Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Megan (committee staff)]: Okay, you're live.

[Sen. Richard Westman (Chair)]: Thank you very much, Megan, for all your hard work. This is the Senate Transportation Committee. It's Tuesday, February 3, and we are here with Transportation for Vermonters. And Katie, it's your show, and we need your name and a little background.

[Katie Gallagher]: Sure thing. Good morning. Thank you, chair, members of the committee for making time for us today, and I appreciate you getting us in a little bit earlier so we have a little bit more time. I will share my screen now. My name is Katie Gallagher. I direct the Sustainable Communities Program with the Vermont Natural Resources, but as part of that role, I get to help facilitate the Transportation for Vermonters Coalition. So that is why we are here today. Okay. So, we have been in this committee before, but just as a brief reminder, we have been around since 2017 to try and advocate for a well funded, accessible, equitable transportation system for Vermont. And of course, when we're talking about Vermont, we're talking about a very rural state with dispersed communities. So that is part and parcel of what we are trying to achieve is figure out what does a sustainable transportation system look like for a state that doesn't really lend itself to many transportation options. I guess I should say we have many different coalition partners representing transit providers, housing, health, climate equity, community organizations. These are advocacy partners. We also have about a dozen other partners who participate in our monthly meetings and help contribute to our policy priorities and how we make decisions and determine needs. They are not listed here, but just to note that there are many other folks here who are participating. We strongly believe that we have a transportation system that can provide a lot of social, economic, and environmental goods and benefits. Unfortunately, we have built our transportation system over the past couple of decades in such a way that it really narrows folks into needing to rely on single occupancy vehicles. That takes away the ability for many folks to get to where they need to go. It also increases our pollution and climate emissions and makes it a really big affordability burden on folks. So, just to kind of hit on these challenges a little bit, but I'm sure you all know what we're talking about here. One is that transportation is the highest source of our greenhouse gas emissions, about 40%. And that has been the case over the past couple of decades. Affordability, I think this is one that really stands out to me and to many other members of the coalition. It's interesting that we don't talk about transportation as much when we're talking about our affordability crisis. This is a chart on the left that's looking at the difference between housing and transportation costs between urban and rural Vermont. These numbers are available in a couple of different arenas. We can pull them out for regions or for municipalities, but kind of however way you slice it, it is both true that rural Vermont suffers a lot more in terms of that transportation affordability burden and that we need to be looking at both transportation and housing together when we're talking about affordability, because it might be cheaper to build housing out in a rural area, but if you then have to spend more on transportation, it's kind of negating that benefit. There's a lot of other challenges I won't get into, but here's just a couple big numbers over a billion dollars that we could save and reduce healthcare costs and increase productivity by 2,050 if we were to implement the state's recommended clean transportation actions. AARP notes that the impact of isolation on older adults is the equivalent of about 15 cigarettes a day, which is kind of a shocking figure. So the good news is we think that there is a big opportunity here. Transportation has a lot of challenges, but it also plays a really key role in addressing healthcare affordability, access to work, again, environmental pollution. So we're going to go through a couple of our key priorities for this year. You're going to hear some that we have brought up in the past as well. And I guess to say at the outset that we understand that you all and the state are dealing with really tight budgets. And so some of these priorities we decided to include recognizing that it might not move this year, but we wanted to list it here anyways just to kind of keep it front and center as something that is a priority, but understand that we have certain constraints in particular this year. So this slide is about land use and the intersection between land use and in particular, again, housing and transportation. We have this really big opportunity with Act 181 and other related components to plan for our communities in a way that promote compact development. When we do that, we are not only producing an environment that can allow more homes in those areas because they can be smaller and closer together, rely on infrastructure, but it also sets the stage to have transportation infrastructure like sidewalks, like transit stops, etcetera. So really, we wanted to highlight that we need to be thinking about transportation in conjunction with these land use and housing conversations. And so this isn't really a specific policy aspect, just wanting to call out that this transportation is a huge part of that conversation and it's often left out. The second one well, we can't read that anyway, but I was gonna say- It's a wonky academic thing. Anyways, I don't really need to talk about it. But what we're just trying to get at is, again, that connection between how we plan our communities and really not wanting to work backwards and kind of set ourselves up for failure when we develop in a sprawling dispersed pattern that we then need to set up transportation systems to address that. So we know across for various reasons, again, healthcare, climate, all of these different pieces lead us to, we should be trying to drive less. So that is vehicle miles traveled, VMT reduction. Many other states have started to establish a VMT reduction target or goal that can look like various different ways states do it differently. But really, we're just trying to set up metrics to measure our success in actually achieving these goals and aligning transportation with housing and land use. So, that is something that there has been kind of discussion about a similar target for years, but we haven't really gotten down to it. There was a Man, I should have bring this up because I can't remember. I didn't write it down. But there was a target that was set and it actually looked towards 2025 and I can't remember what it was, but I do remember that we were not meeting it. So I'll also say on this that the B TRANS Smart Growth Study that they put out, I think it was 2024, maybe 2023, also has a lot of data to support this action. The next priority is related to electric vehicles. This is one where, I think, just to note, we're not really expecting too much, but one, noting the intersection between climate emissions and affordability. Again, these issues touch on various pieces of our communities. We specifically wanted to focus on three programs here. One is MileageSmart. The second is the e bike incentive programs. Both of those kind of combined because of their targeting for lower income communities. And I pulled out a couple of numbers just because it Again, data showing that roughly 40% of EVs in Vermont have used the state incentives, 66% of those incentives, and nearly 80% of the program funding were supporting lower income Vermonters and accessing clean transportation options. They made a really significant difference. And then the third part is a statewide right to charge law. This came up in previous sessions. This year, we're looking at something that's a little bit more narrowly focused on residents in condos or have a home ownership Yes, thank you. Okay. So then the next one we have here, again, is kind of our bread and butter. We need more funding for biking and walking and transit and transportation demand management. I think I've already talked about all of the reasons why these are important, but I think our main ask this year is to stabilize funding for these programs. We have in our written testimony the key programs that we are focused on, such as the MTI program, the BiTEP program, there's several others. One thing to note from a consumer perspective and some of these that also are related to businesses or institutions is that when we are changing how much we are funding these programs year after year, it is really challenging for those to be counted on or relied on and for people to plan ahead, especially for larger purchases or capital investments. What else did I want to say here? Oh, another piece of this that is not asking for more funding is addressing how we allocate funds within the Transportation Alternatives Program, which is one of the key sources of funding that we have for walking and biking, as well as Safe Routes to School, which we'd really like to see get greater funding. Right now, we have a fiftyfifty split between active transportation and mitigation projects like culverts, salt sheds, we are advocating to shift that up to an eightytwenty split for 80% for active transportation programs. That would be more in line with what other states are funding. And I can say as the representative from VNRC, that doesn't give us heartburn. So, where are we? Just to share, we have heard from many folks across the state about their needs for transportation. This was just a quote that I wanted to pull out from a woman in Newport who's speaking to what this lack of investment in transportation options means for her. I'm sorry, kind of a long, long quote, and I'm going to go to

[Christina Erickson (Executive Director, Local Motion)]: the next slide.

[Katie Gallagher]: You're so fast. This is the last priority. This has also been one of our key priorities several years now, and this is speaking to the need to have more sustainable sources of funding for transportation, which I know you all know about. From our perspective, we are looking at those very many studies that have been produced either by the legislature or by other partners over the past ten, fifteen years now, and have produced a number of recommendations for how we might be able to start to replace revenues from the gas tax, etcetera. So we are asking the legislature again to try to identify what could work for sustainable long term funding. This, we are saying, out public transportation here because we are experiencing active cuts both in our urban and rural systems. Once we go down that path of cutting routes, it's really difficult to get those back. As you saw in the previous slide, this is directly impacting people's lives. But of course, it is broader than public transit. Is our full transportation system. I think when we talk to the House, AARP will also be talking. So this is just talking about how old our state is and that we are aging and we have a lot of aging at Vermonters in rural areas. So this is going to continue to be a really urgent problem for getting people around. Studies and another Perchance. Okay. So that is it. I'm happy to take any questions.

[Sen. Richard Westman (Chair)]: We're really glad you're here.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Member)]: Very

[Sen. Richard Westman (Chair)]: much we're we're struggling with all of this. And the overarching issue that you've touched a little on is we have a $35,000,000 hold rotation, and almost nothing now is is safe within the transportation budget. And we we've had some initiatives here from one of the areas. We didn't spend a lot of time on it. We spent a lot of time on medical transports. Yeah. And as the healthcare system realigns itself and its services get further and further away from rural Vermonters, that becomes we're limited by the overall, but I would say, crisis that is overarching all of transportation. And we welcome any help we could get to bring some stability to the overall system. And, you know, when we'd like to we like solid revenues for public transit. But the question is when everything is averaging, where do we go? Right.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Member)]: So go ahead. Thank you, Terry. I wanted if you could remind us what the Safe to Schools what would be a project that you'd find if we already get more money? Can you give us some examples?

[Christina Erickson (Executive Director, Local Motion)]: Can I call on a friend?

[Sen. Richard Westman (Chair)]: Sure. You need to I introduce your

[Christina Erickson (Executive Director, Local Motion)]: would be happy to. Hello everyone, I'm Christina Erickson. I'm the executive director of Local Motion. Local Motion had the privilege of being for several years the statewide coordinator for Safe Routes to School and we actually had dedicated funding directly from V Trains to support that. That meant everything from we had what we called regional coordinators and these were folks who were going into the school communities to help do things like encouragement events, safe bike to school day, walk to school day. There were some schools like in St. Albans who would do this weekly. And then we also worked with infrastructure partners to do that. Without that currently, or without the funding currently, we don't have those regional coordinators, so there's no direct outreach within the school community. There might be some parent groups who are still retaining this and those encouragement type of activities. On a small scale basis, we at Local Motion still have some funding from Chitney County Regional Planning Commission, and we actually have convened three task forces in Burlington, South Burlington, and Winooski to bring folks from Department of Public Works, the schools, and other direct partners, some family or parent outreach, to really look at the infrastructure of what's going on in schools and where are the barriers where there might not be the physical elements, sidewalk or crosswalk, crossing guard, and trying to problem solve with the direct practitioners. We are not really doing much of the engagement anymore at the school level on a very, very limited basis. We would love to see that on a much more cohesive and comprehensive statewide, and not just limited to Chittenden County as it is right now.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Member)]: Thanks, Lucas.

[Sen. Richard Westman (Chair)]: Go ahead, Cindy.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Clerk)]: Thank you. And thank you for being here, and please stay engaged. The nexus between transportation, land use, affordability is just really, really important, and we are doing a lot of, we're having conversations about that here. And then we actually lost potentially some of our existing revenue sources when Act 181, which is Act two fifty, but I think we're still going to keep calling it Act two fifty. Those changes didn't adequately include transportation funding impacts especially, and not just funding but operational requirements. And so we're looking at that also. There's a study that showed that the eleven eleven permits and the 145 permits aren't available right now to communities that are going to be 1A communities. Sorry for all the numbers. But something it showed that was really important, it included the providers of transit and clean, I don't know if you were one of those, we didn't have names, but they said we want to be part of the development process early so that we can let you know what would be helpful and it doesn't necessarily cost money to make the system work better. But when a developer is coming in and they're on a bus route, they need to know that they're on that bus route and talk to the bus company early. And right now we lost some of that ability to make that happen, but we can also have it be more automatic in the systems. You all would be just a great advocate and partner in that process.

[Katie Gallagher]: And we've also been hearing about housing developments that have been going in specifically along transit routes because they want that transit access for

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Clerk)]: their residents and then that route gets cut. Oh, yep, not good. Yep, and so the key is to have funding available for that.

[Sen. Richard Westman (Chair)]: But that's the story across everything. It is. Yeah, it

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Clerk)]: is. We can be creative.

[Sen. Richard Westman (Chair)]: Creative only goes so far and that's our overarching issue now. And, you know, coming from a community, we lost a bus room. And and within the last year and a half, we've lost a bus room. And, you know, it does come down to the funding. Did you want to?

[Sen. Rebecca “Becca” White (Vice Chair)]: No, I'm just so grateful you're here and I really appreciate that you

[Katie Gallagher]: had the

[Sen. Rebecca “Becca” White (Vice Chair)]: good fortune to come and visit us today. I just want to recommend we do have Vital Communities in the room and the thing that we don't talk enough about is that this is like on the ground work. And we have a group in my area, Vital Communities, who is very engaged in both the pedestrian and bike safety work, public transit work, all of it. And I'm really grateful that you bring together this coalition and that you all came up. That's really all I wanted.

[Sen. Richard Westman (Chair)]: Well, thank you all for coming. Thank you very much. Megan, we're gonna cut you off because we some of us

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Clerk)]: have lunchtime. Yes.