 Secretary Curley, thank you for being here. Thank you for having the team. You all could, it sounds like Jessica knows more than anybody about what's going on. That's pretty usual. So, I, we have just an order that's on our witness list, but we'll ignore it if you have an order and just rely on you to make sure no one gets left. Left out? Sure. And how do you start with an overview of how things are going at ACCD? Sure. So, for the record, I'm Lindsay Curley. I'm the Secretary of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development. We have one new senator. So, I thought I'd be going to Wendy Harrison with Wyndham Counts from Wyndham Counts. Oh, of course. Nice to meet you. So, I know most everyone in here, but I'll do a very quick, a little bit about me. First of all, really happy to be here. Thanks for inviting us in. I actually grew up here in my pillar. I've known Senator Cummings for a long time. And graduated from Montpere High School, St. Nicholas College. And in my first tour, I was a CPA working for the international accounting firm of KPMG. And then I did a few other things and started, or not started, but worked in business with my husband, small business here in Montpelier for almost two decades. And sold that business right around the time Governor Scott was elected. So, when he was elected, I worked first as the commissioner of labor. So, very much in a regulatory position, which was interesting, a very interesting role, but bringing sort of a business person's hat to the table and enjoyed that role and understanding that from that perspective. In 2019, in the fall of 2019, he asked me to transition to the agency of commerce and community development, which is seen more as I would say promotional, right? Growing the economy and, you know, promoting our state to both business and visitors and growing communities. And you all know where the story heads because sadly, we were faced with a pandemic just six months later. So, my role turned sadly back to regulatory and asking people, you know, very politely to stay away for a bit. And it was a very, very difficult time for everyone in our state. But we learned a lot about Romaners and their resiliency and their willingness to step up and prioritize public health. And I could not have done the job that I did without the amazing team that you'll meet today. They really stepped up and found a way to help people through this. It was very scary. Having been a business owner, I know how painful it would have been to have somebody ask me to suspend my business operations, knowing that the family that worked, you know, I call them family, the employees that worked for us would potentially have not received a paycheck because there was no income coming in. And folks didn't know there was any federal aid coming. So it was a scary time. But again, for monitors really stepped up and they made sacrifices and we made it through. But the team has done an amazing amount of work, lifted federal programs. Thanks to the legislature that agreed to entrust us with some programs that we had never done on grant programs to individuals, which we had never done before. But we got money out the door as you'll hear Commissioner Goldstein talk about it wasn't always perfect, but we had to do it fast and we did it and we're still doing it. But we've also had to go back to picking up the work that we were we were asked to do prior, you know, we're expected to do prior to that. So we've done that our agency has grown as a result of that and she'll talk she'll talk about that as well. Some of the other commissioners because that work will continue for a few years while we continue to have extra extra money to to help people survive and thrive as we go forward. So with that, I really don't want to take up a lot of the time because I want you to hear more detail about what's going on within each department. But within the agency of commerce and community development, we have three departments. We have the Department of Economic Development, we have the Department of Housing and Community Development, and we have the Department of Tourism and Marketing. And when I came to the agency, we had just under under 90 and I'm going to say that we're over 100. I haven't added it all up lately, but again, we have grown and we continue to try to, you know, build the team swiftly to make sure that we can help folks around the state as best we can. With that, I am happy to take questions, but I'm guessing you may be happy to fire them off to me. You may have more questions after you hear from the whole team today, but and I'll stick around as well. Appreciate that. Any preliminary questions? All right. No, I just want to say thank you for your leadership during Howard. I think we forget to thank each other and we all work so closely together for the last two years. And so thank you, Lindsay. And I guess I'd also love to say, because I think one of the things during the course of this biennium is we'll be distilling our lessons learned and we and what we want to make permanent in terms of it requires statutory change. And I don't know if you came prepared today because I know you have other priorities today, but I think we'd appreciate any recommendations you have of those lessons learned that require statutory change. And I know Jess is taking a note because I just saw her head go bobbing. So, but I think that would be a useful thing for us is is anything lessons learned from a CCD that we should actually make permanent change. Okay. Well, we had a lot of wonderful learning opportunities in the last three years. So we will. That's a great piece of advice. I'm also glad you actually mentioned Jess because she's at my back and I think before I came in, some of you may have met her. Jess Vintner as I want to just highlight when I when I came into the role in this role, it was my first time serving in an appointed position and having run a business was one thing and having been an accountant was one thing, but working in policy was very, very different for me. And I credit Jess I often say she was she's been like my right arm and learning the policy aspect of this. So, Jess is an amazing resource for all of us. And so to all of you Jess is available. I say that our entire team again, we're very open door policy and, you know, please make sure you reach out. We want to provide you with the resources that you need. And we work with a lot of partners within your communities. As you know, already sees that our PCs. I should not the chambers. I shouldn't name them all because I'm going to forget somebody. But also, who was somebody who's not here today, but many of you should know is tape Brooks, who is the deputy secretary at the agency again has a wealth of experience in economic development. And he's also another resource for all of you in terms of another person to reach out to when you need help trying to get answers or get more data or information. You will meet, you know, others on the team, but because tape wasn't here, I wanted to make you all aware of him and acknowledge him and the hard work he does as well. Great. You have a great team. And Jess is one of the most proactive people. Just to let you know, it's just a statement. I am still grieving Jessica being sent back to you because when she was on the, she was on loan to labor and I had her on speed dial and nobody could help solve the problems of all my constituents like Jessica. And it was not the same. She was just fantastic. It was some people that were really hurting. Oh, really. We were really making a difference. Well, I appreciate that. I like to joke and say that when the governor asked me to make the move, it was kind of a package to you. I would be happy to go and I'd like to take someone with me. So anyway, here she is. I like to also embarrass her. So, this may be part of what the folks that are going to testify for the agreement. ACCD has been at the forefront of being able to produce one page graphics that express and provide some numbers to make sense. And I would like to get a good sense of not necessarily today, but in recent times over where you stand with federal money. How much money? Where is it? Where is it going? But more important, what's left and what do we have that in effect is uncommitted or that may be available for other things that we decide to come up with or modify or whatever this year. Okay. Just a clear picture of where this whole chain of COVID money that affects your agency has gone or may go. Yeah, and we're happy to do that. I appreciate that acknowledgement as well that some of it is very prescriptive, right? And then there's other money that may be more flexible in terms of making decisions on where it goes. Or there may be money that is prescriptive and that has not been prescribed by sitting there unused because. Yes, right, because there's various barriers that we need. Or it's having a positive impact if we want it. Okay, more about that. We're probably going to do this all over again after the Governor's budget is addressed. Instead of you introducing yourselves, it will be very specific to what we ask. Okay. Probably you don't need you as much secretary for that. But that's, that's fine. I would love to come anytime. So with that, I'm pretty sure that Commissioner Goldstein is joining by. Yes, I'm sorry. I really appreciate everyone's kind. Comments and thoughts is making me a little emotional, but I'm not going to. I actually work for the agency remotely. Now. I, my family and I relocated because of some family issues to North Carolina. So. Please use me as a resource and a conduit. I do. I'll be watching. I'm going to try to be connected. I will be there a few times a month in the coming months, but. Thank you all so much. I've known you all for many, many years and it means we need to not be there in person. And to be with you all, but just thank you so much. We're actually going to start with Chris today. You're still on my feet. Joan is coming down in person. She's on her way from the agency. So we're going to start with Chris. Who's going to go through some housing and community development stuff. Chris, just let me know what presentation you want to present from. Yeah, the image based slides. Yes. Okay. Perfect. Thank you all. I miss you all. Alex. I can sit down and we can at least let one in. How many do you have a couple? Yeah. Okay. Two more. Okay. I'm going to grab that. Does that make sense? Okay. Two. We're coming in. It's Richard and Jacob. And Alex was already in. I'm going to make. Yeah. We've set this up. So I'm also going to have to leave in January and a January and Jacob Hammer, whom you're going to meet in a second is going to be covering for me. Oh, I thought so. How are you going to change that? Yeah. We're going to have a long week. Probably a week. I hope we'll be fine. I tell you. Yeah. We're just doing how you're taking over. Yes. Oh, I don't know. He would do a better job. But briefly, my name for the record is Chris Conpran. I'm the director of community planning revitalization. I'm joined by. Jacob or Jay Camerick. Planning policy manager was in the same division and with the division of about five years now before that was a planning and economic development director in Milton. And the superstar of the show is Richard. Good morning. Richard. Good morning. Great to see you all. Thank you. And do you know everybody here? I do, but I don't think everybody else. I'm Senator Harrison. I'm Senator Harrison. One year in Wyndham County. I live and brought up our own and I'm actually on the seventh board and I chair that board. So I appreciate your efforts. Jacob is the mayor of berries. My volunteer. You two have a municipal life. We'll see our presentation. So much of the work you do is so connected to you and candidly. Our presentation has a lot of transportation stuff because I know that's your passion. I think these folks know a lot of what we do, but we're going to be good friends. I'm confident. So I'm just going to step back just a little bit on these sides. A little bit more about myself. I have a background in historic preservation. I've been working for State Government for about 20 years. I ran the historic downtown and the listener tax credit program. That's how I got my start and learned the state. I think I've been doing this director job for about 10 years now. And the reason I kind of made the change was it was great to fix that one building. You really needed the whole community working together to really create a strong backer place. So the work we do is complicated, messy at times, but it's really, really important. And you do like the challenge. We've heard a little bit about Jacob. I don't know if you want to do a brief background. Yeah, nothing else to add. I'm kind of a nerd around zoning and planning issues. And one thing that's great to work at the state level is being able to support the foundation and the community scale. So that's a big part of the mission. Are we sure? Sure, yeah. I've been with the state for 10 years. When I first started I was running a village center program. So I was out and we were in a lot meeting with local communities like boards, planning commissions. And as a newcomer to the state, 12 years ago, it was a great way to get out in communities and not visit every 200 communities, talking with local officials. And it really got me at the speed on their issues and opportunities. And the past few years, it's kind of done some of that experience working with the team, developing new programs with you all, like better places and some of the being trained as agents of transportation, better connections, what we'll talk about, and really doing it into what small villages need and one from state government. So it's great to be here. It's great, Dan. All right. We have about, I don't know, maybe 15 slides. It'll be quick. And if you want to stop, please do. I'd much rather this be interactive. She's not just talking to you. This will be on our website. Yeah, we're really good. Your presentation is on our website? Yes. So we need to go back to it. Everything should all be on our website. Because I hear it's on our website. Perfect. So, you know our name, but we provide tools training and incentives to help municipalities create strong and vibrant places. We have relationships throughout the state. We work closely with so many partners to really make this stuff happen. But it's really important for us to have a community, be a good partner in this. We can only provide incentives. They have to do the work. They have to stand up. And next slide. We've seen huge success in our efforts. This is a picture of Bristol from, I think, the late 70s, early 80s. And, you know, is this a place where you want to start a business? Is this a place where you want to move to? I think it is. And then the next slide, please. And this is Bristol pre-pandemic, but this is what they are today. It is the cutest, smallest little vibrant town ever. You can't be so cute or like my husband always says. It's great. They've done so much so well. And, you know, to see the excitement, the vitality of the community, you know, the main street is still there, but behind the main street, they've got, you know, a drug store, it is just kind of like everything we want a community to do. And we've had great successes, you know, from St. Albans to Mannington to Browbro, and we just need to see more of it. But the work we do is kind of at the intersection of so many areas of policy. You know, it's diversity, equity, inclusion, it's health, it's transportation, it's community investment, it's development, it's housing, it's complicated. But next slide. How you do this work is really hard. It's got to be very intentional, but when you get it right, it's infectious. More and more towns are kind of working and partnering with us to kind of make these things happen. Next slide. The secret sauce in all of our work is our team. I am, last, kind of the smartest, most hard-working, most energetic group. All the stories that you hear about the struggles about hiring is so true. It was hard for us to hire two new people, but we hired some really terrific folks. And I don't know if you recognize the background of where we are, does anybody know where we are? No. We got a tour a couple weeks ago of the State House Rotunda. Oh, that's the job! Yeah, the job. But you're not all the way up because there's stairs or something. No, David took us up to the very top. I know, but this photo is... Yeah, well, we couldn't get us all in that shot. But you'll meet them eventually. But we have expertise in historic preservation, landscape architecture, architecture community development, transportation. So it is a multi-discipline group and just a thrill to work with. And I hope you reach out to them. They are what keeps me going every day. Next slide. While we are a small team, really our secret is just our partnerships. We do work with all our sister agencies closely. Mechanically, you know, some of our external partners are just a little bit more nimble and more flexible and more responsive to kind of the things that we would like to do in communities. The breadth is pretty diverse from our housing partners to our environmental partners to private sector partners like Green Mountain Power to quasi-government folks like efficiency for mud. We really... And our PC partners who you heard from this morning, we're really closely with them. It's amazing what you can do. And all the people we work with, the people we choose to work with, and it's just really nice what you can achieve when you're kind of chair a mission and kind of just want to do the type. Next slide. The big focus of ours is downtowns, obviously. We're still again. I'm sorry. It's getting a lot of pie. 252 towns. We helped us out with what's left. Three slides, one town. Yeah. I only... He came up yesterday. We made a similar presentation in house commerce. I'm like, oh, we did a little too much crystal. Yeah. We love all towns. It's really every town. They're a great poster child. But they've got some great things. But downtown to Scanners, where it all happens, we have these programs that help. And we'll talk more about the details. The next slide is about our villages. We designate villages. We help them. Their needs are different. And I think there's going to be a lot of conversations about capacity building for how we can help them step up and do more because our needs are great. I think Vermont is in a very unique and interesting time. You know, we've made a huge investments in broadband. We've seen a lot of new people coming to the state. We do need more people. More people. We do need more housing. And how can we take this as an opportunity to, you know, if our communities are more vibrant, more compact, I think we can really revitalize so many of the places that I think feel left behind. Our downtown's a little time to provide an experience that Amazon can't, you know, it is a place to connect to your neighbors. It is a place to do real things and run into people. It is a place where businesses can start, but we need to figure out how to make more room for more people. And this is kind of, you know, a table setting for a big bill that we're working on that I'll talk about more in a second. Next slide. I'm going to pass this over to Jacob, who does a lot of our work in neighborhood revitalization. Well, in a lot of what we do, in addition to being a policy manager, we're all active program managers. And so we support place-based designation programs like downtown, centers, village centers, neighborhood development areas. And so the program is expanded to look at those walkable areas in and around downtown. It's where we can support housing development and recognize the great work that's happening locally to just be able to say yes to housing in a little bit of places. Next slide. So where is that? Ah, this is all so Christian. No, I think they have to, you know, be out of here. It's just a perfect day for the talk. Did you get a little profession? I sent you a race and it's these shots, yeah. There's a lot of these programs. When you have to sell a bill that we run in here in natural resources, you have a great reason to do it. We do have examples from all through this game. Just this high level of kind of just some of the programs that we administer, municipal planning grants, these are programs that help municipalities. They often need expertise that they don't have in-house. This is a very flexible program. It's enjoyed a lot of support, a big kind of bump, I think, last year to help communities figure out, you know, what are their challenges, what are their priorities, and set them up for success. Better Connections Grants is a transportation-related program that we're just going to talk about more. The downtown transportation fund, you know, as I think many of you know, we have these tax credits that fix up a lot of the buildings, but the money doesn't go to the municipalities. You need to look at the whole package. And unless, you know, it is a place where you actually want to stop and get out of your car, unless you create welcoming sidewalks, places for people to gather, places for people for pedestrians to feel safe, so those bump-outs, it provides that infrastructure that kind of makes that downtown feel like a welcoming place to be. The downtown tax credits, again, I'll talk more about them later. This is kind of our signature program. I think it is the only tax credit program that our friends in Senate finance in ways it means like. They don't like making tax expenditures. I like tax expenditures. Certainly taxes. So, but you're more than that. You're 4.8 through 5. There's a little all of this one. Well, there's a $2 million bump, one-time money, and we're trying to do that to get it out. Oh, so then we definitely need to fix that. To be continued. But we do have this additional money and the base is at 3 million, but we bumped it up to 4 million for 2 years, and that's a temporary bump. But it is a terrific program. Over-subscribed, really going to provide, well, I should just wait. I'm going to stop. Jacob, do you want to take the next line? Sure. So the electric vehicle charging grants, it's sort of an odd thing to be in the community planning and revitalization instead of these grants, but the division got involved in this first because I thought thought it was, if we get these charging stations in downtown to where people are spending a lot of time on their car's charge, they're going to spend money, on local merchants and bidders, and not just going to be out by the side of the highway looking at their phone, and that's just growing and growing. Or they have no reception. Right. And this is St. Albans City, so we're going to recognize that. We knew it wasn't possible because there were three floors in these buildings as opposed to two in there. And of course you're familiar with the funding that is going to support multi-family housing because we know that a lot of people are going to be doing electric charging in their homes, and there had to be a special partnership built to be able to support tenants for electric charging. Regional planning commissions, Charlie, and of course you just said Charlie and Catherine, you're talking about the MAPDA. For many years it's been 2.9 million. It's got about last year, it's now up to 4.2, 4.3. We're the pass-through agency for that funding. We're trying to develop work plans so that they can support regional planning initiatives, all the things that they're required to do on this planning. Regulatory and satisfactory activity, the state designation programs, which we're going to talk about in the next slide, and I think most of you are familiar with, are a way, a pathway to recognize the capacity and work that's happening to local plans and by-laws and capital planning in non-regulatory implementation like funding, sidewalks, school, bike paths, and so the programs extend sort of the delegation to our recognition for projects that are in activity, whether it be fee-relieved or presumptions of compliance for the criteria that projects have to be reviewed for, but they also can provide exemptions for mixed-income housing projects, which are sometimes called priority housing projects, and I'm sure that will be reflected in some legislation this year. And then, special initiatives we're always trying to pick up some fun projects here and there, and I think the next slide launches us in this. Well, now after the state designation, we'll talk about those. Senator Clarkson, the slide's for you. I know how you love how we have this complicated layer of different designations. Well, and we've got some work trying to blend them together. And with your support, and with support from our actual resources committees, we have $150,000 to hire a consultant to help us and step back, checking with municipalities and how these programs are working, what's working and what's not. As you can see, we have pretty much colored in a lot of the map of the state for communities that have one or several designations, so it's been a super successful program. We're coming up on the 25-year mark of the designation programs, to figure out how we can simplify them, make them work better for our communities, and we're really, you know, RFP is almost done, but it's really going to be a broad stakeholder engagement with all of our partners. It's our environmental partners, all of the partners you saw in the initial slide, but also the municipalities, and we hope to come in next year with everybody on the same page with some great ideas and consensus programs and more effective. So this is a next year piece. They're good programs, but it's important to step back and say how can we make them better. It's been 25 years since the first program. Just a quick question. Is there any report of what you've done in the past 25 years? Because I think it's important for the public to see the benefit of this, the before and after of Brazil, for example. Yeah, we have annual reports every year, but honestly never done a retrospective. It might be helpful. 25 years would be helpful. We're at 25 years. I mean, not 25. I mean, I would, the goal for me would be to have 25 years covered, but maybe in five pages. Oh, yeah. But that's just me. Yeah, that's a nuanced suit. The downtown program is coming up in 25 years. Village centers came after that in a later time. And then these other designations are like, not everything is going to fit in your compact little downtown village, so you have to think about the whole community. We need cart dealerships. Where are they going to go? So those are designations that came later, but as a package. But I had a great idea of something that we could absolutely do. We'll continue on your reports of all of our programs. We do them every year, but again, the one thing that I asked before you were in the room on Senator Crowley was said, it's great to do what the department has done, the agency has done, of being able to summarize things on one piece of paper. Sending us reports is not a great idea, because frankly, I'm sure there's a warehouse somewhere that a lot has of unread reports sent to the village. There's just a limit in terms of the amount of access, and it's much harder to write something short than it is something long. I hear you, and all of our reports are one pages. One page, one to two pages. They're user friendly. I secretly joke that half of our work is marketing and sales, so it's really important to me and our division to have really good looking accessible products. So I hear you, we're on the same page. So where is that picture? So So where do you see me on the slide? It is, it's the same body porch. It's the same porch from downtown. It's the same porch, different direction. I'll correct. We'll play name that town better next time. In terms of the designations and policy leverage point, it's one of the only platforms we have that is consistent statewide to recognize. It's different types of place types. Even though the regional plans, future lineages, maps have some nuances and that's why it's been a great way to make place based investments because it has that statewide consistency. One thing we've learned promoting the neighborhood development area destination is that many of the municipal bylaws throughout the state are in some ways stuck in 1970s values. Large blocks, big streets, separated uses, single family homes. The color of law is up on the shelf. That's right. This is my stop pick. So to make that, to start looking at that and help nudge those reforms at the local level, we said how can we make it easier. And we partnered with the congressmen who are urbanism, the remote realtor's association, the remote housing conservation board and other partners to develop a zoning cut that looks at all changes that can make a big difference for housing production throughout the state of Vermont. Let's go way more splash and attention than I think we ever thought a zoning guide would get. And I think it's made a lot of changes to follow up with that. Next slide. We pitched to you bylaw modernization rates and legislatures working twice now. We're able to touch 41 communities in F1-22 with just a half a million dollars. And then we announced another 15 this week. Right. What's the 41st because it's covered by that? It would suck. So it's real last year. It just was one. It's Bristol. Bristol is number three. It's alphabet. But I'm happy to point out the bevels number one. That's right. Because that was right. And this is huge. It's 27 percent with zoning. 56 communities now will have gotten. Yeah, absolutely. And comparing this to other states that are doing similar work so far we're touching a higher percentage of total communities at a lower cost than any other state doing this work. So it's pretty impressive. Who's leading this work? Okay, great. That's a very impressive model. They're working with RPCs. What's the partnership there? Yeah, what happens? We give the grants to communities they can hire a private consultant they can hire the regional planning commission to get that by-law expertise. They're very small grants. Yeah, under 25,000. Although we did allow some group applications to go up to 60,000 to try to get some economies of scale for smaller towns there might be any similar changes. Great. Yeah. Are they having trouble finding consultants to help them? We have heard a little bit of that but not a lot of questions. There was one of our concerns because the contracts are not attracted to a lot of breaking order larger firms but we seem to have enough one-person shops that are collaborations and with the regional planning commission staff to be able to move this forward. Great. How much longer did you want to present? Because we have a lot of questions from the end. I think we can get to this part. We can get to it in five minutes. We have a fluid amount of time that's just we have so many people to hear from. So I think you're okay. Joan, I don't know if it's okay for you to take a break after this. We always do that to you, Joan. She always reminds me. I'm going to speed up to these next slides to make sure the chance to talk. Zoning and local regulations is the policies of backwater. But it got really elevated thanks to the seven days pieces. They've done an incredible amount of work on this housing series and really cast a bright light on kind of... I don't think they're intentional. Perhaps they are intentional, but how our regulations have incrementally really, really hard to build homes and you know, it has probably the unintentional result of us being one of the older states in the nation and one of the wider states in the nation. So this space of like how do we align our regulations to meet the monitors and leads to create the homes we need to improve the processes is really important and we've worked closely with Senator Bonner. Former Senator Bonner. It's now Representative Bonner. It's on a bill. Stakeholders, everybody from the environmental community to regional planning commissions municipalities a suite of changes to help communities get a yes on the housing. So desperate. And we will see a version of that as part of a larger bill from here next week. Another project we're rolling out over the next year is a missing little housing toolkit for the HFA. No, this is just through this came out of your committee. Yeah, we Yeah, we were going to have a consultant on board but it won't be the HFA for the project to look at missing middle homes. These are the duplexes, triplexes they're the types of housing. We're seeing a lot of single family home development, a lot of large multifamily but that category of missing middle homes is pretty narrow and so there's going to be a building design schematics a builders toolkit to attract new developers of missing middle homes to make it easy for them to understand how to get into that business and then community design for infill development so communities can see how these homes can fit into existing neighborhoods where there are already streets and sidewalks and water and sewer as well as creature locations where there might be new development. Dude, are we looking at all the temporary constituents having to find missing middle? And then it's been pointed out to us that with interest rates where they are, the middle range of homeowners is now different because interest rates have now made it maybe you're at $80,000 maybe you're at $60,000 before you can bridge it personal are you tracking a sort of range of what we're talking about when you're saying missing middle homes? Yeah, it's interesting because middle means different things to different people from our planning and design background missing middle is a type of housing that was once common in Vermont communities but due to zoning changes it's really hard to build now so it's the quads, the triplexes that's right the type of homes that we need that because they're used land more efficiently are more affordable then there's the other conversation about missing middle being an income type that we're trying to carry they're kind of like but our focus is on design and getting I think the big housing developments people get concerned about them but we have huge infill opportunities within our communities where we have roads we have sewer and water but we need to use our land more efficiently and this links to our conversation about zoning reform we want to see people more comfortable with grabbing a new home built getting their hand around what it's going to look like so we don't have the opposition and people to our communities quickly and where are we here we had a million dollars in the housing bill last year to create a new framework and conversation around how do we create more housing infill housing in smart locations and identify the whole host of local partners mostly focused on one of the bigger costs for housing is the infrastructure, the roads, the pipes the things that you need the government used to pay for but now it's on the private development so how do we change that so these towns we started this conversation everybody's very excited about how do we work together more intentionally to create housing options in these centers for the first time ever all the housing funders and regulators being together to meet with developers kind of a one stop shop conversation because before they used to knock on everybody's door did inconsistent information and wasted everybody's time but now we're, let's have a conversation we're talking about developments we're giving feedback memos like here's the things you can do the next step it's really exciting, it's the kind of system change we need to kind of get our regulations and our funding sources creating the housing options in the right locations quickly because we need to solve this problem faster and this blends into our place-based TIF our place-based you know, small TIF is that coming up again this year on time? tax credits, I'll skip this slide this is a well broadly supported program can I just say because I will forget otherwise I hope someone today is going to tell us if there are any requests for extensions for TIFs yes, Hartford I heard my date from Jessica back someone might be tracking request for TIF extensions I know we did one last year and we had Hartford's coming up which was way too strong yes Windsor and then okay, okay I just want to flag that for the pilot TIFs we're trying to do the transportation act because I've talked enough this is a great program in partnership with VTrans to support transportation improvements with very flexible state funding to allow communities to do kind of those enhancements that make places focus on people and humanity rather than just cars and really creating sidewalks amenities to create that quality of place that supports economic vitality and just community vitality in general we run about $300,000 annually to support our designated downtowns and this year we got last year we got a one-time set of some funding $2 million to expand that to villages that's gone through a robust planning process through Better Connections and communities do really remarkable things like here in Virginia their businesses aren't accessible and ADA accessible so they use the Downtown Transportation Fund to make all their businesses accessible which has been incredible to see and they've done it over several years tapping into the grants to kind of further the community Just one thing that stands out for me is vehicle charging stations and I'm wondering as you use that fund are you just your observations generally are you seeing standards being developed as to what what's the extent of vehicle charging stations is growing for example in grants that are being issued through the fund the need for it or the recognition that they need we need to be more and more we need to do more but right now we have a slide on REB charging station right now Vermont is number one per capita in the number of charging stations ACCD has been involved in this since 2014 and we now have a NOFA right up now to kind of significantly expand the capacity of charging stations in the state does the capacity or at least the plan to expand the capacity match what we're saying in terms of targets I think we could always use more the number of electric the notion is you get all the electric vehicles that are various plans and goals and so on to say but are there going to be charging stations to charge them as we talked with natural resources is there going to be the electrical infrastructure to be able to support them most people are going to charge it home because that's where it's going to be easiest and most convenient the public charging stations refer a lot of the traveling public or the people who are like I didn't plug in last night I need to find a place in town to work and quickly charge it's been pointed out to me that the state just spent a whole lot of money redoing the parking ride in Berlin and there is not a charging station in that parking ride and that's not you you are cabin that's what I have been told and I drove by the other day and I balled it I couldn't see one in that instance there might be where they did an inventory of the other charging stations pretty close by there because I know there is a huge bag just on the other side of the road with the tourist stop they might also have a DCFC but it would seem like we are encouraging people to carpool you park there you carpool but that would be an obvious place to plug in for the day I don't want to do that we do have chief romay 1130 for security briefing we have half hour less than I thought I think we can give you just a couple more minutes and then we can take a break as they need and we'll just go straight to job so good next slide let's talk about better connections in the next slide right there it's a partnership with the department of health the department of environmental conservation it's a really high touch super responsive program we fund three communities a year provide boots on the ground, technical assistance and it's rather than providing a grant to communities to develop action plans that set their priorities and path toward implementation we provide on-the-boot support with interagency collaboration coordination to link their planning goals to implementation funding it's been remarkable this was one of the spring boards for what spring builds have been accomplishing for seven years we funded 21 projects and it's filled a really good gap in the planning ground because it's a lot larger money than the municipal planning grant and it provides more technical assistance from state and regional entities to provide extra capacity to smaller towns and then I do want to end I guess with Better Places and I want to share our annual reports for the program they are more than one page Senator Brock but there's three different case studies but they get lots of pictures lots of pictures this has been a remarkable program and I'm very grateful for this committee and House Commerce standing it up in the session of 2021 and everything that this program was designed to do has been well received and it provides another funding and financing mechanism for grant making that is different than any other state grant to support projects that create public spaces, revitalize public spaces and bring Bermuda from all walks of life together in our downtowns and villages to bring the quality of life and social connection and economic vitality and the way it does it rather than being a competitive grandparent where everybody is fighting for limited state funds the community has a project that's eligible and they can raise their match through a very community engagement process through crowdfunding the state will reward them a two to one match and they set their own priority to revitalize public spaces in their communities it's a program that can deliver it's remarkable to see what the communities are doing we've brought a lot of touch points to it it's really a TA plus technical system plus program we've brought a lot of coaching and the feedback we're getting like we're teaching folks how to fund rate we're teaching them how to fish we're teaching them how to develop projects and engage their communities rather than just being a small group of citizens making the broader public and financing these projects and building that community confidence to take on larger things because these are smaller projects but it really changes that morale that's what can change a community and set them on trajectory to positive growth that's been fun and we've had so much interest 100 conversations 84 communities this past year and the interest has just been overwhelming so how many total communities have you touched with this? 100 communities have been engaged 100 inquires 84 communities we've funded successfully 18 projects in 2022 we didn't watch the program until February of last year we have three live campaigns going on right now they're already successful and we have sticks launching in the next couple months and anticipate another 15 to 25 this year that seems about the kind of cadence of communities going through the program and there's some changes that may request because we've had a lot of interest and right now there's only one community per calendar year allowed to go through the program and I think we can have a little more uptake in the program if we can allow a couple communities per year to go through the program as well so in your last five minutes I just want to see if you have asks that you want to preview for us as we continue through the session about months just partnership on the housing bill we're going to be the focus of our policy work session we'll wait for the budget address but what I love about this program I work in my small little town I know where all the money is how to turn over the rocks and make things happen it's so hard when you set things up if you miss one grant you're delayed for years and you're sitting on this project trying to keep that momentum going and this program just changes who makes the decision the community identifies the priorities they raise the money and it gets done I would love to see all of our programs move toward the splitting where somebody from Montpelier is not making the decision it's the community identifying the priority it's amazing it's been remarkable to see too the donations come from all over the state and even outside the state from young children donating $3 New Park and their community to larger donors donating $4,000 from the business community or other key actors in the community well you've certainly made the case strongly if we can I'd like to just give us a 3 minute break up before Joe so we could talk about how great all this work is and you've left us with so many wonderful materials clearly work the investment that we made and we'll continue to make your budget for the past later on thank you for your time thank you guys for your work it's so exciting so please don't go far we just want people to have 3 minutes to go to the bathroom and stretch okay welcome Joe thank you very much for the record Joe Goldstein Commissioner of the Economic Development at the Agency of Commerce and Community Development I'm not going to be able to keep looking back so we'll keep up with the slides but we're a staff of now 28 and for a long time we were probably one of the smallest departments in state government we were covering around 19 or 20 people since then we've gotten some limited service positions thank you we did that I guess over the last 2 years just to help us with the deluge I would say of funding from pandemic related relief many people have been in the department as long as I have I've been commissioner now it will be 8 years in April which feels long by state government standards in terms of these roles I was appointed by Governor Shumlin reappointed by Governor Scott several times and hopefully that means economic development is nonpartisan and I like to think that because we all need it the mission this is like a mission I think that's been recited so much but I like to think about economic development as creating opportunity for all Vermonters while preserving all of our quality of life and values I think we had a slide on buzzwords many of you that are familiar with what we do we'll see that some of this is all within our purview so I'll try not to speak in buzzwords and just keep it in plain English we don't do this work alone with economic development we have a number of partners all over the state regional development corporations regional planning commissions local chambers VEDA of course the economic development authority small business administration small business development center and the northern border regional commission which is a federal commission but we Vermon stands to gain I think this year there's even more money coming to the commission but our agency our department actually administers solicits applications with USDA too yes with USDA there are a couple of not set-asides but there are USDA and EDA initiatives that we could divert some of the NBRC money toward so it's all in all tremendous amount of heft when I think about the work we do it's all about how do we improve properties how do we improve re-enlist values how do we recruit team workers and train them and overall just make it a better place to live I often say the governor is going to present his budget next week and that's really a spending plan and what we're trying to do is encourage activity that's going to bring about the revenue side so that there's more economic activity there's more sales and use tax there's more property tax income tax being the largest generator so I have a whole bunch of different programs to go through and give you results but is there any one in particular one that's to focus on I mean the big news last year was the $40 million that was appropriated to the community recovery and revitalization program and that was ARPA money that's the American Rescue Plan Act funding and we had five different categories of who could apply so we have of course impacted industries arts and entertainment hospitality education or agriculture we also had municipalities could apply if they were doing a water wastewater project connected to housing or an economic development initiative and the other scenario is affordable housing or child care so quite a lot of big swath we launched the program in November we had the first 30 days were open to owners of BIPOC owners of businesses or serving BIPOC communities or any other community that's not in the Burlington metropolitan statistical area so think everybody outside of Chittenden Franklin and Grand Isle so far we've received over 75 applications to that program with about $385 million worth of activity and I like to say that in addition of being able to launch this funding opportunity we get to know what's going on all over the state and there's some great projects going on with communities banding together to bring forth many pieces of the capital structure to bring it to fruition so that's the great news that there is great news happening all over the state and we probably will be oversubscribed if we're not already I think there's about $30 million worth of ask so far but it's only end of December that we opened it up to all I'm probably speaking out of order and of the early crowd we got how many of the early seven do I see seven BIPOC so there's seven BIPOC led or serving six were in qualified census tracks so that is another track of being able to apply for this they have a lot more leeway what they could use the money for because it is a disadvantaged area in terms of poverty rates and income levels but interestingly there's 215 child care slots through five different projects of applications 43 applicants from impacted industries six in QCT so I think overall we're very pleased with so far I mean we have a lot of work to go through all of them we don't have all sorted out Senator Rockett let's make sure the questions are very informational the question is on the awards thus far is there publicly available a list on an ongoing basis of what the projects are and who it went to in the announced so there will be so for for the capital investment program which was the precursor to this program we have that on our website on eccd.formonth.gov it'll give a synopsis of who got funding as you recall two sessions ago we got ten million dollars for the capital investment program and that has been pretty much expended there are some people that are still in documentation process so that's working its way these we are still in the process of making decisions and what we think will work is that there's a legislative report due middle of February we'll probably do the approvals and get everything through interagency team probably by early February so that we can be in a position to we notify everyone and we also make a couple of things available and we'll do that more or less on a quarterly basis right and so the next slide also just talks about capital investment as I just said we announced awards to 35 awardees and again 12 different counties around the state $195 million worth of capital investment projects so it's encouraging it really truly is I mean they're at various stages of development like some are very very early stage and we're going to work with them to see as they line up their funding so that we're not the first funding in and the max is $350 no on this the maximum is 20% of the capital investment cost or a million dollars in the capital investment program it was all devised by the net fiscal impact modeling I don't know if you remember last year we worked hard to not use that model for the community recovery because the model is very strict about job creation when in fact many capital investment projects don't necessarily create long term jobs but it doesn't mean that we don't want those investments and those improvements to happen so that award from capital investment was limited by the amount of the net fiscal impact that was found so many of them were under $500,000 each I'll stick to the property sort of development like brownfields I'm going backwards Jess I don't know if she's driving she went whizzing forward okay so brownfield revitalization fund was a couple of slides before but again this notion is really about our communities all over the state have contaminated properties and it's so difficult to get those cleaned up they're expensive and the state has a very good we call it Brella for sure it's the brownfields limited liability program so if you're an innocent purchaser you want to buy this property you want to redevelop that the state will protect you from liability if you go through these stages of assessment understanding what's in there coming up with the corrective action plan and in that plan we'll talk about it'll quantify what will it cost to clean it up and so we because of the brownfields state money that you all helped get appropriated in the last two sessions we were able to get quite a lot of funding out the door we've got it's for for-profits non-profits and for municipalities which is a lot more flexible than the federal money we were also able to give larger grants the feds usually limited to 200,000 so we are very keen to get those redeveloped obviously even once it's cleaned up there's time that it takes to get teneted I wonder if I know that you have a question on this I wonder if this could be an offline discussion yeah no I just this is not the question you're thinking about this is just if you could give people because the scale if you could give people a sense of the scale of the brownfield challenge how many years on average it takes to clean them up how many dollars it takes I think we just have to appreciate the scale of the brownfield cleanup yeah that's a good point and you've agreed that back yeah it's fair we get asked the question how many brownfields are there and like A&R has the database and it is hundreds of properties all over the state some of which have not been assessed right so they tend to lie there they tend to be pretty valueless you know towns are not able to collect what they could collect from the property some of them are really bad let's look at Springfield you know a little bit of mine a little bit of mine some are you know either superfund site or borderline superfund site in terms of the amount of money we take to clean up millions so we're not providing all of the money you know but we're providing a very good gap 453 Pine Street and in Burlington had you know it's next to a superfund site so the build out on that is much more expensive to prevent any seepage you know so that is there's a developer lined up to do a spa there I understand it and we had a good kind of groundbreaking but millions of dollars messy things like sometimes it's as simple as just cover if it's going to be used as a parking lot you just pave it over fine and sometimes not it's PCBs or there's air contamination there have to be vapor barriers installed and testing and monitoring so it gets expensive really quick and a lot of people will be like sorry you know there's liability and then there's also the cost so this has been an excellent program that I think had wide acceptance in both chambers really really really happy about that I guess and I don't know this oh good Abby's here there's so many other programs but I think we should probably talk about the veggie the Vermont employment growth incentive you'll be hearing a lot about it this session because it's sunsetting January of 24 so we obviously want to extend it and what it does is it incentivizes a business to grow here in Vermont provided that they meet certain targets so they currently have to say they're going to grow X amount of jobs a dollar value amount payroll and capital investment that's how it works currently so we have some suggestions on how to make it a little bit more clear easier to understand more transparent and right now the way the statute reads we only aggregate the information every year and so people like well what did someone so get and right now the statute doesn't really permit us to do that so we have some suggestions on how to change that that has a lot of data a lot of data on what's working right the money has gone to how many jobs it's created how many of those businesses have stayed here longer than five years there are issues and we will be about this in finance yes yes we will totally be in your community yeah so we don't have that data with us I don't see it on the I'll attract rent for chairs well and we want to give that some time so we need to okay that's fine some of it's up now but we want to dive into it I mean the other thing that we are going to bring back and you mentioned it before was the project based TIF in fact during the year we had tried I guess about five times to get project based TIF passed and we weren't necessarily going to bring it forward but towns are coming to us asking what about that project based TIF and they're selling this on it they're pitching to us why they own it so we thought we have to listen to that and come back to the Durham Board and see if we could get that passed in fact Montpelier withdrew their regular TIF and they're one of the proponents of project based TIF it's simpler it's easier you don't have to do a 20 year plan you don't have to identify so many parcels and everything has to be aligned correctly and then you go in for changes I mean it gets really complicated really quickly and you know some of the larger towns have been able to do it some of the larger towns have had problems with it as well so I think project based TIF really speaks to the need of there may be a smaller town that doesn't have the wherewithal doesn't have the bonding capacity necessarily right so it should be easier also yeah and measuring is easier it's just so straight forward so we will be back to the Durham Board with that do you know when you are drawing I mean Veggie I think we want to put some TIF stuff in our housing bill which will start to take shape next week so I don't know if you have we do they will say it's been run by me but a proposal for a housing based TIF yes right yeah yes so that's great so yeah I think TIFs most TIF stuff might end up in this faster probably finance excellent yeah and I think do we have we have some TIF extensions that have been requested so if you want to explain do you want me to come to the team and introduce myself how many of my presentation or I can answer that question oh it's in your presentation well not about the TIF extension we are trying to transition to your presentation Abby so it depends on it works together we're going to see you so to your question we did is looking for a TIF extension it's not coming from the administration the town is going to we have to fill out we have to fill out that's it just hard for for exploration I think they have another year we did we did Windsor I think last year two years ago this is an extension on their debt that incurrence or extension so they're looking for an extension on both that incurrence and retention period because at this point they're at 13 years because they got a three year extension so which of the three tips we just mentioned do you talk about it hard for what we were talking about and so if they ask for another extension you're getting so far into their 20 year period that they're also looking at extending their retention period let's say to install the public improvements it takes a little while for those private developments to happen and come online before they start seeing the tax there's a little bit of a lag there so it just makes sense that it needs to be extended but as far as other towns I had heard sort of anecdotally a lot of others they don't always tell us okay yeah I don't know if they're I don't know if they're considering it seriously well they'll start to hear because it's a legislative it's like Betsy can't approve that yeah do you have a quick question do you ever deny them extending the tip or recommend denial of that so if they do want an extension it would have to come through the legislature it would have to come through the legislature there is something in statute that allows Betsy to extend the debt in part of her or increment retention the only thing, the only role that Betsy would have is to review their tip district plan, to financing plan to make sure it's still viable so if the legislature did approve an extension then we would review that plan I guess I was asking do they ever get denied or have the tip of an extension been denied no we haven't denied one that came to us I agree we might have come closer to Burlington no it's Burlington you've delayed some of our decisions when I got here there were Watozki Burlington and Milton all had different standards different timelines and finance did the standardized TIF bill so the new ones are all playing under the same rules but just to clarify just to make sure so Betsy doesn't have any ability to approve an extension it's always we have to do that because it impacts the F1 and what I meant to say was have you ever recommended denials someone said we're not a party to that oh okay and we've never denied one okay I mean it's 20 years we're just we'd be pushing it out and COVID kind of threw a wrench and that was our challenge and that was the challenge you just shut everything down for two years so my name is for the record Executive Director of the Broad Economic Progress Council I have been with Betsy for five years four years as the grants program manager and then a year ago I got appointed as the Executive Director prior to that I spent six months in the agency of education that was my introduction to state government and prior to that I spent 11 years with the town of that world when I left there I was their assistant town manager sorry where were you assistant the town of that world yeah this is great I was there during my read which was a challenging time it was a very challenging time and prior to that I was with the Windsor Northwest Supervisory Union which is no longer in existence it's a small consolidation but I worked in special education during that time next slide Jess so a little background about Betsy Betsy is an independent board of Vermont citizens it was created by the General Assembly 28 years or 28 years ago nine members are appointed by the Governor and two by the General Assembly currently have vacancies in the General Assembly with the departure of Charlie Kimball in the House and Cheryl Laffer in the Senate so we are looking for a appointee from the Senate we also have two vacancies for Governor appointments which we are working on but you can imagine it's going to be a challenge with just seven members early until we get some more appointments in there we are housed within ACCD and we receive our legal administrative IT and other services and support from the agency and we administer two programs for the state the Vermont Employment Growth Incentive and the tax increment financing program Betsy and Tiff next slide Betsy was created by the legislature and has been in place since 2007 it's designed to encourage job and payroll growth and the expansion of facilities Betsy's role is to renew the applications to the program to determine eligibility and authorize or deny a business to earn the incentive it is not a grant it is a performance based incentive so what that means is the company only receives the payment if they need those requirements and maintain them this chart gives you a little overview of where the incentive comes from it's part of a complex cost benefit model the same one that Joan described that was part of the capital investment program it looks at the revenues the company's growth bring to the state and it deducts the cost to the state for that growth and the incentive the green is the incremental revenue the blue is what they are currently doing and then what we are paying out would be this incentive in yellow the blue is the blue is it's not a flat line it assumes that there is always going to be some sort of growth but yes the yellow is where the incentive is coming from the company where the incentive is coming from that is paid to the company for performance and just to point out on that too that the model is driven by job growth so if the company is not adding jobs they can't access this program if they're only doing capital investments this program is not available to them next slide so this is some of the data from our annual report that came out on September 1st it is the actual data is based on claims submitted to the tax department and there is always a little bit of a two year lag because tax is auditing each claim to make sure the targets are met before they pay the incentive to the company so since 2007 through 2020 331 incentive claims have been approved paying out more than 33.8 million incentives for the creation of 8,812 jobs with over 1 billion in capital investments it's been provided to 64 applications receiving the incentive from this program over 13 years Senator Brock now talk about the demographic crisis that's affecting Vermont with thousands of unfilled jobs as opposed to when Pepsi was started we were looking for jobs to hire people now we're looking for people to fill jobs do you do anything in terms of metrics or at least also in terms of speaking with the companies that are in the program now of what the impact of that demographic crisis is and whether or not the entire program that we're looking at as an incentive program is the right thing to be looking for at this point in time that's kind of a long economy question you're interested in you used to be able to tell us that today but I think it's something that's going to be important to the committee as we go forward in talking with you further about what we do if anything with this program a lot of that is policy related we implement the program so somebody events it to that point it's interesting what one of the things we'd like to see is what about just if someone's doing a capital investment we want them to continue to invest in their properties here otherwise we'll do it elsewhere so that's one of the ideas it's like what about just for capital investment the other factor the matter is somebody like Beta has grown like by hundreds of jobs and there are people moving to the state to take the job of Beta so we don't look at the labor force as fixed and that there's no way to increase it and we are hearing this why are we incentivizing jobs I don't know what the alternative would be do we want the jobs to grow in other states so I think we have to continue to work to create good jobs people need to be gainfully employed and then if there's a great opportunity they move for it it's shocking how much Beta has grown because they're not having a problem higher education they are having problems so most of the housing and child care are still having a problem it's living in one box it's hard to isolate it it's hard to isolate it is the money best used for a child care center instead at the same time I think we have to work on each of these things concurrently because it's not going to be like okay housing is fixed now we could recruit a system of are there good jobs being created how do we incentivize that to happen are we building enough housing are we helping get the housing built by alleviating some of the barriers to that there used to be a thing called company housing it was a very bad wrap probably deserves it but there have been proposals that in order to get workers you might invest in housing for those workers and that might be something to look at if we don't need to really push for jobs I'm wondering we're dealing with the census which happened just prior to COVID in the middle of it and we keep hearing that there's all kinds of people moving here but do we how do we document that do we know do we have to wait 10 years to brand less schools that's how those taxes might be awaited but that's not well no because they would know new income tax that might be the best one taxpayers who are no longer filing that you track so that would be a good question for the tax department and education and the school population is still declining and a lot of the wood stock I got an example COVID and we were declining but there is growth we can track AOE can help us and tax can help us and brand less towns can my niece is one of those people moved and when she went to enroll her kids over in the valley who was told that that school was seeing quite a few new kids it may be our more affluent ski second home become first home towns but that would also be something to track where is the growth we know Chittin and County but are there pockets I think tells me that Brighton isn't seeing a big increase in population well I think actually we'd be surprised I mean we should know that when there are so many schools in your population Windham increased population the last year but now it's coming back it's surprising I do want to reward Heather's patient if I but yeah I think we acknowledge that but you also want to incentive businesses are having to automate that we should make sure they do that here as opposed to a different plan I do also want to just mention to that the council does they do ask I hear that with every company they do ask that question how are you getting these people and sometimes it is while we we have housing work right is a recurring question with the applications the applications have dwindled in recent years as well 2022 we have approved four final applications 2021 I think it was three the year before that before that there were many more so the applications are dwindling as well there are ideas about employer generated housing from a number of different employers for my glove there are examples of it and I know you probably didn't hear from the HF that right but it's happening there are some interesting levels but it's interesting this is the friendly committee there are concerns in the money committee areas there are also three people on that that's right but there it will be I think a harder sell we're in favor of the morning guest you need to commit the votes in the morning for the afternoon it's a different focus I know I'm not going to cross my chair in the afternoon do you want me to continue with my yeah yeah especially if there are some final fights yeah do you think I have like four left just to go to the next slide so every every veggie in your work court is beta is one as we just talked about they were able to expand their South Burlington location with the use of veggie they continue to grow in that location they were also just approved for a second veggie award in 2022 to expand in St. Albans town in a new utilize building CAD is another company they expanded their operations from California to a location in Randolph taking up shop in a vacant building in East Randolph they also have a great and GW plastics in your own Bethel they also have a veggie their veggie covers Bethel Union so what does CAD do with the dogs I was looking at the dogs and I was wondering well the dogs are a real selling boy I was just saying that Rida also has dogs so it's just a dog friendly it's a dog friendly work okay how about CAD the customer's trouble it's a true CAD it's true Tats in her financing districts that is the other program that the FCE oversees we currently have, the state currently has 10 active TIP districts Killington being the newest TIP district we're quite excited approved in June 2022 we also just approved their first face finally for that district it's going to be happening very soon it's sort of almost like a mini TIP I was going to say where is downtown Killington up towards the mouth it is I know where the town clerk's office is so it's alright it's closer to the ski area because it's not it's not root for it's not the village center it's up towards the mountain it's okay yeah poor Heather I'm not kidding you against your colleagues so these are two graphics that we use I'm sure Heather's office created these for us to describe TIP which basically how does it work municipality encores debt they use that debt to build their infrastructure this is the simplest TIP very simple TIP is complicated they use the TIP debt to build their infrastructure which causes private development to happen increases grantless values which creates new property tax revenue which they then TIP districts then use to repay that TIP debt the graphic on the right I just want to point your attention to the Spartan spot in green but while the dark blue is the base value grantless value to stay at that value from the district the lighter blue and the green that's the overall tax increment that is generated the lighter blue is the amount that continues to go to the education fund and the green is the amount that goes to the TIP district firm to help repay TIP debt they also of course have to retain their municipal tax fees towards that but that is at a higher rate 85% municipal 80% 85% TIP 15% okay it depends we also provide annual report on the TIP program the next one we'll come out on April 1st through fiscal year 2021 TIP districts have invested over 173 million in their communities financing 117 million without the TIP these investments have spurred private development and increased tax values by over 405 million generating over 92 million in tax revenues with 6 million of that going to the education fund last slide we've been sort of the success story but we're required to provide profiles on TIP districts this one's on St. Albans since the creation of their TIP district taxable values have increased over 50 million they've invested over 31 million in public infrastructure financing 1.5 million of that with TIP in fiscal year 2021 just that year alone their increase in taxable values generated 1.4 million in new tax revenues projects they've completed include brownfield mediation of multiple sites in their downtown streetscape improvements such as Kingman Street on your screen and the construction of a parking garage and that is the we have a whole bunch of other programs that would be happy to talk to you about that I may have said this already today but we're going to do a big housing bill and then we're going to start looking at all the other requests we have to address some categories that generally relate to work for us in economic development you have a little time to sort of gather all that together is there any data requests that people have for next time if we know that we're looking a lot at veggie tips we're going to have this out of us in finance no, I'm actually thinking tips are really set from big municipalities that are planning and zoning in a finance office and if we fulfill that need maybe it's time to transition to a smaller system I think we agree on this committee we would have to give up on one but that might work better for Vermont because it's a statewide property tax school tax whatever we do with it that we impact with that and it remains to be seen if we ever do go to an income based school tax what impact that would have on tips there's a lot of things moving thank you that is sustained for such good work and there will be reports coming out shortly on everything from new workers new workers the community recovery will have a report Vermont training firm will have a report you have a veggie report already out there the good news is you can connect those right to your recommendations and requests when we hear about that but this was a really good overview and you've done incredible work thanks for all that you've done to make that possible I appreciate you we're good when you talk about partners we're one of your partners totally are we're not we have to imagine we're not we have some new people um Sandra Chitenden and Sandra Rahm and Sandra McComach who is a attorney yes but there are three of us and the other three are natural resources right it is funny that's been a standard it hasn't always been one year I frequently have had several members unnatural understand. Sometimes we don't always agree. Oh no. Commissioner Pelham, thanks so much for you've heard a lot about your analysis, which probably helps you to do your job. But thanks so much for being here. We can definitely ask Chief Romero to hold off for another five minutes and give you a full, a lot of time. Well, I appreciate that. And again, for the record, Heather Pelham and the Commission of the Department of Tourism and Marketing. Thank you for that. Also, I would say I can always come back. So, you know, I will be happy to provide this high level. And then if there's more information you'd like on anything in particular, please let me know. Well, we're going to do some field trips that I have you in mind. Oh, fabulous. Order related. Okay. Love field trips. So very, you know, on a very broad level, you know, our mission department, well, I guess just very briefly, Senator Harrison. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. I guess really quickly in terms of my background, I've been in this role since 2019. So about three years, I've been actually with the Agency of Commerce for 10. So previous to becoming the Commissioner of the Department of Tourism and Marketing, I was the Chief Marketing Officer for the state. So within the Agency of Commerce, but looking to the rest of the state enterprise and helping other agencies and departments with their marketing communication needs. And then previous to that, I was an private sector sector running a creative agency here from on a creative about 15 years or so. So that's my back thing. So Department of Tourism and Marketing, you know, as the name implies, you know, we are about promoting the state. And, you know, our mission is not just for visitation, but that has extended to relocation as well. In terms of facing some of our demographic challenges has already come up. And to your point, chair about listening to the rest of the agency, you know, one of the reasons why I do that is because our work really is interconnected. So when I think about tourism, you know, I think of that that is, you know, rural economic development. Tourism reaches all corners of the state. It has that ability to kind of transcend in terms of it is also about like revitalizing our communities. It's about those assets that visitors come to enjoy. I would also remind folks that where our work starts is at the very top of the marketing funnel. So if you think about that, you know, we're not selling any one product, but we're selling the idea of Vermont. And so that idea is, yes, please come here on vacation. But it's also just generally contained in nurture that brand affinity that folks have with Vermont. So maybe they're visiting family and friends, maybe they came to school here, maybe they came on vacation and all of that adds up to either repeat visitation or potentially maybe they want to come here as new residents. Are people now looking for Jericho Vermont? You know, I will have to talk to the folks in Jericho to see if they've gotten questions about that. Senator Brock and I have had a chance to work together on the film media task force where that's come up, which we'll come back and talk about it. I like the hallmark that came into Rutland Regional Airport that had terminals. Oh, yeah. Really? It's okay. It doesn't matter. Vermont is mentioned. It's a Vermont touch. It feels like Canada, but it doesn't care as they're talking about it as a Vermont thing. You know, they don't care about the film. They care that it's certainly was a avalanche and people got shut in and couldn't get out. I don't know. It's fiction. So we go to the next slide, Jess. Just I did want to give an overview for context in terms of, you know, the tourism, the visitor economy as we as we refer to it in the state of Vermont. It's a three, almost a three billion dollar part of our economy. So as I mentioned, it touches all sectors to the all sections of the state, all regions of the state. You know, pre pandemic, we were looking about 13 million visitors who come to the state. We are, you know, we have our other way road to recovery or not say that we're totally there yet. But as a source of generation for the general fund, you know, $387 million. If you do the calculation as to, you know, how much that translates to per household of Vermont, it's about $1500 of tax savings that, you know, might have needs to be generated elsewhere for it not coming from visitation. So just a point of context for folks over 30,000 jobs. That's 10% of our workforce. So this really is a significant part of I would hope any economic development and, you know, community development conversations. I also wanted to include outdoor recreation. We've all seen how that has exploded. It was always a brand strength for us. But in terms of what we've seen over the last several years, new statistic came out from the Bureau of Economic Analysis that shows that outdoor recreation is 4.1% of our GDP. And that puts us as third highest in the country. So just beyond Hawaii and Montana. Also in terms of the job growth within the outdoor recreation sector. From 20 to 21, we saw 17.5% increase in jobs in the outdoor recreation sector. Excuse me. So we're just behind Montana and Hawaii for GDP. Are ski resorts included in that? Yeah, absolutely. But mountain biking. Yeah, it's a it's a it's a broad sector. But I think it just kind of speaks to the intersection, you know, of these types of questions that we're talking about. And so that that job growth at 17.6% from 2021 that put us as sixth highest in the country, highest in the east. Again, all the other growth was in far west. Okay, are we doing any thinking planning about the impact of climate change on some of our outdoor recreation? We are yes, I would say one of the cute through yeah, through all that we lost it through COVID in terms of travel and tourism. There is another set of money that is coming to the department through the economic administration EDA. There was a there's a set aside state grant program. Every state is receiving a pot of money based proportionally to their losses in travel and tourism. When we get access to that money, which we will have in the next two years or so, one of the things that we're doing is a whole bunch of strategic planning, as well as data collection, research and so forth about how do we create resilience in the industry. So climate change is certainly part of that. So I would say more to come. Yeah, because I'm just thinking of one small town that doesn't plow its roads so that you can have snowmobiles. And I don't think there's any snowmobiles on those roads right now, or on the lakes, unless they're into high risk. Snowmobiles. Yeah. Our industries are iconic for our industries are very hugely impacted by climate change. Seeing an outdoor wreck heavily. But all of tourism is going to be impacted. So you know, the resilience of our communities, the you know, the ability to pivot, the ability to define what it is that makes a community unique. That is something that you know, we do now. And as that changes, we will continue to do so. Can you do us a favor and connect with the outdoor recreation alliance or the association? Sure. So we can help them to testify. Yeah, so the Vermont outdoor business alliance is is a group that we work with quite a bit. And then I would also encourage you to talk to Jackie Dagger if you haven't already, she is the a bore. She's the vorac program manager. So that's the Vermont outdoor recreation economic collaborative. And she has a she has a joint position between Forest Parks and Rec and ACCD. So I would think between Jackie and then Kelly Alt, who's the executive director of MOBA. So then just I can go quickly through sort of what we do. Next slide is just about you know, our signature program certainly is destination marketing. You know, we again, we're at the top of the funnel, we're planting that seed, we're trying to reach as many people as possible by elevating the brand experiences that are created throughout our state. We used owned earned and paid media, you know, quickly owned media is what we can say about ourselves. That's our website social media and so forth earned media as press what people are saying about us and then paid media clearly is we pay for it. But it gives us a lot more opportunities to reach more people than we would be able to do so on our own. I did include in this presentation and I can just kind of go through it quickly and again, come back or in this presentation, I did try and include some links but I really kind of want to know what we do. So the next couple of slides to show some visuals of our of the creative work that we do do. So, you know, we lean heavily into our brand strengths and outdoor recreation and so forth. But what we're really trying to do is, you know, it reinforce that idea that, you know, coming out of the pandemic, our theme was beyond four walls. Now we're talking about beyond the everyday and it's really one of our campaign lines is, you know, Vermont is a place unlike any other, where life is better when you slow down, look around and simply take notice, Vermont can inspire, restore and bring you to a whole new state. Right. This is just some, you know, again, just some examples of what we do, you know, we do do a lot of work and this is digital advertising that you're seeing here. If you go to the next slide, Jess. But your whole campaign of bringing people back after the pandemic has been wonderful. It's been very, it's been very heartening. I mean, there's so many different persons I can dig into, but we did through some one time funding that we've received last session, we were able to do a much larger campaign this year to aid that recovery. We can talk about base funding another day in terms of being able to sustain that. But I believe this next slide just shows we also do out of home. So this is an example of a campaign we ran this summer in the New York City market. I think it's a great juxtaposition to see, you know, how we can really position Vermont as a place where people want to go when they're seeing it on the sidewalk. So this was a program where we did, there was a creative specifically about encouraging the new train extension to Burlington, which you can see all the way in the far left. And then these were on bus shelters and digital boards in residential areas in Manhattan and in Brooklyn. We also had we also had boards up and down the commuter rail line in Connecticut, as well as in Grand Central Station. So I can do a larger report on that, but people love it. It's a great market for us. It's also, you know, we, you know, our core markets are definitely our drive markets here in the Northeast, but you know, we are competing nationally and internationally. So, you know, we really have to kind of weigh what we're doing where this next slide is another tactic of ours is called sponsor content. So we work with different brands and publishers to create content about Vermont. That helps us helps us access their reach so that that brand like outside you're seeing here backpack or yoga journal and so forth, you know, clean eating, they have their whole sense of followers. So if we work with them, hopefully then we can bring them over to our channels and continue that conversation. It also gives us a chance to highlight different trip ideas, so different, you know, ends might say a restaurant you might go to different experiences you can have when we work on sponsor content, we have that ability to kind of go that level deeper. I think the next slide, Jess, is just another couple of examples, you know, we in terms of the types of content that we work that we put out the one on the left is about scenic drives you can take around state. We did a digital travel guide for mountain biking. We partnered with Edge Media, which is a LGBTQ plus content platform to do what they call a rainbow road trip. And then the far right is about we work with New York bags into do a piece about culinary experiences that you can have here in Vermont. So just some just, you know, examples, those should all click through to the actual articles when we pass on this presentation. Matrix, we love to talk about metrics, so I'm happy to again dive into this. I'm trying to move it a little quickly just to give you guys a sense of what we where we try to think about the effectiveness of our work through our digital display advertising vendor. We are trying to calculate that very important return on ad spend number 37 to one is preliminary. What we've seen for the summer campaign, I will say that was just for the first two and a half months of it. Explain $37 of income we see in Vermont to one for every one dollar we spend on advertising. So, for instance, the $200,000 that we spent on advertising in this with this particular vendor. I don't do that much time, but 37 times times that I can give you a bigger slide with more information on that. But that's what we're seeing when the so the folks exposed that advertising when they showed up in market and they made purchases here. We can see that it's 37 times versus the amount we spent to put up those ads. We're also seeing that there's more than three times likelihood that someone exposed to advertising actually does show up in the marketplace than those who are not exposed to it. Again, we can have longer conversations about return on investment, but it is as important to us as it is, you know, I think to everybody in this body. You know, we also so in terms of, you know, in terms of how do we think about the impact of our work? You know, I started talking about taxes and, you know, big macro economy level type impacts. Again, then there's these sort of more performance based that I just mentioned here. And then there's just I would call basic marketing metrics. So are we reaching more people with their social media audience? Are we, you know, increasing visits to our website, which is where, you know, we track conversions in terms of is somebody, you know, looking at our travel planner and connecting to local businesses about where they might want to stay or where they might want to go. Are they interacting with our events calendar? And so those, you know, we have so different whole different layers of types of metrics that we try and monitor to see how we're doing. And why, why is you're in here? Yes, every year, excuse me for that. So I'm going to move on to the next major program that we work on is relocation through our Think Vermont program. So, you know, I think you guys are well aware of our demographic crisis. So, you know, Think Vermont is something that has been in existence for a couple of years now. We use some of the same tactics, earned to known media. We do not have a paid media budget for that work. That said, I will, if you see on the next slide, we were able to find a carve out for $60,000 to do a small social media campaign this summer. This is some of the creative that we use for that, where we're really talking about, you know, what it is like to live and work in Vermont. And I'll just go to the next slide to show you that I hope this is not any surprise. But one of our conversion points is when we're doing advertising, people come to Think Vermont, we have this connect with a Vermont form. So you can see that they when the campaign was running in August and September, we saw the number of average inquiries we got from that form double. So I hope it's not a surprise that, you know, when you get the word out there, you actually get people engaged with you. That whole connect with the Vermont process. What that is is, you know, really is our lead generation and distribution system. So people show they're interested in moving to Vermont. Then we find out where they might be interested in moving to that's what the graph on the bottom is. And then we distribute those leads to the local regions. That's where we've seen the most impact in terms of being able to make that final sale of somebody is interested in moving here is by talking to somebody on the local level. The huge issue there is that we've always done that on a volunteer basis with our partners. They are very willing partners, but they don't have the capacity to really handle this, you know, one on one of the support that we know is impactful. So that's something I would love to talk to you guys about again. Probably running so and then I can just if we go to the next light just the other area, I would say another big area of our work is just really supporting the industry at large, you know, through one time appropriation, we were able to do a grant program. We've never been able to do that in the past. That was one time money that we were able to do. We were able to give out 22 towards an economic recovery marketing grants. We will have a report coming out in February about that in total, but it was up to about $30,000 and we were able to to fund things like festivals in the waking windows and Winooski the fly fishing festival down in Arlington. We've been able to fund creative assets like Vermont Adaptive is doing some videos on the work that they do. A tenor a development in, you know, I know Addison County, NK upper valley was just a couple of different projects so I can give you more details on that. And that's been wonderful to be able to work with our communities because it's really, you know, we're not creating those grant experiences. We're just trying to make sure as many people as possible know about them. And so when we talk about partnerships and sponsorships, that's another area of our work. And that's where, for instance, we work with the Vermont Council of Business Alliance. You know, one of our priorities is in is looking at everything we do through a DEI lens. Voba's been a great partner with us with that. We did a project together this summer to get some additional diverse photography for our work. And we've also recently joined travel unity, which is a nonprofit organization looking to increase diversity in the world of travel. We've created our own DEI statement that we're using to kind of guide our work. So I hope you partnered with Marna Lario right here. Yeah, Bern is wonderful. She's an amazing brand ambassador. And even in, you know, so it's just social media influencers in general, when we look at, you know, who we're working with, you know, all the, you know, we, the pro one of our signature programs this summer was about bringing, I think it was five separate BIPOC influencers here for, you know, different areas of state and I can give you more information about that. But through partnerships and sponsorships, that's one way that we can elevate the things that are important and priorities to us. And what do you have left in that? How much money was in it was 600,000. That's right. So that was that was gone. It was competitive. We had 41 applications. We were able to give out 22 grants. But through potentially through the EDA money that I mentioned earlier, that is still to come. We might be able to do some of those programs again. Then the last program is just so you folks know the chief marketing office is also part of the Department of Tourism Marketing. It's two folks that, as I mentioned, that's where I came into the agency, you know, they work to support other agencies and departments in their communications needs, whether it be through infographics about, you know, budget impacts and so forth, or just accessing marketing expertise. We have a pre qualified vendor program and also a set of master marketing contracts so that stated state agencies who may not have communications staff or very deep communication staff can still get access to that level of expertise. And I think that's those are the highlights. You know, we'd work with a number of different partners around the state, just like the rest of the agency. Whether that be other state departments or, you know, other activities specific or, you know, reasons downtown organizations and so forth. And I think the last slide is just about buzz words, which was our sort of standard that we did throughout the agency. So Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we were, you know, in terms of folks who may be not for this committee, but for folks who are interested in if you are hearing conversations about branding or about marketing or about, you know, about film or about, you know, any those types of things come to us, if you would, or includes in the conversation, if there's data you're looking for wondering how we intersect. That was the idea of including those. We noticed we're not listed as one of your partners. Oh, well, I think it's the last slide. I don't think we enlisted committees. I think we don't need a committee. It's just a lot just like your yeah. Fair enough. Fair enough. I'm sorry. I mean, they're talking to us. So we did have a committee slide that we gave this presentation to the new legislation. Have a little conversation about what you said, but I'm sure it was partnership like, yeah, Fortress is now going to go at the legislative everything. I feel like they're going to use overtime. Um, this was a great preview. You know, work to refer more to come. As we wrap up, Jessica, we want to thank you very much, and we wouldn't even know you're not in Vermont. You're still in Vermont. You're still in Vermont. So we hope some some day soon you make it back. But just thank you to ACCG to tourism. Yeah, no, it's my pleasure. And if you have specific follow up questions, I know we don't have much time right now, but please let me know. You know, what else you'd like to hear more on well, we can't wait for your graphics once the budget is out and you're coming back with your specific ask. We can't wait for that. Simple Hey, I don't and me, uh, just did a little part of the task force that we had this summer and, uh, yeah, encouraging things that you're coming to. Yeah, we'll hear. Hopefully we'll get a piece of tissue going and we'll have so Jessica will just if you could coordinate with Scott on after the budget address, you know, maybe like early February mid February. Yeah, I think you're going to have a really early February mid February. Yep, we will be ready with graphics and one pagers. So perfect. You appreciate that. Thank you all. Thanks. Thanks. Thank you, chief for your patients.