 Good morning. This is the morning meeting of the House Appropriations Committee on April 27th. And we are appreciate representatives of the Vermont Housing Conservation Board for coming in and helping us to understand the governor's proposal as it relates to housing and the creation of more housing and without any further ado, let me turn this over to Mr. Selig. I assume you will kick us off, Gus. We try to get formal when we have guests in here. And so forgive me if I lapse occasionally, but Mr. Selig, thank you. And Ms. Holler, thank you for joining us. Okay, Madam Chair for the record, Gus Selig director for the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. And I think we're here primarily to talk about of governor's proposal to use ARPA funds to meet the state's housing needs. And I will get into that in a moment in terms of his $249 million request, which I think also came with a request to appropriate at least something over $100 million in this year's budget and talk about what the other body has done. Before I get into that, I guess I just wanna first say a thank you to the committee because as you began the session, the governor had recommended a one time of $20 million and you decided to double down on that and increase the funding by to $40 million in one time funding. The appearance of ARPA changes the calculation somewhat. I understand that the other body has actually taken your recommendation and increased it by about another $10 million, but they have not appropriated ARPA funding to any significant degree beyond the VHIP program in the budget that they voted out of committee yesterday. Let me back into the need issue. And I think Representative Fagan's remarks before you went live just speak to the tremendous need. And so although we have moved lots of people out of motels with the work that you, the monies you provided us through CRF last year, the problems that the state is seeing in terms of its housing needs continue to strain our system dramatically. And while it is certainly better for people to be in motels than it is to be in the woods in the midst of a pandemic or doubled and tripled up with neighbors, it causes its own problems. So there's as of a couple of weeks ago, my understanding is there were 2,700 Vermonters about 1,900 families still in the motels. The depth of the problem we're facing and I think the reason the governor is proposing what I've called a moonshot on housing is that people with section eight vouchers are not able to find housing, which speaks to a supply problem all over the state. And I think as we testified at the beginning of the session, there was lots of information, data, anecdotal and both borne out in the transfer tax revenue of folks from out of state seeing Vermont as a great place, safe place to be and buying properties up. And we have a really hot real estate market today that is driving the costs of housing up. My friends at the Housing Finance Agency report that the average single family home in Vermont last year, new home, newly constructed home was a $450,000 proposition. There was an article in The New Yorker a few weeks ago about out of state investment groups, not just in Vermont, but all over the country looking for real estate investments, particularly in mobile home parks. We're seeing that play out with the proposed sale of several parks right now. And there is reason to think also that out of state investors are looking for rental investments as well, where they can jack rents up. So those are the factors that are driving our problems today. On a personal level, I was just thinking about when I got out of college in the mid-70s and I rented an old farmhouse in North Calus with a pall of mine for 150 bucks a month. I'm sure that that house, if on the market as a rental today would be 17 or 1800 a month and the entry level salaries since that time have not gone up by 10 times when you're leaving college and getting your first job. It just speaks to a great imbalance between what Vermonters earned and what it costs to rent housing, to buy housing and what it costs to build housing. And we have seen great increases in construction costs over the last year. Some of that is related to the pandemic in terms of supply chain interruptions, but the price of plywood apparently went up greatly after the power outages in Texas where lots of plywood gets put together. So the problems are getting worse. And I would say that what you did last year with CR with your fast track bill signaled to everybody that you were ready and serious to take aim at the housing issue and that resulted in lots of applications. Similarly with 315 this year, you provided $10 million. We asked for letters of intent to apply for that money to do fast track housing. And within two weeks we had applications or letters of intent to apply that total $27 and a half million with a variety of different kinds of projects to relieve the pressures on motels and the GA program. So we think that there is more, if we put out a second letter, we're sure that that would double. To talk about what the needs are or what the program would be around increased appropriations, the biggest need in the state is rental housing and more multifamily rental housing. Obviously there is a significant and that will be part of the solution to the problem of homelessness and the problems in the motels. I would say that it is important as you consider the governor's recommendation that what he put together was a proposal for adding shelter capacity, fast track housing to relieve homelessness and more integrated housing. And I think the problems representative Fagan was talking about before you went live speaks to that the best practice is absolutely to integrate people into the communities not to isolate them and to create mixed income housing with a multitude of folks. That's what we did with a housing revenue bond. But obviously homeless relief anything we can do quickly should be a priority. I've spoken in the past about mobile home parks and that need that is being driven in part by out of state investments but I've also talked about the need to invest as in a project like Tri Park and there are many others around the state where the infrastructure is worn out and without help people are really gonna struggle. The two parks on the market right now if there's no public intervention the rents would go to $530 a month to rent your lot before you get to your housing costs. We had a report issued about a week ago on the need for farm worker housing that two other committees in the house have taken testimony on. There's a big need there. There is home ownership that needs to be a part of a focus and is part of the governor's proposal and what I'd say to you is that today nobody is building in Vermont on any scale entry level starter housing unless you're building your own home. Nobody's building a 1200 square foot cape or ranch. It's not, it costs too much to build. It's not profitable and we need some incentives and this is part of the governor's proposal to do that. The VHIP program has been a great success. There is money that the Senate approved to continue that program through ARPA. We've had discussions with the committee and the other body about innovative ideas like accessory dwelling units. We did some of that with technical assistance with the revenue bond. That's something that could be done across the state. And then finally, I just don't wanna forget it. There's a need for recovery residences across the state to deal with the opioid problem. Since it became clear that you were providing more resources and since President Biden announced his jobs and infrastructure package, we are getting lots and lots of requests for our feasibility grant program. This is a small grants that help developers explore a can of project really take place. So we usually spend $150,000 a year at max on a program like that. In the last two and a half months, we've had 10 requests that would exhaust that fund. So people, once you signal that there's an opportunity, people are going to develop it. I know that I don't think I'll be repeat myself, but in terms of the opportunities, what we wanna do is not just look at the issue of shovel readiness, but shovel worthiness. In 315, I think it was, you asked for a working group, that working group that would include, that would be led by DCF and the Department of Housing and Include Us and VHFA, that group's been meeting about weekly to talk about how to integrate capital dollars with service dollars with rental assistance and is beginning to form the outlines of a plan to help do that. We don't have all the answers yet, but I think it speaks to what the governor's goals are with his proposal. To give you a few examples around the state, this was not in my consciousness when I talked to you early in the session, but Chair Stevens let me know that Stanley Hall and on the Waterbury campus has been taken down, and he says, Waterbury thinks that would be a great place for housing. Two weeks ago, the director of Washington County Mental Health called me about a building she owns, her organization owns in Montpelier that could be converted to housing. The folks at Christ Church in Montpelier with the failure of the garage project are ready to use their land and an end in addition to the church to provide 25 units of housing. There are four or five projects in the Brattleboro, Wyndham County area that have been in some stage of discussion to take place over five years that would provide close to 100 units of housing that could be done much more rapidly. I saw in the newspapers, and I don't speak with any knowledge about availability, that the city of Rutland made a deal to buy a facility for recreation on the St. Joseph's campus. I don't know if there are other buildings on that campus that could be converted to housing, but we would wanna look at that. We looked at a building up the road a few years ago across from the Marble Museum that I think is still vacant, and I think there are gonna be opportunities across the state to convert what had been used as office space into other sorts of facilities. One of the fast track projects we got was a project like that in St. Johnsbury that can provide 10 units of housing that had been more of an office location before. So across the state, I think there are opportunities. We did, after meeting with the committee, talk with the chancellor and her CFO, they asked us not to visit the state colleges until the students left for COVID reasons. So shortly after May 17th, we are gonna look at buildings at Johnson and Lyndon and at VTC as you had suggested. We know that there's a big hole on the ground in Newport. We know that there's a neighborhood in Windsor called Jarvis Street that the community very much wants to revitalize. There's also an opportunity, I think, in downtown Windsor. So what I would say to you about the governor's proposal is if you move it forward, it will signal to the development community that the state is serious and gonna go on a multi-year effort to fix the imbalance that we've all had in the housing market. And again, as I said earlier, I'm sure that if we send out a second request for letters of interest as we did about the wrap of the $10 million you made available in 315, that the need would more than double or the request for that funding would more than double. So I think with that, I'd be the governor's proposal is in five different buckets. The, I think it's imaginative, creative, it's powerful. Obviously, it's sort of the sort of moment for somebody like me has been waiting my entire career for this kind of an opportunity to really do more than make incremental progress on this issue, to really change the balance and have a much more balanced and equitable housing market and be able to meet more people's needs. The one thing that I would just say as you consider that is that it would be good, again, to create the best practices to create housing for a range of people and not to isolate people who have had great financial and other difficulties in their lives all into one single locations. And we've done that successfully. Usually there's an executive order that requires that 15% of the publicly funded housing in the state be provided to Vermonters who've experienced homelessness. Most of the providers we work with have provided more than 20% of their housing to families that experience homelessness, but it is in a mixed income setting. So with that, I'm happy to answer questions rather than to go on at length, but I do want to just convey my enthusiasm and support for what the governor's put forward. We had a feedback session with a number of stakeholders yesterday. I think there were more than 70 people on the call. There is great interest and great enthusiasm. This was done by the working group and people would like to know just how to get started. There were a lot of questions like, how are you gonna really do this? How are you gonna pull it off? And I guess I would just going back to the notion of a moonshot, there's enough people on this call that are near my age that when Jack Kennedy said we're gonna go to the moon, he didn't know how we were gonna get there. I can't give you all the details. I can't promise you that we'll get exactly to 5,000 units today, but I think that the times call for and COVID has shown the need for a dramatic response to the state's housing needs. And you can look at that from the perspective of the problems that you were talking about in the Rutland Motels or you can look at it from the perspective of employers who are looking for more opportunities for their workforce, given where our wages are to be able to afford quality housing in the state or as part of the state's, meeting the state's demographic challenges. So I'll stop there and take your questions. Thank you very much, Mr. C. like for laying it out so eloquently for us to understand what's being proposed. We have a couple of questions. Representative Helm, Bob. Oh, he's looks like he's still having Bob. Yeah, I thought my telephone company was making headway. They spent all day Friday and it's as bad now as it was when I started. I'm gonna just unplug here. It's awful. Bob, I feel for you. I'm actually at a neighbor's house because consolidated is not delivering internet to my house and hasn't, they promised a call back in 24 hours and it's been two days. I have no idea when they're even planning to show up. That's the same company I'm working with. Anyways, so I just wanted to say you were giving a list of possible purchases or development projects that you might look into in the future. I just came from a meeting where there was a group that thought, yeah, I'll look at buying the quality in and roll. But I won't go any further than that. That's it, man. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Bob. Representative Yacoboni. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Mr. Selig. Always good to see you. I'm trying to, what's behind my questioning is total capacity needed and total resources necessary to meet that capacity. You use the number a little while ago, 5,000. I didn't know if that was for illustrative purposes or if that's the assessment on the amount of the number of affordable housing units that are needed. That's the number the governor used in his proposal for $249 million. And I don't know that we can achieve that goal but that's the goal that he's set forth. And I think it's a mix of both market rate and affordable units as I understand the proposal. What's, what capacity do you have? What's the total amount of money you could process annually? Is there a limit on that where you just your systems couldn't do any more than a certain amount? I'm trying to find out how many years it might take. Well, I think that the question of capacity, again, these are the kinds of questions people were asking on our call yesterday. But the first thing that I would do quite frankly is to make some investments in the capacity of our community providers, because most of them with a few exceptions of the larger organizations are used to doing one project a year. And so we wanna strengthen that capacity. We do have a statewide group called Housing Vermont. They actually have a new name ever north and they work all over the state and they can strengthen the local capacity greatly. So, you know, one of the proposals we just got in with the $10 million would give us nine units in Stowe and two in Morrisville with a capacity to add on the Stowe site in the future. And that is partly because the Memorial Housing Partnership has a relationship with them. So we will definitely invest in, we will invest in capacity, we'll invest more in our feasibility program so that people have the dollars to do the investigation of is a project feasible or not. What I can tell you is that during the housing revenue bond we moved up to the place where we were doing $20 million of investment per year. Then last year you said to us, can you move $33 million in nine months? And we did that. And I don't know today where the limit of our capacity is. One of the things that will have to happen necessarily is that we will get less leverage depending on when President Biden passes the infrastructure and jobs package. And that means we're gonna have to put more dollars per unit into every unit we develop. There's a limit on something called the low income housing tax credits, 9% tax credit program, which is what we usually work with. So once we've maxed that out, we have to provide more funding for every unit we do. So I don't have a precise answer today other than we'll invest in the capacity to speed things up. I feel like I need to go find a book about how FDR and Harold Vicki's scaled up the new deal as quickly as they did. I think it's that sort of a challenge that's in front of us and that's what we intend to do. But I'm also very mindful and I've heard Secretary Buttigieg use this phrase. And so now I'm using it that there's a big difference between shovel ready and shovel worthy. And we wanna make sure, I think the reason the program's been successful is that projects, if I'm thinking about your district like Arthur's have enhanced the community. And if you look back to housing from many years ago, it was poorly constructed and poorly located and it isolated low income Vermonters or low income people, not just in Vermont, but around the country and was not well received. So we wanna hit that balance as well. So there's quality and quantity. So I know there's many variables involved. One is an averages are misleading, but there's the cost per unit. And then there's the dollars you can leverage from various sources to bring the cost per unit to some type of affordability. And it sounds like both of those variables are in play, given factors beyond our control. Absolutely. The price of materials has gone up since the pandemic began. We did a project in Representative Fagan's district with a great contractor and huge cooperation from Act 250 who moved it way faster than they usually do. But the reason it got done at a high cost is that the contractor, Naylor and Breen had their employees work 10 days, 10 hour days and Saturdays. And we would not have met the CRF deadline without that. So the cost went up because we were paying overtime. And I can guarantee you, I wish this were not the case, but there will be sellers who see that there's a huge amount of public money and the price is gonna go up. So how we proceed around that is gonna be a challenge for us, but that's just a fact of life in the real estate market. If there's a lot of public money available, we will see prices rise in terms of what people's expectations are. I hope that because the commercial real estate market is likely to change as people need less office space that there'll be some offsetting pressures that will temper that, but we will definitely see prices go up. Thank you. One last thought on the price issue, which is I've been doing this for a long time. As you know, some people would say too long, but everything we did 10 and 15 years ago that we thought, oh my God, this is so expensive. Today looks like a bargain. I don't have any reason to believe if we waited five years that prices will go down. Thank you. What you've evoked some of our history, some of our positive history in terms of getting to the moon or the new deal. I'm also thinking of one of our not so great history points where we did urban renewal and knocked down neighborhoods to put highways through them in the name of some good. When you look at projects, you have criteria that you follow that looks at mixed income and how it contributes to the community. Can you just talk a little bit about how you do that to assure that the developments are integrated into the community rather than isolated. We have an example here of an old project a way old project that's down a road and kind of isolated and gets a few more police cars than other places do just because we've packed a handful of people into kind of dense area, isolated area. Well, what I would say is that when you look at the enabling statute for the Housing and Conservation Board, historic preservation is part of our mission. And so that has always made the renewal of the state's historic fabric really important and why a project like the French Block in Montpelier, the Tuttle Block in Rutland, the project now called the New Avenue Hotel in St. Johnsbury have always been priorities for us to invest and that means putting developments in places that are gonna be in to some degree convenient to services, whether those services are a grocery store, medical services, all the public library and so on and so forth. And so that's a part of our mission. And the historic, when you look at our mission it is also about preserving the countryside. So we don't want to develop sprawl projects where people will be isolated. So those are, and over the years our board has developed a series of policies that speak to that. The governor, when he proposed the Housing Revenue Bond was very strong on, you do a great job on serving people up to 60% a median. I'd really like to see us, which is a limit that the tax credit program uses, but I'd like it to see you guys invest a little more and go beyond those Vermonters who are below 60% a median and be able to serve somebody who's at 80% a median which for most of the state for a family of three or four might be $40, $45,000 a year. And we made that part of the program and we certainly would within the context of the work that we need to do going forward. So those are some of the things that we do to try to ensure that projects are not isolated locationally. We have done, I have to say several smaller projects, 20 units and below that are sometimes single purpose housing. We try to make sure that services are there. We help Orange County Mental Health buy a four unit building for its clients that's right in downtown Randolph. Again, convenient to services. Not everything can be in a downtown or neighborhood adjacent to a downtown. So then we look to, is there good bus service or is there not? Or is the community willing to extend bus service? So those are all the things that go into how we think about and plan for projects is what's the location? What's the service mix? Can you walk anywhere to services? Is there any public transit? Can there be more public transit? And the program mix calls for different levels of affordability within a project. It doesn't call for just, with a few exceptions, just having folks who all have great difficulty in one location. Thank you. Representative Fagan. Thank you. And Gus, thank you for coming in. I really do appreciate it. I always enjoy talking to you. So the governor's got, there's a lot of proposals out there and it's not just the governor's. It's some are ours and some are everyone's. And for example, I'll just use an example. And what I'm asking is cross coordination between all of those projects such that there may be some things that are being worked on like Brown's fields, projects that might actually, if located in the correct place, I'm thinking the old Rutland Dress Factory that's been sitting vacant for a hundred years. I don't know. That's a long time. That might be really good place for yours. So I'm not asking about my specific, like the Rutland Dress Factory. I'm asking cross coordination between programs. Are you starting to, is there starting to be a work group put together somewhere that can talk about, hey, we've got something that I think you can be a part of, that type thing? Yes, the short answer is yes and yes. So we are talking regularly with Commissioner Hanford. We are, A&R is actually represented on my board. So to the extent that there are cleanup funds in either of those agencies, we're talking about how can we put them together? Should there be money for infrastructure that A&R is administering? We want that as part of our thinking as we work with the residents of a mobile home park who want to buy their park, because most of their water and sewer systems are ancient and some of them are not public systems, they're onsite systems. And so whether it's this Dress Factory, which I'm not particularly aware of or the Jarvis Street neighborhood in Windsor or any number of locations around the state, we are looking at, how do we put the different resources together? And I think a chief value of the work that we've always tried to do is to get multiple benefits for a community. One of the hardest things to do is to combine housing and retail, but we've done that on a number of occasions with downtown buildings where that becomes part of the program. Thank you, we're looking for multiple goods is the short answer. Thank you, good. Representative Yacoboni. Yes, thank you. I don't expect you to present the administration proposal, but you may be able to comment on this. If I take 249 million and divide it by 5,000, that's like 50,000 a unit. I must be missing something because how do you address the problem at 50,000 a unit? Unless the leveraging is just incredible. Well, I don't think you do need more money. You do need to leverage more money. And that's why we did not go over the numbers carefully with them before they announced their plan. So that number may be optimistic without significant leveraging. It has to be optimistic without significant leveraging, but we can't attack the problem significantly with 249 million dollars. And we can leverage some dollars. We just will not leverage as much because there's a limit to the 9% low-income housing tax credit that the state is allocated. There is a proposal in Congress to increase that program by 25% so that will help, but we will need more leverage and you're absolutely right about that. And what I'm trying to send the message, also to this committee's conferees, that there's so many different needs and frankly, I don't have my ARPA spreadsheet now to know if there's anything left over being held for the future, but housing may be another one where even more might be needed. Thank you. Thank you, Dave. I think this, you raise an interesting point. I, and Gus has talked about this as a moonshot and I think the governor's numbers are aspirational. I'm not sure any of us know what the right number is and in five years, I hope we're not critical of each other because we didn't hit a target. I think what we're hearing is we have an extraordinary opportunity to actually make a difference in the fabric of our communities and in the lives of Vermonters. And so how can we best take advantage of it? The moonshot makes us look out. I'm concerned about what the next year looks like and this is not the HCB's problem, but one of the other issues that we have is the, and you've opened with, Gus, what you said, 2,700 folks living in housing that we've provided that we're going to lose and we will not have an ability to replace that lost housing in the timeframe that we're looking at. So, committee, I think we have to put our arms around what that means. This afternoon, we're going to hear from DCF on their housing proposal, but we need to be conscious of what the challenge is there and I think to the meeting that Reps Fagan-Helm and Harrison were in this morning, we need to also talk about the services that are necessary to avoid the problems that are created by folks living on top of each other in very difficult circumstances and not even mentioning the difficult circumstances that folks bring in when they're in these sort of situations. So we don't have a solution for that problem. I wonder, Gus, to bring this back to you all. I mean, one of the concerns over the years has been the state's ability to provide ongoing services within some of the housing that you help facilitate the development of, be it vouchers, which is less of a concern right now, but also the mental health, healthcare, substance use, et cetera, services. Not your problem, but would you care to comment on what we ought to be thinking about in order to make, because these places are not going to be successful unless we also put that ongoing support in some of the places that we're talking about. So let me differ with you a little bit to this degree, which is it is our problem because when projects are not successful, when there is dysfunction from a single tenant, it affects the whole building, because it can affect the neighborhood. And so, you know, when representative Yacovoni had our section of the budget, we would have an annual discussion about the need for services and housing to be integrated. There's an excellent program that many of you are aware of called SASH, and it is a population-based program centered in housing. And it brings together all the folks who work with elderly people, whether it's from a AAA, a mental health agency, a home health agency, in a team approach to help make sure that when somebody's having a problem, they figure it out and address it. There is a proposal to do that, and we help to fund it at a family level. I know that the Agency of Human Services through the group work we've been doing with them is gonna propose some changes in their Medicaid waiver to do some work. There's a demonstration program right now at two housing locations in the state where a clinical social worker is embedded into the nature of the housing. The Champlain Housing Trust would tell you with one of the motel projects we did with them because they were able to buy it without debt with the CRF funding, that's allowing them to use the rents they're collecting to have social services on site. So this is absolutely a critical issue. I don't know that we'll solve it in perpetuity. There is an allowance for some of the rental assistance money to be used for services, that's short-term, not long-term, but it really gets to the issue of, how do we make sure that Vermonters can be as successful as possible? There's a model that we have worked with and this is the model that's gonna go into the former ICM school in Rutland called Permanent Supportive Housing. It's one that we used at Great River Terrace, which is a similar community that opened a couple of years ago in Brattleboro, but the Mental Health Agency is going to be providing an on-site person there for a number of hours a week as that property is repurposed as housing for people who've experienced homelessness. So this cross-agency collaboration is absolutely essential to ultimately a successful outcome, particularly for those Vermonters who've struggled the most. Now, there's a whole other range of Vermonters who may just be struggling with the dislocation from the pandemic having lost a job. They may need some temporary help rather than ongoing help, but people go through cycles in their life where sometimes you need some help and many, you may go years where everything's just fine. But we absolutely need to be able, as we do our work and we do our planning and we do our project development to integrate that kind of thinking into the design of the housing we build. Thank you. And to my knowledge, there are not dollars from in the governor's proposal that are explicitly tied into the support services, et cetera around housing. I mean, we've added some money and we've talked about what the challenges are with the DCF population, but I don't recall there being a pot of money. Am I going to be wrong? There is not in the capital proposal that he made. Jen, do you, I believe that there's a plan, but correct me if I'm wrong for some of the rental assistance funding to be used for services. Actually, I do know. I believe that there is some funds but they have to do with the requirements around the federal requirements around use of that emergency rental. For example, you have to guide people through attestations. You have to, on S or two, there's more requirements about income. So you'll have to get the tax documents. You have to get all of the income verification through and that's a lot of what I understand. And we can confirm this later this afternoon with DCF is what those 17 temporary serve or limited service positions are, but I don't know that beyond that it's getting at some of the factors that we're hearing this morning about what makes something successful in the long term. And I think that's vital as everyone has already noted. Okay. Jen, did you want, Ms. Holler, did you want to add anything to that? My understanding tracks representative steps, of course. And I think what we're understanding is that the governor's proposal for the $1 billion is really around capital investments, okay. That proposal assumes that some of the other categorical grant programs that are included in the American Rescue Plan Act, such as the emergency rental assistance and others would provide some of those services supports. But as representative Gessup just said, there are a good number of strings that come with each of those. So maybe this is a time for me to be able to say that the Senate budget, as it's coming out of the Appropriations Committee, strikes the Housing Recovery Working Group, but regardless of where that lands or not, the funders have been meeting historically, but when you passed that charge in your version of the budget, we formalized that group and focused specifically on how to use the ARPA resources. I've been developing a number of strategies and planning tools around that and we'll continue to do that regardless of whether there's a specific direction to us to do that or not. But because ARPA funds aren't here yet and there's some guidance on the one billion or nor is there for many of the other programs that are included in that act, we are focused on kind of strategies and tools for being able to break services, capital and rental assistance in a way that's gonna be able to absorb whatever resources come our way, which are gonna be driven by what you and the Senate decide that you wanna make in terms of appropriations, what ultimately the rules for all those programs are and then whatever additional federal resources may come, whether it's in the form of additional sort of low income housing tax credits or something in the infrastructure bill. Although I will say that at the listening session Gus described yesterday of the working group, we heard clearly from the congressional delegation staff that we're best focused on the resources that we have because they don't have clarity at all on what might be coming in the infrastructure bill. And in fact, the Republican counter proposal in the Senate is based on the premise that housing is not infrastructure, it wouldn't be included. And that's all to be negotiated, but I don't think we can count on that coming. Healthly it will. Thank you. Committee, other questions or thoughts? This is likely our last chance to have a conversation with the folks from VHCB. We don't know what the, we follow what the Senate does. We kind of have a general understanding but in the next couple of weeks we're going to make a decision and set ourselves on a path. So, one last call for questions. Representative Yacoboni. I apologize. Like our friends in Rutland this morning, in LaMoyle we had our housing meeting yesterday. So this is fresh on my mind. There's no numbers, but we heard a lot of testimony that much of our long-term rental housing is being converted to short-term rental housing through Airbnb's and such. Again, I don't know how much that means, but I've also heard unsolicited from constituents helping me, asking me to help address this issue. So I do think it's real. What's behind this thought is that our net gain will be reduced for rental housing opportunities because of the conversion of long-term rental housing into short-term, which is driven by several factors. One, you can get more money and that drives the market. Two, there's different kinds of landlord eviction obligations and management of tenants that our current laws don't allow us. Having said all that, should I be concerned that whatever we're putting into this won't be enough because of the conversion of long-term rental property? And is that yet another pressure that we should be increasing the number of resources on this issue? I think you should absolutely be concerned. Short-term rentals are a two-way street. So if you have an elderly retired person with a big old house and it's in pretty good shape and she supplements her income by renting out a room on Airbnb, for her that's a really good thing. To the extent that it makes housing less available to the general public, to other constituents of yours who need rental housing because people can make more money this way and it decreases the supply of affordable housing that has an impact as well. So when you get into the issue, it's a two-edge sword and it's good for some people and not as good for others and good for in some communities and not as good in other places. And so I think it's an issue to pay attention to. I think it's something that the legislature is gonna have to deal with as a policy and regulatory matter. And I don't think it's a simple, like most issues it's not, there isn't one simple fix to it. Thank you. Okay, Jen, Ms. Holler. I wonder if I might add that your House General Housing and Military Affairs Committee is looking at S79, which includes a rental housing registry and that would incorporate short-term rental. So you will have some additional information there and unfortunately representative Yacoboni, the impact of short-term rentals is much greater in resort communities. So it's consistent with what we see in terms of statewide data that you're hearing about that issue, particularly in your area. Thank you. So Mr. Selig and Ms. Holler, thank you very much for joining us here today and but more importantly, being willing to be the kind of one of the central partners in accomplishing what could be an extraordinary thing for the state. It's an exciting moment. It is. And again, I understand the, some people may wanna hang back a bit, but I would just finish up today with you just say that as with the CRF, if you put, when you and your colleagues in the other body get to negotiating, if you put dollars into the budget from ARPA, it's gonna send a signal. I can't tell you, we're gonna get it all out the door this year. I wouldn't try to say that, but it's gonna send a really important signal. So I hope you'll take the governor's proposal and that it'll end up in your budget when you get done negotiating with them. So thank you very much. Okay. Thank you. So committee, we are almost at 10 and so floor at 10 back here at one for S 102. And then at 2 30, we have folks from DCF in for, to talk about their proposal around emergency housing. We may, I surely hope that we're not gonna spend an hour and a half on 102. So maybe we can slot something else in there. So see you guys in the afternoon.