 Welcome under the dome. Returning to TownMeetingTV is part of our ongoing legislative coverage. We'll be checking in with legislators from around our coverage area in the next several months. Mondays at 12pm you can watch online at youtube.com slash townmeetingtv or on Comcast Channel 1087 or Brolinston Telecom 17 and 217. If you have a question for our guests you can call in at 802-862-3966 and we'll get you on the air. So today we're joined virtually by our two delegates from Brolinston to representatives. We have Tiff Blumlee and Gabrielle Stebbins. Both of you would like to introduce yourselves real quick and tell us what you're working on. Let's start with Gabrielle. Good. Okay. Okay. Great. Thank you so much for having us. My name is Gabrielle Stebbins and I live in the south end of Brolinston along with Representative Blumlee. I serve on the House Transportation Committee and there we pass your typical bills associated with making sure towns, town roads, bridges, highways, etc. Trains including the fact that soon we will have a train from Brolinston to New York City coming this summer. Trains, planes, automobiles, but related to that since about 40% of our emissions come from transportation quite a bit of our work in the last few years has been to identify ways to transform how we move around and how we make that more affordable for monitors and how we give more choices, be it bus, be it sort of a rural Uber and what not. And related to that, my other job besides being on the House Transportation Committee is I am a managing consultant at a clean energy consulting firm. So I'm also very involved in a lot of the energy and environmental related bills. Meaning I keep a close tab on them and I'm often, you know, trying to support them from behind the scenes by answering questions from constituents as well as from other state reps who may wonder what the details are behind various bills. And with that, Blumlee, if you want to say who you are. Sorry about that. So my name is Tiff Blumlee, and I also am from the south end of Burlington. And so I sit on the House General Committee and House General Committee is a funny committee it's called the kitchen sink of committees where, and general is kind of the word in the, in the title House General comma housing comma and military affairs and we do everything from daylight savings time to abandoned swimming pools to liquor and lottery to the National Guard to affordable housing employment law. And that's a lot. And it means having to set a lot of priorities are set set parameters on priorities because that you know in in everybody's piece of mind their bill as a priority right and the, the, probably the areas where we've focused the most attention lies in racial justice. And I can talk a little bit about that later and housing, and we've done some work in employment legislation to protect workers so at any rate that's, that's the kind of work that we've done and because it is so broad. And we have been waiting to get a lot of things over from the Senate. There are things that, you know, unfortunately we have not been able to spend time on which I'm hopeful will be able to address in the coming biennium, but anyway. So that's me. Thank you, Tiff. I think we'll stay with you. So last week we had John Kalakian, who is your, your colleague on that committee and he specifically wanted to ask you about affordable housing and some of those bills that you were working on in the last past couple of weeks and where those are at. So could you give us a little update. And thank God they're out of our committee now. We just passed them out last, last week and they're, they're too pretty. They're two interesting bills are not going to talk about them separately as bills because that doesn't really matter to most folks it's, I guess, I guess I want to talk about them in terms of how they address certain issues that are that have contributed to the housing factor one may we the crisis is a function of a number of different things and I'm not trying to oversimplify things but they're but but you know they're probably seven different factors one is a significant drop an 87% drop in the actual amount of new housing since 1980 and zoning laws that have discouraged density in town centers public under investment we we have rated the property transfer tax money that was supposed to go to VHCB and other things other priorities but that has resulted in millions of dollars not spent on housing. We have a lot of property, maybe four to 6000 units in the state they're offline because they're, they're out of code and that obviously constricts what's available to people. So, wealth gap has put home ownership out of reach of a number of Vermonters and short term rental growth has has grown in the state which further constricts the market. I think climate and COVID refugees, folks who've moved into the area who can pay cash for houses and escalate the prices of homes has put an enormous pressure on the market and priced many people here out of markets all over the state and so to address this range of needs. We've set up a fund to develop costs to develop sorry to develop housing, which we would put money actually in the hands of developers who won't build housing because they can't recoup the cost of it. So, it brings by by funding developers, we're helping to subsidize the cost of the house to bring that cost down to people who are, you know, 120% of am I, and of those houses that will be built. A third will be perpetually affordable through the model that Champlain Housing Trust has pioneered for so long. We the legislation not actually didn't come up our committee it's now in natural resources incentivizes changes in zoning that would contribute to greater density. We are allocating a significant percentage of our money to Vermont Housing Conservation Board that will fund new development and mobile home improvement funding that will help improve the mobile home stock which is an important housing option for a lot of folks. We made a major investment in bringing properties back online rental properties that are not up to code, and it can pay for weatherization but it can also pay for all the things that are bringing that that piece out of code, and it allows for accessory dwelling and the the single person households is the kind of the biggest share biggest growing share of the housing. Well, the customer market for housing and ADUs are one response to that so there's also a grant program that is really explicit to meeting kind of the down payment needs and perhaps the rehab costs associated with buying a new home and there's specific language in the legislation that would direct that money be the specific outreach be done to BIPOC community organizations to make that that funding available to them for first generation home buyers. There's also and the last thing I'll just say is that there are also renter and homeowner protections built into both pieces of legislation one relates to a registry of rental registry which exists in Burlington exists in a lot of different towns and it's really a safeguard because a lot of that kind of a lot of what the inspection work that is done in smaller towns is done by volunteers who don't necessarily have any training and they are, you know, entering maybe their neighbor's house or, you know, a friend's home house in a very difficult position so this would actually centralize the responsibility for complaint driven inspection calls for inspections and then there's a contractor registry to protect people from contractors who do shoddy work or don't fulfill their end of the contract that they may have had with a homeowner to fix something so that's a lot of words and a lot of pieces it was, you know, one of the bills was classified as an omnibus bill and it definitely was an omnibus bill. And, but I think that it actually addresses a wide range of the issues that have have contributed to the housing crisis it's certainly not. It doesn't solve it. What is the step forward. These are a set of really extensive bills it sounds like and as someone who's currently looking for housing and struggling with that mightily. I appreciate that the legislature has taken that up so it's very important and it affects a lot of people. It's a high priority I think it was one of the highest priorities for the caucus this year. And, you know, on both sides of the legislature so I'm hopeful that it will go through and obviously we've got to go through the money committees and then there the Senate has to review the changes that we've made and and then the governor has to decide whether he will. He will sign the bills because there are pieces of each bill that we know that the governor won't like but there we've also made some significant concessions to the concerns that he raised so. All right. So, we'll go to Gabrielle on her work in the Transportation Committee Gabrielle. So, when I was looking through the agenda from last week, I saw an act related to miscellaneous changes to laws related to vehicles and I saw that come up a few times. And I was just curious what what does that mean it's a it's a vague title for a bill so I'm curious what what is in there. Yeah, it's, you know, much of the work that the Transportation Committee does is work that really is it's invisible until it doesn't work. Right. So for example, you know if culverts aren't being replaced, or if our bridges or roads aren't being maintained or paved correctly. So it's the bill that you refer to, you know, typically every year the Transportation Committee works through at least two bills if not more. One is sort of the writ large transportation bill, which is where we typically see the prioritization of funding this past year. We had a transportation bill that was well over $800 million. Quite a bit of that went to electric vehicles, electric vehicle charging stations, really trying to push through fair free for, well it's for the entire state but the one place that it wasn't going to be because it costs more because there are more riders and therefore there's less budget in response if you provide a fair free for public transit is in the Burlington area. So in our transportation bill is where you'll see a lot of those financial programmatic policy pieces. And then this bill that you just referenced it's essentially the bill that relates to everything that you might think about the DMV. So everything related to registrations and when a vehicle is abandoned on the side of the highway, who picks it up, who gets who pays for it, how do we really identify that it is really abandoned and it's not someone's you know last financial asset. So we covered a number of different items in that bill we also added on some items related to connecting the state climate action plan to our transportation planning, and also added in some items related to pedestrian safety and bicycling safety and updating our roads to try and improve them generally so a lot of different pieces in that bill. A lot of it probably is is not the most fascinating until it doesn't work and then it's really important. So, right, well thank you for illuminating that for me. You brought up energy and climate change a few times as you've been talking through this and so is there anything along those lines that you're working on in that committee right now that you'd like to talk about or anything you're you're interested or anything else in your committee generally that you'd like to bring up or talk about here. Yeah, I think some of the pieces that we've done over the last three, four months. You know, we have established a number of programs to help people who've never been able to purchase a car. Actually, purchase a car but not just any car a more efficient car so that ultimately, you know, if the reason why they haven't been able to purchase a car is because they don't have a lot of money. Then it really matters if they're buying a vehicle that costs a lot to fill up. So we have a program that really focuses on lower income Vermonters to help them be able to get to work get to their doctor's appointments get to daycare. We also have a program that is focused on helping lower income Vermonters. If they so choose invest in electric vehicles. And then we have a whole statewide program that looks at where we should be putting electric vehicle charging stations. With the focus here that, especially now that people are filling up at $4.19 and up. People are really feeling how, how expensive it is to try to get from point A to point B and as a rural state. It's really, it's really critical that we identify other ways for people to live their lives in a way that they can afford and that is better. Overall, in terms of climate, but also in terms of air quality and a host of other benefits. But yeah, there are a number of bills that the state house is or rather the house has passed writ large related to climate change. There's a weatherization bill that is being discussed right now. There are some bills related to upgrading or state buildings. There's a clean heat standard. So a lot of different bills that all sort of intersect around this area of as we're doing in transportation. How do we help people save money and also, you know, use fewer fossil fuels, something that we rely upon from other countries that, you know, clearly it has a very significant impact. When there's global instability, what that means here at home. So are there any other items in your committees we haven't talked about yet, things that are personally important to you that we haven't touched on yet? Let's start with Tiff that you'd like to go into. Sure. Um, you know, the we spent we took a lot of testimony in the area of social justice and our committee tends to get bills that relate to reparations or or other equity issues that don't seem to fit into another committee. And we passed a bill that is currently in the Senate that would form a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And it it it was a bill that came out of an apology that we passed last year that apologize for the general assembly's role in promoting and funding eugenics in the state of Vermont. And so there are a couple of House members who sponsored a bill and we as a committee fleshed it out. It was a short form bill and it came to us that lays out a process performing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that that grows out of the eugenics apology but would perhaps look more broadly at addressing state policies and practices that have contributed to discrimination and harmed particular communities and the communities that we identified in the legislation but the commission could broaden that include disabilities community, people of color and indigenous from honors and and I will go into the details of you know how how the commission will will work. In fact, they're going to be defining that themselves. I think one of the most interesting pieces of work was how how to avoid over overly structuring and prescribing the work of a commission that needs by definition to be iterative and responsive and informed by the very communities that have been harmed by state policy. And so there's a selection panel that will be named by an initial group of government officials. That selection panel then will will develop and then host a statewide public process for selecting commissioners. Those commissioners be supported by a staff and by possibly researchers. But what we did was we provided a container we constructed a container within which that was solid enough in terms of its funding and and and the the support that we that we gave it at from the beginning. But that but that could really be responsive to what it learns over a period of time and there's about three three year period of work through which we don't want to report. I mean we will get a report. But what we really want is we want this to help educate all of us about our own history and to understand that the laws that might affect me in one way might affect other people in a very different way or opportunities. And and there will be very specific recommendations that come from this whole process that will point perhaps to reparations in all different kinds of forms and not just in terms of of cash but perhaps partnerships or language programs or it's really going to be it's going to take conversations with broad range of people within these communities and they're not monolithic communities to to identify what's going to be meaningful. So I'm I'm particularly excited by this piece of work and I also think it's going to be a really hard piece of work and I'm really proud of the House for putting its support behind it because we've put a fair amount of funding behind it and I think that's appropriate and necessary and I'm hopeful that the Senate will pass it and the governor will sign it into law. Gabrielle anything you'd like to add or anything else you'd like to talk about same question. Yeah, if you don't mind. I'd love to actually switch from my committee work and just highlight something that's really critical for our community and for Berlin Tonians and for our children. For the last 25 years we have been under waiting and over waiting students in terms of how we calibrate how much money is needed to teach our students. Basically the structure is that a student you know all students are set at one and then if a student comes from a community that's, you know, more impoverished than there is a slightly higher weight for that student or if a student is in high school, there's a higher weight for that because as you might imagine, you know, in high school you need labs, you might need AP courses, you have buses for sports, you have, you know, maybe a theater and, you know, a whole host of additional educational costs if you want to give your student at that age the type of education that we have as Ramonters historically wanted to. And then obviously, you know, there is a additional weight for folks who are English language learners. And there's a whole slew of weights that basically a report was done a few years ago that said we haven't updated our weights in 25 years and we really need to. This is a bill called S287 and right now it is in houseways and means and it's a pretty critical bill because the conversation right now is whether or not we update our weights as per what this report recommended or whether or not we look at a slightly different way to to address the funding inequalities. And one of the terms for that approach is cost factor. And what we've really been hearing both Representative Bloomley and myself from our, from our school board, our superintendent from many, many of the communities that have either, you know, either that are rural or they have a lot of new Americans or that it's high school is that we really do need those weights to be updated rather than taking in a different approach right now at this time. A different approach may make a lot of sense in the future. And that's another conversation worth having, but I just wanted to highlight if anybody's watching. This is something to keep an eye on because it really does impact how we support our future. And our children who are going to be the ones taking care of us as we get older. So it's S287 and right now it's in ways and means. Great. So we're coming up on time here. Do we want to give each of you a moment to talk about anything else that you didn't have a chance to go into just real briefly. We'll start with you Tiff closing statements. Well, I'm certainly hopeful that we will get our charter changes through the Senate and passed by the governor. That is a, you know, I, it's been a priority for our delegation and I think that and I'm very hopeful we've worked hard to try to get those through the various committees and over the house. I guess I would really welcome anybody to get in touch with Gabrielle and me to talk about any issues we raised or things we didn't talk about, because there's a lot happening right now and and things are very fluid. So your input is, is very helpful to us right now. Great. Gabrielle. Yes, just get in touch and you know, keep in mind that this is people come to visit the state house often, and they're always kind of timid and looking into the building and that house is your house. It is all of our house so come visit. Give us a call, send us an email. We're always interested in hearing your viewpoint. And we're also always learning because it's really hard to know everything that's being picked up and discussed in the state house. So thanks for the opportunity to be here. Yeah, well, thank you both. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you both for joining us. This has been great. Good to see both of you. And we will be returning next Monday at 12pm with our Chittenden County Patricia Rom-Hinsdale and Thomas Chittenden. So you can continue to watch this at our YouTube channel, of course, and on our website at cctv.org. And of course always on our channels 1087 Burlington Telecom 17 and 217. So once again, thank you both for joining us and we'll see you next week. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So