that we'd love to work with you. We have found interestingly that the future land use categories as folks have said it before me, some of them bring in these tier 1A and tier 1B categories, that has an interesting effect of pressure to have certain ones of these categories assigned to certain areas in order to achieve these benefits. And if we were really thinking outside the box, we could say maybe all of the non rural patrilineal categories could be eligible for this if the municipality can prove that it has sufficient regulations in place. So it's a little outside the box thinking on there.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Sorry, can I pause there?

[Paul Conner (Planning & Zoning Director, City of South Burlington)]: Yeah. I'm not

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: sure I understood that point. Can you just Sure, so

[Paul Conner (Planning & Zoning Director, City of South Burlington)]: there are 11 land use categories, three of them, four of them are rural, so I'm going speak to the other ones. All of the other ones, centers and planned growth areas afford the benefits of tier 1B and tier 1A. So that means an active 50 exemption or an active 50 higher threshold. Other categories like enterprise area or transition area, which is showing areas that are in need of some investments, those are not eligible for these programs, for tier 1A and tier 1B. What we're perceiving is this tension where good planning would say that area is a transition area, and to make its transition happen, we should foster new housing in these areas to replace Triptevelopment that existed. And so there becomes this tension of saying, should we try to categorize it as a planning growth area in order to get these benefits, or does it more naturally fit as say a transition area, knowing that there are significant regulatory implications of that choice? So if we disconnected the subject altogether, because in order to be eligible for tier one A, we have to demonstrate to the language we knew more locally that we have sufficient regulations in place for good planning. We could apply that to these other categories too.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: That's helpful, thank you. And

[Paul Conner (Planning & Zoning Director, City of South Burlington)]: then we've already shown this chart here. In Chichen County, the first presentation spoke about a low and a high. In Chichen County, we also look to a mid target, which represents substantial progress and a stretch and something that the communities feel like we can really aim for. And so that's the number we've been working towards, which in Southern Bloomington would be about 7,500 units. We've averaged about 175 per year for the last twenty five years. This stretches us up to 300 a year, but two of the last three years we've been over full on. So we are excited to take on the challenge.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: That's a nice question. First of all, your presentation that's online is not the same.

[Paul Conner (Planning & Zoning Director, City of South Burlington)]: I moved the order of it.

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: Yeah, I'm like, Hey, Harvey.

[Paul Conner (Planning & Zoning Director, City of South Burlington)]: Sorry about

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: that. That. No, No, that's okay. There's a couple of slides you have up here that are not in here. So I love that you said we want to create communities, not just growth, and I think that's really awesome and would love more people to think of it that way. And maybe people do, but this is the first you were I appreciate that a lot. I'm wondering, particularly for South Burlington, which has traditionally been, I mean, it's to the extent that we have this in Vermont, it's like a suburban community. These housing targets and the way you're developing is moving more toward the urban community for Vermont. And I'm wondering, how are you making sure, or are you making sure that as you're developing, you're not just gentrifying people out of being able to afford to live in South Burlington?

[Paul Conner (Planning & Zoning Director, City of South Burlington)]: Yeah, that is a important and very difficult subject for all of us to tackle. We have partnered year over year with the CDP community development program to work with our nonprofit partners to make sure that we're getting affordable housing built. The very first building built in our city center were senior affordable housing, family housing, included some four bedroom units, and some general affordable housing. At the same time, we acknowledge that some of the most affordable housing that we have is that which we already have, and I know that we spoke about that at the mobile home parks earlier today. For us, those are areas like the neighborhood next to the airport, which for years was seeing homes removed. We worked very closely with the city of Burlington to end the program of removing homes and instead use federal money to soundclimate insulate the homes. So we unfortunately lost about 200 homes over twenty five years. However, the updated program, which affects four communities will potentially invest in over 2,000 homes. And these are homes built in 1950s, smaller homes. They are going be in need of a maintenance investment anyway, so being able to leverage federal funds on that is really-

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: Federal funds still exist.

[Paul Conner (Planning & Zoning Director, City of South Burlington)]: At the moment they do, this is an FAA program. Okay. And so because it is about noise compatibility. Yeah. So it's not under some of the other things, but of course we do know what to be. Yeah. But yes, it is an ongoing challenge. Okay. I appreciate that. I just wanna make sure

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: that it's front and center that we want housing, we want to build communities, but we want to build communities where all people can afford to live there.

[Paul Conner (Planning & Zoning Director, City of South Burlington)]: One of the areas that we've seen some success is some conversions of buildings, in some cases, some hotel buildings that were really in need of a generational upgrade anyway, being converted to housing, that is something that our partners in the development community have found it is a way to bring in housing at a cost that is substantially lower because the building already exists. And so from their perspective, they're meeting a market need. From our perspective, they're meeting an housing need. So we've seen two or three of those in the last couple of years, including just, we have one that's just applying for about six feet more in its own. So we're excited by that component to it too. Good notes, Katie, when I answered that subject. For sure, yeah.

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: Thank you for your time, everyone. Keep up the good work.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Yes, I just want to say that that is, all of that is just so encouraging.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: I like the vertical component.

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: Yes, you do, it's vertical. Just want

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: The to answer is a large part of my answer. I'm just Yes. Registering the program and not out there.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: I also appreciate sentiment that you shared about, you know, if you're regulating the size of the building, then why regulate the number of units inside in addition to that? It makes a lot of sense. Thank you. Thank you

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: for your time.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Okay, yep, so we have a break now. So we're going take a break for about five minutes.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Let's do it. Taking a second.

[Paul Conner (Planning & Zoning Director, City of South Burlington)]: Right now, can see where go down.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: There's no we have no credit. We'll be near for attention.

[Paul Conner (Planning & Zoning Director, City of South Burlington)]: Right. Handouts.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: So we're live again. Yeah, we have been. Oh, okay. All right. Super. All right. Well, Center of Natural Resources and Energy coming back for a break. And we are joined by Jeff Doody from DHCP, welcome.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Hi, everyone. Thank you again. My name

[Jeff Dubey (DHCD) [overlap]]: is Jeff Dubey. I'm with

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: the Department of Housing and Community Development. I'm a community planner and project manager. Have the distinct pleasure of working with this Homes For All effort. Now in our phases two and three, we'll hear more about. I'm joined here by Chris Cochran, our director, as well as Beth Lynn Rich, who's leading a phase two effort with the program. As mentioned, we're here to talk today about homes for all, and this is really our effort to boost housing prediction, particularly in that midst of the middle housing range that we've been talking about this morning by way of standing up a cohort of small scale developers and really changing the way that homes

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: are gonna prepare for home.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Quick refresher, we're talking here mostly about this missing middle housing type. We need all types of housing in Vermont, but I think we're largely stuck between these large single family homes on large lots and the larger multi unit podium type building that we're seeing in our downtown. We'd like to see more of this in the housing type that can meet the needs of Vermonters, whether it be folks engaging and looking to downsize or new things in which you were not just getting started. Of course, these larger style developments have their time and place. They're easy to do, well, either not easy to do, but they benefit from economies of scale that really help drive down the cost of production, but they're harder to do in our existing neighborhoods. These neighborhoods, as we know, have opportunities for infill development. They have a system infrastructure that helps bring down the cost of development, but it's hard to do projects here sometimes. With recent changes like Act 47 and the Home Act that we've been hearing about and Act 181, the time is now to introduce a project like Homes For to get at this new single housing type. And part of that is really changing the hearts and minds of people in these neighborhoods to let housing in. So to do that, we launched the Homes for All Toolkit in 2023. This is part of a three phased effort to really boost housing production in Vermont, not in a single housing type, but also train a newer cohort of small scale developers. With this first phase, we were looking to five communities as sort of our pilot communities or case studies. These were Arlington, Douglas Falls, Hemalstead, and Mount Sibyl, and Virgins. Here we're looking to understand what types of housing would be permitted in their existing neighborhoods and try to get to yes for community members and show them a different size of housing. These are homes that have existed through the ages, but largely became a legal deal with exclusionary zoning principles. As part of that, we were looking to reintroduce two different styles of development that can help meet community design goals, as well as housing. These are gentle infill, or you might have a large double lot that could permit a new type of multi unit housing without changing the character of the existing neighborhood, but also incremental development where folks within their communities can start to build homes and they already have the trust in buying from community members. So their pathway might be a little bit easier and they have a little bit more knowledge and who's on the ground within their communities. As part of that, we were looking to identify infill sites that we could use as case studies. So of course, we looked at regulatory analysis, it be FEMA or zoning regulations, environmental constraints like flooding and slopes, and sort of the use and lot characteristics of the lots themselves and whether or not they need permissive to new housing. Here's a quick case study that we identified in Rutland City. It's surprising that there was in the house here already. It's really the ideal candidate site. It's a corner lot in a walkable ridden neighborhood. It's already got access to sewer and water surrounding homes in the neighborhood are about one and a half to reduce stories. And so really with this case study, we looked to the community and the property owner to understand what sort of housing they'd like to see on-site. With that, we came up with a side by side plus one. It's effectively a duplex or a bonus net in the back. So here we found it. It works really well for this corner lot and its square footprint. We were able to accommodate an accessible unit in the back of the structure with side parking that was sort of screaming from the street. We were able to preserve a lot of open space for gardening and play, and the pitched roofs matched the same objects of the neighborhood. Here's a quick peek of that side by side plus one on the lot. So as you see, were able to accommodate that bonus unit in the back with an accessible ramp, an open space, side parking. It's like it's always been here. Here's The floor plan of this side by side plus one, in the green we have unit A, on the left we have the first floor plan. The second floor plan is above, and in the orange you see that accessible unit that I mentioned at the back. And this home is inspired by an insisting housing type of existing duplex that I'm seeing in Bury City on the bottom right. So these are very character homes that fit nicely across Vermont. With this design exercise, we're trying to be very intentional about some of design choices that we make. We're trying to build an incentive affordability by design, where there's a logic to the design and stack wet walls and structural efficiencies that help mitigate costs of the structure, but also balance the needs of every diver for modders. I personally love a closet in my entry. I just don't have it yet, but these designs do look to build that functionality into the designs while staying below the cost thresholds that tend to

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: drive up. My sister calls it mononomic entity.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Yeah. I know. It's it

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: was just having It's not function. Okay.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: It's not a you do.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: And as far as this space one toolkit, we were looking to understand if there was a sweet spot, if you will, where we could encourage new small scale developers to operate in. And with that code analysis that we did, we really found that the one four unit rectal really is that sweet spot. It can start small. It sounds obvious, but if you stay below four units, you mitigate the need for sprinklers, second needs of egress, sort of those code requirements that tend to drive up costs and make it a little bit challenging for a new time, first time developer. And we think there's great opportunity in this. This is Jonah Richard. I think we're going to be hearing from him later today. He is a small scale developer. He might be jumping up into the mid tier at this point, but he's got a number of units built. He's got a number of units in the pipeline, and he's been really effective at bringing together some of our funding sources like DHIP to create new units and bring them back online within existing structures and new ones as well. And the intent of Homes four All is really to try to inspire people to follow John's footsteps and operate in their community to start building housing in their backyards and communities. To do that, we really need to introduce folks to the idea and the process of being a developer. So the phase one toolkit has a lot in terms of its builder workbook and bringing this knowledge out into the public. So it covers anything from building a team, feasibility, design, permitting. We even have sample pro formas to help folks understand if their idea test is out or not. We launched the toolkit last year in Barrie a sold out group. It was really, really inspiring to see the number of small scale developers come out, share lessons learned, and help folks carry this work toward. It's going to be an all hands on deck effort, as you guys know. This past summer, we won an award for the Congress of New Urbanism. So it's very encouraging to see and there's been a lot of support and interest behind the initiative. But back to work, this is phase two launching now in tandem with phase three that you'll hear a lot about. Phase two really looks to bring the lessons learned from the toolkit to life in a series of workshops and training opportunities for potential small scale developers. Although this is a partnership between HCD, Department of Housing and Community Development, the Land Access and Opportunity Board and the Vermont Housing Finance Agency. And this will bring together established development professionals, established Vermont developers and developers across The United States to really bring these lessons from the toolkit out into the public. And we've got the multi entrance pipeline depending on your interest in development, but also experience and knowledge existing already. So we've got anything from a one on one, a development one on one workforce workshop to individualized project coaching, say if you already have site control of the building or a lot. From there, there'll be opportunities for developers to stay engaged and connected through an element of meeting practice. So we launched, I think, two weeks ago, and we've seen a huge support, significant amount of interest. We've got about 170 already signed up through our mailing list representing all 14 counties. We've already got 50 Vermonters registered for our first series of workshops. And we're starting to see other neighboring states take notice. We've already got messages and support from folks in Maine that are looking to Vermont as model and how to inspire folks in this small scale developer world. It's only really encouraging to see this launch of the training program. I'll note that we've got funding for this first phase to carry through 2026. Beyond that, we'd be looking for additional funding to carry the project forward. We do expect these events to sell out, so please spread word if there are folks in your community's curious. So sorry

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: to interrupt, but the trainings are specifically for builders or for future developers. Is that accurate?

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Yeah, so we're looking to inspire anybody from a builder to maybe a lot owner or somebody that has development experience if they're an architect or any trades themselves. Okay. So it's pretty broad. It's pretty broad. And I think the ask is that they intend to develop in Vermont. It could be somebody across the Connecticut River, but we'll need to develop, say, handle shipper around Hartford, right? Thank you. Yeah, thank you. I'm just gonna just

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: wanna follow-up. Thank you for joining on in Middlebury.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Where is the link to,

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: is this the actual link if I wanted to share it with folks?

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Exactly, so that will take you to the intake form. There's a series of questions that we're trying to collect for data analysis purposes. But then from the intake form in that process, you'd be able

[Paul Conner (Planning & Zoning Director, City of South Burlington)]: to register for a specific

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: show. Okay, well done.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Okay, so then this next phase, eight zero two Homes, this is really exciting. It's inspired in part by the Sears catalog and the Aladdin home catalogs of old. These are responsible and have been very effective at creating some beautiful homes in our beloved neighborhoods. And so past this plural, to a certain extent, we're looking to bring it back into the twenty first century to create a pre approved home catalog specific to Vermont. And we think this is a great opportunity to increase the time limit for housing production in Vermont and better utilize our limited workforce to bring the maintenance off line. This has been done across the nation more at a city level or regional level. This is a look at Southend Indiana's catalog. This has been very effective at increasing the production timeline or decreasing the production timeline, but also creating clarity in the development process itself. I'll note again that Vermont will be the first state to do this, so this will look to create preapproval at the state level through the Division of Fire Safety and align that with local any vote opportunities on the ground in Vermont communities and hopefully dovetail with a streamlined local approval process. So like phase one, we selected three partner communities for this effort. Those being Hartford, Essex Junction, and Manchester based on their efforts to support small scale development and some of the missing middle housing. But from there, once the catalog goes live next December, it will be free and available to all Vermont developers and communities that can use the catalog. So we're really just getting off the ground now. We launched the project in November with series of infill tours to understand the opportunity and character housings types in those three communities that would have applicability more broadly to Vermont. In February, we had our three community design workshops to sort of test fit the home designs and look to the public's input in terms of whether or not they can see themselves living in or next to these structures. And from there, throughout the summer, we'll have the opportunity to have more technical conversations with home builders, off-site experts as well to create a series of construction documents for the home designs.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: Question, for these homes where you said it comes out in December, list of homes that are already all ready to go designs. Are you partnering, are you communicating with some of our manufactured homes with Bennington and others? Absolutely. So they're ready to go too?

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Absolutely, and that we'll touch on that later, but the intent really is to support the way homes are being built now, off-site or traditional on-site frame, but also look to the modular experts to understand what's possible from there as well. So 've got modular experts on our design team, but we're also looking to those technical resources outside of the project to really make sure that what we propose is something that they can manufacture in the facility. So with the project, we have a series of case studies as well. We're trying to be mindful that gentle infill is just one opportunity to create housing through the program. This could be our double lot idea, but also new neighborhoods. In the case of Manchester, there's a larger lot that's still connected to the village center by way of sidewalks. They've got planned sewer expansion in the area. So this would be an opportunity to create a smaller new neighborhood. So we'll looking to the catalog to create home designs that are compatible with one another that really create a cohesive neighborhood. As mentioned, we'll be looking to historic housing types as sort of the precedent homes within design that we're producing. Here's a look at some of the four that came out of the phase one effort. This is sort of our starting point. From here, we're looking to the idea of multi generational housing in these smaller single family homes that could be deployed rapidly post disaster. Is that a way to

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: the left in Mount Kilier?

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Believe so. Is that okay? Yeah, I believe so.

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: That's very funny too. And

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: as Senator Beck alluded to, the really exciting thing about this project is one that it's covering multi unit housing types, but also off-site construction. So we really think this is a big opportunity to sort of modernize the way homes are built and delivered in Vermont and really better utilize our limited workforce here in Vermont. And this project will give us that opportunity to explore that a bit more. And of course, they're drawing partly based on the inspirational of the assembly line. So this allows us again to build inside, limits the delays from weather standpoint, but also really dial in what homes are produced in the factory and then delivered on-site. So there's a number of benefits I've sort of been alluding to them, but one that we've been hearing of course is limited risk. You can reduce risk by locking in pricing early and then limiting the amount of weather delays and on-site scheduling that happens with our current mode of production. We also have the opportunity to expand the workforce beyond those who have traditionally participated in the trades. I certainly couldn't lift bundles of shingles on a roof all day in the hot sun, And this gives us the opportunity to sort of change the mode of production a bit more. Another thing, the logic of course is bulk purchasing. Standardizing production of housing units would give us the opportunity to sort of explore what bulk purchasing could do in terms of lowering the cost of production. To even have that conversation, we really need to standardize for the off-site manufacturers. Looked at a different way, building indoors allows us to stack building functions where we can be producing the home off-site in a factory at the same time as we're doing the on-site work. And this really allows us to increase that production management. This is sort of that concept illustrated on-site. This is just across the river. This is in Japan or New Hampshire. But here we see the foundations are already poured, they're wrapped in plastic, the trees are already planted, the street lights are in, and they're just awaiting delivery of the nodules from Huntington's homes. From there, they're placed on the foundation within hours. The Ukraine is off-site by 1PM, and after a month of on-site buttoning up, if you will, the house is ready for the wooden day. Here's a little pond down the other side of the street. This is the finished project, Almost started from a little day here. But what this allows us to do is really increase or keep the off-site facility working at full steam all winter long if we can sort of align the on-site work with production of

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: the modules there. Those would be panelists, right? Because they're ready to go on a project.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Well, so you see on the right, is one of four modules that I believe mix up these units. Units. Oh, okay. So it's almost like the Lego block of Roche, where you've got a series of modules that come together and they are bolted essentially to create a larger structure. So these are what you're seeing in this photo.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: I apologize for the question. I'm assuming the answer is yes, but they're all weatherized to be tight for winter weathers and energy efficiency.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Exactly, exactly. So there's even projects that are net zero running that have microgrids built into them. We'll see a little later on. But yeah, even by 1PM, they're weather sealed. And yes, they are meeting energy efficiency standards.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: In the program, are there requirements for what energy efficiency standards they need to, or is this something you're considering anyway? Yeah, exactly. Both environmentally, but also just from a cost perspective, making sure that they're low cost to own

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: or live Yeah,

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: will be meeting the RV standards for energy efficiency. But within that, we do anticipate having a good, better, best for energy efficiency.

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: Okay.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: As well as dovetailing with different energy efficiency incentives through the postage you can feed, that can break down costs of some of these higher energy savings.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: Okay, and also could you

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: quickly go to Mr. Hello.

[Chris Cochran (Director, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Chris Cochran from the Department of Housing and Community Development. In fact, we took this tour with a guy from Efficiency Vermont or the EIC. He's very excited about this and wants to figure out how they can, as Jeff mentioned, make an investment upfront to make sure that you know the money that they invest in weatherization and advanced mechanicals are part of this project. Yeah that would be great. They're involved in our technical advisor group so when they're doing the mechanical engineering plans for the building they're in at the Ground Floor so they're thinking about weatherization and energy efficiency is going to build in day one. Perfect, great.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Good to hear. Thank you. So

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: a bit in terms of how these are produced, these are utilizing what we call volumetric modular. This is Huntington Homes, but there's other folks across Northern New England that are doing a similar style of building. This is our Lego block approach, right? So this is a of five modules that comes together to build, in this case, the same thinning structure. We will have some single family structures within our homes catalog, but we're really targeting that multi year building.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Just as I'm thinking about this question, I'm gonna pause for a second. I want to be clear that, I hate to frame it this way, but often, manufactured homes, big older homes decrease in value, over time, whereas stick built homes do not. Do you have any data or indication as to how these as an asset will move on to the future. Does that make sense?

[Chris Cochran (Director, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: For it, I got it.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Well, I don't have the data myself, but my understanding is that these do increase in value similar to a state built home. Okay. Yeah.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: And something else to add here?

[Chris Cochran (Director, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Yeah, Chris Caughlin from the department. Before this was a twinkle in our eye, we spent a lot of times talking to banks about how they finance these buildings and they look at off-site buildings as a traditional home. They appreciate in value just like a regular home and when we did this tour with the Vicious Newmont we saw the quality of these buildings, they're outstanding. Once they're assembled you cannot tell the difference whether they were manufactured. Well actually they're better, Cause they didn't get rained on the whole time or snowed on you know.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Super, thank you. I appreciate that. That was my suspicion but I also just wanted to get that

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: on the record as well. Yes, question? No, just kind

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: of I own the manufactured home sold it, I'd appreciate it.

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: Oh, that's great. Okay, super. Thank you. Right, Terry?

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Yeah, thank you. So the other style of off-site building that would be implemented through the AOV home style is this idea of painless. This is traditional framing as we know it today, but done off-site with the benefit of the home members. From there, the panels, larger sections of the home do a longer shift to the site and need to assemble on-site with the help of the brain. The other one, another innovation that I'm starting to see is this idea of pods or preassembled components. These are largely bathrooms and sections of kitchens that are assembled in a factory but then shipped to the site for rapid installation within a home. These can be inserted into a traditional frame structure but also in modular or panelized foam as well. And this is an example of Stone Crop Meadows in Middlebury. We'll be hearing from Zee Davidson later from Summit Properties. This is a partnership between Summit, the town of Middlebury with Huntington Homes, building the modules with of course funding from the HFA and DHCD and many others, I believe. But this is an amazing project. It's about two fifty units in total. It's a mixed income project. We've got a photo here of the first six townhomes that are done and we've occupied now. Amazing to hear that these first townhomes were set on-site in days, really. Anecdotally, we've been already hearing from the development team here. They used to be on pins and needles when the modules arrived. Now they don't even feel the need to get out of the trailer. They just really have it dialed in on-site here to deliver these homes. This next one I alluded to earlier, this is Salisbury Square Village in Randolph. These are quadplex buildings that you see here. It's a mixed income project. I believe these are affordable units here in these quadplex structures. This is that net zero ready project. Seating got the microgrid and solar energy as backup here as well. We've been showing larger format buildings, but these can be built as ADUs as well. These are two companies in Vermont up into this and Johnson and Union Frameworks in Essex that are delivering smaller AVUs. But of course, there's a lot to be done and a lot to figure out with this work here. We're just in the early stages now, as I mentioned, but we do hope that you can see the speed and quality of these homes, as well as the potential for off-site construction in Vermont and the way we deliver homes here. We've been hearing that a lot of these factories are ready to scale up. They're interested, they're leaning in, they lack that pipeline of units to really justify and make them feel comfortable with facilities expansion, excuse me. To make that happen, we've been having conversations with anyone from the finance and banking community, workforce development, energy efficiency folks with tier three incentives, really trying to make sure that this project is not a well thought out planning exercise, but actually does yield homes in Vermont communities. So we're really looking to build our coalition of partners. With that, we're hoping to explore and demonstrate potential for the AWS Home's catalog within pilot communities. We're really looking to provide wraparound services for developers with technical assistance and hopefully funding and incentives to reduce costs for these structures. And with that, we're encouraged to see draft legislation in partnership with the treasurer's office and representative Mahalo's committee to explore what bulk purchasing could mean for house production in Vermont, particularly through off-site production.

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: I'm pushing you against some things. Yeah.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: Two questions. Of the work that you're trying to build in communities that already have the sewer and water connections, or is

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: there a model for communities without

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Yes, that's a great question. So what we're looking to do with this project and the initiative more broadly is really align some of the resources and new programs that came online, things like SHIP. So with SHIP working in tandem with eight zero two homes and off-site homes construction, we can really increase the number of units produced in places that have a sewer or need that little boost through SHARE funding to get that To extend it. To extend it or get even alternative wastewater facilities off line, whether it be a septic system or not.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: Okay, and also in the broader part of this work, is there any conversation about this kind of model applying to, for lack of a better term, supportive housing. There are certain types of housing that are really expensive to build and really needed, whether it be recovery housing or assisted living or any of those kinds of housing, can this model be applied to having an easily developed plan and model to just plug and play for those kinds of housing?

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: I would say that's the next phase of the conversation. We haven't quite gotten there. We've been more focused on the development of the catalog at this stage, but it certainly could lend itself to that. Our hope is that we can deliver a product and package of incentives that helps these projects as well without too much subsidy. But for some of those trickier projects, it could certainly lend itself to that. We just haven't gotten away from that.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: Okay. Because that's huge housing need that is rarely thought about in the context of all of this So I really love to see more work on that when you're done with it.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Yeah, earlier.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: Yeah, and just to, the Middlebury, that housing, the Stone Crop Meadows, it is amazing to see them go in so fast. It's like, Oh, I drove by in the morning and there was nothing there. I

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: drove by in

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: the afternoon and it like, Oh, half an apartment complex is there. It's really amazing.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: And it is quite amazing to see them at work in the bathroom. I didn't mention it, but the modules being produced by Huntington, they already have drywall. They're already painted. The mirror is the mirror home, but they've already got all the door packages placed in the rooms ready to go once they land on-site.

[Chris Cochran (Director, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: The toilet paper roll is in the bathroom, but

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: the roll is not installed yet.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: So it's really interesting to see. Yeah.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: I think we have another question.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: Just a point. A lot of our towns, older people, you know, we've got that demographic. They're living in 10 or 12 house all by themselves. Yeah. Because they have no place to go. Yep. So they would be glad to go to some assisted living facility or some sort of like what you're talking about here. And that would put a lot more of the older housing stock.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: We're being very intentional about agent based functionality within the homes. So there will be a lot of models that have that single floor living kitchen dwell with that added functionality of wider doorways, bathrooms that accommodate different amenities at exposed age.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: Well, just thinking of my 97 year old mother who lives all by herself and that pretty nice. Yeah. She's she's like I'm not going anywhere because I I know what I got here. Right. Know where do I go? So yeah.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: I'm just gonna answer that.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: And then I've there's a

[Chris Cochran (Director, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: couple Yeah.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Chris got

[Chris Cochran (Director, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: in one word. It's just it's early days but we were approached by AARP Vermont to value this project. They were a partner in the initial phase, a funding partner and they love this project. They are considering providing some additional funding for this bird so we can do, let's say focus groups or do a lot of engagement with older Vermonters about their needs. It's one thing to meet the ADA requirements, the code, etc, but let's get when we want to talk with older Vermonters to understand

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: what their real needs are and kind

[Chris Cochran (Director, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: of what features are really desirable to them. To your point, if we're going to build these homes, we need to create a unit type that is attractive to our older Montrose. We have more older Montrose than anybody any other part of the population and they are, I'm one of them, I'm living in a 3,000 square foot house with my wife me, and it'd be great if there was an in town opportunity for me to move to town, be closer to services, be connected to my community rather than out in the country, and let a new family move into my house, but we don't have that dynamic. Mean this is hopefully a way that we can start creating that natural trend that should happen that the reasons a little bit beyond our control is the market's just because there's no place to go.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: All we need to do is start the conversation because a lot of people will jump up. Yeah.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: Yeah. Thank you. Yes, Luis. Quite sadness, but the the there's the preapproval in the in the community for the designer designer deal, which removes one obstacle because you have you have that. Mhmm. You're giving a blueprints to people who wanna stick to it once the improvements are ready. Right? So there's that, and then there's the preapproval. So Mhmm. And so there's a lot of by utilizing these designs, the future can reduce the cost pervert. Yeah. You know how to design it, not design it. No. The cost of these trucks.

[Chris Cochran (Director, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: One off design about 10% of

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: your product cost. Yeah. And then can put in more efficient modules. Yeah.

[Chris Cochran (Director, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: And scale can give a savings through volume.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: With the pre approval support that's

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: a cool part of it yeah something to add over here

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: really quick Deputy Commissioner Vapo Mallard just on your theme of all that this is because of all the work that's been done over the years and in my presentation, I failed to mention that Chip is launching this week and gonna be taking applications. Like, this is real and there's real momentum. So I just wanted to make sure I got that. Thank

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: you. Yeah.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: One more slide and I'm done. We've been in conversation with a lot of different partners. It's been really encouraging to see a wide variety of folks across the building trades and development world leaning into this project and initiative. This is a look at folks that we've reached out to. These are either folks and firms that have agreed to support our design team from a more technical aspect, like construction and engineering, or folks that are more on the state side, helping us to make sure that we get this right and that we need slight signs that are going to meet the needs of Vermonters across the state. And other folks are even folks looking to support the developers themselves with incentive and funding to hopefully reduce the confidence. There so from there, I'll leave it. Got any any other questions? Yes. Go ahead.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: Just, know, are we are we looking at maybe building some more repurposing some of the old manufacturing facilities we have? Exactly. One of my district there. Mhmm.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Yeah. So Peter Center heard

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: a lot of talk about, but I haven't seen this move.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: There's an RFP out. That's my understanding. So Peter Center from the EIC, he's a technical advisor of ours, and he's been helping the project. I understand he's been working with Fairhaven directly to try to find a team that would go into that facility. And that's exactly the hope of this project that we could create by one that could help make that more feasible

[Paul Conner (Planning & Zoning Director, City of South Burlington)]: for somebody who be into that facility.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Great. I have a couple other questions, follow ups. So one of the things that you mentioned is the connections with say like Huntington Palms or wood on your list. So opportunities to build homes indoors. Amazing. That seems like, especially here, a really great idea. You know, in connection with the training that you're doing, right? So you're doing all this training now to hopefully help there be more infill, more developers, more people who are ready to get into this as an industry. Are you also hoping that there may be more opportunities for indoor development. Is there a

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: need for that or? I'm not sure I

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: understand. Well, one hypothesis is that the opportunities for indoor development that we have now with existing companies would be sufficient to meet the demand, let's say. And I may made a little more of a question. Do you think the indoor development is sufficient right now, or do you think there's more of a need for indoor development? Does that make sense?

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Yeah, sort of along the same line of questioning from Senator, our hope is that we can encourage more manufacturing facilities in Vermont. I'm not sure in terms of the volume whether or not we're at capacity. Our hope is that we can build enough homes where there are more companies looking to enter this market. We've been in conversations with off-site manufacturers in Greater Boston and they're curious about the Vermont market. Like I mentioned, we really just need to demonstrate that pipeline is definitely needed to work here. We've done I

[Chris Cochran (Director, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: think we're starting from the department. Huntington Homes in East Mount Hood, encourage you to check them out. Jason, the guy that we talked to there, he told us back, I'm saying the 90s or maybe the 80s, they used to run two shifts. He's got a huge facility with a high overhead cost and he can't justify another shift until he has that pipeline. So that's our hope that you know we can actually get more out of our existing facilities. Opportunity to go to him is another one you know, can we create more sites but there's also a regional network of people that can meet these needs. Our idea is we're agnostic, it wants to be built, we just want to make sure that the community is supportive of building new houses in these infill sites, that the process is turnkey and easy as possible for anybody who wants to develop and if we can get the means of manufacturing changes in the process and make off-site construction more mainstream that's just icing on the cake.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: Robin is the halftime community being out there. They

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Yeah. And we've heard anecdotally that they have explored modular construction to deliver homes through their network. It's certainly a possibility and it's encouraging to hear that they're taking that stuff. Yeah, it's awesome.

[Chris Cochran (Director, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: In Colorado, the Habitat grouped to

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: the bottom off-site manufacturing facility to build their pet homes. One

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: theoretical number that would be interesting, I don't necessarily expect that you would have this, but if these facilities were just cranking out homes at their highest capacity, how long would it take to, like, it meet the annual housing target? Or how do those numbers compare? It would be interesting.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: So I forgot to mention it, but Huntington Homes, they mentioned they could do about one house every ninety six hours to about every two weeks.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: So it's, really And working

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: that's just Huntington, right? So that's

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: just a quick That's helpful in terms of scale. Super. Any other follow-up questions? I guess I would also just add, this is very exciting. It's very encouraging without needing to cut corners on process or regulation, I suppose. Getting the pre approval makes so much sense making all these systems streamlined and more efficient. Seems like it's going to be a real problem. Yes.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: And maybe, because once you start it, it'll catch you on back in that chart that I talked about, Doc and Grossman's, they go precut packages from the homes. And if you go to, like, where I live, most of the houses go side of the tier one b area. We're all ranches and raised ranches.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: And to the credit of the team they're talking to lumber yards and window manufacturers and making sure that the supply chain is there as well so credit to the team they're overturning every rock. One

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: further thing, just to confirm it, it sounds like you all are just cruising with this. There's nothing further that you need from us legislatively to keep moving with all of this.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: I'm going

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: turn to our appointee. Well, we want to see where this goes. We want to see what happens in these pilot communities and there could be future asks, of course, to keep it rolling. Sure.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: At this point though,

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: great. Okay.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: Just true about staff.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Addison staff. Have, this is the staff of homes for all right now. That's what we have the funding for and that's what we're moving forward.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: Okay. Just anticipating the need to build out more infrastructure too. You know, we have areas in my district that have designated for construction. They don't they need to build sewer lines and bottlenecks. So so we may have to, you know, look to the total number eventually for others and

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Yeah. The water and sewer lines does still seem like a a bottleneck.

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: You need to build that out. Yeah, okay.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Thank you.

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: Thank you. Okay,

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: I'll get back to my agenda here. Okay, oh, we are next joined by Ms. Beyer, welcome.

[Cathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Evernorth)]: Hey. Welcome to everyone. For the record, I'm Cathy Beyer, Senior Vice President at Emory North. I have been in Daria this year, so it's nice to see you all. See if I can do those correctly. Okay. Good morning. I was asked to, just as a reminder, Addison North works to create affordable housing in actually Northern New England, so Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: And we've been doing

[Cathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Evernorth)]: it for over thirty five years. And here in Vermont, we always partner with what we call our local partners, so that's Downs Creek Housing in Central Vermont area, Cornerstone, Elkburn, there's not many down roads. We aim to build at every corner of the city. And this is multi family housing. This was a great presentation, but it's more for the single family, duplex quadplex. So now we're shifting to larger buildings, the multi family buildings. We have 180 units under construction right now, and we have three thirty units in pre development, meaning they are on the march towards getting to construction.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: I was asked to speak

[Cathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Evernorth)]: on four areas. The first is, has leave home and Act 181 reduced regulatory risk? And I'll just say, in my role, I've been doing this a long time, I have been involved in many permanent reform efforts, probably too many. And I was on the NRV scaring committee, the precursor to F-one 181. And I can say that during the Home Act 2023, then Act one eighty one, our fact resulted in more housing getting bills in the more timely fashion. So congratulations, thank you very much. I'm gonna give you our best example, which is planning to start construction in June. So with our partner, Wyndham and Windsor Cosby Trust, we are currently bringing forward phase one of what's called the Chalet Apartments. So if you're familiar with West Brattleboro, you get off the exit, it's Route 9, starts heading west and actually not that far off, you come to South Street, and that's the location of Chalet Apartments. This has to be done in phases. It's in total build out, 71 new homes, and eight of them are home ownership people. Up here, phase one is to the right of the screen. In the middle will be the home ownership, and then phase three, I have my map in front of me right now, will be an additional affordable rent. One of my favorite things I learned about, I really like duplexes by writing, quadplexes by writing, but minimum parking requirements of one space per unit if you are on tunnel water and sewer. And this is incredibly important. Often we are building in tight infill sites in the downtowns or the village centers, so the one parking space for you is very helpful. This is interesting, we have 17 acres here, but it is topographically challenged, which means it's hill, and very limited across space. By incorporating just one space per unit, we can fit more housing and we have the added benefit of less impervious, so less storm water. So it's a good thing on many levels. Yay. Yeah, I know, I like that one. I don't know if anyone was thinking about storm water when we said one space could come. So here's our building. I don't know why it's all white, but it's architects rendering it.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: Since it's

[Cathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Evernorth)]: snowy out, it's appropriate for the day. This phase one building, as I said, is 31 Parfums. When we started on permitting, what we do is go to get a jurisdictional opinion related to that. And this was, unfortunately, just on the heels of the passage of Act twenty eighty one. And the J. O. Verbatim, this is the statute you passed, said that you could do up to 75 units if you are in one of the growth center areas, including designated neighborhood development area, which is what we are in, on public water and sewer. And JL the goes on to say, These are the reasons that this project is exempt under Act 50 for up to 75 buildings. As I said, we are planning to build 71. So what that means is we have shaved four to five months off the permitting process. We now don't have to pay an active 50 permit fee before this build out would have tripped the maximum of 180 a couple of dollars. And probably most importantly, due to the exemption, there is no risk of appeal. It's very meaningful, a private citizen benefit from these exemptions in any way. So if there aren't any questions, I was going move on to infrastructure. That should I could go and otherwise stop sharing.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: I'm just, that's very encouraging. Isn't it? Yes, you did go to work. Turns out that was a good thing. So,

[Cathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Evernorth)]: I don't know if can show any more slides, so we just have a conversation. Infrastructure. I say this all the time, we need more land on town water and so on. It is very difficult to find palpable wind in front of town. Big picture, we need more capacity. It is too early to assess the impact of chip.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: Yeah, so I Not live quite yet.

[Cathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Evernorth)]: I can't really comment on that. And I just want to acknowledge that the wage shift is structured, it will bring greater value to housing developments that have higher price points. It's just how the legislation is structured.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: So it will bring more higher priced homes. It will. The benefits of CHIP,

[Cathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Evernorth)]: so the tax increment is higher for

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: a higher priced home as opposed to our affordable. Is it a percentage increment or is it a dollar amount increment? I can't remember how

[Cathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Evernorth)]: it is. I'm not the answer to tip.

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: I didn't go too deep in the weeds, but it's, I believe it's percent. And then if you are building affordable units, you can retain a higher percent of the equipment. So I don't know if these are the exact numbers, but maybe I won't say them on the record, but X percent, if it's market rate, you can retain a higher percent of the increment that's important. Yeah, that's, sorry.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: It's the

[Cathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Evernorth)]: increment itself that's higher for market rate housing, right? Correct. Because it's a higher value on a brand list.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: Right, so the dollar amount is bigger because the house is more important. Yeah, so, but it is percentage based, so.

[Cathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Evernorth)]: Of the increment, and again, I'm not an expert. If you include affordable housing in your development, that makes certain definitions. You get to say the developer gets 85% of the increment. If it doesn't have that affordable component, it gets? I think 70. 70? Okay. Neither of us are on record

[Nate Formalarie (Deputy Commissioner, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: on this. Betsy would be happy to.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: So it's a higher percentage for affordable housing. It's just a larger dollar amount because for the non affordable. The cools bigger. But maybe those.

[Cathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Evernorth)]: It's the way the legislation was. Like I said, next year, public will be able to come back. But I don't have one right now. We just started to talk accounts about it.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: What do mean the company here?

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: So I have to bring this up. We hear the rumor about $600,000 units. So what cost per unit is this Chalet?

[Cathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Evernorth)]: Chalet? I'm sorry. Don't have it with me right now. I think it's around I think it's around 560,000 unit. It has some unfortunately,

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: it had a lot of the

[Cathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Evernorth)]: site plan up again. It's got a lot of infrastructure, including roads to bring in. We have to, I don't know if you're familiar, there used to be a hotel called the Dalham Chalet. Remember that? Have you ever seen it? That's the property. And there's costs associated with we need to- can't take the whole thing down for under certain preservation reasons. So it has some added costs. So there's a destruction

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: permit too that has to be achieved or anything after Demolition. Yeah, demolition permit.

[Cathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Evernorth)]: Yeah, that hasn't been a problem. We can come back another time to talk about construction costs, and we certainly use tantalize and construction. So the third item I was asked to talk about was alignment of housing funders on designated centers. And I just want to say this commitment to working in our downtowns, our village centers, now our neighborhood development areas, it's been going on for over twenty five years, right? And it's just one of the best things we've done. Really, if you look around, you see the evidence in our village centers and in our downtowns. I grew up in Iowa, and they're trying to have a downtown program, but believe me, we're twenty five years old and the income shows. And, you know, really it's built upon itself, right? It started as a downtown program, then added village centers, growth centers, NDAs, and then particularly the housing funders, like the Department of Housing and Community Development, prioritized funding when you're building in these areas and the planning that's come along with it. And so it's just been layer after layer of reinforcing this. And I think, and then we got the exemptions under Act three fifty if you're in this fiscal. So So it's just a really successful and impactful. No surprise when we build, particularly in tight parcels, it's more expensive than a flat site. Often they have brownfields contamination. So it's more expensive, but I love the state of Maine. People who live in our downtowns drive 30% less than the average return. And not only is that great for our residents, we don't have to have cars, but it's a huge win for climate change. The last area I was asked to speak about are remaining barriers to scaling affordable housing production and getting a big department. The work the department's doing is addressing a key part of that. Particularly, I'm working on more of a larger multifamily buildings, it's just 30 unit apartment buildings in some communities is not going to fit. It's not what that community needs. And that's why it's important that we are trying to address all sizes of housing and also at all affordable levels. I just happen to talk about this. It's a federal issue, but I really want you to be aware of it because it is the biggest barrier that affordable housing development in Vermont is facing for 2026. And it's called Build America by America BABA. For any project that is now using a CDBG program, home or housing trust fund, those federal dollars that come from HUD now have attached to them what's called BABA compliance. BABA originally was applied to infrastructure projects, so building roads, bridges, extending water and sewer. Quite frankly, it's much easier to implement that for an infrastructure project. It doesn't have as many components, because now we are looking at multifamily housing that has hundreds of components, and we need to try to domestically source those. But we've made very well, we set up examples. First of all, there's almost no elevator made in The United States. And also heat pumps, which we've been trying to electrify our building. But then just small things. We have a building where the door stops, there was no BABA compliant doorstop. None were made in The US. And the theory behind BABA is that we're trying to incentivize domestic production manufacturing, which is a great goal, but apply to affordable housing. It was done with a bit too much of a blunt instrument and needs a scalpel. So I would just ask, if you are talking to our congressional delegation, bring up Bob, because there is the ability to say, we're not asking to eliminate Bob. We're asking to go back to the old definition where it applies to infrastructure and doesn't apply to formal policy. I just had a couple other ideas for me to consider. One of them is, I talked briefly with the Regional Planning Commission about it, her name was in here in Wisconsin. This needs more discussion, but I will say that when we go to our local DRB hearings, In some communities, the design administrator might be part time or the DRB chair might be fairly new. Into the project, if we know, you know when it's going to be contentious. You know when the emergency room is done. So those applications would benefit if there was ability to bring in a facilitator,

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: staff from

[Cathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Evernorth)]: the Region Planning Commission, not to be a decision maker at all, but to coach the DRB chair about the proceeding, because it's often easy for those proceedings to go off the rails. The rule book is the zoning ordinance, and often the conversation starts going very, very far away. That is one idea, but it's a very I'd only talk with a couple of the agencies, and I'm sure

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: they would have a much more informed

[Cathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Evernorth)]: viewpoint on that. The other is, and I think we've talked frequently about this last year perhaps, is that the Brownfields program, which we have observed, is becoming more timely in their process, but we are still dealing with standards that often are more conservative than our surrounding states. And in Vermont, the Department of Health establishes those standards of the Brownhill program on their own in a silo. And if you look to say Massachusetts, they use a multidisciplinary panel so that you might have someone from, obviously, public pal, but you might also have someone from the Department of Environmental Conservation, and you might have someone more multidisciplinary approach about how we assess risk, because it's all about assessing risk and setting that standard, and we can't get to zero. Zero was not an achievable plan.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: In this context, what do you mean by conservative? You said we're more conservative than other states, but I'm not. I'm trying to understand what Yeah, that so the number of,

[Cathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Evernorth)]: the list of contaminants, when you're looking at, lead, arsenic, PAHs, there's a long list, and every single one of them has a separate standard. And they are honestly, the measurement is something a layman struggles to understand. Like it can be 10 parts per billion is the easier one. So they all have different measurements. Say in Vermont, it might be five parts per billion I'm getting. This is not founded in data. And in Massachusetts, it might be 10 parts per building. And that doesn't sound like much, but it can be.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: Okay, so the standards for contaminants are stricter in

[Cathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Evernorth)]: Vermont, and that would One would say more protective on public health. Okay, Okay. Yeah. So I do think it's something that's been discussed in Vermont for a few years and could use more

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

[Cathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Evernorth)]: building is 31, it's a one building, 31 apartments. Phase two will be eight home ownership units.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: And I'm sorry,

[Cathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Evernorth)]: I don't know if they are single family homes in Texas. So the last area to touch upon, which you won't be surprised, is how we resolve our appeals. And I know you have the alert report, and I'm not gonna go I'm not gonna go into the details. I'm just gonna reinstate, we really do need to find a letter that appeals can be resolved within six months. And I'm not too opine, we'll wish, how we achieve that, I just think it's agreement that this is a goal we should collectively hold because when a deal happens, it's a one to two year, it's not longer.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Okay, super, thank you. Thank you.

[Cathy Beyer (Senior Vice President, Evernorth)]: I really do appreciate all your efforts.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Same face. Thank you. Okay, so I believe that our next witness is not able to join us. So we are otherwise done, but having just heard all of this, any comments from the committee, thoughts, takeaways?

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: Yes, go ahead. Well, first of all, you to the two of you first said. This was really helpful to have this sort

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: of framework. It's also really nice to hear that things that we've done

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: are working, because that sometimes is not the

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: narrative that you hear out there,

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: or even in here in this building. So it's really nice to hear how things are progressing and that we are doing some work that is like first innovation at work in some areas. So thank you for setting this up. And then my second question is what is our I know we have

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: the appeals potentially, but what else is going to be recognized?

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: That's a great question. So actually to that point, anticipating that we will have a bill, committee bill to discuss tomorrow. That's about another idea that we haven't talked about yet. Just because of the timeline of how that needs to work, recognizing that it is not done and that we can improve it in any way that we want and anticipating that I would love to vote it out tomorrow to bring it back here

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: for further work. Does this make sense? What is the bill?

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: It's about roughly

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: yeah. Put it

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: on your table.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Put it on your it's linked to a Let's Build Homes initiative, specifically around wind zones. We So can talk more about that and- I'm sorry, let's build homes.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: A certain type of homes.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: No, they're an organization that's, they're a housing advocate.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: No, they said specifically around something. Oh,

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: I'm sorry. Root zone. It's a different way to think about basically a pre approval process potentially. So we'll be talking more about that tomorrow. Happy to Okay. I apologize that it's all kind of come together pretty quickly. Okay.

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: Happy to Are we also talking about the appeals process or is another community tackling?

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: That is something that we can have further conversation. Okay. Yeah. So more to come on that. Got it. Yes. Yes. Right

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: here. So we're all right on the parade because I like what I heard today. It's really impressive that we're we're making good progress, but that for 71 units, that's at $500,000 per unit for a single part. Mhmm. I know someone who just built a home, put in a separate system, a well, bought the land, and built a home for $350. If you can build for $350,000, we could build a 102 units. Mhmm. So what are we doing to try and get the price down? Where's the money? How long will that? Mhmm. My my decisions won't. Mhmm.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Do you have a thought

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: to one?

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: No. Was gonna say it. I yeah. Kathy, about to listen on the backstage. I

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: I I think if if you'd

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: like to have a discussion about construction cost, it's probably good to, you use some data and Sure. 500,000 per month. Yes. Did your constituent build it themselves? No. They had it built by some of these. Okay. Because I mean,

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: I think we're speculate, but

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: I think most of the cost is in labor and materials.

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: So Material. Yeah. I mean, and

[Sen. Scott Beck (Clerk)]: the materials cost, so much of that cost is not something we can legislate.

[Sen. Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: But this is bigger than a single parent. This is a smaller one. Yeah, no,

[Sen. Ruth Hardy]: I understand that an apartment is a home too.

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: So it is more of a special problem, but it's also true that the house is being built the building house is built to be like your house and Mhmm. Really, really high quality and really, really cheap. Mhmm. It's a residual that there was a, I don't know if it's probably not, it's not productive. It

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: is an interesting question, you know, looking at a typical home going up in 2026, what is the breakdown of the costs? Yeah, that would be interesting. Okay, maybe we can take some further testimony on that. Okay, well thank you. A lot of appreciation to you, Senator Byers, for thinking through who would be

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: good to hear. I think that eight zero two poems is really long term careful and hard work that actually is itself against housing bill about about 20.

[Jeff Dubey (Community Planner/Project Manager, VT Dept. of Housing and Community Development)]: Mhmm. Mhmm. We think because that's

[Sen. Seth Bongartz]: I mean, that's that's really what I'm seeing in in this. And there's a the tool that we're talking about, but all of the components of this, the real possibility it's generating is really very Yeah. And it's just because of taking an all different attitude about making it happen to their friend. So I'm deeply impressed with her. So Same. Yeah.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: So Super. Okay. Any other thoughts or comments? Okay.