 Good morning and welcome to the House Committee on Environment and Energy. This morning we're going to continue talking about the Renewable Energy Standard. And we are going to start by hearing from Andrea Cohen, the manager of Government Affairs at the Vermont Electric Co-op. Welcome. I try to shut the screen. There's my slide. Good morning. Good morning. I am going to share some slides. And I know we don't have lots of time. So I'll go kind of quick and happy to come back if we want to dive into anything, you know, more detail. But just to remind you, Vermont Electric Co-op is a member-owned nonprofit cooperative utility in the state. And you can see on this. Oh, let me see if I could get bigger here. You can see on this map, the pink towns on the top and that's our service territory. We go from the west side of the islands through Franklin County, Lemuel County, over to Essex Orleans on the east side. So the whole northern tier. And a few things about VEC to just share. We're the second largest utility in the state. And our demographic is interesting and I think relevant to this conversation. We have an older membership. Our members, almost half of them are over age 65. A lot of what I'm going to talk about today is the cost of providing safe, clean, reliable service. And why, as it relates to this RES bill, some of the things you'll be hearing from us as you actually get into looking at language and how to consider all the provisions in there. I will say we, my boss, Rebecca town was a participant in the study committee this summer. And the reason, you know, we're, and this is a very sensitive balance of things. There's things in there that we feel are important and things that are a little bit of maybe a cost pressure, but as a package overall, it's something at this point. We're participating in and want to help see happen. But of course, once you get into language and things like that, we might have different things to say, depending on what you're considering. Again, it all goes back to our members. We have a pretty low income demographic. And you'll see, I don't know if you're familiar with the energy burden report that efficiency of our mom puts out, but you, it's something to learn more about it's fascinating and important when it comes to energy equity. When we look at the most recent report, we see that out of the top 10 towns with the largest energy burden. Six of those are BC members and the next one's a busy member. We talk a lot about costs and getting good value for the investments we're putting in our electrical system. And you'll hear us nonstop talk about that frankly. Excuse me. One more time for me. It helps to know, like, how many towns you serve. Yeah, we have 78 towns, 78. Right. And as you saw from that first map, a lot of them are little smaller towns. And there's places where the more than one utility is in the town and BC, and you'll see co-optionally. The history is we, we ended up picking up where it was uneconomic for people to do it. So we're kind of not in the villages, you know, we're in the rural parts of those towns. So we like to joke we do Mountain View Road. You know, we're always kind of out there. So the number of meters per mile, you know, is a lot less than maybe some of the other utilities. That little piece of history is I think worth just sitting with for a second. You ended up picking up where the others wouldn't and not unlike your world. Right. I think that is important for us. Yeah, we were formed in 1938. And it was because the farmers were like, we'd like to get some power out here where nobody else is serving. Yeah, very similar. We survey our members every year over 1200 members statistically significant. This is the past few years just on a chart and you'll see the low cost to energy is the most important thing to our members. Not to say they don't care about renewable energy and carbon free, but we always have our eye on the cost. And if you break that data down, you'll see the lower income folks care more than the, you know, it's obvious, but we actually can see that, you know, cost to energy is particularly relevant to the lower income folks in our membership. Obviously, if you want to dig in, like I said, we have a lot of data. So our priorities are multiple priorities. It needs to be safe. It has to be affordable. It has to be reliable. Has to be clean and equitable. And so we're always balancing all these things. It's never just one of those things. And, you know, to get to some of what you're working on on the renewable energy standard. This is, you're not going to read the little numbers down below. There's just an example. There's a lot of ways to get renewable energy on our system. Some are much more expensive than others. You will hear us often come in to say, why should we pay more. When we could get renewable energy for less money. Again, because we have other things we're trying to do keep the lights on, not raise rates more than we need to. A lot of times you'll hear us bring up, and these are just two examples. This is a chart DPS put together. On the far right, if you go out and you competitively bid for solar, you can get a much less expensive thing than say net metering. So that other arrow is current net metering, almost half price, right. So the scale, some of it said, you're going competitive net metering. As you may be aware is like, there's nothing you can negotiate. It's set. We have to pay that much. We don't get to negotiate about that. Yeah, you touched on this, Andrea. And good morning. Good morning. I just for the committee, just so they know the far right standard offer. That's like a two megawatt size plant. That is definitely, yes, it's competitively bid, but it's also, you know, you're talking about a very big difference of scale and you've touched upon that. But I think 2 megawatts to like comparison to it 10 KW is, is a big difference. And so those aren't like homeowners. So thank you for that clarification. So what we do as a nonprofit co-op is we do these competitively bid community solar on behalf of all of our members. So it's not just those that net meter, but we procure this and put this on the system. So you don't necessarily need to do the 1 on your own house. I mean, if you want to find. But you don't need to because we're procuring renewable energy for everybody at this larger scale, as you're saying. So, great, great segue into our community solar. So there's a lot of ways to do solar. VEC for the past 8, 10 years has done community scale projects. It's our VEC community solar project. They're comparing different ways to bring solar on the system. We find this to be very cost effective. As you just saw, we get to control where the siting is. So we put it in locations that are efficient on the grid. It's local renewable energy. The wrecks get retired. It's very inclusive. So if you're a renter and you don't have a good site, you know, to put solar or any of those things, you're still benefiting from the solar. We're putting on the system and that brings the energy equity can see the bottom. Let me see if I can move that. Yeah. And it's affordable. We offer financing options on that. So, we're really proud of the community solar program. We think it's a great model. I can I advance my slide. There we go. So, this is an example of 3 of the projects we've done larger than that metering. Absolutely. But the Albert 1 is about 1 megawatt the grand aisle on the far right is 5 and the Heinz burgers 1.3. So we've done projects at that scale. And we do that on behalf of all of our members, but we do offer members the opportunity sponsor panels that they like. That community solar program was kind of the model for something new and exciting that I want to share about to launch a partnership with WAC. We were able to secure dollars. Thank you all through the affordable community solar program. And it all appropriated $10 million of ARPA dollars for this to do community scale solar for income qualified folks. We are super excited. Like we just signed the grant agreement and about to launch in a week or 2. And what we're going to be able to do is use another lamp. Another solar project that our partners with on core renewables. They've been a partner for a lot of our projects. They've been amazing. We have this project in Jericho landfill that was a year and a half ago opens that we'll be using for this. And essentially the grant will be used to provide income qualified folks. The ability to sponsor panels. And how we design this one is those folks will be able to get a $45 a month bill credit every month for 5 years. Bring in real dollars to people that really could use that help. Phase 1, which is the Jericho landfill project VC will be able to enroll 365 of our members and that we'll be able to enroll 115. There's a phase 2 potential we have agreed. So this is 1.2 million dollars directly to people for their bills. Like, we're so excited about this. Phase 2, we're looking at other projects other potential new renewables. So we're working with partners now to see what we can do for that. And if we get phase 2, you know, permitted and going, well, we have more money on phase 2 of the grant to do more. So, this is the model that we see is how to support low income from monitors in terms of supporting renewable energy, bringing more renewable energy on the system in a very cost effective way, not paying more than we need to paying, you know, competitive prices for that. So, that was my last slide. I just wanted to put that out there to say, we see this as the model for how we can really move forward in a way where support goes to the people that need it most. One thing I just, I've noticed is that you seem to have maybe. And this is typical perhaps of many jurisdictions in Vermont. Bifurcated. You know, you said your average household income was $72,000, $77,000. And yet you have 6 of the top 10 most energy burden communities. So, that's like, that's a big. So you must, you know, seeing that you probably have a lot of wealthy retirees, perhaps, and then lower income folks. You know, the second homeowners, you know, we have the islands. And some other places. So the, the average is the average. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Thank you. That was helpful. Do members have questions for representative. Do you have a low income assistance? Okay. We do not. And we've worked, there's a lot of dockets at the PC regarding this, our problem with just VEC having one is who is not enough. Like so many people. So, how do, who do we, you know, hold from to support? Like, so, as we talk about that, but we've said to the PC is maybe think about a statewide kind of approach to this because we couldn't do it at VEC just on our own. I'm sorry, I couldn't do it. I missed. You know, like a low income rate. Yeah. That's been talked about and we've looked at that and just because we have so many fixed income people that would need, we need to receive support. There's not enough there. So maybe statewide is it is worth looking at. Representative civilian and study. I know we have a bunch of witnesses and not a ton of time, but if you could just for a moment kind of talk about one of our rural utilities. Really, like, what are your priorities this year? You know, last year, like, what are the things that are top of mind for our rural utilities are. I neglected to mention, we've already, our board is already committed to 100% renewable and 100% carbon free. I'll just put that out there and in a way that we could do that cost effectively are most, you know, we're coming off of 2 storms. 58 broken poles. 30,000 plus outages that we've restored in 5 days. And we think we're doing a great job. It's actually was 2 storm Elliott's that we cleaned up in the same period of time. So our crews are amazing and they're exhausted. And the dollars like those broken poles. That's like a half a day job and special equipment and, you know, like, so in terms of, you know, we need to keep the lights on, especially for rural lower income folks who, you know. Don't have maybe the means to buy a generator don't have, you know, like. So our, you know, we're laser focused on like keeping the lights on for those people that need that rely on us for that. That's our priority. I mean, cyber is another thing like cyber threats are not going away. We have been investing more and more in that. And that's going to need more investment and smarter people. You know, who want to make sure that our systems secure. So I'd say those 2 things are absolutely the highest priority for us. And we believe we could still do clean energy like we have committed, but I think the part of that is let us do it in the way that we need to do it so that we're not paying more than we need to. So we have money for these other things. Yeah, and actually, I'm going to ask, we'll, we ended up to some more folks in this slot than we originally anticipated. And I don't want you all to feel this time pressure because I think if you could reach out to the next. Wait, this is Chris Cochran and Jacob and see if they could start at 11. And then we'll have more time and people will feel like we can. Have these questions answered that we need answered. Representative step it. Thanks, Madam chair. There is an H668 the low income electric repair protection act on our wall that I'd love to hear your feedback. It is a state approach. It's a starting point. I don't necessarily, you know, it's really. Because I think it is too challenging to address this individually. But I think it's something that we need to start talking about figuring out a plan. I haven't read it happened to, you know, not now. Yeah, our low income strategy, Jen, you know, starts with just keeping costs down as much as we can, right? Because that benefits everyone because wherever you put the line, there's somebody just over the line. You know, somebody and come qualifies and then that next person didn't. So we try to keep costs down for everybody, but if there's creative ideas about, you know, just be interesting. Yeah. This, you know, it's regressive, right? Anybody who, you know, a lecture bill for $100, depending on your income, that's where the energy burden report is fascinating and really helpful because it's like a percentage of your overall. Right. Right. And that's important because we hear sometimes people like, oh, it's just a few bucks. Well. We have people that come to our office to negotiate payment arrangements. Because just a few bucks really makes a difference. Like, we turn people's power off if they don't pay their bill eventually, right? Yeah. And there's a lot of supports and we direct them and we work with them and it's not, we take no pleasure in that. But. You know, people literally are like on payment plans for $10 a week for the next 4 weeks. And, you know, so, you know, so science. So, it's heartbreaking. So those $3 to make a difference. And so we just try our best to keep the cost down as much as we can. Further questions. Andrea, thank you. Thank you. I have 2 short ones. I think I think they're short. Thank you. Andrea, what do you attribute the, the reason for the 6 of the top 10 communities. And you also hold number 11. The high, the high burden cost. So, what, what do you truly? Efficiency Vermont could come in and speak to how they come up with all that, but it's both your income and your cost of energy. So it's income. Right. So income really drives a lot of that. I mean, different utilities have different costs. We're not so out of whack with everybody that it's like, wow, your rates are crazy. It's just more, I think the income income. Thank you for that. And then it's whole energy. So it's, it's, it's heating. It's transportation that that number I gave you. They also break it down by just electrical or transfer. It's, it's fascinating report worth taking a look at. Thank you for that. My second question is, I'm just curious about the low income payback $45 a month for 5 years. Is there an initial cost for entering to that or is it just credit? So just the, it's, there's no, there's no entry fee for that. It is just designed to help people support renewable energy and get a bill credit through the arbor dollars that are just going to make their way through to them and. Wacken ourselves. We basically have, you know, we're not taking much, you know, admin or anything. We're really trying to pass through as much as we can. So most of the grant is going right out to people. Thank you. It has to be short. We don't have, now I don't have forever with each way to see there. This is a quick question. I could also ask Lewis the same way. I'm curious about your access to some of the federal dollars. Are you, are you able to access those dollars? Do you have the, you know, the resources to even lie and. Yeah, we've been applying for things. Like this one was a little easier because it came through DPS and they, you know, Lewis might be able to, you're probably a little closer to some of the infrastructure types of grants. We've been part of a few applications. Not everything has worked out, you know, it's tremendous amount of time, as you might imagine to that. So we're a little limited in our ability to jump on everything. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for your testimony. Kathy buyer from ever north. And so we've, we've about 10 to 15 minutes each. So keep that in mind. Thanks. Good morning. I'm Kathy buyer and from every north we build and own affordable rental housing across the state of Vermont. In partnership with many of our regional nonprofits that I'm sure many of you are. aware of. I need to figure out how to share my screen. Great to work. I'm really glad I got to hear Andrea's presentation. Because I'm here to talk about she touched about on net metering. And that's what I'm here to talk about today. But I'm really here to talk about a subset of what she was talking about. I was talking about net metering for low and moderate income renters, which is a very different population than homeowners. And I'd like to use an example of a portable housing development that Champlain housing trust in ever north hope to have under construction in May. It's located in this 68 apartments. Located in, it's going to be a mixed income neighborhood. It's located right off Shelburne road. If those of you who know that corridor is very close to the auto master. And it also includes 26 shared equity homes. So, the, and here's the site plan the rental housing is on is to the right and the shared equity homes are to the left. Ever north and Champlain housing trust are committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in our buildings and what we do is we build very high performance buildings. So, in this way, we'll be using cold, cold climate heat pumps. And in this way, Bay Ridge apartments addresses climate change by reducing the use of fossil fuels and therefore reducing our carbon emissions by 189 tons per year. However, the choice to electrify our building means the operating costs that Bay Ridge will be higher than if we had stayed with natural gas. And their operating costs make it more challenging to keep our to keep our rents affordable. Therefore, adding solar to Bay Ridge apartments is critical to the long term sustainability of our property. So, the solar the estimated annual electric costs are $108,000 a year. And that does not include the added cost of maintaining heat pumps which are have a higher maintenance operating costs than the standard natural. Here's here's a elevation and wanted you to get an idea for the new construction buildings and I don't see we have planned for a flat roof. Part of the reason we need the flat roof, however, is that the compressors for the heat pumps have to be located on the roof. So, we then worked with to get a plan for how many panels we could get on the roof and here you'll see this is what is in our construction documents and working with this rooftop solar plan. We can only offset 15% of our electric load with what's on the rooftop and this is typical in a multifamily rental building. We have more people per square foot. We have less roof space to deal with and particularly compared to a single family home where you can often offset almost 100% of your load. We just have we house more people per square foot it's actually a very from an energy efficiency perspective it's a very energy efficient building per person living per square foot. There's another way to say that but that's the way I say it. So, off site net metered solar, and I'm not going to use your community solar because we're really talking about net meters solar to Bay Ridge Apartments is needed to advance both the climate related electrification goals and our affordable housing goals at Bay Ridge. So we looked to a parcel right across the road right across route seven and a parcel that's owned by Champlain Housing Trust. And they purchased this parcel. It was the days in parcel and they are now housing. They have supportive housing for the homeless population in the former hotel building. And behind that parcel was excess land that is not can you cannot add additional residential development back there. And it's a very good location for 150 kilowatt solar PV. Array. And by combining the rooftop solar and this so called off site solar. We now will be able to offset 51% of our electric flow. There's no middleman in this transaction the owner of the rental housing will also be the owner of the solar array. Our goal is to drive. All of the benefit of the net meter credits to the building that's serving low and moderate income renters and we are able to use the new incentives under the inflation reduction act. One of them that's in place now is the investment tax credit, which is a base level is at 30% but at Bay Ridge. It's a low income percentage. It qualifies for low income boost. And we can get a 50% tax credit for Bay Ridge apartments. That's a federal tax credit. It's actually a national competition. If Vermont doesn't. If Vermont. Developers don't make an application for these this boost. It's going to go elsewhere. We haven't heard yet on that application. But we're very, very hopeful that we will get that approved by treasury. We have a question from representative seven. So, right, this is the solar for all program. No, no, the investment tax credit is a different tranche than solar for all. The investment tax credit has more time. To it number of years, like how many years. You caught me. I. It does phase out the boost does phase out after five or 10 years, but not exact. I hope the rest of my questions for now. But as you said, solar for all would be another stream of federal money that could be used for a project like this. So, why is this important. Most income remuners live in rental housing. And historically, the benefits of. PV have gone to higher income single family homeowners. And renters have had. Almost no access to the benefits of solar. And I found this statistic recently. It's a little disturbing nationally. And I think this is close to what is the case in Vermont. Only 2% of the solar capacity is benefiting LMI communities. But here we are. The inflation reduction act is presenting an enormous opportunity to change this. But we as affordable housing developers believe that we still need to have this tool. In order to have a meaningful way to get the benefit of solar to our buildings. It's a tool that's used broadly in other states. The statistics said, there's 2,500 community solar projects across 43 states. And we think that we can be. That slide that Andrea showed of the cost of net metering, which used to be at 23 cents. At Bay Ridge, we will be getting 15 cents. I understand the rate, the cost shift across rate pairs. But what we are proposing is a pretty small subset. And it is directly connected to LMI renters. So, there just hasn't been a way to do this in the past and why it's why we think it's very important to hopefully keep this tool in place. And it happens right at the time we're trying to electrify our buildings. I mean, it's like the perfect storm, right? We're, we're, we want to address climate change as affordable housing developers, but we also have a housing crisis. So, if we electrify our buildings, we have got to be able to connect them to solar. We've been working with VHFA and VHFA has been working with the public service department on the solar for all application that's gone in, I believe in March. They're going to hear if they applied for 100 million. I believe the concept is that 40 million would be administered by VHFA and part of that program part of that money would be used for net meat offsite net meter solar to affordable housing. So, I think it's a very unique moment in time as you consider this. So, I think we're going to be able to do a res update as we talk about the value and costs of net metering as our affordable housing is in transition to electrification. And as as the inflation reduction act, we're really, we're really on the beginning of when we're going to be able to get our get those dollars implemented and assist in our clean energy transition. Representative civilian. Thanks. Thanks for your testimony, Kathy, and thanks for your work on housing. I have a couple of questions actually. And the first one is, help me understand how the benefit gets to the individual tenant between either the single meter net metering, which looks like a benefit to the developer. Versus community solar, which looks like a bill credit on an individual customers bill. Very good question affordable housing. Owners across the state have chosen not to use the split incentive approach where the tenants pay for their heat. Hot water in all of our buildings, the owner of the building pays for heat and hot water. And when we are able to connect our buildings to solar. We even, and particularly in senior housing, we also take on what's called the plug load of the apartment so that the tenant will have a zero electric bill. If, if you want to get the solar benefit to our tenants meter, our tenants are only paying 30 to $40 a month in electric bills and $20, probably $22 a month is the meter charge. You can't get rid of the meter charge. So, there's the $45 that Andrea was talking about a benefit renters in our buildings don't have that much of an electric bill to be credited to. So, I know you were used the word developers. I ever nor this developer, but we also are owners of these buildings that sign long term affordability covenants and just selects here today. We in perpetuity. I think that we will rent to this level of this level of incomes and that the rents will stay affordable. So really, that's how we get the benefit to the rest to the tenant is that we're able to sustain that building over time. So, as you know, this, there's a group that's working group that has been working and they've agreed on some proposed updates to the renewable energy standard and one of those in this tentative agreement that this will have to weigh in on is getting rid of group that and so a failure to do that may cause us not to be able to update the rest. So, what I want to understand is. Help me understand what happens in terms of the number of units you're able to bring online. If group that goes away forever. So, how would that have affected, you know, your last project. That you used group group net metering on what was that project and affected it. You have to follow the breadcrumbs, but let's use Bay Ridge apartments. If we can't, if we were not able to do the offsite 150 kilowatt solar system. Then our operating costs are going to be higher, which means we can borrow less debt, which means we can build less housing. That doesn't mean we can't build 68 apartments, but maybe we can only build 60, because if our, if our operating costs are going to go up, we're going to build less units. Because they, I didn't bring the number with me, but I think Bay Ridge apartments has 2.6 million dollars of debt on it right now. Well, if I have to change this construct, and I can't have up and we can't have offsite net metering, it will be able to borrow 2.6 million. So that's the ripple effect. But we have to talk about the fact that. As I understand it net metering for single family owners homeowners is going to continue. And the, I mean, how can we do that. And at the preferred rate, not at not at 15 cents at 17 cents. There's over 19,000 and there's 19,800. I'm a numbers nerd. Single family homeowners that are net metered currently and I'm we're talking about about a universe that's, you know, probably less than we're not going to net meter every affordable housing apartment in the states. So we're talking about a much smaller subset of that. Which is help me let me know if you disagree with my sense of. How to bring solar to your development. So community solar is 1 in which your. Net metering is 1 that is figured it's paid by repairs, including low income repairs. Community solar is 1 that is paid through grants through working with power purchasing agreements with the utility kind of 1 off. A little bit more fine tuned in terms of who is paying for that as opposed to other low income folks. Would you agree that that's the case. I'm not sure I'm quite followed by that net metering is paid for by low income rate payers as well. It's paid by all repairs, all repairs, including low income repairs and community solar has the ability to be much more finely tuned in terms of who's paying for it. So via grant funding or working through utility programs. So that it's not put on rates. I'm not understanding the difference between community solar and I think I almost don't want to talk. I don't almost don't. I don't want to call what we're doing community net meter because we are directly. We are both the off taker and the producer at 100% matched. So, I'm still not. I'm still not understanding the difference. Yeah. Thank you. Did you still have a question. I appreciate you bringing up the fact that single family home that metering would still be allowed. And we're getting a group met metering. So, if I understand you correctly, you're asking for a carve out for affordable housing development on group metering. Yeah, I do allow it. Yeah, and I apologize. I've been working with be a Japanese and possible language to statutory language. We can provide that another time. Thanks. Yeah, I, you know, my, my. Major or the piece here that really gets me is that it is nearly a once in a lifetime to have the solar for all and the direct pay from the federal government where nonprofits after 20, you know, whatever 15 years nonprofits can finally like access the tax credit directly instead of having to go through, you know, someone else who can hold the taxes because that's something that the inflation reduction act did. So, I just, I'm just so mindful that, you know, we happen to be entering this opportunity that until effectively like July, 20, 29, because it's a five year. You know, once a, if VHFA gets this grant or whatnot. They have five years until 2029 to complete all the projects. And, you know, if you pencil that out, if you layer on by, you know, made in America, low income, you can actually get 70% of the project costs paid for by the federal government. So, I'm just mindful that like, we have something outside of Vermont that can help us. I mean, we all pay into our federal taxes. If you understand my test. So, my question to you is sort of working off of the card out question. And I also am very mindful of the fact that the proposed structure is, you know, was carefully balanced by many competing interests. How many, how much, how much, you know, net meter solar do you think you could build to match your current project pipeline through 2029 so that we really do bring in 70% of a project is just Wow, you're exactly what I'm feeling is like we're at this cusp of a moment in time and we've been waiting. And we also, in order to decarbonize it. You know, some of our going to carbon, carbon decarbonize our existing housing stock, they can't some of our buildings can't have solar on the roofs. I mean, we, we locate our proper properties with our, we locate our properties so that our tenants won't have high transportation costs in places where there's not a lot of access land. So, are you thinking like one megawatt a year. I'm not going to translate. Okay. Dollars to kill. Maybe you can do that. Well, if you think about Bay Ridge, that's 150 KW. And that's 68 apartments. So maybe that's a good example, like, you know, multiple in. And, you know, that's, we've got the rooftop we've got 150, and that's 68 apartments, and I can get back I can have some office who could probably help me with I'm just curious because I do hear also, you know, our, our rural utilities, you know, they've got a lot of costs and of coverage and therefore that impacts costs. So I do also hear that. So I'm wondering if there were to be a carve out what what does that look like to make sure we capitalize on the federal. That's a good dollars. Yeah, I'll try to work on that. Thanks. Thank you for your testimony. We represent Smith. I have an easy question. I think an easy question. And once these units if and once these units get built. Are you a limiting rentals to a low income like $40,000 a year or whatever the low income is considered. So we use a program called the federal loan from housing tax credit and it comes with a lot of rules. We're on both BH of a and BH to be request require us to do permanent affordability and the high I find I don't want to fall into housing speak. And typically our units are targeted to 60% a meeting income. And in Washington County, wait, I usually have a chart with me 60% meeting income is probably under 40,000. What can these render to expect to pay for rent? They don't pay more than 30% of their income towards what. Okay. Yeah, we also have to agree to that. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. And I to representative Stevens point, even just sort of a, I mean, I think we're looking for kind of a scale thing. It doesn't have to be. Hold you to it exactly, but I think we're looking for what would be impact actually base. Thank you for the record. Gus Sealy. Please join us. We now have got Sealy from the Vermont housing conservation board. Thanks for the record. Gus Sealy. Thank you very much for making time for me. I'm going to start by saying I am not an energy economist, and I can't answer some of the questions that you guys have to wrestle with. But I do want to talk a bit about. And usually when I'm coming in here, I'm in a fairly broad impact of our work on climate, whether it's. We're working on a farm that's going to be converted back to wetlands. We're working right now in Brattleboro to restore floodplain. It's just awesome. Oh, site. We are. We have, we do a lot of cleanup of contaminated sites. So lots of the work that you spend time on. There's a lot in our housing policies of housing dollars. So we are asking, as Kathy said, for smart growth locations revitalization of downtown's the cleanup of polluted sites. Highly efficient buildings. We are asking to serve more and more. We're asking for a relatively low income for monitors and for monitors who are unhoused. And you're also asked in our statute to consider the opportunity to leverage the state's funds as much as possible. And I think we're moving toward a moment where there's going to be a lot less housing dollars available. And I think you want us to continue to build. We're doing what we can that are going to be carbon free of carbon. We have worked toward those goals throughout my career at the HCD we wrote our first energy policy with Blair Hamilton back in the late 90s. And VHFA wanted MacArthur grant in 2008 and we went back to the I see and we updated what we call the roadmap to energy affordability to encourage all of our participants to build the most efficient buildings we could be built. We built the first passive house certified. A multifamily building in northern New England a few years ago. We've worked with high Meadows fund and the I see to stand up for mod. About a week ago we took three weeks ago we took delivery on a new product, which is a zero energy ready mobile home out of a manufacturer from New York state. As finally there's a new standard for mobile homes that's much better than the current standards had been. There are, I think about 26 more homes headed toward Brattleboro to try park to move people out of the floodway. Another way that we're trying to deal always with climate issues. Can you give us a sense of just curious about your zero energy mobile home with the price tag on that is. It's in the high one. It's around 170 the cost of the home is different from what it takes to actually put it on a lot. There's often costs either because there's a wrecked home there. It's either removed or the new foundation requirements that gives us but the cost difference between the zero energy ready home and another home is not that huge significance I'm told it's a little over $20,000. And the 170 is inclusive or just for the unit and then it's for the unit not for the site costs. Thank you. Thank you so much. So we are looking anywhere and everywhere to stretch our dollars and I can't quantify as one of you just asked of Kathy exactly what the impact will be but as she said, when we have higher operating costs in any development. The project can borrow less money and it means that for what's called the soft debt lender so we provide debt to these tax credit deals on a deferred basis and in order to make the deal work and so the hit on us will go up if the operating costs of a project also go up. So there's real value. If we wanted to use least cost for building housing and building multifamily housing and smart growth, you wouldn't do smart growth locations. We wouldn't do the most efficient buildings we would be as Kathy said, eating with gas and not achieving the goals and the reason we're doing it is because it's the right thing to do. So it's morally important. It's important to our climate but it doesn't have the quickest back. So, whether it's the solar for all program or the tax credit program, we want to be able to see our partners let us to the issues that Kathy spoke to a moment ago I just want to be clear about what our requirements are of the developers we work with for primarily nonprofit organization today. We are recording in the land records when they get a grant from us or deferred loan from us requirement that they restrict the income of the property that you're investing in on a permanent basis so that it can be continued to be affordable to low and moderate income people, and we're fundamentally restricting what and how it can be sold in the future so it's not a typical market asset. I would say that I am, I live at the end of the line in Lewis's territory, I am mindful of what the collapse have done for the state of Vermont. When I first started my first job in Vermont I was running fuel assistance and weatherization programs for a fellow who was quite named and college is quite close to the Akins and I understand the legacy the collapse give and the value that they bring to Vermont. I'm also, and this was probably an average time, I called Washington Electric I do, I am a full disclosure part of an three family net metered system, which at that time, WEC, the guy at WEC Bill Powell, good friend said, Oh, I'm so excited you'll be the very first to do this, and he encouraged us to do it. I understand we're in a different time and place in terms of where Vermont is but I think that, as Kathy said if somebody with my family's income can benefit net metering it seems to me that the global warming Solutions Act suggests equitable access. And it's for you to figure out the best way to achieve that, but it will be a loss for us. We will produce somewhat less housing, we will have less incentive to ask of developers to build the most efficient buildings if we can't add some subset of multi family housing, which are mostly in downtown and village centers and not have the same impact on our small collapse that will on our larger utilities. I think that's those are the things I wanted to say to you. I'm happy to answer your questions. I know this is a tough issue. Thank you. That was helpful. Representative Sebelia. Thanks, Gus. I'm really struck and thinking about you know kind of where we are right now which feels like really a lot of urgency and a lot of friends with climate change with our failure to build housing for years and years and years. With opportunity with all of these federal dollars and I'm really struck by how important it is that we are all working together and that there is no way for really any of these sectors to win like there's going to be wins and losses all around. You know, I think about right now. I believe it's $2 billion that is needed to storm pardon our grid because of the weather that we are seeing. And that is particularly necessary in our rural utilities. Kingdom, central Vermont in a GMP's territory. We certainly have seen the effects of climate change. You know, last year this year with these kind of repeated outages. I know that you all are also feeling the urgency of people don't have phones. And we have a lot of resources, not a lot of, you know, we've got the workforce issue as well. So, along those lines, you know, how do you see the affordable housers being able to help with the reliability issue? You know, we're asking the utilities to help on a whole bunch of different issues and to add on to that question, I would just say, you know, you've kind of put it on us that we have a bunch of difficult choices, you know, you guys, you guys are the experts and really what I'm counting on is you all who are really in the weeds on the federal funding that's coming in what you need. And the utilities are in the weeds and industry, you know, so I kind of would turn that back to you like help us figure this out. You know, we're not looking at net metering writ large because that's not what's been able to kind of come to the surface here in terms of making incremental progress decarbonization. I'm happy to work on that as an issue I have not the HFA had a representative on the committee that's been working on the renewable energy standard we were not asked there I'm happy for us to put some time in some of the complications of energy finances, kind of above but we have people that we can talk to and we're happy to work on this as an issue what I do think that, you know, most of you are rightly proud of, you know, all that's come from our public policies to push equity to the forefront. And I think all I'm trying to say is a policy that will help somebody with my family's income and much higher. I'd have 3000 square foot home or 6000 square foot starter castle, but doesn't help somebody who is living in a 405 400 square foot studio apartment. Doesn't strike me as yet achieving the equity that we all want to achieve. And I don't have the answer for you today, but I'm happy for VHC be to put some time to that question. I really appreciate that. So thank you. That's great. Thank you for your testimony today. We're good. Can you make it brief because I just want to tell committee members and Gus that that three home net metering project way back when created some very, very unique and odd regulatory issues for both me and my success. I'm happy to show that. Yeah, I'm sure they did and I'm sure bill was completely straightforward when he said please do this you'll be the first. All right, thanks again. We're going to take 5 minutes. We are reconvening our meeting. And welcoming Lewis Porter from Washington electric co up. Great. Thank you for the invite and sorry to not make it last week I had was ill so I couldn't make it. So thank you for, for allowing me to come in today. I'll try to be short knowing you have a lot of a lot of witnesses, but obviously happy to answer any questions also. Washington electric is like Vermont electric co up Washington electric. So you nonprofit utility owned by the people who, who pay for the electricity that we provide them. We like VC we were founded in 1938. And after several attempts to get investor owned utilities to expand in what's now our territory. A group people got together and always is incredible to me that from the 1st time they got together to found the to start the utility to when the 1st generator was turned on by Governor Aiken was less than a year. So they built a utility strong lines, but generators and turned it on in less than a year, which is, is always pretty remarkable to me. Right now we serve 12,000 meters, 12,000 members across the rural parts of 41 towns in the kind of central eastern part of Vermont. We have enough power lines to stretch from here to the state of Georgia. And we have 13 people on our line crew who keep those running. So it's the nature of a rural utility anywhere to to be have a lot of miles of line with not a lot of people to pay for it. But but ours is a particularly extreme, particularly extreme case of that probably the most rural utility territory in the Northeast. We're very proud that due to those who have been in my job before me, including Representative Pat Washington Electric has also been able to to become 100% renewable utility and to provide 100% renewable electricity to its members for for a number of years now. And the the social and environmental mission of the utility are at least equal for us to the more traditional utility missions of reliable, safe and and affordable service. That has been, you know, a very important part of Washington Electric remains an important part of what we do for our membership and for the board of directors that manages that oversees us who are themselves co-op members. So that's sort of who we are in a nutshell. We were part of the. Renewable energy standard working group over the off session grateful to be invited to participate there. A very candid and productive conversation. Occurred and I think an important one given the complexity and difficulty of some of the issues that that. All utilities face but but those in Vermont, especially. We support the the agreement that the kind of framework agreement that came out of that. For the simple reason that. As 100% renewable utility, we think all of Vermont or should have access to 100% renewable power as soon as is practical. And so that's the I think the top line and most important aspect to that framework is 1 we're very much in support of. Same time because. The electric sector in Vermont is only responsible for 2% of Vermonters carbon production. We think it's very important to keep. And I keep in a focus on the price of that renewable power at the same time. And the reason for that is not just. For the financial well being of our members, Andrea Cohen was very eloquent on that point and our, we, our members have the same. Concerns the same issues as hers in that regard, but also because. The transportation and electric sectors in Vermont each contribute 36% roughly of Vermonters carbon load. So the real opportunity here is to electrify heating and transportation. And obviously price of the electricity that you're charging people is an important component that people are price sensitive. They do pay attention and they do follow. What will be best for their wallets as well as what will be best for the environment. So. Keeping that price at the most reasonable amount is is an important aspect of that. There are several very important elements of that framework agreement that are that are essential for watching electric. I can go into them if you'd like, but I think we're going to talk about the bill. I think, you know, we're supportive of the framework as it exists. And I want to make sure that those elements end up being reflected in the legislation is as I think everybody on that agreement does. I can go into some of those pieces if it would be helpful or we can talk about it when the bill comes out that might make might make more sense. But it very briefly, the, the having the Coventry landfill gas plant. Be and remain renewable is important to us our members and invested millions and millions of dollars in building that renewable energy plant. And having the 100% renewable utilities subject to a load growth measure instead of to a base tier 2. Renewability measure is important for us so that we are not in the position of having to sell renewable power that we already have in order to buy new renewable power. So I think it's reasonable and a fair approach to have the 100% renewable utilities. Be obligated to meet a large share of their load growth through renewables rather than have it them be wrapped into the overall percentages as the other utilities are. And don't worry too much about that at this point I'd say we're going to go into the bill in detail and I'm happy to come back and talk about the details of that. But that as a as a placeholder for 2 of the things that are very important to us. We were glad that the framework agreement includes the elimination sun setting of group net metering. We feel that net metering reform really needs to go farther than it did in the framework agreement. The nature of a complicated multi party agreement is nobody gets everything they want. And so I recognize that but I in the interest of my members and the organization that they own that I work for. I really need to flag that that net metering is a two fold concern for us. One is that cost shift that Andrea talked about from generally well or more well off members to lower lower income less well off members. And the second is that price that the increase in the rate of electricity that net metering drives and the difficulty in electrifying heating and transportation based on that. We actually just last night had a consultant complete an analysis for us of the cost of net metering. And for Washington Electric members in 2000 and 23 they paid just a little over a million dollars more than they would have in the absence of net meter. So that's net metering certainly has a benefit for us. The power you know power is good. The savings on transportation and transmission cost is good for us. The peak shaving is good for us. So once you take all those benefits into account Washington Electric members in 2023 paid about a million dollars more than they would have otherwise because of the net metering program. In the scale of things that all of you deal with a million dollars is not a lot. But remember that's an annual cost. And for us that represents about 5.6% on rates because we're relatively small. So that's of significance to us. I have a quick question then I know representative Logan does too. What percentage of your members have net metering just under 10%. And have you gone to the PUC to seek a relief from net metering. Well, yeah, yes. And in several iterations and several different rounds the PUC has. Slightly decreased the the price paid for net metering over the years for all the utilities. But there is not a authority or provision for them to provide relief just to Washington Electric as I understand it. Thank you Logan. Thanks chair. Of that million dollars additional costs for net metering to your customers what percentage of the net earnings cost is for single family homes. We are very virtually all of it. We are we are very heavily over 95% residential load and and very, very heavily single family homes. Yeah, so not all of it likely but but but very close. And thanks for your testimony goes. Question on Coventry actually and potential expansion in the future. Is there a way for an expansion to be done in a way that with increased efficiency at the plant. Or would it only be at the same level of efficiency. I is a question that's been posed to me. Yeah, and it's 1 I've thought about and done some research on the answer is not a simple yes or no there are certainly ways to build the plant that would operate more efficiently. But those would be at significantly higher cost. So, I would say, I think even at its current efficiency level. The plan should be considered renewable because the nature of the methane produced in the landfill is otherwise it gets flared. And either way it's putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the fact that that's the way landfill gas plant works to my mind argues that it should be efficient should be considered renewable even at the current levels of efficiency. There would I expect there would be a way to build such a plant using say a gas turbine engine something like that instead of a, you know, an internal combustion engine that might operate at a more efficient level. But I think the expense of building and operating it would be significantly higher. One more question. Thank you. One more question. It would be great to know if you have some range actually I'm not that's not my question. Happy to follow up offline with you on that. There's been described a phenomenon that I still have a hard time kind of grappling with one because of the prevalence of net metering in wet territory. An effect that happens when the sun shines and if you can help me understand how that translates to rates. Yeah, okay. Great, great question. So, the basic the simplest way to describe it is because net metering in our territory is almost exclusively solar. It produces all at the same time. And those times are not when the peak usage in our territory is so at 3 o'clock on an August afternoon, you are getting a lot of solar production. You're not having a a peak load in our territory. We are a winter evening peaking utility. And the challenge of that is twofold. One is on the electric supply. It doesn't match up well with the load. And so that increased costs. The other, I'll call it physical effect of that is that you are putting strain and jeopardy on the physical infrastructure of the grid because the mat the load and the production are not matched up well. And so that causes us and requires us to to rebuild and upgrade physical infrastructure that is then paid for by our members. Borrowed through this federal government at very good rates. Thank you very much federal government. But, but is paid ultimately those loans are paid by the members to do those upgrades. My answering your question. Thank you. One more. Oh, sorry. I do. Thank you. Thank you for your presentation in Coventry. They're burning a lot of methane that is not being produced is not producing power. But a lot. There are times where due to our equipment having maintenance issues or the amount of production or for some other other issues they are flaring sometimes. Yeah. Is there enough there to build another generator to produce more power. There will be within the next 10 years enough to to add engines to our plant or to build another smaller plant but probably adding engines to our plant. Our plant. Our plants five huge caterpillar diesels that burn that beautiful. It's amazing. I mean for somebody who's in who's interested in mechanics and engineering. It's an amazing site to behold. But, but yes, there would be enough to expand that plant. The challenge will be because it's in the she I region and because it's in this transmission constrained region. There's some challenges in terms of getting the power out to where it's used. So we would probably want to do that junction with a battery system at the Coventry plant so we could load that at periods where the transmission constraint is great and discharge it when it's not. But the short answer is, yes, there will be enough methane at that at that facility to expand. But there are other uses for methane as well. There are plants there are landfills that bottle that methane. Truck it and use it as as a natural gas renewable natural gas. So there are other usage uses for that as well. I have one more question. Is that all right? Yeah. Recently. I'm driving home from I'm driving on 91. And I never smelled methane before or whatever that is. I don't think it's garbage. It's it's I think it's methane that they're burning. And that's probably two and a half miles from the dump as a crow flies. Is that what I'm smelling is what they're burning? You're probably smelling uncombusted methane. Now, I don't want to. I don't want to I want to be careful here not to go into my partner, because cell is part of the operation too much. So just take this for what it's worth an ignorant electrical utility person talking about a landfill. But there are there are a variety of things that can cause short term. Issues where the methane may not be captured or may not be burnt efficient efficiently, particularly in the winter. The freezing thawing temperatures can pop the tops off the wells because cell is extremely efficient and effective at getting out there and fix that. But there are times where sometimes there's methane that might escape in small amounts. Thank you representative very quickly follow up on expansion with a battery and the question around efficiency. And I mean, this is probably a larger conversation, but just around batteries and what what makes something more efficient. I mean, it seems to me that if you're a battery might be making something more. Well, it's all I mean, you all deal with definitions, legal definitions every day. So I I'm not telling you anything you don't know it's all in how you define it. I would agree that it's more efficient use to combine these things, whether it's not metering or whether it's a common tree plant with a battery. It's not actually increasing the combustion of fish efficiency of the engines. But, but yes, and, and, and to somebody's question about federal money. Vermont all utilities in the state, including us put in for a grant last year to try to get some federal money to build utility scale batteries. It was, I thought it was kind of a remarkable project because you had municipality municipal electric companies. Velco, the transmission utility, you had co-ops and you had the IOU Green Mountain and you had the state of Vermont all participating in a grant application. We didn't get that grant. We didn't receive that grant application. I think there was about a 20% success rate nationwide on those and we didn't get that one. We are resubmitting that again. Updating it based on the feedback we got. And so, you know, not good. Washington Electric certainly needs to install utility scale batteries at its substations within the next decade. And we need to do that both for economic reasons and also for to help deal with this excess production of solar when, when all the net metering systems are on. You for your testimony. Thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. And I appreciate the chance to weigh in a little bit on net metering, knowing that that's not really the core of this agreement, but I do think it's important that we keep an eye on. Thanks. Next up we have Vanessa rule from 350. Good morning. Thank you for inviting me to speak. My name is Vanessa rule. I'm lead organizer and the co-director of 350 Vermont. I first want to thank you for your service. The more I learn about how Vermont's legislature works more. I appreciate how arduous your task is. And so I want to thank you for your hard work. I'm here testifying on behalf of thousands of reminders who volunteer with and support the work of 350 Vermont. Our mission is to build a people powered and people led climate justice movement for just and and thriving world. And we are here to work with you and to help you do this job. In addition to our regular membership and our volunteer electricity and campaign teams. I'm here representing the hundred and 66 people who signed up to take action after attending one of our 11 empower Vermont events this fall. These events were designed to give attendees the opportunity to understand where electricity comes from and why our renewable energy standard needs updating. Most were shocked to find out that the majority of Vermont's so called renewable electricity does little to reduce carbon emissions. In one of the presentations attendees often expressed anger at the current system and a feeling of inspiration to change it. They translated their outrage and hope into action. They reached out to many of you made public comments at the legislative working group meetings, attended DPS events and wrote letters to the editor. They showed that there is political well public support in Vermont for updating the rest so that it will work to deliver more just and low emissions electricity. 350 Vermont is highly supportive of revising the renewable energy standard. We support the creation of tier one a regional new renewables and increasing tier two requirements in state new renewables in the proposed bill. This increases the amount for low emissions electricity that's solar and wind by 10% by 2032 to between 30 and 40% by 2030 2035 depending on the utilities respective goals. We understand the significance of the compromise reach between the utilities and the environmental groups at the table. This makes it much more likely that Governor Scott won't veto the bill and that you would have the numbers to override veto if he did. We understand that you're working within the bounds of what's politically possible currently. And as you know, you, despite these efforts 40% is not enough. When I and many others involved in three or movement started advocating for elected officials to act on climate in 2007, my children were three and six years old. I learned then that the maximum safe amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is 350 parts per million, hence 350.org and 350 Vermont. Do you know at what level of parts per million human life on earth evolved. Any of you. 270 270 parts per million. Today we're at over 420 parts per million. That's 20% higher than the maximum safe amount level and rising faster than ever. The heat we're feeling today is the result of emissions from 30 years ago. So what's in the atmosphere now, plus all we continue to add year after year warming will continue to accelerate and Vermont and the Vermont our children inherit will look nothing like where we live today. So we're going to build McKibben's earth that's earth with two a's in 2010 about how wildfire storms and droughts would wreak havoc by washing out our roads by making it harder to grow food by displacing people and by increase by increasing geopolitical conflicts, harming the most those who had done the least to cause the problem. We're in 2024, and we're starting to see the true impacts of climate change. And this is only the tip of the iceberg, unless we take action that is proportional to the crisis. This summer I lay awake, most of the night during the July storm that put this town Montpelier underwater. This is the unrelenting pounding rain feeling the wrath of our planet, and wondering if we could in fact do anything to have to avoid total climate catastrophe, and I asked myself, what will the storms droughts and fires look like in Vermont five to 10 years from now. What happens if we don't do enough to stop this. The thing is, we know that later is too late. We know that. Our communities or children are planet need us to get to 100% low emissions renewable that's solar and wind as quickly as possible to protect them from runway climate change. So 40% is not enough, but it's an important start. We need your commitment to an aggressive and ongoing revision of the renewable energy standard moving forward to reach 100% low emissions renewables as quickly as possible. And we also understand that our electricity sector needs to be affordable and reliable. The good news is that this transition to 100% low emissions electricity is increasingly feasible the cost of solar and wind is dropping. They're not cheaper than coal and nuclear battery storage technology improves by leaps and bounds every day. The need for mining rent metals is decreasing thanks to new minerals to new materials and recycling and the vast majority of people want leaders to act. So here are four things we ask you to do to get us on the right track. First, we need you to be honest about how much this bill will actually reduce emissions. Renewable energy is not necessarily low emissions. The claim is that this bill gets us from 75 to 100% renewable energy. The public and many elected officials have been misled into believing that our electricity is cleaner than it is. This has made it harder to get public and political support for cleaning it up. The science and research tells us that large hydro power, the use of unbundled renewable energy credits biomass and renewable natural gas immense significant greenhouse gas emissions. They have no place as a solution in a bill whose purpose is to address climate change. The current bill still allows for 20% increase from large hydro power, more unbundled renewable energy credits biomass and RNG under tier one. That means 20 more percent emissions from flooding indigenous lands in Quebec from burning gas, wood or new RNG. We can't power our homes by producing more trash. The methane that's being produced by these landfills shouldn't be in the trash. It should be composted. We shouldn't have material that produces methane in landfills. Our second ask is, instead of leaving this 20% under tier one, we ask you to increase tier one and tier two requirements from 40 to 60% by 2030 so that the 20% is guaranteed to come from solar and wind. We understand that current hydro power back contracts will be online through 2038 and we're not asking you to touch these. Third, the proposal, the proposed bill eliminates group need group net metering. I want to echo the testimony you saw from housing advocates affordable housing advocates today. If group net metering is going to be eliminated, an alternative and viable path for affordable community solar needs to be put in place. Many Vermonters, including affordable housing advocates, support and will champion community on solar. And some of those same people will oppose utility on solar in our communities. Vermonters are proud self reliant people and are culturally much more likely to embrace new solar if they own it. As we electrify everything, this bill sets the electric utilities as the sole source of monopoly for a full range of energy needs. Consumer choice is eliminated as the products become more and more essential. We need consumer choice. And the beautiful thing is that today's technology allows this we should be encouraging community solar not creating bigger and bigger obstacles. 350 Vermont has also been organizing conversations about solar and citing in order to find ways to meet the need for increasing solar while protecting agricultural lands open space and biodiversity. We believe this energy transition will be much more feasible if Vermonters have a say and agency over what it looks like. Finally, there are two companion bills that would increase the likelihood of passing the res and make it more achievable. The first, as was already mentioned today is the rate protection, the rate pair protection bill sponsored by representative Stebbins, which will lay the groundwork for a bill in 2025 to protect low and middle income rate pairs. Rate peer protection is essential even now as low income families spend over five times more of their monthly income on energy bills than higher income families. And as we consider cost, we need to ask ourselves what's the cost of transitioning to solar and wind compared to the cost of the current current climate catastrophes. How much did the July storm cause for man for monitors financially physically emotionally. What was the cost of the people whose homes and farms were destroyed. What about the cost to those who couldn't make it to work to the health care workers working overtime with that extra compensation. How often will this kind of storm happen moving forward. How do these costs compare to the cost of investing in a low in a resilient low emissions and reliable grid. The second bill is the thermal energy networks bill, co-sponsored by representative story in Cordes. It would decrease the electricity demand from air source heat pumps and are needed to burn carbon based fuels to heat buildings. Thermal energy networks could be owned by municipalities for monitors want more energy choices at their disposal to actively support and participate in this energy transition. We literally need to put more power in the hands of the people. And what about jobs. There are so many jobs to be gained from this transition. Solar and wind energy jobs have steadily decreased since the renewable energy standard was passed in 2017. You can turn that around. Finally, we want to raise the concern about the disproportionate voice the utilities have in this process. Especially has the as they claim to be 100% renewable, which we know is not low emissions and is not helping our climate. We're grateful for their work keeping the lights on and understand that we need to work with them through this, this transition. Particularly the people who work for the utilities. We appreciate that they came to the table to reach a compromise. But we need to acknowledge that our biggest utility is accountable to shareholder profits first, and that they're part of an industry that has systematically and intentionally slowed progress on climate. Because this energy transition threatens their bottom line, including by threatening rate increases. We ask you to keep this in mind as you consider what you do this session, whose interests are you hearing the loudest. Who stands to benefit or lose. What do Vermonters really want. And finally, what's at stake. Thank you for tackling this most important and challenging tasks you and governor Scott are the people in the state currently with the most power to improve the lives of those disproportionately impacted by the production and burning of carbon based fuels and by climate change. And you and governor Scott, hold our children and our planets future in your hands. Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. Representative civilian. Thank you, Vanessa for your testimony question about some of your testimony having to do with monopolies and competition. Are you arguing for deregulation of the electric sector. I'm just saying that it needs to be shared not just we need to be on the utilities, but that we need community on solar. So we need more regulated utilities is what you're arguing for. I don't know how to answer that question. So, I need to think about it. Okay, so thanks for asking the question. When you're talking about monopolies. Yeah. And about utilities, you know, I start thinking about. The other parallel for me is the telecommunications sector. And you can be regulated by government or you can be regulated by the market. And what, what I was starting to hear you say is deregulation, which is regulated by the market, which feels very, very dangerous. We're not advocating for that at all. I'm just saying that we're putting energy production increasingly in the hands of the utilities by getting rid of community solar and and. Yeah, and the right for people to own, you know, group net metering community solar in their communities. And who has responsibility for the polls and wires that transmission, all of that. Well, I'm assuming you would be a collaborative effort. I mean, I live in Stratford right now we have a community on solar project of the road that 32 households have invested in. You know, we're plugged into the grid, but we're getting we're getting payback for the, the money that we invested. So this is an advocacy for group and metering as opposed to community solar. Well, both and we need to be different. So, okay, I guess I'm not an expert on all of these issues. I work with an electricity team that our policy experts and we would be glad to get back to you on that. And any other technical question. One other question on the methane issues that you brought up around country and HQ. So, we have, I mean, we have, we have nothing that's being released. Right. No, so we're not saying so we shouldn't be adding new methane. We shouldn't be banking on landfills to expand. We don't want new renewable natural gas. The gas that's being captured at Coventry and used is fine. It is better than it being flared into the atmosphere. We shouldn't be transporting renewable natural gas because it will leak out of trucks out of pipes in through transportation. But the idea that we might create more opportunities to generate renewable natural gas to power our buildings is really not the right way to go. And, you know, the fact that we call it renewable. There's nothing renewable about, you know, taking resources and throwing them away, instead of recycling them. So, a lot of what's creating the methane in landfills is biological matter that shouldn't be in landfills in the first place. They should be going back into the soil and sequestering carbon. So request question. I would love to hear more about how community solar is being. I'm happy to talk to you all. Well, my sense is it's harder to build community solar with that group net metering. That's my understanding. Representative Stevens. Thanks, Mr. Thanks for your testimony. I heard from a constituent that emailed me that said a decade ago, the Vermont legislature passed 10 BSA 582 little G and directed an art to draft rules around carbon inventory within one year. And our has still not drafted these rules. So my question to you is, you know, your first comment was be honest about what this bill will will really do. So do you have recommended changes to how 10 BSA 582 G is currently written so that we capture things differently? Or is it more that we need to say, Hey, it's been 10 years. Can we draft the rules? I think we need to draft the rules. I mean, I again, I would need to go back to my team. I fully expected that. Yeah, but I think that's a good question. And I think we need to be exploring all the avenues that we have to really fix that because it's really misleading. Thanks. Thank you again for your testimony. Thanks. Yeah. We will welcome Annette Smith on the zoom from Vermonters for a clean environment. Welcome. Thank you. Annette Smith. I'm executive director of Vermonters for a clean environment. And I thank the committee for inviting me to testify today. My work for the last 25 years has been at the tail end of the policies enacted by this legislature in which we work with Vermonters to enable them to have a say in what goes on in our communities and and to have a voice in regulatory processes. I participated in the department of public services renewable energy standard stakeholder advisory group this summer and watch most of the legislative res meetings. What is the purpose of the renewable energy standard. As we heard in the legislative res committee is expressed by Lewis Porter of Washington Electric purpose of the res is to reduce emissions in the electric sector. It is more appropriate to provide some context. That's interesting. Never used this program before and it's not working. Okay. Let's just try something else. Don't you love technology. Yesterday I had to testify and sent it finance and my Internet went out for two hours right before it was supposed to happen. I will try this again. Globally here is a depiction of CO2 emissions in the six largest economies. During the same time period the United States has reduced emissions while China and India have greatly increased emissions. Why? All generation coal consumption in Asia has skyrocketed while it has declined in North America. In December India announced it plans to double its coal production. Nationally Vermont has the lowest CO2 emissions of any state in the country and all the numbers are here. I'm. I have submitted this presentation you can look at it larger. And Vermont is among the lowest per capita emissions states. I hope you will keep the global and national emissions context in mind as you consider the costs and benefits of revising Vermont's renewable energy standard to require utility portfolios to contract for more renewable energy and require more in-state renewable energy to be built. In the global context Vermont's emissions are minuscule. In the national context they are very, very small. How much should ratepayers pay to reduce Vermont's already low emissions? The right priority at this moment in time. On the state level the electric grid for distributed generation consists of municipal cooperative and investor owned utilities. Green Mountain Power serves the largest territory and customers. Its distributed generation map provides a view of the challenges the state faces in providing equitable access to locally distributed electricity. Some areas have plenty of capacity while others have less than zero and I'm sure the other utilities have similar maps like this and we're not talking about how we're going to upgrade all of this distribution system. Access to three phase power is limited and my local area is only available along Route 7 while there are a lot of us who live over here. No doubt most of the other utilities in the state have similar challenges building out distributed generation throughout their service territories with the possible exception of Burlington Electric Department. Think of this as equivalent to the challenge of building out fiber optic cable where some areas got it a decade ago while some are just now being served. What is the cost of deploying locally distributed generation equitably throughout Vermont? This means upgrading power lines, transformers and substations plus updated service to the home. Is this additional cost incorporated into the res models? As someone who thinks I have a lot of capacity for energy policy, I will share with you that I find this topic to be enormously complicated. If you are not well versed in the discount rate and the social cost of carbon, it is easy to get lost. Models are inherently going to be wrong. I was glad to see part of the stakeholder advisory group or be a part of the stakeholder advisory group so that I got a front row seat into the details of the modeling which was then used by the legislative committee's consultants. Overall my experience was that the modeling results were not presented in a way that the average person could understand and therefore obscured important details that became better understood because we were able to ask questions. In an effort to simplify what I learned, I will focus on three topics. Benefits and cost modeling, land use and rate payer costs. How are the benefits and costs determined? I think that the model overestimates the benefits and underestimates the cost. I'm not going to say this isn't bigger, but I'm not going to go try and make it bigger and leave the ability to continue. Can you just zoom in on your screen? There you go. It is also available online under a net snake. Yes, it is. This slide is from the first draft made available from SEA, the consultant to the stakeholder advisory group. In reviewing the potential benefits, it's important to understand that some of these are regional benefits and as such only 4% accrue to Vermont. Land use costs are not monetized and therefore unvalued. Because I am aware of environmental issues that have arisen from constructing wind and solar projects in Vermont, such as problems building solar on wetlands, clearing forests for solar and wind, high elevation stormwater problems, I delve further into the identification of environmental impacts as a benefit. I learned that benefit is based on a potential reduction in groundwater use for a fossil fuel plant. This presumed benefit would not occur in Vermont and therefore Vermont would receive only 4% of that benefit. I supplied further information to the consultant in an effort to bring a real world Vermont assessment into the model and my understanding is that the agency of natural resources did also. However, the model is based on data and as such it could quantify gallons of water consumption reduced by not using a fossil fuel plant, but could not incorporate damage to Vermont's wetlands or streams as a result of renewable energy development. And I just happened to find the New Yorker has a piece on modeling that I put a link to in my written testimony. It gives a good review of modeling and about mathematicians. Also not quantified are societal costs, some of which we have seen in Vermont are serious when it comes to wind and solar energy development, such as property devaluation, health effects from sleep disruption due to wind turbine noise are not considered. I did bring it up and asked that it be considered. As such, the model is very general, regional and contains biases that exclude the specific issues we have experienced in Vermont regarding the impacts to the environment and the people who live here. The proposal to increase tier two from 10% to 30% by 20, 20, 30 or 20, 35 raises questions about land use impacts and the process by which we cite locally distributed generation. According to the Department of Public Service, the current tier two at 10% requires 25 to 30 acres of land developed for solar annually. The model estimates about 2200 acres through 2035, depending on the scenario chosen as 30% increase in tier two could require 200 acres per year to be devoted to solar over the next 11 years through 2035. For context, Vermont's standard offer program required 127.5 megawatts over 14 years, assuming five acres per megawatt, that means 25 acres per year. Tier two at 30% requirement could require nearly 10 times more land for solar development annually. What we have not seen is the baseline. How much land has been converted to solar in Vermont to date? In the eight years from 2016 to 2023, since the res was first adopted, how much acreage has been used for solar? And that includes ancillary areas and not just the footprint of the array itself. I've asked DPS and ANR and they do not have answers. I do not know that anyone has kept track of total acreage devoted to solar development in Vermont. This is a foundational question that should be known before choosing to devote more than 2000 acres to solar development in Vermont over the next decade. Because of our terrain and topography and competing land uses, use needs, Vermont has limitations on development. Lots of rock, water, wetlands, steep slopes, an agricultural economy, forests, especially valuable to address climate change, housing development, tourism, commercial and industrial uses compete for limited available buildable land. This is a fact we all need to recognize. As you heard from Jonathan Thompson of Harvard Forest in his presentation of the report Growing Solar Protecting Nature, it is possible to do a strategic evaluation of what has happened to date and prioritize future development. We have not done that work in Vermont. Why not? Perhaps in part it is due to the shift in focus to emissions reductions of Vermont's environmental groups who participated in the Legislative Res Committee but did not bring up environmental or land use issues. Those groups do not participate in the process of citing new renewable energy in Vermont with one exception. This has left a big vacuum in the state regarding environmental impacts of locally distributed energy. If Vermont continues along the current path, we will see more haphazard development driven by developers choosing the cheapest sites close to transmission lines but not necessarily where they would be most beneficial from a utility or community perspective. We will see inequity as areas of the state with grid capacity are favored over those in need of expensive upgrades. We will see conflicts and efforts to reduce or eliminate public participation in the PUC process in order to build as much solar and wind energy as fast as possible. As I asked in public comment to the Legislative Res Committee is updating the res the right conversation to be having at this time. It's evident that from the testimony you're hearing that lots of people are working on developing renewable energy in Vermont. I'm not sure anybody needs incentives. When are we going to talk about citing renewable energy projects and create incentives for citing on the built landscape and disincentives for building on natural and working lands as recommended by the Mass Audubon Harvard Forest Report? I suggest now is the right time. To my third point, what is the cost of the res as it exists now? What is the cost of the res under the different models? This slide from the res technical analysis report rim focuses exclusively on items impacting Vermont bills. All scenarios modeled yield net increases to Vermont ratepayers under every scenario modeled. This cost of the current res is about 15.5 million. So that's added on to what ratepayers would pay instead. And this is only a very small part of the cost estimates which go out and you can see the business as usual is increasing over time and then every model has different increases. Rate impacts will increase over time. Some utilities recently have requested five and 8% rate increases for Vermont Electric just filed for 8.7% Burlington Electric just filed for 5%. These rate increases that you are proposing to create by adding more requirements in the res are on top of that. Given the rising cost of so many aspects of Vermonters lives right now, is this the right time to add more financial burden to Vermonters by increasing electric rates? Since the passage of the Global Warming Solutions Act, Vermont has invested many millions of dollars focused on emissions reductions. Is there a cap on how much can be extracted from taxpayers and ratepayers? I leave you with this final image taken from a proposed scenic viewing tower location on Mount Anthony in Bennington. The tip of the Bennington Battle Mark monument here is a forested area that has been the subject of extensive litigation over the siting of two contiguous two megawatt standard offer solar projects that began in 2013. One of the projects was denied twice by the PUC and is back for a third time. The other projects denial was just upheld by the Vermont Supreme Court, but the developer will probably petition again for another one. The developer currently has five lawsuits in federal court, four against the PUC and one against the town of Bennington. The town has been sued twice and the governor A&R and V-Trans have also been sued. This is the picture of solar development in Vermont. When are we going to talk about how to change our system to avoid these types of conflicts? VCE recommends that now is the time to do the work to protect nature and engage our communities and encourage solar development in locations that make sense from multiple perspectives. Now is not the time to enact more requirements to build more renewable energy in Vermont and let developers choose the technologies and locations without consideration of how it affects the cost of living for people and the cost to our natural and working lands and the scenic natural beauty of Vermont. Thank you. I'm happy to answer questions. Thank you for your testimony. Do members have questions? I just have a comment. I appreciate your attention to the modeling and also your reference to the Massachusetts report. So I was thinking the same thing. I would really like to see a map like that for Vermont. As I think we're hearing, and I've felt for quite a while, that we need a complete revision of standard offer net metering. The energy policies that we've had, now is the time to do it and it's been fascinating to listen to the testimony this morning and hear so much of it focused on net metering and not about res at all. I'm glad to hear the conversation shifting and I hope that you will continue in that realm because that really is what's needed. And if you want to look more at net metering, take a look at what's happening in California. You might want to get Mary Powell to come in and talk to you about what she's dealing with out there with Sun Run. It's a big story. It was in the New York Times the other day. There are other states that are making changes to their programs. Everybody's dealing with these same challenges. People want more renewable energy. We just need to reconfigure the way we do it so that we can do it better. Do you have a question? Just wanted to follow. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I just wanted to also mention your testimony made me think about how with the costs and that modeling graph that you shared, you know, there's a lot of other movements and changes coming in the energy transition that are going to affect what we pay for electricity and how the electricity we produce is valued. There's a lot of movement on that. So I think in some ways, tackling what you're suggesting now could be just a little bit premature. And I think focusing on the good work that was done this summer is probably enough for right now, but I do. There is a lot. There's a lot here. It's a very complex sector and a lot of opportunity to have a much more holistic look at how we use and produce energy in the state. On the comment about premature, I'm reading about something I've been hearing about for a long time, which is thin film solar. Well, the Japanese and the Chinese are competing right now to bring it to market in the next couple of years. And if that happens, that's a total game changer. Depending on the cost. So this whole conversation about citing silicon panels may, may become moved if this technology becomes cost effective and gets out there. Yeah, thank you for that. I guess in follow up, I appreciate that your attempt, your model, you know, kind of talking about land use and identifying which I have also identified the fact that no one's tracking how much solar we have now and where it is. And I guess I'm curious, is there a jurisdiction that you're aware of that's doing a great job balancing all these competing needs? Well, as you saw with Vermont Electric Co-op, they've taken their own approach to serving their customers. And I think they are a good model. You know, I was on Vermont Public Radio, Vermont edition a few years ago, and I was asked, well, can you identify any good solar sites, you know, any that you'd like? And I was kind of stumped. I mean, I like some of the landfill sites, but on the other hand, the wrecks are sold out of state. I mean, that's a whole other part of the problem is that you can't point to any of the big wind projects or any of the big solar projects and say that they are renewable energy for Vermonters. And I understand that's one of the things that this proposes to change, but it also is one of the reasons for the rate increases is allowing the big wind projects to retire the wrecks. And that turned out in the questioning on the RES model to be one of the major cost drivers. When the companies that are doing these that are driving the siting, they may be some of them may be Vermont companies, but then follow the money, which nobody's done. And you end up with that, for instance, one company, a couple of companies that I've noticed are bundling their net meter projects, and then they sell them to investment banks. My impression is that in a lot of the solar projects that are built are going to, you know, in Citibank, Morgan Stanley, investment banks. So how do we evaluate what's good when we don't really have an understanding of the financial side of it? And so there's the siting issues. There's the financial issues. There's the is it renewable energy for Vermonters? Is it really, you know, doing what we want it to do? So, you know, I see a lot of bad sites. I don't hear about sites that are good because people don't come to Vermonters for a clean environment with problems with good siting. They do come to us when they feel that there should have been notification they didn't get. And I'm struggling to answer your question, Madam Chair, because the whole process for developing solar is not working on so many levels. And, you know, aside from what, for instance, the Vermont Electric Co-op is doing to serve their members with solar, I don't know, and on net metering, I mean, I'm off grid. So I can't bank my credits. I'm running a gasoline generator. That's actually how renewable energy works. You know, when when you have the the winter peak, you're, you have to get electricity somewhere. This idea that we're going to get it all from wind and solar and some backup hydro. We are not. I'm sorry to say this is not politically correct. We are not going to get off fossil fuels, not with the technologies we have now. They are going to be an important part of the energy mix. And nobody wants to say that, but I will step up and say that's part of what it's like when you live with a renewable energy system. So the net metering program that's letting people generate excess electricity in the summer and get credit for it in the winter. That's not how renewable energy works. I did find that Rhode Island has a cap on how much you can net meter and you can't over build so that you can earn more credits and and game the net metering system. There's a there are a lot of issues with these topics. And I also want to say to this committee, I appreciate all that you have been given. And I've been looking at the structural changes in the these legislative committees and it used to be that house natural and energy was the jurisdiction over policy, but then the committee that had the jurisdiction over the money part of it. And the the PUC was house commerce. My very first testimony in this in this legislature 24 years ago was before house commerce on a proposal about section 248. And so when the House Technology and Energy Committee was created, that took away the jurisdiction over the money part of it to and gave that to house technology and technology, which I was supportive of because and there was a chair who was in the financial business. But now with the elimination of that committee and joining energy technology and I gather you have jurisdiction over the PUC and money. Plus natural resources fish and wildlife. I just I'm concerned about the structural changes in the legislature and how we've kind of in a way lost that second look at the policies that come out which and this still exists in the in the Senate. And so I think that this Senate natural and energy can come up with policies, but then they go to Senate finance and I see a lot of changes that happen there because of money. So I just offer that observation over time. Thank you again for your testimony. Thank you. Members are going to take 5 minutes and then change topics. We are reconvening this meeting of the House Environment Energy Committee and shifting gears to hear from the agency of commerce and community development on their designations report. Thank you. Well, we're waiting for the slide to go up. Thank you for the opportunity to speak on this summer of engagement on the designation 2020 report and process for the record. My name is Chris. I'm the director of community planning and revitalization and I work at the agency of commerce and community development and I'm joined by. I'm Jacob America. I'm the policy manager with the Department of Health and Community Development. I think many of you know us, but a little bit more about where we work in state government. We are a very small team, but we have deep partnerships across state government. Many of our agency partners, you know, they jokingly, you know, be trans works in their lanes, but so does a and R. So does a H. S. So does the public service department and even emergency management. And so much of our work is intersectional. You know, we are focused on land use and land use touches all these agencies. So a lot of what we do and then the programs we minister are pretty broad and diverse, but they all kind of connect these different agencies to build stronger and vital communities. And some examples of the programs that we run are we run an electric vehicle charging station grant program. We administer programs that improve the vitality of communities and walkability of communities with sidewalks and trail networks. We help communities with sewer and water systems and clean water systems. We, of course, being the conversation see we support local economic development. But we also do work in the housing space. We're working hard on projects to support infill housing and smart growth housing in the lives of patients. And really, I think, you know, the focus of this session and really something that we've been working on very long. And I think the chair knows this is community resilience. How do we make sure that our communities that have been on the landscape for a long time and be prepared for an unpredictable future. It's an eclectic mix of programs, but it keeps it fun. And it keeps it interesting. I didn't, I've been working for the state for over 20 years. I think I thought I would. But because it's always changing, I think it's very interesting and the challenges never seem to stop this. I'm sure, you know, we are here to talk about this report. It was a huge effort. This is on your website. And also on your website. We've got, I know nobody really wants to read that many pages. We've got a one page overview, a two page overview and an eight page executive summary. And these are all on your website. And we've brought paper copies of them as well. I know that sometimes found upon, but it may be helpful in this instance. I'm just kind of. It's just people more organized. You'd send them one way. Okay. Yeah, we'll just send it. Yes, skip. I think we skip a few slides. We couldn't have, I'm sorry. This was a huge endeavor for us. And we couldn't have done it without the help from a lot of folks. As I mentioned, a lot of our partners were integral to this process. State agency partners, but also external partners. Our housing partners, our community development partners all across the board played a role in shaping these recommendations that we're here to talk to you about today. Huge thanks to our consultants. We hired a firm out of Washington, DC called smart growth America. Their mission and focus is on smart growth and land use and they were a huge asset to us. And our assistance for the engagement process was a group called community workshop. They're based in Bethel and they really did a fantastic job kind of hearing from a lot of people in a very short amount of time. So I know our timelines compressed. And we're going to just need some direction from you. I was going to just focus on engagement and evaluation kind of table setting and then Jacob was going to talk about the recommendations. And I don't know if you can do that all in 45 minutes. There's a lot. Yeah, I mean, I would say that, you know, definitely set the table. I don't know that we need to know every intricacy and outreach. And then we'd go to the take home. I can try to just do it quick. I mean, mostly mostly the point I want to make on the engagement is we heard from a lot of people. The direction that this committee gave us was seen in the recommendations that legislative direct community gave us to see in the recommendations and finds up fairly well with what you want in need. I will be prompt and quick. I think since we don't have a lot of time, if you have questions and answer them another time, but maybe just hold them just so we can just do this. Let's do this. The key thing what we heard is communities in housing community need climate and flood resistant resilience and they need livability action now. And for monitors and I think the speaker of the house are counting on this committee to find solutions. About 68% of our cities and towns have one of these designations and there's five of them. We can go into those in a little bit and we learned through our surveys, focus groups and other public engagement that communities really do value these programs. And while hundreds of stakeholders say the programs are really valued. They find them hard to access. They find them hard to access and use. And while many cities and towns have used the program to great benefits we've got examples all over the state of large and small communities. Many communities are left behind. Lord, this is for you. The designations generally we found that they have great potential, but communities really need more impactful benefits to meet this moment. And just as I said, briefly, we're going to talk about the outreach heard from a lot of monitors. I would imagine that the people who are aware of the designation programs are a very select subset of Vermonters. So did you target them or you just like blanketed fandom for monitors about the designation program. It was targeting. We had a group of like key advisors, you know, who had their constituencies and their channels to work out and kind of pass out our surveys and engagement forms and gather information from them. But I would say the key audience for this designation program is municipalities. And I think we heard from well over 130 of them about what's working and what's not working from them. But another key concern them through their select board, their planning commission, their staff. Various. There was so many different channels for them. They were just surveys. There were focus group meetings, but directly to those people. Yeah. I think over 500 people and directly weighed in in one shape way or another into this conversation just to skip forward. And we do have an engagement at a glance. It talks about all the different outreach that was done, but a lot of the, a lot of the audience focused on municipal officials. Do you have stats of those like who those. We do. We have an engagement report. We didn't. That's a pretty dry report, but we're happy to share it with you. You mean to direct. Go ahead. So, you know, I'm kind of back there. So, thanks with your support and with the general semesters for, you know, this was $150,000 project. So it was big. You gave us a very specific task in the legislation to look at place based location based jurisdiction, economic development, and these intentionally aligned with the scopes of the other related studies. It was a really hard process because many of us during the process got COVID and then there was a summer of floods. So that delayed us. We did submit our final report to the general assembly last Friday. It was 15 days late, but we did get it done. So that was a big relief. So thank you all for your support. About 250 downtowns and village centers are participating in the program. They docked with Vermont landscape. These are kind of compact and special places critical to our culture, history, brand and economy. Interestingly, about 69% of our monitors live within or very close to one of these designated centers and investing in these centers are really important because they have so many co-benefits and they impact so many of our state goals at once from housing access to smart growth, to racial equity, to environmental protection, flood resilience, walkability, livability, economic development, public health and energy efficiency and more. This is kind of municipalities and these centers is where kind of all the policies that you make and the other committees make kind of have to come together and kind of figure out how it's going to play out in the land. This was a really compressed process. Everybody jokes that they say things are a marathon and not a sprint. Well, this was a sprint, not a marathon. We had about six months to get a whole lot of work done. We analyzed existing data. Many of these programs have been on the books for 25 years. We looked at existing conditions and land use, housing, hazards and more. We gathered input from 120 communities, four states, 250 organizations and entities. We hosted 14 events and focus groups with nearly 500 registrations. We conducted five surveys, live event polls with nearly 400,000, oh, not 400,000, I wish, 400,000 responses. We also looked at other states and kind of how they kind of skin the cat on smart growth and how do you create these strong communities and no response for Montes unique midway through the process, you know, the summer floods happened and with special thanks to the agency of natural resources we got additional funds to expand the scope. And we are working on very specific climate, adaption resilience recommendations related to our centers. Those were on a slower boat but those recommendations will be completed by the end of January so we'll get you those when they are done. We also met weekly with our partners who are working on concurrent reports so we worked with the RPCs and you've heard about their report. We also met, I would say bi-weekly with the RPCs and the NRB. It was a very collaborative process and we all kind of, thanks to you, we knew what we were trying to achieve and we worked together very efficiently and collaboratively to get there. All the reports I think are integrated and intended to be delivered as a package. So this is the stakeholder summary. We've had an excellent event. Several of your members attended. Representative Sackowitz was there, Representative Sebelia was there, it was a day long event. We really drew a diverse crowd of people for a day long summit. It's really hard for people to give up their time but about 130 people showed up. And it was pretty diverse. Everything from VNRC to VPIRD, the Vermont Climate Office, the VHCB, VHFA, a lot of Vermont planners, a lot of municipalities, realtors in the Vermont Chambers. So it was a really fantastic day. We got a lot of great input on how do we make these programs better. We asked people at that day to work on these, I call them high coos to Vermont Futures, Vermont's future, these six word statements. And we got over 200 of these. And from these we kind of merged them together to create kind of a vision for what communities in the state should work toward to kind of making sure these centers stay vital and strong. And these, this is a word cloud of these visions. So these are the keywords. No surprise. I think we've seen them all before. So these were compiled into a vision for designation 2050. Probably don't need to read it to you, but I'll give you a moment to read it. But we envision, you know, a unique vital and resilient communities where everyone has an opportunity to thrive in the background. These are samples of the six word visions that were compiled. On the next slide, you'll see additional, you know, is we're kind of poignant interesting kind of statements about where communities and our partners would like the state to be. These were kind of compiled based on the feedback and kind of how do we know what did we hear from communities. And the recommendations are we need to make these programs easier and more accessible so more communities can participate in the programs. We need to do a better job aligning state and partner resources to help communities. And for our smaller communities in particular, we need to increase the benefits and technical assistance we provide to them to ensure that they can participate. What communities wanted was everything. You know, the gamut from housing to infrastructure, more staff and capacity, climate resilience, livable amenities. They want a nice community, a nice community to visit and enjoy. And they wanted overall vibrancy. So no surprise, the communities lists of once were long. But there's very high participation in these programs. And for you, Laura, especially our smallest villages, you know, we've got a ton of communities who are in this program. And there's been a growing interest in the neighborhood designation program. That program has really grown thanks to changes this committee's made, making the program a little bit easier to for smaller communities in particular. What they're really interested in is, you know, the, the tax credits that help fix up existing buildings. The active 50 relief for housing within the centers and the technical assistance from the state. These all got high marks as the highest benefits. Some areas for improvement. The programs were laid out by programs over 25 years for different times and purposes they're complex. We want to create administrative burdens for the state for DHS and also municipalities. You'll hear from Jacob a little bit what we're trying to do is kind of just make it easier. We want people to participate in this programs. We want people to take advantage of these programs, but right now it's usually the smaller and more sophisticated communities that know how to pull the levers who know how to access government who are really maximizing the benefits of these programs. We're making the rewards, but we want to make sure that the program is open and more broadly available to all communities. Thank you. Did you say smaller? Okay. Sorry, smaller like population, smaller density smaller. You know, people. You know, need to make things happen. You know, we provide resources and but we need to be able to work with local volunteers and many instances who can make these things happen. And our smaller communities, while they're, they're tightly knit and more cohesive. I don't have the capacity or you're saying they aren't getting. They aren't getting. Okay, I thought you said. Thank you. Okay, that's why you said the smaller ones were participating. They're in the program, but are they accessing all the benefits of distinction that I maybe models. And there are a lot of opportunities to make the programs easier. We would like to make it simpler. We'd like them to focus on key priorities and the report recommends. In fact, reducing the number of programs. We'd like to clarify the goals and focus on things like vibrant commerce, housing and climate resilience because these are the things that communities really want. And to deepen the impact. We need stronger coordination and more strategic investments in community development across our sister agencies. And also with our external partners and private investors to replace is both ready for homes, commerce and the extreme weather that we're experiencing. The challenge is no surprise, nothing new here scarcity of time and money. And especially for the projects that need to be supported locally if there's not somebody there to champion it's really hard for our programs to be successful. The complex state systems that don't always work together complex state interests, local interests, not always coming together. And it makes it really, really hard to meet. I kind of have a one size all program that meets the diverse needs of all these different communities, but we do have a plan to make it better. And at this point, I'm going to hand it off to Jacob. I was going to tell you what the rich wallet recommends. How we strengthen these programs and how we work together to align kind of our funding with our regulatory incentives because regulatory alignment alone is not going to build the communities you need the financial piece there to really make it work. So thanks to show the opportunity to come today. So the reform priorities that emerge from all the summer about reach and all the feedback we heard not only from a municipal officials, we did have wider, wider audience and outreach than just that, but they are the primary program users. Is that there's a, there's a continued commitment to Vermont school of historic centers and our development patterns, especially growing housing and climate preparedness in our centers. We have a continued focus on livable vibrant excuse development that helps support cost effective public services so for affordability urgent needs like housing equity across communities from small communities like forward to our largest communities like Burlington and infrastructure investments and a focus on building capacity and coordination across governments across state agencies across governments to solve solvable problems. So smart growth America. Install this data and work, working with our stakeholders developed some recommendations and the recommendation, the recommendations in this report. But I closely to what you're going to hear or I probably have already heard some from the regional future land use mapping report and active 50 reports and all of these reports have location based components. These are state investment investments and regulations in ways that makes life in Vermont more livable and affordable some key recommendations include simpler designations as Chris mentioned less burdensome administrative and governance processes associated with the designations and benefits and support to solve what our local priorities and accessible information and promotion and monitoring. So this is how the recommendations are broken down in the report and the executive summary. So taking a closer look, you can see this is this is quite a big undertaking for the state and particularly for program administrator administrators. And there are many details on the full report. So the first phase of a potential shift is a focus on building the framework for simpler designation smoother administrative systems. For, for, for the designations and over time, we hope to add new benefits that make communities needs. So what do we mean when we say simpler designations as J's first recommendation is to simplify into one program built around core village in downtown areas with flexible options for centers and neighborhoods to access goals that deliver on community priorities. So how does that work. The reform recommendation would take the five existing designations and essentially create to two base designations a core designation like a downtown or village to anchor. The program surrounding neighborhood as an add on designation, as well as a pathway to access additional regulatory recognition by active 50 and other state agencies through a development ready at all. And that would occur as an overlay within the core and the neighborhood. So the core designation that maintains remote commitment to villages and downtown as mixed use centers and hubs and creates one entry point from the smallest village to step up and access benefit benefits right for them to the largest downtown. The consolidation is designed to support communities. Community, they're developed local development goals and meet them where they are in terms of local capacity. So the boundaries for these areas would be prepared by the regional planning commissions and their member municipalities and approve the region why. That would just be a huge simplification of the process where a program staff in the downtown board spent an enormous amount of time designation by designation. Discussing boundaries. So this would be 1, 1 map for the region using a consistent statewide. Methodology the add on neighborhood designation maintains from on commitments to recognizing those areas around civic and commercial centers like our current neighbors and neighborhood development areas. And these would also be derived from regional maps and have a key focus on home development and compact neighborhoods that are climate resilient. Last, the report recommends a separate add on designation that could overlay the cores and neighborhoods for regulatory recognition by active 50 or other state regulators core neighborhood benefits will help communities meet program requirements and build. Build investments in a local plan for planning framework to make them ready for a development ready area with predictable outcomes. So instead of approval by the downtown board, this would be a track for approval with the natural resources board and it corresponds a lot to tier 1 concept that's in the natural resources. So process, the approach would simplify the process for the state municipalities by moving from the program with 5 designations with distinct requirements renewals and tedious mapping. It's a 1 time designation process that can be done a region wide among the 11 regional planning commissions, elevating the value of consistent regional future land use match prepared with their member municipalities. We recognize that moving into this new framework is a system change that's going to take time. And municipalities are watching us and you closely to make sure that they don't lose existing benefits and that there's a pathway. Our goal at the department is to ensure that all existing designated areas get recognized in the new framework and see no loss of current benefits during the transition. We estimate that that could take 2-3 years just to get the future of the regional mapping in place. And at the same time, DHC would be working on program accessibility guidelines, marketing measurement. Trying to find pathways to new benefits with our sister agencies and technical assistance delivery models that have a real impact on what the state says are its priorities. The report also makes recommendations on administration and governance. So right now the designation program is steered by the downtown board. This report recommends a more streamlined process through the regional approvals with flexible entry points and evolve downtown board that spends less time looking at boundaries and more time building interagency coordination and impact for growth with additional diversity. These changes would shift how people spend time interacting with the program, especially the department. For example, we would spend less time on program administration and application review and more on working directly with communities on program development on technical assistance. We would also have a more formal role and a much more important role in regional mapping. And the locals would spend less time just doing the paperwork to get in the program and more time. So that takes us to the benefits. So the last, the report recommends bigger budgets and partnerships and envisions new technical assistance delivery models. The current benefits are greater than those of the state. I'm interfacing with the benefits. So that takes us to the benefits. So the last report recommends bigger budgets and partnerships and envisions new technical assistance delivery models. The current benefits are grouped into financial regulatory and other options like tax credits like state granting priority, like the priority housing project recognition with an active 50. And it's going to take some time to work out the details of, which can begin the session, but some of the bigger system changed the new benefits that can really leverage interagency buy in, especially in times when their budget scarcity. The designation serves as a platform for strategic and coordinated investment and money follows readiness and what the designation program has proven. Is that it's a platform for government cooperation and inner interagency coordination and making hard to do projects possible by connecting by connecting the dots. So, just in terms of. I'm going to skip just an interest in time to how these. How this report interacts with the future land use report and active 50 modernization, because all location based in place based. And so we put this isn't in the small growth America report because we're trying to bridge. And explain how our report interacts with the region's report and active 50 modernization. You can see here that downtowns and villages and plan growth areas are as well as village, village areas with lower resource, smaller communities are where the designation program interacts. The regional future land use maps would interact with the active 50 modernization recommendations. Cross their tears. And, and really the blue areas are the plan growth areas that are where you're seeing in those reports recommendations for active 50. Recognition and so in the future regional and use a proposal you see the plan growth areas defined as an area served by water wastewater. Local land use and development regulations, multimodal transportation and complete streets in the designation report. These are areas that would be within cores or neighborhood and within a regional planning area with a local framework for growth and development. That can work with both the original concept and active 50 concept of tier 1. And tier 1 be exempt areas where there's water and wastewater or soil treatment capacity. Local land use and development regulations and an administrative capacity. One thing we didn't coordinate though. And these reports was naming. So you see different names and all these reports. So we're using it. We're hoping that this is a helpful. Guide to the sort of a glossary. Those reports jokingly call it there was at a stone. So if you want to. Know what the different, but they're all largely talking about the same things, but the terminology and their slight nuances and changes between the 2. And oh my God, we did it. We told you 6 months worth of work in 15 or 20 minutes. There's a lot more in the report. There's things that we didn't get to in the interest of time. You still have a fair amount of time. Yeah, I think they're less pride. I mean, there was there's a whole bunch of recommendations around better marketing. Of the program better coordination of getting the word out to communities like we've had these designation programs forever. But people don't know what they are. You know, and it doesn't have a name that kind of like gels with people. So, you know, once we had our framework and benefits better aligned really working to get the word out to communities. There's also a bunch of recommendations around better measurement of our progress. You know, we have a statewide land use goal to support compact settlements surrounded by rural countryside. The designation program is really. An aid to that goal, but it's not solely responsible to that goal because really on the bigger picture. It doesn't make a huge amount of investments to actually kind of move the needle to make sure that all growth happens in these title tidy areas. But we do think. You know, we'd like to be able to monitor and check and see how things are going, but there's a lot of frustrations with statewide data collection and gathering and capacity to actually monitor. But those are key recommendations and I think it's something that we do need to do, but it's it's hard for us to do without additional staff and capacity. I think those are the 2 primarily primary kind of recommendations that we skipped was marketing and measurement. Okay, but I think like you flew through some of your slides. So I would like to go back to some of them. There's 1 administration and governance roles. Maybe walk us through that. Like, I guess I'm really wanting to understand how. You're envisioning the role. I mean, you know, historically the designations were very much focused on what we like to say. The tax kind of benefits tax incentive programs. You shared with us other benefits or things that you're working actively with communities on, which excites me. I mean, I was struck by the shifting role of the downtown board. We're really supporting technical assistance at communities theme. We're hearing this session. And in doing those things that meet our, our other goals, besides sort of the land use regulation buckets, but making our towns more vital so that people want to be as your role. And I think that's great. And so I want to understand that complimentary role to the other things that we've been talking about. And I think that starts here and it fits. Yeah, so I'll let you address that. Um, governance, we spend like as they could mention, we spend a lot of time, you know, picking deciding what part of the community is in and out of the boundary. It's not a good use of time. I think the regional planning commissions help many of our communities do this work already create these maps already. If we could just delegate this to them and do it all at once, they would save our member communities a lot of time. It would save the RPCs time and we would save us time to really focus on the things that matter like getting projects scoped and developed in the ground. Other governance changes that come to mind. The downtown board right now is as comprised of agency secretaries or their designees. And this recommendation envisions elevating it back to the secretaries because we want to create that intersectional leadership platform to be able to figure out how the trans and our and PST, how all these programs can align to create the outcomes. That are needed in communities. It happens to a limited extent now. But oftentimes, you know, for instance, you know, secretary Moore is our designee she appoints Billy cost or Billy cost is a great person knows and that's in both the program but he's not the decision maker on how programs are prioritized and how they're administered. So I think that's a potential huge opportunity for us to really elevate the effectiveness of the programs fully engaging the agency secretaries are governance. Also, the board was created many, many years ago with small changes. There's no. There's no D I membership. So we'd really like to see somebody from the office of racial equity be a member of our board to make sure that our decisions. Are thought of more holistically other thoughts and stick it in. Yeah, I think one of the ways that. When a community is interested in designation will reach out to us and beyond the village designation, there's quite a few requirements. We go to the community and walking to the requirements. Sometimes they require that they need to do a specific area improvement plan. Or they need to do some by law updates. And so they're in the grand cycle when they're getting ready for an application. They do the application and then they come to the downtown board, the downtown board spends time reviewing the staff report, reviewing the boundaries. And then there's a check in 4 years because they're 8 year designations. And then there's a renewal process every year and send the municipalities are often having to collect data and do this. What the shift of the governance by moving more decision making to a regional future land use map does. Is it just recognizes these are intrinsically valuable areas. That there are certain conditions in place, whether it be infrastructure. Local planning to recognize them in our regional maps as a place where we want to invest or we want to grow and where it makes sense to grow. And so that shift, what that does is it allows. Allarming municipalities to so called be part of the at the designation program. And begin to access benefits and incrementally. Get the grants and work on community developments that meet their needs without a higher barrier to entry. So. What's happening is, is that the regions are recognizing these areas and then the communities then can access benefits to the projects that they want to do. And our staff time municipal staff time is then freed up to be focused on projects and not being not so much programming administrations because that's that's a big, big shift in the. And I related point is, you know, right now. The designations. You have a nod to local and regional planning, but they're not an integral part of it. And I think the same is true of active 50 as you know, you know, there's a recognition of regional plans and one of the criteria, but it's not driven by kind of a map that identifies. Where are we want to focus development where we want to make these investments where we want to make regulatory ease more possible? And where do we want to do more environmental protection? I think. Making that clear across the state with consistency through this regional process is going to be an amazing tool over time to really help us focus on what matters. Thanks. A little bit of a shift from the designation report update, but you mentioned. You could do more if you, not that we have any budget issues going on, but you mentioned that you could do more if you have more staff. We had a bill introduced yesterday that proposed, if I recall correctly, 1.5 million to assist ACC D to assist municipalities. And then also with them that to provide more support to RPCs for their, you know, so they could have more staff. And then also in that bill, and I might be characterizing it slightly off, but you get the point also in the point also in the bill is $125,000 to go to ACC D for a position to do more. That's another $125,000 proposed for a different place. I wonder what your thoughts are on, I guess, sorry to button. I'm curious if you're familiar with the bills. Is this reptilins bill? Yeah. Yeah, I read it quickly. Somewhat familiar. We have a small team. We're 8 people and we have 3 limited service positions. So we try to do a lot for a lot of people with a very small amount of people. I think all those decisions about staffing and positions are, you know, they're waiting on the governor's office to figure out what their budget priorities are. I think all agencies could do more with more people, but we have to work within what the governor's directing us to do. Actually representative Satkowitz and then Bob. So, this proposal would give RPC some additional responsibilities. But I also think I heard you say that there would be some efficiencies that they'd be able to gain in the process also. So, are you envisioning sort of a enough sort of no net difference in sort of the overall level of staff time we would expect from them when they're interfacing with these programs. That's my that's our hope, our belief, because right now these are one off decisions that we make, we designate one community at a time. RPCs have done a lot of work in their regional plans. We make a pretty significant investment in regional plans. They have future land use maps already. I think you heard from the RPCs last week. But just with some efforts on consistency and working, you know, with their member municipalities. We could take something that they do already and map it to this other so to speak to this other purpose. And I think that will be a huge savings in time. We'll approve regions at a time. So, you know, potentially, you know, 50 to 100 communities at once, rather than one off. So I think that will save a lot of time. Being the gatekeeper while it's valuable to have the state oversight and that's still envisioned in this process. It does just take a lot of time. And as Jacob mentioned, we'd much rather help communities do these projects and make some things happen. Rather than doing the process. Representative bond guards 2, 2 things 1 very quick. If you have free limited service positions. How long do they last? It's a great question. You had them. Well, we've had them for maybe, I think, I want to say 2 years. But it's been incredibly challenging to recruit people during the pandemic. So some have been filled and then some have gone vacant. So there's not been a consistent capacity within our division. Many of the ARPA positions, I think, expire in 2025, I think, and I think they're all slated to put that. In fact, down to 5. Oh, okay. Yeah, included the 3. See me back down to 5. Okay. So, just to make sure we. All in the same page about how this all fits together because you talked about that. So if I just want to try to articulate this and see if I. I think I have it right. But. So, we have the, both the NRP report and your report. Really. Shift some ways the way we do business by really having it start with the future when I do snaps. And giving them much. I think a role in that in that town and region of working out what's where. And the designated so that the parts of the designate downtown for. Back on the governance side. Part about the core and the NDA using different from now it's. So, that would be based on 1st on the future land use maps. Then they would apply to the talking about making some changes to those 2 levels of destination, right? And then the 3rd level of designation, if you will, I'm just using my own language here. Which would involve regulatory relief would be applied for. For 1st through your board, but then then the town would apply town and region would apply. To the whatever board we end up calling with the current NRP. For the regulatory relief in some portion. Of that area that those 2 put together, right? So there's a. Okay, so it's a really. It's all dependent on future when these maps. You do the 1st level, but then in order to gain the regulatory relief, that's a separate process to the, okay. Yeah. And what this addresses is, I think this committee is well known. The designation programs became kind of a proxy area for for active 50 relief. Because that we could never give any agreement. So what if I can go kind of go 1 more. What portion of this you talked about this taking years to unfold what portion of this. Is particularly valuable and your, you needs to get in place this year. Doing our work. Our goal is, you know, we need to get the mapping process rolling because that's as you noted is drives all the other pieces so without that, we're kind of blind. We would like to get the basic designation revised designation framework past. It will take us time to develop new applications, new guidelines, new process, or how communities apply for how the process works. And that will take probably several years to implement, but you know, if anything is possible getting the framework past this year that sets us up for future work or reporting back as you see fit on how this is implemented is what we need. And I think you know, you know, represent bongars has a bill h 683 that kind of lays out this basic framework sort of how do we how do we how would we envision implementing this. I guess I'm kind of curious about back to the better benefits offering slide, which is 38. The assistance, you have current benefits, 20 plus assistance options and then consolidated into something called review and improve, which I'm not quite sure about. I'd like to know what you mean by that in the slide and then is there in this large report. An outline of these current benefits are not an outline, but actual in depth, like, what are they? Yes. And then, okay, great. And so can you just tell me what does review and improve me on this slide. I'm on, sorry, I'm on a different slide. Yeah, that was renew and renew and improve. Other lower right hand corner review and improve. It's 20 plus assistance and then it sugars off to review and approve, which I just need an interpretation. So my understanding that would be. And it goes back to you may remember the last prior years. We brought the table requirements and benefits and we actually we took out that slide we shouldn't have. But, but there are maybe 20 different benefits programs. Most of them are financial or regulatory, but then there are other assistance like direct direct visit from the downtown coordinator to the downtown to 23 downtown organizations. So, this is an opportunity with the shift that we think about how those types of small, small or ancillary benefits can best deployed to meet housing needs to meet their climate challenges to meet. To meet the infrastructure needs of communities. Is that, is that. It's true. I don't know it's your slide idea what it's. Sorry, my response. I love the reference into in this in the report. The slide you left out perhaps is that in the report or we have a much much longer slide deck and I think we tried to truncate quickly beforehand because our time that shut shut down so. The slide deck used, what was this, the longer one was set up for who the longer one we presented it to our advisor group. So we had a group of about, say about 20 different stakeholders was presented to them in December. This basically right track wrong track on report and file of recommendations. I had a consultant. Yes. Right. Further questions. Sure. This is the beginning of a conversation. So, I hope so. Thank you for being flexible on our timing today and for doing all this work at a sprint and not as a marathon. Thank you for your support and if there's additional questions will. I think we'll give you the full more comprehensive slide deck for you to review if you have more questions, you know how to fund this. So, thank you for your time. Thank you very much. Members before we go before we adjourn, I just want to say that I'm Gabrielle's provided me a draft letter. Yeah, that I'm going to read and then expect to see that coming up in for a group conversation here. I can find it in my desk. Continuing thoughts on bills that we may move to other committees that we went through yesterday. My inclination is to move a couple of those. I haven't finished my thinking on it. And if you have again, I'm open to your input on it. We'll talk about that perhaps we have some time this afternoon. And other public service announcements that you look like you might want to share something. Barbi down 911. I wonder if we should hear enough. Yeah, no, for today. Today. I don't think Bernie is available, but we're just getting one through of what that is. Okay. And here's because we're going to get the other funding. Good. All right. With that, I'm not seeing any comments from you all. We will adjourn for lunch.