 Good morning. Today is Wednesday, January 24th. It's 9 a.m. and this is a special joint meeting of the Senate Economic Development Housing and General Affairs Committee and the Senate National Resources and Energy Committee. We're here to talk this morning about housing and regulatory reform. We're coming up, I think it's April 4th is the 54th anniversary of Act 250 passing. So it has for us the state in good stead for helping do a lot of the planning and development that we often all refer to as smart growth. We also know that a law that's 54 years old in a state that's changed a great deal and four years in between, especially at the regional and municipal planning level. It's always worth reviewing and seeing if we can make improvements. So with that, do you want to help pick us off? We have, oh, just another quick logistical note. So we have a lot of witnesses today. I talked about a little bit, we're not going to do questions until if we have time at the end, we'll get to a Q&A time. Other than. No, I don't think so. They like diverting attention. We have 16 witnesses, so we're going to be marching right along. People have roughly 10 minutes. And I'm sure we'll win a lot from all those folks. Anything else you'd like to add this morning? Well, a couple of things. I think that also means we'll try to have a very short bio break somewhere in here. And your chair, managed around heart has written it in. But if you need to use the restroom or get up and do something, please feel free to do that. So I am chair Keisha Ram Hinsdale from Economic Development Housing and General Affairs and I don't know the last time these two committees had a joint hearing. But I think it's incredibly fitting, not just in exploring the dual housing and climate crises. We face generally, but in the aftermath of a flood that has left many people without adequate housing or living in unsafe conditions. I was just looking at some data from the World Economic Forum about the lung respiratory and other illnesses that are tracked most flood in a lot of areas that see frequent flooding and the toll on people's well being and the economy are both tremendous when we think about climate vulnerability. We know in Vermont that our climate vulnerability really lands most squarely on rural seniors who are trying to find somewhere to live allows them to access health care and quality of life easily and gets them out of very large single family homes. That could be turned over for larger families that want to grow and expand. So I just think it's really fitting, not only in the aftermath of the flood but because when economy and environment are pitted against each other, Vermonters lose, people lose. So it is really incumbent upon us to be working together to figure out how we meet the moment of the climate reality that we're in and how we advance housing access for everyone that is safe, warm and close to places that they live, work and play. So with that, I think one more logistical note is just so people watching know we each picked eight witnesses from our committees and, you know, we'll take turns introducing both, unless you want to do it, which is also fine. Yeah, I thought we might do a call on people so we can go and just make a general request, which is, could you use your diaphragms to project here because it's a long way from our witnesses to people hearing all the way in the back. So, and there's no microphone. So I would encourage us all to use our big indoor voice. It's all a Senate Eclipse indeed. What's the goal of this? Well, I'll speak for a center around him. So I talked about it. I'll jump right to sort of the bottom line in a little bit. We, we often have the committees take a different view of growth and development regulation impact on the environment. And rather than last year we went through, I think, a difficult process whereby the Economic Development Committee brought forward a bill that then we responded to. So rather than have us going in sequence, we thought it would be more productive for all of us to have the conversation in parallel, even if it's the bills might sequence in, in that way, like similar to last year. But if we have the conversation in parallel all the way along, we can stay better apprised of how each committee is looking at the same overarching issue. I've asked Magali to share a visual because I think it speaks more highly than I can about why we're here. At some point, you know, our job is to develop housing and commercial activity that keeps our state vital. And, you know, Act 250, as I understand it, was originally intended to focus on land use. And where we know the land use is residential commercial industrial. We need to be able to build densely to really fulfill the ultimate principle of Act 250, which is compact village settlement with working lands around it. And so with our shared jurisdictions, I think we need to look at the flowchart of permits and all of the places that you can get sent back to go or, you know, get appealed into perpetuity or have one person in charge of decision making that can stop dense affordable housing and appropriate commercial activity from happening where we've already designated the land use for such activity. So, you know, I think the other reality that I like to highlight about Act 250 is we talked about it as something once upon a time where you could have this conversation on your front porch so that you encouraged smart development. Not so that you went all the way to the Supreme Court to stop development. And so Act 250 I think has become the symbol for what has strayed from its original intention to create density where it belongs. So this meeting is about Act 250. It's not about what's standing in a way of housing for months. I would say any any obstacle what's gained for I'm hoping that our witnesses will help us understand. Act 250 is maybe the the most the largest most visible object for discussion, but it's certainly not the only thing so I'm hoping that we'll have any of our witnesses who see other aspects of developing housing. Anything impacting them that we'll hear about them and get them all on the table. And I would also say we have put into play with our legislation of the last couple years, a number of legs to the stool that we're hoping will support updating and reforming all the barriers that we face with housing and and protecting our environment. And one leg of that stool are Charlie and Catherine the planners. So we have this exciting mapping and planning update we have the designations and we have the Act 250 for homes. Activity isn't the only issue with a housing in the environment we have many other issues and where it needs to be. We need to green light it is what I think Charlie and Catherine are going to be addressing and what we. So I think it's the bringing all those pieces together, which will give us a cleaner easier simpler way to understand to green light. Where develop where we what we save essentially we've asked experts to tell us what's getting in the way of housing and we're here to listen to them. And one expert that I had called on they're coming to our committee and I hope you'll hear them as well is the Pew Charitable Trust they've been following all the laws across the country that have loosened up housing and rental vacancy. And where you find a healthy rent rental and home ownership vacancy rate, you find low rent increases and low homelessness right and they can spell that out across the country. So we face both our unique rural challenge in Vermont, but we also face a national housing crisis that has very clear data informed solutions and we're here to talk about that. One thing center around him so mentioned was, you know, the notion of looking at its energy environment and economy aren't opponents and that is an old yes go back through numerous editorial addresses, you know, each governor comes along and says the same thing, they go hand in hand. And so I think we're always trying to remember that and figure it out. It's a long time ago like governor Davis is original formulation for who was on a district commission was coming from the business community somewhere from the environmental community and an outstanding citizen. So it was always about more different voices at the table. And with that, it's a perfect time to hear Mr. Baker's voice. Thank you. That's, I don't know if I could follow up on all of that. But thank you for the opportunity to testify this morning for the record. My name is Charlie Baker. I'm the executive director of the Chinna County Regional Planning Commission. Can you all hear me okay. Yeah. Sorry, this is my normal room speaking voice. But I'm here today testifying both on behalf of the Chinna County RPC and association of planning and development agencies, which is the state association of regional planning commissions. Personally, I've been a professional planner in Vermont for more than 15 years and more than 35 years in total. And one thing over that long time, which I hesitate to write that down, but one thing that experiences upon me is that our land use regulations absolutely do influence developer behavior. So we can see that we had a housing construction boom in the 60s 70s. Yeah. And it lasted into the 80s right because things were grandfathered active 50 what didn't really take effect or have full effect. Until probably we started getting to the 90s, but we had a housing growth rate of about 2%, which is part of the reason I think we got active 50 like, whoa, things are moving too fast. There's too much change happening in our communities. However, we maybe turned the dial too far. And so the last couple of decades, we've been less than half a percent growth rate. And just in the long time that I've been working in different places. A healthy growth rate is closer to around 1%. So I'm just I have that in the back of my mind as I think about this. So how do we get to kind of a healthier growth rates for housing? Well, first, I'd like to thank the committees for supporting the language and s 100 to have us do these studies around active 50. The designation program. And regional planning. And I believe there are 4 broad goals that those studies. Taken together will help us achieve. One is smart plan growth by encouraging more housing in the right places. And part of that is by reducing regulatory redundancy. Stronger natural resource protection. So back to this growth and environmental conservation happen at the same time, but resource protection for flood resilience, our world character and achieving our carbon reduction goals. So we're achieving multiple goals here. Number three is reinvestment in our downtowns and village centers by making it easier to get state designations and increasing reinvestment in those cherished places. And the fourth one is a more general one about getting more consistency and certainty in the local and regional planning and state regulatory systems. So helping the system work together better. Because it's been cobbled together over the last 50 years without necessarily all the updates to the system. So we have planning. We have regulation and permitting and we have investment. Right. So planning regional planning commissions regulation permitting active 50s of part of but not the whole thing. And sorry, I'm looking at Sabina. And to your point, chair Bray, I think active 50s often uses a euphemism for all of the permitting in the state. And so I hope people kind of keep that in mind. Oftentimes we're not just talking about active 50 or maybe there may be something else indeed. But but all of this, the planning, the regulations and the permitting that goes with that and the investments are part of how the legislature has put into place policy to help implement our municipal and regional plans. Right. So you require us to do regional plans. Most of our municipalities do plans. And our regulatory system ought to be helping us achieve what those plans are calling for. So active 50 has been a positive regulatory system for Vermont over the years and has done a lot certainly on the environmental and rural character side. However, there are opportunities to make it better. I'm here this morning to ask you to review and support the recommendations from the regional planning active 50 and designation studies and I'm purposefully mentioning them together as a group. We obviously the RPCs were responsible for the regional planning report and we worked closely with the active 15 designation study efforts to have the three studies align and mutually support each other. And taken together the recommendations of three studies help do help better align our planning regulation investments to better achieve our municipal regional state goals. And how do they do that. And you already started to touch on this at the of your introductory comments, but one of the weaknesses of active 50 has been the lack of the map to guide permitting decisions. And, you know, the state has had conversation over those decades about a state map. But I think our recommendation is rather than doing a new state mapping process. Let's build on what we already have, which is the regional planning commission maps. But to do that, we need to update and provide consistent mapping so that there's a strong foundation for active 50 reviews and designation investments. This will provide increased review in important natural resource areas and decreased review in planned growth areas that have infrastructure and good zoning. This is where our plans called for housing growth and the municipality to determine the details of land use density and design through their zoning. So, and there's those are the people dealing with the neighbors, right, which I think is appropriate responsibility for the municipalities. Last year, you adopted that's what that's 100, which focus on municipal zoning to increase housing and areas with infrastructure. This year is a time to update active 50 to support municipalities and achieving what was required of them last year. Municipalities in all parts of Vermont should be able to have some planned growth so that not all the growth is concentrated in and around Chittin County. As a group, the RPCs want towns in all of our regions to be healthy and prosperous. So the C RPCs are recommending the statutory language that would make our regional plans more consistent in our future land use planning, including delineating the areas that meet designation program requirements. And have the potential to meet criteria established by the N R B the chief exemption from active 50. The designation program is proposing to simplify the designations from 5 to 3 designations. The N R B is recommending a 3 tier system in which we are clear that we are trying to encourage growth in the 1st tier or planned growth areas. And we're clear about tier 3 area. Trying to preserve those natural resources and get a higher level of review at active 50. In the regional planning report, we call that conservation, rural conservation areas. And I did put a graphic in front of all of you can see how these relate. And thank you to the Department of housing development for developing this. So, even though I'm acting like it's mine, I can produce it. But, and you can see how these relate. And really, we're not. And I'm just going to kind of address kind of the elephant in the room. I don't think this is about weakening active 50, but rather strengthening to better accomplish the state's goals. You know, I'm not sure we're really even as much review does happen there that we're really accomplishing what we want to do in terms of rural protection through the active 50 process right now, really due to where the jurisdictional thresholds are. There's also a report that we prepared about how we can make how it could work for high capacity municipalities to obtain a delegation agreement from the NRB. After demonstrating that the regulations are functionally equivalent to active 50. I recommend reviewing that report for another option to consider. And finally, it creating greater alignment between our plans, regulations and the center programs will greatly enhance our ability as a state to achieve our shared goal. We'd be happy to provide more detail about these issues in public testimony. And thank you for your consideration. And I won't ask for any questions because I know you have a lot of witnesses. Thank you very much. And you have a great sense of timing that with about 10 minutes on almost shocked. Thank you so much. So next up, please, like to welcome the Davidson chief operating on serve some properties. Good morning. Can you all see and hear me. Yes, we can. Thank you. Great. Well, thanks for having me again. Zeke Davidson summit properties were the largest private developer of mixed income and affordable housing in the state of Vermont. I appreciate being invited today. I testified to economic development last week. So I've seen a lot of you recently, but obviously met all of you as s 100 was going through the legislature last year. So I'll hopefully beat 10 minutes here. I want to try to make some market related points and tie them back into some active 50 policy related points. And if there's any group of people that I can say that sentence to without completely glossing over it's you all. So, Keisha, Senator Ron Hinsdale referenced this earlier and hopefully you'll have the future will trust. Talk to you all but there's a lot of research that demonstrates that homelessness and housing affordability are directly correlated to rent a vacancy rate right which is just a measure of empty units and a healthy housing market common wisdom is needs a vacancy rate of around 5% Vermont's closer to 2% it's been under 1% in Chittenden County for much of the last three years. And that vacancy rate is really driven by a supply and demand curve when there's low supply. There's not a lot that sits empty prices go up homelessness goes up. And our vacancy rate is skewed because we simply don't have enough supply of housing units to create a healthy housing market right now, which has led to some of the homelessness and the housing cost burden we've seen. So, that's all the precursor to why don't we have enough homes right there. There are a lot of reasons, and one of which is that for the last 50 years we've we've made it hard to develop in Vermont, it's a policy decision. It was it was a preservation of our state at a time, like Charlie said of uncontrolled growth, and it was a trade off to preserve rural agrarian open spaces and prevent spa. Well, we love this about Vermont. This is uniquely Vermont we all we all cherish that that brand and what Act 250 has done for Vermont. But we also find ourselves today so far behind generationally behind on housing supply and market conditions have shifted so quickly in the last five years that, you know, housing costs and homelessness have have exploded and we really don't have a path to combating that right now with subsidy with with money. These rates are second highest in the country, we're on par with major urban states New York, California, District of Columbia, and unfortunately this is really also now becoming a reality that's uniquely Vermont. And at its core this is a policy trade off, and it's, and it's luckily one that the legislature can address in areas where towns want growth where they're ready for growth where they've gone through the democratic process to codify growth and what that should look like. We have really one meaningful policy lever that isn't subsidy that can give supply a better chance of fighting chance here and that's and that's reduction or elimination of active 50 jurisdiction in those areas. I made all these arguments in front of your two committees last year. Yeah, the best 100, the act to 50 provisions of that bill Charlie mentioned that became a municipal bill that to, there were a few active 50 provisions. But they became really narrow and they did meaningfully impact one project that's going through the state right now and going through permitting and that's that's one of ours it's 200 unit mixed income master plan community in Middlebury that we're going through the permitting process on. But so I kind of use that today as a sample size of one which is better than a sample size of nothing as we talked about this. So because of s 100 and because of the work done by the town of Middlebury, we're ready to break ground this year. So the trade off of risk and margin really would not have been worth it on that project. And even if we decided to move forward on that project with active 50 jurisdiction, we would certainly not be breaking ground this year. So one common reaction I do want to address that I get whenever we talk about active 50 and smart growth is, wait, you can't pin all this on active 50 it's this it's not the only driving force here. And I've sort of struggled always with how to respond to that, because it's both true. But I think it's some at the same time it kind of avoids some of the responsibility of active 50. We have enough land in Vermont to house all Vermonters. We've made it too difficult or we've chilled the use of that land all together in the name of this character of a character Vermont that we're trying to preserve and it's sort of is a false choice. We've created these market conditions that that are on par with the challenges of major urban centers, but but developers can't get urban center rentals or sales prices. We don't have the incomes to support that we build less. Here we are. The legislature this year can make a policy decision to help developers large and small, you know, for by Vermont standards were pretty large developer, but the ones that are, you know, the developers that are toying with that do I build eight units to build 12 units 20 units. I think that you can help developers make the same decision that s 100 is let us make proceed with a smart growth town supported housing projects that the state desperately needs. You know, the major changes were punted as Charlie said this session, and those are really being proposed now. I think the elimination of active 50 jurisdiction in meaningfully drawn tier one areas where the towns want the growth there's been a democratic process for imagining what that growth is going to look like is really the least we can do on the policy side to be to be serious about building the tide on housing supply here in Vermont, and I hope we can do this really soon and appreciate what you are all doing to take a serious look at this again this year. So, I beat 10 minutes. Thank you all and appreciate you guys all sitting in the room today to talk about this. Thank you so much. With that, like to go to Catherine Dimitri. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for having me today. Again, I'm Catherine Dimitri. I'm director of Northwest Regional Planning Commission and I'm chair of the Vermont Association of Planning and Development Agencies. It's pretty cool to be apart at place in my career where I can say way back when when I started. So 30 years ago when I started. We were definitely at a place that people are referenced where growth was at a scary level in Grand Isle County, we grew 30% on a decade. That's just crazy amounts of growth when you think about what's happening now our schools are at capacity. People were justifiably scared about what was happening in Vermont. And Act 250 really served as an important check on that. And Act 250 has been valuable for the state of Vermont. But now we're at a place where, you know, regional growth has been 5% over a decade statewide 3%. We have a shortage of workers and housing in Franklin and Grand Isle counties alone. We estimate there's 7600 needed housing units in order to create an accessible and affordable housing market. And our communities now have robust regulations. When I started some towns, most of our towns had no zoning or what they did have was still copied on a mimeograph machine. You know things have changed a lot and we are ready for something new. I love Act 250. I just love it. I remember learning about it and understanding how uniquely Vermont it was and just being so proud to be part of a state that had something like Act 250. But loving Act 250 doesn't mean that it can't change. There's a, there are some things that are wrong with Act 250 for what we need today. Act 250 regulates residential more stringently than it regulates commercial growth. It's a quite stark difference when you put it on jurisdiction triggers for Act 250 for residential versus commercial. Act 250 doesn't care about climate resilience and Act 250 doesn't care about rewarding larger scale well planned comprehensive projects. And I'm going to give you some examples to illustrate the points. There are two projects in Franklin County. I won't name the towns because one of them still going through process. But one is a 12 unit residential development on less than two acres of land hundreds of feet from the state designated growth center and highly walkable area. That requires Act 250 review. Permit fees alone were $7200. And that doesn't even count the cost of actually preparing and going through the Act 250 application up the road. In a not a walkable area much further from the designated area development or seven commercial buildings. Almost 200 parking spaces and two acres of pavement didn't require Act 250 review because it was located on less than 10 acres just barely but less than 10 acres. So that's a great contrast that you can see to illustrate my point about how residential is regulated much more stringently from the jurisdictional trigger perspective than commercial. And then I want to give you a couple examples related to the whole Mac that you passed last year. Assume you've got a nine acre parcel of land that has access to water and sewer. If you want to probably build that out with commercial you care your exempt from Act 250. If you want to build from an equity perspective if you want to build eight mansions on that parcel with water and sewer, you can do that and not require Act 250. But if you want to take advantage of the whole Mac provisions that were passed last year and build 45 market rate housing units that are available to our people who want to and currently live in Vermont. You have to go through Act 250. So active 50 now is in contrast to the whole Mac provisions that you passed last year. And another example statewide the local level now do plexus must be allowed where single family used to only be allowed. So you have to do plexus in the same place active 50 still counts do plexus as two units. So there's there's a hill that needs to be climbed in the active 50 area to bring it even to bring it into parody with the home act. Fortunately, as Charlie mentioned, there's some solutions that you asked us to work on last year as part of the home act. And we have given you some recommendations from the planning perspective, the incentive perspective and the regulatory perspective and taken together those, those recommendations can really address those issues of equity and jurisdiction. And I want to make it clear that nothing in these studies are recommending weakened to nothing is recommending weakening the standards weakening the environmental provisions. The recommendations are to change the jurisdiction where it applies how it applies when it. And then finally, I would just like to say that. I think it's time. It's time to modernize active 50. It's Vermont's landmark environmental and development law. And I think with these changes we can say that even more proudly that it serves or not now and in our future. Thank you. Just for clarity, when you're referring to plans or reports, can you name those so that people will know what to take a look at in order to keep up with the all the good work that's been going on? Sure. And make sure they're on our websites under the appropriate subject matter. So the first is the regional planning commission's future land use report. The second is designations 2050, I think it's called. And then the third is necessary updates to active 50. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. We are moving right along. Rare experience for committee. Maybe we're more disciplined for different space. The, the other thing is for any witnesses who are speaking to you, if you have written testimony that you can share with us. If you could send that to us, it will help us create a better webpage for people who want to follow up or for committee members who want to look at what you brought forward. If you email them to the two committee assistants for our committees. There's Newman and this element, then that would be helpful. Hey, so we're now we're up to Mr. ceiling, gut ceiling executive director for Mount housing and conservation board. Thank you for coming in. Oh, it's good to see you. Good morning. So for the record, gut ceiling director for the Mount housing and conservation board. The housing and conservation board stands at the cross section of this question that. Senator Ron Hinsdale talked about a land use of both conserving the things we. Treasure the most and trying to build in the places that it makes the most sense and that's a piece of why we were invented back in the 1980s when the pace of development had. Early the session really picked up and you're both committees of jurisdiction that oversee our work. So I want to walk through this saying I am not an act to 50 expert. I'm a funder of projects and I have observed lots of projects. Lots of difficulty over the years and really want to applaud the work you did on act 47. When you sit at the local level as on a development review board making your neighbors mad at you is really hard. And my own observation is human beings are not good at change, whether it's a change in their view or change in the amount of traffic they have, or any of those kinds of things. So act 47 has already netted results in the permitting of emergency shelters. This town of Waterbury did a reversal. When they understood I think act 47 and permitted a building in its downtown so you're having a positive impact. And I appreciate that work. I have two former mayors of Montpelier on this committee and we have seen the great difficulty of achieving community consensus around Saban's pasture for all the time I've been in my job. And so it's really hard. The old expression of all politics is local. In an neighborhood where there are people with lots of money and lots of attorneys and time on their hands we saw it would stock a case take a deck, a decade to work through the court system, two and a half times to the Supreme Court so your focus here is really important. I apologize for anything I might repeat that you heard either at the session I did with Mark Collins and Sue Minter in December, or I've already been in front of the Economic Development Committee, a few things that go not to act 250 but to the general subject that you're working on and this goes back to what Governor Dean said this farewell address. If we don't build up we will sprawl out so as you do this work anything you can do to encourage communities to allow taller buildings is a good thing. Recently in Windsor Vermont. The community and the historic reservationists in that community. They permitted a building only because the developers agreed to couple on story off. There's a historic church on the National Register down the street on the other side of the street and thought that would have a negative impact. In Bristol we just did a great project on Firehouse Lane, but I would say to you Senator Bray it would have been great to reopen that situation and build three story buildings instead of two and we would have had 30 apartments instead of 20 so think about that as you, as you do your work. Figure out how to shorten the appeals process because whenever somebody goes to court, it takes at least two years if the appellants go all the way to Supreme Court and in this environment, even if the cost increases go down from where they've been in double digits or at 7% to 3% the basis on which costs are based to build housing is now so much higher that 3% ends up being a lot of money so time is money in trying to get housing built. And finally, the last two things I'll say is the corrective action plan process at DC is taking people a year or more to work through. This is something I've, the governor's council on housing and homelessness has said, can't we cut that time in half. But I hope you'll ask the administration what their plans are to speed that process up and finally, can we use infrastructure dollars to support developers that are coming to us through the through the bipartisan act to make to take the cost of water and sewer off of them, which is a big cost driver. I want to acknowledge all the good that I think I've seen act 250 do over the years, all broon was a great personal friend. I love being able to see the whales tails at exit for and we help conserve some of the land around that as part of the ultimate settlement I'm glad that downtown Rutland has Walmart in the downtown. So there's a lot of good that people been able to do because we have act 50 need to acknowledge that you'll hear from Kathy buyer in a few minutes she's a practitioner with far more on the ground expertise. Then I have, but, but I want to note that one of the things that act 250 never was able to achieve and I was not around for the beginning of it but it didn't get a legislature failed to pass a statewide land use plan. I was around for the act 200 debate, and the idea was bottom up planning. We were invented in part to help protect the rural landscape because people decided nine B was not enough, and we've now conserved our friends in some nonprofit organizations about 200,000 acres or ag based permanently. But we decided nine B was not enough. In the same way you invented the downtown program downtown tax credits now designation programs. What I want to suggest to all of you is that I think that that's a different way at the question of having a statewide land use plan I'm not sure for monitors will ever accept the top down land use plan but I think a bottom up plan where communities designate the areas they want to grow is the right approach to take. And so we've done a lot of work with the St. Albans with a very entrepreneurial manager and city council, and they've made a decision about where they want growth to occur and we've funded now for projects that will produce well over 100 units of housing in that designated area. So I think that's a great model in the in the reality that we're not going to have a statewide land use plan. I do want to note that I think you have to consider how democracy works and when we have enough democracy so when a community gets a designation. That's through a public process at the local level. It's approved by a regional planning commission and approved at the state level. So at some point, I think we all have to ask the question, when do you then have the right to build or is everything negotiable forever between a developer and a governing body. And I think that that's a place to focus your work to look at the reports that you're getting from the regional planners and from the natural resources board of that. And that mimics what you are give one of the supporters and sponsors of our legislation had hoped for right at the beginning when Act 250 was created. I do want to note that we have had great success with the realities of priority housing projects and we're doing great work in communities and just heard from Mr. Davidson where South Burlington and Burlington adopted inclusionary zoning. And that is provided not just for market rate housing but for affordable housing to be required as part of the package. So I'd ask you to think about as we change the system. How do you insist that communities reserve capacity reserve land. Some of the land some of some of that will turn into affordable housing because market rate housing at its current price is not going to serve teachers ox firefighters. Nurses aides live librarians, lots of sliders legislators. Yes. The whole whole gamut. The work will ultimately work in terms of the market will produce market rate housing. But without funding that brings the cost down. We're not going to have what we really need for for the working from honors. The governor talked about Kathy will talk more about the act 250 process but a couple of observations for me which is developers don't begin that process till they have all the rest of their permits. And so it's not that the natural resources board is unwilling to move things along. But it is that a developer wouldn't initiate the cost or time if they're not going to get their permits for may and are and they're not going to get their permits from the community. Just adds cost adds risk. So that's a piece of the problem that I think you'll be sure about terms of act 250. We have seen some circumstances where people built below the threshold in order to not trigger act 250. So again going back to the idea that we want to designate areas plan for areas that ought to have growth. I think that then allowing that growth and that density to happen so that we do protect the environment by not sprawling out is important. Act 250 was created as other folks said at a different time and as somebody who graduated from college 1976 my pals and I rented a beautiful farmhouse in North Calis for 150 bucks a month. It was not a well insulated house we lived about eight feet from the Ashley Wood stove that winter. We got laid off in the middle of the winter and but we made things work. A few years later my wife and I bought a house in East Calis for $26,500 interest rates were close to 10% at that house at its last sale at the beginning of the pandemic went for 300,000. The woman who and her boyfriend who came to buy that house. They split up and then she went off for another job. Her dad loves the house. So this beautiful village house is now used about eight times a year we have a shortage of housing in Vermont that's one of the things that's different. The cost basis is so different today that it was in the time that act 250 was invented so we do have a real shortage that we have to address and so those are some of the differences between today and 50 years ago in terms of the environment that we're trying to navigate I think communities also are doing more planning work because we've provided whether it was act 200 or designation programs or resources for planning and more capability so I hope this is an issue in a year that we can find common ground and we can figure out the right balance where we are using a plan a thoughtful planning process supporting communities. But also asking everybody to make room to be more equitable and more welcoming as a state so I'm going to stop there. I hope I'm under 10 minutes. 149. Yeah, the, I do just a quick clarification, you referred to a corrective action plans. Can you just say a little more about what those are. When you have a site that has environmental problems it, you then need a corrective action plan, and it takes a really long time and Kathy can probably speak to this way better than I but I am hearing regularly from developers who don't want to build on the good insights where there's any danger how long that process takes and I don't know if I'm not an environmental expert either I'm not a scientist here, but I'm just saying that it takes more than a year to work through that process too often. And so I think that's something that we really need to look at with our friends at the Department of Environmental Conservation. And with that next up is Seth Jensen, principal planner of the Memorial County Planning Commission. And Mr. Jensen are you on the. I'm sorry, looking at the screen. Good morning. Thanks for coming in. It's not perfect. Go ahead. Well, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this morning. I'm Seth Jensen. I'm the deputy director of the Memorial County Planning Commission. I'm LCPC's executive director. Tasha Wallace spoke to the Committee on Natural Resources last week about S-213, a bill that's focused on protection of wetlands floodplains and dam removal. I'm also joined today by Melissa Manca, who's a new planner at LCPC, who has been working since joining us in November on housing issues through the housing navigator program as well as the municipal technical assistance program, two of the very important initiatives that the legislature passed last session. So, I would like to take a moment to speak about some of the housing issues that we face in the Memorial County. And it is impossible to discuss housing in the Memorial County planning in the Memorial County and land use in the Memorial County without discussing a last summer and winter's flooding. And I would just like to be sure that we are all clear on the severity and urgency that we currently face in our region and the state as a whole. Two of the four largest floods recorded in the Memorial County occurred in the last six months. That's the July flood and then the December flood. And those floods highlighted gaps in inadequacies of many of our existing programs and systems and is often the case. Those gaps have the greatest impact on the people with the fewest resources. Those gaps exist in many areas. Those gaps also exist in planning process and permitting process. And what we are watching unfold in our time is the climate crisis and the housing crisis converging into an equity crisis. So nearly six months after the July floodwaters receded many people and communities are still living daily with the impacts of the floods. We met just last week with the folks who are organizing the Memorial Area Recovery Network. And there are still people who have been displaced from their homes are experiencing or at risk of homelessness on people even in this weather who are living in homes that are damaged without heat or electricity and people who are living in unsafe conditions and unable to relocate because of the lack of safe and affordable housing options outside of the floodplain. So I could walk through the impacts in each of the communities in our region in recognition of the time limits and respect to other witnesses I will save that from my written testimony but I will forward that on to all of you. I will summarize those issues by noting that two major issues were highlighted by the flooding more than two but two that are pertinent to the discussion today. And that is that many of the areas that were most impacted by the flood are also home to low and moderate income households, the location of our oldest, but also most affordable housing stock, and the location where they're high concentrations of rental housing. A few days after the July flood I spoke to a member of a local select board who had himself lead his home in the middle of the night on July 10, as the waters were cresting in the memorial. And he remarked to me that we were, if there was any silver lining it was that the flood occurred in July and not December. December 14 that comment developed a sense of cruel irony. As the Memorial River flooded once again, and in his community, we were less than three inches away from the river once again cresting into many of the neighborhoods that had been evacuated only six months before. We saw the post office and Johnson flood that was not near as severe. And though the physical impacts were not as severe as July. It had left great impact of lasting trauma on people who are who had experienced the flood in July. And many what we heard from our partners in the human service world is that people who had been trying to make do since July came out of the woodwork seeking help. So I'm going to read a letter that's now 10 years old that was sent to me from the residents of the man's meadow senior housing complex in Jeffersonville, which had flooded in 2011, which was the focus of a lot of flood prevention planning efforts to reduce damages because I think it is policy makers, whether the local or regional or state level important to remember that housing isn't just about a structure it's about security and it's about people living in those. In 2011 this building was evacuated and these are their words, not mine. I just want to someone with the access and privilege to speak to you make sure that their voices are heard as well. For us memories of the forced evacuations from our homes remain frightful ones with the increased frequency and severity of the storms that led to major flooding events. These anxieties are compounded. It is stressful to our families and loved ones as well. And then under the impression that we were living in secure circumstances. And I want to pause and return to the policy discussion on that last statement who had been under the impression that we were living in secure circumstances that one of the things we have learned that we knew, but perhaps need to learn again is how old and adequate the FEMA maps are predicting actual flood levels from a policy standpoint where we've widely acknowledged that those FEMA maps are old and outdated. We also need to acknowledge that our process for identifying where new development can and should happen is also old and outdated and inadequate to deal with the challenges that we are facing today. The designation program, which has been a wonderful program for revitalizing the cores of our villages and downtowns was focused on the cores of the villages and downtowns, not the surrounding residential areas. There is no clear provision in existing statute for identifying new areas that are disassociated with existing villages and downtowns that are located in safer areas out of floodplain areas. There is some language about that in the designation study as well as the regional planning commissions, land use study. And those are gaps that are as equally important to address as the outdated flood maps. We need to both be identifying where it's unsafe to build as well as where we can be building. I was a young planner after Irene I have my recovery sticker from working on Irene recovery. And I remember the celebration every time we reopened a road every time a new community was open and I want to close. I think with the thought that for the recovery of the July 2023 and December 2023 floods to be truly successful, we need to have the same celebration for building flooding, building homes outside of the floodplain that the average remonter can afford. And that that will be the true mark of recovery from these events that will be the true mark of moving forward. We need to figure out where that housing is going to be built, be built, we need to enable it and then we need to build it. And we need to start in 1995 we can start in 1995 so we need to start in 2020. Thank you. That you're still a young plan. I will say younger planner there. So one S 213. Yes, is focused exactly on the mapping and river quarter and the plane. Thank you. Addressing that from a environmental and a housing point of view. Thank you for bringing that to the thing is thanks for. Bring reminding us or remind me and others of the trauma that lives, you know, we're having a very. Tidy meeting and a tidy building. These is the paper figuring out plans. It's all important and necessary, but underneath it. There are a lot of people are really suffering still. Thank you for bringing their. Reminding stuff that bringing their voice to the. Thank you, Senator. Thank you for recognizing them as well. I think Seth said something when he testified to us about. Being up at night and considering it a personal failure if we don't see the housing built. And I know it's because you carry those stories with you live everyone you have to tell. But you don't have another option. So we really have been we'll be doing this in your honor as well. Thank you. I have been part of the change. Thank you. Thank you for everything you are doing. With that, then next up is Kathy buyer senior VP of real estate development for every North. And this fire ice you're on this. I'm here. She's here. I see someone's name on the screen. So I think they're going to see maybe sharing. I'm going to try to share my screen. Is that. Are we able to do that this morning? Always. Oh, I believe so. Give it a try. It always makes me nervous. I'm going to get it wrong. So. See a ball game. Hold on. What happens. That work. Amazing. Good morning. Some great testimony this morning. And as you know, I am a testifying as a nonprofit housing developer from ever North, but also as a member of the NRB steering committee. And one of the clear legislative charges you gave the steering committee was to come up with a place based jurisdiction framework for active 50. And you've heard a lot about that this morning. So I'm going to start with a couple of things. I'm going to start with a couple of things. I'm going to start with a couple of things from Charlie and Catherine. And others. I'd like to stray a bit from the NRB report. And provide some context. Specifically as it relates to affordable housing. So the downtown designation program started in 1999. And over the years. Legislature added other destinations programs such as a village center. And as you know, those are mixed income development areas. And I think it was about 10 years ago, but the concept of priority housing projects was introduced. And as you know, those are mixed income developments with 20% of the units dedicated to affordable. And if you are a, I'm going to start saying PHP, because it's a lot easier to say than priority housing projects. So. And in the last few years, I've been doing the same thing. Um, a new town center growth center. Or a neighborhood, um, development area. And it used to be, there used to be a cap on the number of units. You lifted that cap last year until 2026. And I will say that the PHP exemption has been utilized frequently, frequently by both nonprofit and private developers. local workers around the state have benefited from the PHP exemption. So in my mind, the PHP exemption has laid the groundwork for what is included in the NRB Steering Committee Recognition. And I will say, I think it is monumental that there was consensus that there should be active 50 exemption in what is called the tier one designation areas. I think the definition of tier one areas is likely among the most challenging efforts you will have before you, as you consider this. But I wanted to talk about some existing framework that's in place, which is the neighborhood development areas. And I think you will find a very good foundation for how you might frame a tier one area. The NDA, Neighbor Development Area, is a very robust application process. I'm such a nerd, I have the application right here. And the application process includes assessment of blood hazard areas, mapping of important natural resources, public infrastructure and density requirements. So here's a, I literally, I can send you the whole application if you want, but you have to identify many of the things that are of concern in the 10 criteria for active 50 in the NDA. And in my mind, that is what we are talking about when we talk about exempting development in tier one areas. You might ask, why is this important for the purposes of building more housing? And that's touched upon it. And I will tell you that as a real estate developer that I think the active 50 permitting process is administered in a very professional manner. But you, we would get our active 50 permits sooner, but all the underlying state permits have to be in hand. State water, wastewater, stormwater, water supply, which is a very lengthy process to get through. So that means the active 50 permit can't drop and the 30 day appeal period clock can't start. And for a real estate developer, this is the time when you are the most at risk. You have not vested in your permit. And really the value that you are pursuing by spending money on architects and engineers is at risk until you have that permit appeal free. And it's not uncommon. I'm shocked sometimes when we get to the, for our projects that need active 50 permits, and I look at how much we've spent in pre development, it can be up to $500,000 that has been at risk until we get past that appeal free period. So in my mind, the true cost of when we say permit redundancy is this, is this risk that the developer has to take to get to that appeal free moment. And if we can construct a tier one designation that provides a framework that is in keeping with the framework of active 50, I do think we are going to be able to build more housing and we're going to be able to build it a bit faster. I want to point out that the NRB steering committee in the report made it clear that the recommendations as a whole, the consensus only held together as a whole, which meant that also there needed to be the tier two and tier three designation areas. But I want to shift to another topic that is governance and appeals. The steering committee was did have consensus on creating a more professionalized NRB and natural resources board with a full-time chair and three to five part-time members who had experience in land use. But there was not consensus on whether the appeal should continue to be heard in the environmental court or go to the professionalized NRB. I will say, regardless of what you decide, a strong message needs to be that housing projects, appeals of housing projects, need to be decided within six months. And currently it takes 12 to 24 months. And when I'm talking about appeals, I'm also talking about appeal of the local permit. I think you are hearing from or heard from Ben LaPras from New Hampshire about New Hampshire housing board of appeals, which does require resolution within six months. In my understanding, they are actually averaging four months. I think most of you have heard about our Putney project on hallway drive. We are now almost in year two of fighting a permit, first appeal of our local permit, which went all the way to the Supreme Court. And now we've been appealed on a constitutional opinion. A jurisdictional opinion is just you go to the district coordinator, you present the evidence that you meet the priority housing project exemption and the district coordination coordinator signs as yes, agree. And as a developer, you have to have that to bring forward to your financing because you need an attorney to sign a permit opinion. And attorney won't sign a permit opinion without that J. O. and hand. We were appealed by the same neighbor on the J elevation of 25 homes we're trying to build on hallway drive. It's right across from the Putney food court. It is in a neighborhood development area. If we had a reasonable approach to resolving appeals of Vermont, we would be moving 25 households into their homes now. And I want to stress these aren't units. They're homes. And these are the voices we don't hear. The voices of renters who want to live on hallway drive in Putney. They're not even given a seat at the table. We don't hear from them. Maybe they don't live in Putney now, but they'd like to live there. Maybe they're unhoused. I don't know. I can't meet them until we open the doors to their 25 people. Thank you. Okay. Another clarification. So you're through permitting and then your J. O. was appealed. Can you just explain briefly? So the J. O. is my understanding is it's what indicates that he'd be an active 50 or or or you were exempted from. And so what was the issue that got appealed? The jurisdiction opinion that the district coordinator issues is what confirms that you are of PHP and therefore exempt from active 50. And anyone who has party status in active 50 and the appeal frankly had a very little explanation of why. The specifications for your housing project, at least as I've seen them so far, seem relatively cut and dried. I'm not. Can you just say very briefly what it is that's appealable about whether or not a development is actually correctly characterized as a PHP? That's a good question. Do you have an expert here that might better off? I can speak to the Putney project. There is a road that goes through the property. There's two parcels, but they're the same span number. So same owner, but there's a road that goes through there. So my understanding is, is they feel like it doesn't qualify because there's been split. And our J. O. found that it was indeed a PHP. But there that's a nuance that is being challenged. Well, I have a good sense of when it's a road to parking for the units. Well, thank you for that. And I know enough not to ask anything more. This will lead to an appropriate but much longer conversation. So thanks for helping fill us in. Thanks so much for coming in. And with that, we'll go to Joanna Lawton from Rebuild by Design. Ms. Lawton, good morning. Thank you for joining our committee. Great. Thank you. And good morning. I am going to try to share my screen if that's possible. Could be getting that permission. And if we're sharing it in my hollies, in my hollies, our way to get it bigger, because Kathy's was great, but none of us could possibly read it. So there was only, I'm hoping Kathy's sending it to you because that's the only way I ever read it. Except maybe young eyes. There we go. Great. Thank you. Let's see if we can make it as big as possible. That would be great. All right. Thank you so much. And good morning, everyone. My name is Johanna Law, and I'm a project manager at Rebuild by Design. We are a nonprofit organization that works with communities and governments to plan for climate change. And planning for climate change is very much embedded in our DNA, as our origin story is rooted in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy hitting the northeast. It revealed to our region that not only were we much more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change on a physical level, but also that our social vulnerabilities were inextricably linked to the physical vulnerabilities. And so solving for one had to address solving for the other. In response to this massive challenge, the federal government under the Department of Housing and Urban Development and President Obama's Hurricane Sandy Recovery Task Force realized the traditional design approach to rebuilding a region and putting back exactly what was there before would not address the scale of the challenge. As a result, they launched the Rebuild by Design Hurricane Sandy design competition, which was an interdisciplinary year-long design competition that changed the traditional approach to design after a disaster by creating an iterative process of research and design that truly raised the bar for community collaboration and centering communities at the heart of all the outcomes. At the end of this competition, seven projects were awarded for a total of $930 million, and those seven winning designs that are in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut now have over $4.3 billion invested in them, which really demonstrates that when you have innovative climate adaptation infrastructure projects, they will attract a lot more dollars. And so since then, we have been bringing our approach, our research, our designs to communities around the world. And more recently, we have been focusing our attention a little bit closer to home. We've been looking closer at the U.S. and even at communities that historically have been sort of tagged as climate havens, we know that the realities on the ground are not exactly what we're hearing in the news. So this past summer, just shortly after the July flooding, we put out a report that looked at the recent flooding as well as the litany of events that this event had built upon. Our report called the Vermont Atlas of Disaster found that Vermont had experienced 17 federally declared major disasters just between 2011 and 2021. And 15 of those events were due to tropical storms and flooding. This placed Vermont seventh overall in the entire nation for highest number of disaster declarations in that time period and ranked it fifth in the country for per capita post-disaster federal assistance allocations. We also found in our report that every county had had four or more recent major disasters and six counties had had at least 10, with Washington County having had the highest number of disaster declarations in the state with over 11 disasters. And I do just want to note because this cuts off at 2021, some of the more recent droughts, severe storms and flooding were not even captured in this data that we know is a growing data set of recent events. So just to give you a really quick overview of what is in the report that I think can be useful to you as decision makers, but will also be accessible through the written testimony. This report includes maps that show the occurrences of disaster declarations for every single county in Vermont for a total as I mentioned of 17. And it has that right next to the post-disaster allocations of federal funding through FEMA, which is mapped in the orange map. And we've added that to HUD CDBG DR funds to give sort of a glimpse into the amount of federal post disaster funding that's going into recovering from these events. But I always like to caveat that we know this is just a piece of the pie of the true cost of these events, as there's also insurance payouts, there's loan programs, there's the personal cost that people and residents are taking on. But it does start to give us a sense of the magnitude and the scale of this challenge ahead. We've included all the data in our report so you can go in and if you look at the tables in the report, you can see actually county by county, the number of disaster declarations that that county has experienced in this timeframe, as well as the total FEMA obligations for public assistance dollars and hazard mitigation dollars. And so you can go to a county and look at the disasters it has experienced and the federal funding it has received. You can also go to a disaster event and then look at the specific counties going down that were impacted by it. This report also includes a map of the social vulnerability throughout the state using CDC data as well as energy reliability by utility territory. So the areas that are a little bit darker orange in that map are areas that on average take longer to come back online during an energy outage event. And finally the last set of maps that we've recently added to this report is the disaster declaration map with an overlay of legislative districts. So you can look at the specific legislative districts and see which counties they represent and the total number of disasters that that district also has experienced. And so I do want to note that this report for Vermont builds out of a nationwide report that we've put out last year that includes a number of different chapters that are useful to decision makers, but two that I really want to highlight are the guide for states to build a collaborative program and new finance stools for addressing this challenge. And the reason that we thought it was so incredibly important when we began digging into this data to put out this step forward and sort of the the one two step the one two step guide of how to solve for this challenge is we found when we looked at the entire U.S. that 90% of counties in the U.S. have had a federal disaster declaration due to extreme weather just between 2011 and 2021. And all of this data for us immediately aside from making our jaws drop on the floor show that the reality is that climate change is no longer just coming climate change is here and from Vermont specifically this means that Vermont needs a sustainable source of long term climate adaptation infrastructure funding. We've proposed in our report one way in which Vermont could support this challenge or address this challenge is through a 2% surcharge on property and casualty insurance which could raise $600 million. We like this mechanism for supporting resilient infrastructure because it's progressive. You can surcharge property wealth protection and so intrinsically those with more homes and cars boats etc are likely to have more insurance. It also would go directly back to making those insured assets more resilient and could decrease certain insurance premiums for all consumers. So if you look at specific models such as FEMA's community rating program which rewards consumers who all invest in lowering their flood risk they actually decrease the premiums by 5 to 45%. So already there's a benefit built into building resilient infrastructure. The investment can also seed a new industry and support thousands of jobs. We also believe that you can take it a step further to institutionalize equity into the program by ensuring that the surcharge is instituted on certain types of insurance that largely are connected to climate impacts. So for example we suggest exempting workers compensation medical malpractice lines from property and casualty insurance so that you are looking at specifically lines of insurance that cover types of property that are also contributing to the climate crisis. You could also take a notice that further and exempt certain residents such as lowest income policy holders and affordable housing residents. We know that currently there are bills being considered that look into an insurance surcharge mechanism and we do have just two recommendations that we think could make this sort of policy become a lot stronger. One would be to ensure that you use a percentage instead of a set amount of a surcharge so that it is a sustainable source of funding that could grow over time as the need grows. Also we think that there are certain ways that you can define the types of projects that the fund would support upfront to ensure you are addressing the exact needs of our mentors. So just to point out one specific example in New York State we built the research and advocacy to support a resilient infrastructure fund that was voted through an environmental bond act and we made sure that $250 million was allocated specifically for managed retreat so that those homeowners who live in areas that we will not be able to adapt had options and would end up having a program they can turn to to relocate out of harm's way. We also know that some advocates are advocating for a polluters pay mechanism which could raise up to $2.5 billion in the state and also has a direct policy tie to those who have made the mess in the state. And finally I do just want to conclude that we are rather agnostic to the particular source of funding that Vermont utilizes though I will say that we have seen time and again every community city state that has started to invest in their resilient infrastructure has been overwhelmingly supported by voters. In New York State in particular we saw in our recent election where we advocated for environmental bond act that the bond act actually surpassed or flew flew by with what's the expression I'm blanking out flying colors with greater support than even our governor had at the time. And so I'll just end there that if you have any questions happy to follow up after and we really hope that we can work with you to support a resilient infrastructure fund for Vermont so that we can protect the lives the property and the communities all across the state. Great thank you very much and I'm guessing we have your PowerPoint. Yes you should have the PowerPoint and we'll have an additional written out testimony as well. And one very good question is are who are your partners in Vermont are you working for instance with anyone in state government or legislators how are you connecting to us? Yeah we've been building out a pretty deep network at this moment and Vermont when we are building out the report and I apologize if I confuse the alphabet soup of acronyms of nonprofit organizations we were working with a coalition Vermont Businesses and Sustainability VBSR Vermont Energy Action Network we were working with Vermont Public Interest Research Group and I may be blanking on a few so we've been working with a coalition of primarily nonprofit organizations who have been working in the environmental sector and then more recently building out some some ties throughout policy leaders in the state and we're always open to finding more partnerships that is really our our goal is to be a resource to you all. Any particular contact with the agency and network resources? I'll have to double check with my colleague and I can get back to you. Thank you so much. If we wanted to get a copy of the report I have it but we've printed them out. Magali has printed that we can print it out. I think all our presentations are going to end up on both committees web pages probably today. Great that's on ours already. We were really glad to invite Rebuild by Design because I think we saw some raised eyebrows from your committee and it really gave us a lot to think about in a very short amount of time and we recommend people have them back in to testify. One of the interesting things about your tax proposals you have six of the seven members of senate finance around this table including the chair and I think chair Cummings was taking on board this recommendation and had some questions as a follow-up for concerns. Finance also regulates insurance. Has any state adopted the surcharge on insurance policies? No we've gotten really close in New York state and then ultimately our governor at the time decided to go with a bond act because it was a little bit more politically feasible at the time though we do think that there's still an opportunity in New York state and then there are a couple of other states that are considering at the time New Jersey, Massachusetts and a little bit of Maine as well. Well thank you again for your presentation and with that we'll go on to Rob Wilmington. I'm turning from North Bennington. Good morning Mr. Wilmington. Thanks for joining us. I know you had a you're jumping from one meeting to another so thanks for hearing it. I am thank you. So my name is Rob Wilmington. I live in North Bennington. I've practiced municipal land use in environmental law for months for 40 years and I recently retired. I've been involved in probably 20 administrative and court proceedings involving I-250 including a number of appeals to the Supreme Court. I've represented towns, regional planning commissions, interveners and project proponents. I try appeals before the old environmental board as well as the environmental court. My most recent case in the Supreme Court resulted in the reversal of an egregiously bad decision by the environmental court relating to the siting of a commercial development at an interstate exit and I've litigated dozens of zoning cases before local boards in court and before the Supreme Court. In connection with housing I've served for seven years. I served for seven years as the first chair of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. As a municipal lawyer I've been involved in the planning and financing of a range of housing projects in Bennington County and I'm also a member of a small community development company in North Bennington that's been trying to redevelop a large house in the multifamily housing in the center of our village and even with the so-called missing middle state funding the project has proved to be too expensive to go forward. There are no obvious regulatory issues there assist the construction costs and the soft costs are too high. So from that perspective I'd like to briefly make three points. First in my experience active 50 has not been a significant barrier to the type of housing projects that have been proposed and built in Bennington County. Local zoning and permitting processes more often create uncertainty than active 50 and the issues that arise in active 50 proceedings are often different from those considered in local zoning proceedings. I'm sure there are examples of duplicated review of the same issues in zoning and active 50 cases but in 40 years practicing in this field I saw very little of that. Second the appeals process in the environmental court has not worked well. The old environmental board in my experience did a much better job in processing appeals in the court the board's decisions provided much more guidance for the party and frankly the process was more streamlined. I strongly recommend that the environmental court be stripped of jurisdiction over active 50s appeals. I think all the stakeholders including developers would be better served. I also want to emphasize that I've seen many cases in which project opponents had valid even compelling reasons to oppose development projects and that's particularly with commercial and industrial lens. So it needs to be an appropriate venue for those issues to be resolved but the jurisdiction in the environmental court has been a flop. It's time to restore a competent administrative body to do this important work perhaps with panels or with the hearing officers as with the public utility commission. And third and finally I think expediting permit review in designated areas is the right approach to getting new housing built with appropriate regulatory review. Developers need more certainty and predictable costs communities need assurance that they will not be unduly burdened by environmental impacts or infrastructure costs associated with new projects. And the most important step to accomplish this is to designate particular development areas that meet prescribed standards. I'm not prepared to comment on the specific recommendations of the recently completed NRB study but I've looked at the report and I believe the approach of three tiered locational jurisdictions suggested there. It seems spot on to me in the right way to proceed. So thank you for inviting me to testify. I'd be happy to address any questions. Thank you very much for looking at it. Are there that you're still to think that we could take a question or two. Any members of the committees want to ask a question of minister woman. Senator Harrison. Just and this question doesn't need to be answered now but commercial and industrial has come up a couple of times in this meeting and I think it would be helpful to know at some point in this process of course we're talking about housing that's our main focus but we don't want to inadvertently impact commercial and development or commercial and industrial in ways that we don't intend and there might be opportunities to make that process better. So I'm just saying that I appreciate you bringing that up the commercial and industrial and if you want to provide written comments that would be wonderful. And I do think the NRB study took into account commercial and industrial activity. Yeah just here. Yes. Right. Two one now says would be okay. Right. But I have some questions about that too. Sure. But sure. We can talk about that. Senator Brock. That's a question in your opinion. You mentioned that the environmental court model does not seem to work well. Why would a housing board or some other enterprise such as the use of the hearing office to model work better than the court model. Well it can be two responses that one is I've experienced both of them in Vermont and my experience was that the old environmental board did a better job. It got it got decisions that were in proceedings that were workable that were consistent and just I practice 10 or 15 years before that and as well as the environmental court and I just found it was better for everybody frankly. Second of all you know when the old environmental board and the NRB have to do policy and regulatory work they have a really you have a deeper knowledge of what the whole set of issues is I think than the court brought to it and it informed the boards and when it formed the old environmental board when it was trying to do regulatory policymaking. He had a really good grip on what the real practical issues were and other lawyers may may remind me here but I don't recall many environmental court decisions that really sort of gave broad frameworks that are helpful to future litigants and the environmental board was able to formulate approaches in a pretty coherent way. So I'm speaking from experience I think the public utilities commission which also does regulatory policymaking as well as adjudicatory stuff has worked pretty well and some version of that I just think is better than than the court so I'm not sure that fully addresses your question but it's a practical my practical experience and also I think the role of combining that makes for better policy and also better adjudication. Great thanks so much Mr. Roamington for joining us and providing testimony and we have been churning along and a good clip this morning I'd like to take a proposed we'll take a 10 minute break so we will reconvene at 10 40. 40 a week so we're following their big hearings. Senator Clarkson. Oh so I need to sit at the table. At the table I'm just saying January 24th 2024 and resuming the the second half of our morning meeting a joint deal with senate economic development and general affairs and senate natural resources and energy we're talking about housing and regulatory reform and we're picking back up again. Our next guest is Megan Tuttle director of the office of city planning city of Burlington. Good morning good title thank you for joining him. Good morning chairs and all of the committee members thank you for the invitation to join you this morning. I just want to note that I appreciate that I'm in the middle of this group here this morning so I had I've really enjoyed the opportunity to hear from so many statewide experts in their fields that have already spoken to you today. As chair Bray said my name is Megan Tuttle and I am the planning director for the city of Burlington. I am also one of the working group members that prepared the report on municipal municipal delegation that was directed by act 47 last session. As planning director I lead a team that's responsible for long-range planning and the creation and maintenance of the city's zoning bylaws. I also work closely with the staff that administers our local permitting process. In the near decade that I've worked with the city our council has adopted dozens of changes to our bylaws to better define and implement our planning goals and be responsive to the changing dynamics in the city. Many of these changes have been about removing barriers to housing creation from streamlining the permitting process within downtown to making it easier to build an ADU to implementing new rules to manage short-term rentals. Today we are working on other major housing focus changes including to enable the sort of neighborhood scale housing solutions that were the subject of the municipal zoning provisions of act 47. We also have a long history of participating in the state's designation programs. Just this fall we received approval to expand our neighborhood development area designation to incorporate an area of the city that was recently zoned to support a new neighborhood's creation. As Kathy Byer noted I mentioned these designations because they're significant in their demonstration that a municipality has got a long way to plan for and regulate many of the issues that act 250 is designed to review. Despite this work and many community and state efforts our state is still experiencing a number of significant and in many ways unprecedented housing challenges many challenges to provide the housing that is needed for Vermonters. Not all of these challenges are within state or local control but they are important factors that are influencing and bring increased attention to the processes and laws that we do control. I agree with what Charlie Baker said earlier that these laws can and do influence developer behavior and as a planner I welcomed the steps that were taken to advance municipal bylaws through act 47. Just last evening in a meeting with our planning commission we were discussing the city's inclusionary zoning ordinance a policy that we've had since the 1990s which was novel at the time that it was adopted which mandates that permanently affordable housing be created in new developments. This is an important and foundational housing tool that we need particularly in this moment and yet we're confronted daily with the realities of our state's housing challenges. The HFA's 2023 annual report noted the steep increase 76 percent increase in fact in the cost for constructing new multifamily housing development since 2018. This means that for projects to deliver affordable housing in this environment particularly if they're providing affordable home ownership opportunities the gap between the cost to build and the allowable cost to sell that unit can be well over a hundred thousand dollars per unit. Here in Burlington we're searching for ways to find a balance between this reality while we maintain our commitment to ensuring new development provides permanently affordable housing. While this example is not about Act 250 I share it for a few reasons. First is that while not any one of these issues Act 250 or municipal regulation alone are the reasons why housing can be difficult to advance in Vermont we must consider that the cumulative impacts of these laws together can frustrate it. And second I share it as a local example of what the chair said in his opening remarks. Through careful evaluation and evolution of our policies here in the city housing creation and permanently affordable housing do not need to be in conflict with one another. As a professional planner I completely agree that housing creation and the environment do not need to be in conflict with one another. However what this example highlights is that we need to closely consider the purpose and outcomes of our laws and policies and in this particular moment ensure that any additional cost of regulation and complications of permitting are carefully weighed alongside the positive intended outcomes of those laws. As a member of the Vermont planners association I've been engaged in conversations with planners around the state about Act 250 going back to the legislature's own commission in 2018. I understand and appreciate that changing this law requires careful consideration to preserve what has been strong and positive while also recognizing that we have an opportunity to strengthen it to better achieve our state our shared goals. I echo others support for the interrelated land use Act 250 updates and designation studies that are before you. I'm really encouraged by the coordination and synergy and the recommendations coming from these studies particularly in their focus on how Act 250 jurisdiction can be relaxed in areas where careful planning and the evolution of both state and local regulations support growth in ways that reflect statewide development goals. Members of the municipal delegation working group were engaged in these studies and continuously circled back to understand the related implications on our work. We think these studies go a long way and we continue to recommend municipal delegation as an additional tool that could build on those changes. Similar to what Catherine Dometrick said municipal delegation is not about weakening Act 250. The report recommends an Act 250 exemption for development within communities that have confirmed through a collaboration with the Regional Planning Commission and the NRB that the municipal bylaws and permitting and enforcement processes are functionally equivalent to the criteria that Act 250 would have otherwise reviewed. As members of the working group we did a deep dive into our municipal ordinances to evaluate where there are overlaps between these laws and the criteria in Act 250. We found a high level of overlap certainly some areas where our municipal planning can be strengthened but here in Burlington and the time since Act 250 was enacted and our bylaws have become much more comprehensive and robust and we estimate that we currently regulate approximately 90 to 95% of what Act 250 also reviews. The delegation study recommends a process through which municipalities can demonstrate their comprehensive nature of their laws. A process through which the NRB can consider applications after a public hearing and establishes an agreement with municipalities and the Act 250 to administer local permits in lieu of Act 250. It does not fundamentally change Act 250 on its own and we think it can be an important complement to the other reforms that you're already considering. Notably it also builds on other forms of municipal delegation presently enabled in statute such as for the State Shore Land Protection Act and for building code and fire safety standards both of which Burlington administers in lieu of state permits today. We believe that this is an important complement that can allow municipalities with the regulatory and staffing resources to support statewide housing goals. Particularly as you consider the recommendations of these other studies and really as you define the areas of the state that would fall within these certain planning areas or tiers. In particular one potential gap I see from Burlington's perspective where municipal delegation can be important relates to how small housing types the sort of duplex and four unit buildings that were the focus of Act 47 would actually get implemented. Areas like Burlington's New North End which represents half of the city's land area, a quarter of the population and is served by infrastructure where many of these new home types could be accommodated do not currently qualify for exemption from Act 250 under the state's designation programs and seem unlikely to be exempted under the new frameworks contemplated in these studies. The city does have a local review process called Major Impact that's substantially similar to Act 250 and in the New North End this would require a very detailed level of review for projects as few as five units. Projects of this small scale are much more susceptible to the escalating costs of housing development and duplicative development review processes and ultimately I think municipal delegation could be an important tool to lean on that robust robust level of local review and ensure that high quality development is happening at multiple scales in the city. So I just want to be here to again echo my support for the efforts and appreciate this committee's collaboration and focus on these issues this morning and I'm happy to be available to answer any questions about any of this later. Thank you very much. We're holding questions in conversation for most part so we're done to see if we have any time actually over and with that we thank you and we're going to move on to Kim Taylor former chair of district three environmental commission. Mr. Taylor good morning and thank you for joining us. Thank you. I have to say I'm somewhat humbled to be speaking to you and the company of this illustrious group. For those who might not know me I'm a retired vegetable farmer. I wish I could get this down a little bit here here we go. Having farmed for 43 years with my wife Janet in the village of Post Mills in the town of Fed for Vermont and our farm thanks stack 250 actually has grown to and I'll explain that in a moment to 56 acres of mixed vegetables berries in 20 greenhouses and we grow approximately 30,000 pounds of tomatoes annually. For 11 years I was chair of the district three environmental commission and the towns included our population ranges from Hartford of about you know 10,068, 668 depending on your numbers and as small as Granville with 301 the district includes towns in Orange County Windsor County mostly and two actually in Addison County we go right up to the top of the snowball and our towns are reflective of what is pretty much statewide where in the state a total of the state is has 125 one acre towns which means they're those towns do not have subdivision and stature trolley approved subdivision zoning which is about 45 percent of the towns and then 137 presently are 10 acre towns. Additionally I've served on the town of Fed for development review board for the past 20 years and presently its chair and we've had zoning and subdivision by law since 1972 and finally for what it's worth I graduated from Vermont law school 1978 and clerk for Jonathan Brault now one of the authors of act 250. Senator Bray asked us to explain our experiences with act 250 openly and honestly and I was going to share a couple of anecdotes with you. First is a young farmer in the early 1980s we had a small fledgling farm abandoned the world of farming of law practice rather quickly and there was two neighbors who were going to build next to us over the course of the next 10 years. One of them wanted 10 two-acre lots and act 250 which was chaired by Allison Flannery at the time her testimony and they denied that act 250 application and the long and the short of it was the 10 units were denied because of lack of clustering no showing of unable to build on its remaining 70 acres and potential impact on the farm. The developer turned to us and sold us the land and we continue to farm then later on there was a proposal for 56 units this is rather ironic when we're speaking about housing here today I'm sure you can see that were proposed on some very prime agricultural soils and the long and the short of that was 24 units were finally settled on 15 acres of prime agricultural soils were conserved and in the upshot of that as I feel is that had all these units been built Fedford would have built a middle school which might stand empty today we would not have continued farming we the the small acreage we had would not have served us for that you know to to make a living I do not believe we would not have fed thousands of upper upper valley residents given away thousands of pounds of food to willing hands and hired hundreds of local teenagers to work on the farm and today the farm is conserved we no longer own it we sold it about a year ago it's conserved by the Vermont land trust and a young 37 year old farmer who was started working for us when he was 14 and then became a partner owns what is a very successful vegetable farm and this all occurred right on the edge of what you would characterize as a rural working lands area and the edge of post mills now as chairs district three over the 11 years I chaired we issued over 200 permits we denied only 10 applications of the 10 denials three were appealed during this entire 11 years there was never any applications which concerned housing I think that might be of interest except a section 6086 be downtown project known as 132 south main street it's a kind of hybrid process under 10 vs a 151 designed expedite applications in downtown development districts so this application is to show you and it's in in my testimony here that I've submitted took was received in December of 2019 and the date of decision was issued on 4 to 20 104 days after receipt and I've included a picture of that beautiful downtown building it's five stories high it's I think it's really quite exciting there's a twin pines project which was a php a priority housing exemption on Sykes Avenue which we never saw because 30 units and presently Simpson Development Corp has proposed 100 times 192 market units and 48 prior priority housing units in Hartford which will be exempt under act 250 so I am strongly in favor of permitting municipalities to apply for and receive the quote plan growth area designation as proposed in H 687 this would exempt them from act 250 review I am greatly concerned however what remains I'm sorry about my dog here let me shut the door shut your law clerk is acting up yeah the neighbor neighbor scheme by we one of the things I do in the winter is we are 100 acres here we I groom 10 k of ski trails and he she wants to get out and go play with the dog anyhow I'm very very concerned that with the exemption in either tier one or however you want to characterize it that we will not we will lose this prior right priority housing incentive so I encourage you in any bill you draft to include some kind of incentive for priority housing affordable workforce housing however you want to characterize it I think I think that that is critical to this change I'm also in favor of making permanent the act 250 jurisdictional threshold for a permit from 10 units to 25 for downtowns neighborhood development areas village centers with zoning and subdivision laws and growth centers as long as the projects do not impact critical resource areas such as primary agricultural soils and I've mentioned the workforce housing I thought some excellent thoughts came out today about legislation requiring towns to adopt subdivision well actually this didn't come out but this is something that I feel strongly about that it may be time for towns to have to be required to adopt subdivision and zoning bylaws and we no longer would have the one acre towns and I'm strongly in favor of this concept of bottom up form of planning to which got ceiling alluded and ultimately I'm strongly in favor of the tiered approach to act two for 50 review that I believe is an age 687 I don't know if you all have had time to look at it I think chair Sheldon and representative bongards have done a wonderful job there and finally as climate change rages on oh my gosh this dog why did she do this now we need to strike it's okay it's okay we need to strike a balance as climate change rages we need to strike a balance a field between building affordable housing providing an equitable education and preserving land to feed those who live in those homes and the children that attend those schools but I think you may have thought that I would be opposed to some of these recommendations that came out of the nrb plan but I think most of them are excellent but along with tier one a or b however you want to characterize it we need to concentrate on the tier two and the tier three as well we can't ignore them one last final thing and I included just know you're going to be missing out on a lot of fees with these exemptions potentially we had four car dealerships going on yeah we had four car dealerships come into Sykes Avenue and Hartford in my years there we had application fees of 125 000 transportation fees of 41 000 which went to help build the roundabout and off-site mitigation fees which went to the housing conservation board of 34 000 these were all miners we got them done in very short periods of time so just be aware that you're going to be missing out on some fees potentially here and I guess that's all I have to say okay well thank you very much and thanks for following up on the whatever you had in mind you know it's exactly what we wanted to hear was it looking for any preconceived notion of testimony so thank you for that um at the end personal privilege uh yes there with that karmic uh this is Dick McCormick I'm your one of your predecessors as chair of district three greetings from the past and now one of your senators yeah I know I don't know who knows that all three of your senators are here yeah I know you are and I and I miss mark too uh there is mark yeah all four of us are here okay well thanks so much again for your service on that board and all the innovative stuff you've helped make happen over your way yes here here okay thank you okay and with that we'll go to our next guest which is uh Ryan Bannon zoning administrator and funding manager for the town of Brattle rural morning mr Bannon thanks for uh joining us from my mom's hometown thanks for having me um and also I would like to thank all the people who worked on these studies this summer um and winter they've done really great work and I'm really helpful that it will empower small towns like Brattleboro do our work and encourage the development of more housing Brattleboro is short 500 housing units immediately and on a longer term we're short 1000 units we're also a community of modest incomes and many people are rent stressed and mortgage stressed so doing housing that people can actually afford tremendous challenge heroic work and any risk that we can reduce any fee that we can cut back will help focusing on our developed areas allows us to make most of our tax dollars we can increase the use of our existing sewer water and road network we can improve our public transportation it creates opportunities for people to live and work in places where they can walk where they don't have to have one car for every adult um and this is what Vermont land law has been trying to encourage prosperous cities and villages and working landscapes Brattleboro would like to pursue a tier one for a sewer and water area and we certainly have the capacity to do local review that's adequate and equal to what's done by act 250 uh proposal for tier three for precious and irreplaceable natural landscapes is fantastic there has to be some areas that are just known to be off off and export development and continue to act 250 jurisdiction for areas that are between the celled centers and working lands is appropriate and necessary to reduce sprawl we have found that some projects in our downtown were increased when the jurisdictional threshold was increased and that's bringing needed homes to people in our community we also found that our upzoning and encouragement of mixed use development in centers has been a necessary part of hazard mitigation to relocate homes out of flood hazard areas there has to be some place to actually build and places where we encourage that building the designated program has us look at areas at low risk outside of flood hazard and river quarter areas and encourage building higher densities this is allowed us to take place people move people from flood plains where they've been repeatedly evacuated and faced flood damage and a tropical storm Irene and get them to a safe haven where they don't need to worry about flooding that we've seen this this year i don't really have much more to say than that just thankful for the efforts to empower localities to make decisions from for our communities they're compatible with framework for state planning goals thank you thank you um brian uh and you know you have your senator here senator Harrison who brought some of us down to see your work on melrose terrace with melrose terrace in mind i think you know a great case study in getting lots of vulnerable seniors out of the floodplain one of our takeaways was that it took several years because of permitting processes to relocate those seniors back in community um can you go into a little bit more detail about that because that's our biggest concern is once we get people maybe on this side of the room but once we get people out of flood plains they need somewhere to go in short order and it took maybe seven years to relocate them yeah it was challenging rubber we thought we had really pro housing zoning um and we worked with the housing partnerships and ever north to find locations for a new building to help people find a safe place to live and as we looked at our regulations and tried to work with them we found that we didn't actually have zoning that actually worked with um producing parcels that would actually support a affordable housing project so we went back and we did some additional reforms and came a little bit closer we um we found a existing plan residential development and we were able to use that instrument to get a place for the people to build a replacement housing but then we found that in fact we had made an error and had missed a density cap um so we went back for a third round of of amendments to allow for more housing we got rid of density caps for the number of dwelling units per acre in our developed areas and that's proved really really productive as far as allowing for the development of new units and existing buildings as well as this new larger project so what i would say is that when we look at regulations and regulatory reform to promote housing it should be an iterative process and we should go back and test it periodically to see if it's actually achieving what we're looking for for us it wasn't we wanted to have dense centers where people could walk and live and be safe and it turns out we had really nice looking regulations but didn't do that so go back test have that be part of the process see if we're actually creating lands and parcels that can be developed meet our housing goals well thanks can you just say a little bit again i want to make sure i heard it right we've been hearing more about the um like state level planning or rpc level planning but the are you saying that the the biggest impediment that you have in breadable was attractive but not highly functional municipal planning that's right um you know we had density levels in theory that would produce you know 16 units per acre and that sounded really good but we didn't have very many large parcels in residential areas that would support a building with 55 units which is what we need it those larger buildings are necessary to make an affordable manageable project that would be viable long term but again we just didn't have those parcels so it looked good in theory but to achieve the density that we thought we could it just didn't actually work so we got rid of that density per acre cap and we just established um kind of form-based code that allowed for buildings of a certain size on a parcel and the number of housing units that could be developed in those was whatever the developer thought practical as far as the size of units that were in demand that actually produced the type of townscape that we were looking for and it also allowed projects to be feasible and pencil out right well thank you so much for joining us from down there and good to hear from the other end of the state up here in washington county thank you of that we're going to go to charlie hancock who's the chairman of the montgomery select board jumping from one end of the state to the other good morning uh mr. hancock good to see you again morning it's good to see you all um thank you very much for the opportunity today um again my name is charlie hancock i'm the chairman of the montgomery select board um though my day job is a consulting forester although sometimes it's hard to tell which one of those takes up more of my time um i participated in the nrb report which is already been touched upon many times today and i'd like to echo others who have pointed to this as a compromise framework which addresses so many of the challenges that we face in which we're discussing here today and i want to emphasize the word compromise because for our vision to actually work the various components within that report really need to be considered as a package and i think that's something that clearly came out of the work that we did together uh montgomery which as you mentioned just tucked way up here at the northern end of the state as a rural community like the majority of other towns in romont um we have what i would consider really robust zoning but we're currently working with our rpc to make our bylaws even stronger addressing many of the challenges that you're already aware of we're also in the process of developing a municipal wastewater system for our village centers a principal objective of which is to increase housing availability um i should pause one second i do have a couple slides i'd like to share so if it's possible to enable the screen share that would be excellent so um as a smaller rural community our interaction with act 250 looks a lot different than larger communities which are addressing a scale of projects which are frankly in order of magnitude larger than what we're looking at but it does have a significant impact here um one project i can point to is on a 16 acre parcel right in montgomery center which is one of our two designated village centers where our town plan and zoning seeks to encourage dense compact development and which will be served by our wastewater project um the parcel came under act 250 jurisdiction nearly 20 years ago when the prior landowner began operating a small greenhouse on the site um years of issues with one neighbor um using act 250 to tie them up into knots led the landowner to give up that enterprise and the parcel sat vacant for nearly two decades um we now have a local developer um folks that actually live here in town with really deep roots in the community looking to create a mixed commercial and residential development which would result in over 35 units of new housing specifically targeting workforce and seniors but before they could even think of addressing any permitting let alone act 250 that same name burt neighbor got wind of the land transfer and their intent and went screaming to our district commission which set the ball rolling in a manner which was very discouraging and frankly demoralizing um in this case act 250 literally came to them they didn't even have a chance to go to act 250 since then these guys have faced many of the same burdens you've already heard about today so I won't go into them but you know dealing with pre-existing permit conditions increases in time and expense duplication of permit efforts and frankly living with a heavy amount of fear um this project is just one example of why the recommendations in the nrb report would provide permit relief for projects such as this in these areas where we do affirmatively seek to encourage growth and development and why following those recommendations is so important um I also think it's important within the context of this conversation to highlight what we don't want housing development to look like um what you're looking at here is a 90-acre parcel 190-acre parcel in my own community of montgomery and they say a picture is worth a thousand words um this parcel um uh this parcel which it was historically managed as a working forest sits within both the highest priority forest block which connects this area of the j-state forest with the surrounding landscape and within a highest priority connectivity area adjacent to route 242 the land also serves as the headwaters and flood storage to a critical tributary of the trout river which passes right through montgomery center we've talked about flooding many times today um the land was purchased and subdivided into 15 building lots in a manner which managed to leapfrog after act 250 jurisdiction in terms of timing avoiding that 1055 trigger this led to no opportunity for review or an opportunity to address design potentials which would negate the impacts which we're looking at so now we're looking at a road system approximately 3500 feet length or about 0.6 miles 15 acre uh 15 12 acre building lots again which managed to leapfrog any sort of review um i highlight this because the road rule which is included in the nrb report would have addressed this it would have provided a backstop to catch something like this and not to necessarily limit any development there but to give an opportunity to design that development in a way which can mitigate the impact on these resource concerns and we'll note that the property currently is for sale the developer ended up pulling the plug on the project so you can see the development that went on as far as the roads and the building line infrastructure but nothing was actually built up there um so we're currently seeking a conservation buyer to come in and buy that and to keep it intact as a working forest so if any senators have 1.8 million dollars lying around please give me a call um so uh big picture um big picture i think we need to advance a balance like what's proposed in the nrb report with exemptions and designated areas and resource protection or at least the simple opportunity to review development in these areas um that are so critical for for resource concerns without relief in designated areas i think we'll continue to see development in communities like montgomery being pushed out of these these designated centers and constructed in a way which bypasses review similar to what we just looked at we're seeing fragmentation of our forests of these critical lands not just occurring but rapidly accelerating and that's really concerning on a multitude of levels lastly i think i'd be remiss if i didn't take a moment to highlight the connection between economic development and housing in communities like ours and the need to address permit relief for working lands businesses such as farm and forest enterprises tim spoke earlier about the importance of act 250 and maintaining our land base but i'd like to highlight that it's the success of these enterprises themselves which are foundational to maintaining the landscape that act 250 seeks to protect and the rural communities like ours which depend on them means working lands are what defines us as a state and frankly there are days when i fear that we're forgetting that we often speak about resilience and resilience in this context means economic viability in order for these farms and forest enterprises to continue to feed communities and steward the lands for the multitudes of benefits they provide they must be economically valuable this means supporting diversified income streams adding value to secondary processing and building infrastructure to increase efficiency of operations and embrace the opportunity for these enterprises to be partners as we consider natural climate solutions act 250 often stands in the way of this the nrb report identified one potential solution or one step in the right direction which would be lowering the ag soils mitigation ratio to one to one for forest processing and enterprises this is the same ratio we currently give industrial parks i think this is a great start but i think that more is needed and i would really welcome the opportunity to discuss to discuss that further with you and so with that i will end my testimony thank you um thank you mr handcock i you know i'll i think you'll hear from senate natural resources and energy in part because we i'll express a personal concern and or interest we are we're the today the focus is housing and so that's drawn us to look most uh like a tier one for instance um and i don't want us to find that we're giving short shrift to the natural environments that are out in no two or two or three right um so i that's my own ignorance on how this might roll out but the concern i want to so you've highlighted um that for us and that's helpful his road rule photos are fabulous those are like totally illustrate the challenge that and the battle we've had those were in the legislature strive charlie can you clarify exactly what loophole or window was taken advantage of with the 1055 what what time period that was yeah so i i some of this predated me um being in the community but my understanding is that the subdivision of the lots occurred in a time frame where they managed to do it over 15 or 16 years and so that 10 year window kind of laps separated and so they basically just leapfrogged it they they did i don't know exactly how many they did in what framework but they did just enough not to trigger at 250 and then went back and did the rest right after that window had passed interesting conundrum the rpc yeah hey well good to see you again thanks so much for coming in and thank you so much take care that uh and share yes um i have the privilege of introducing uh a friend and personal hero uh jessica dandrant smith by way of context just bears her a little bit more um we met as part of the inaugural class of the usa obama leaders and while we all showed up to chicago as equals um some people were just cut above the rest in terms of walking the walk at the intersection of social and environmental justice and i think there's probably no city we can learn more from than new orleans and um you know as somebody in jessica's work who uh has been fighting for the heart of new orleans and for those least uh at the table and least represented um there's almost no one i could think of that could speak more to this really big vision of exactly what sef pointed out when you have a climate crisis and a housing crisis taken together you get an equity crisis um so jessica's a big thinker and i'm really grateful she could join us and i'll probably take an embarrassing picture to show all of our obama leader that's fine thank you kisha for the wonderful introduction and uh wonderful i've been listening in since this morning and so many wonderful thoughts and ideas and many of the people are um spot on in terms of the challenges as well as the solutions um and i know i do have 10 minutes i will try my best to be brief i i could probably talk about this all day long and again thank you all for having me i'm very honored to be invited and speak to you all and hopefully provide some insights and inspiration as well as provide some solutions for some of the challenges you all have been facing um as you all know louisiana is no stranger to the climate crisis and in every single map of the climate crisis globally louisiana is on the front lines of that and is predicted to be partially if not two-thirds of it underwater by 2050 um with that being said i'm born raised in the state of louisiana particularly in new orleans louisiana my family is multi-generational and with that multi-generational um bloodline here that means that many every generation dating back to my great grandmother has dealt with an immense flooding and loss um so growing up in the city of new orleans flooding is very common we are at delta we're below sea level and we have the largest pumping system in the world over 99 pumps to keep the city moving and thriving and going we also have the largest port system in the world um combined right so we have five of the largest ports and most of the products that come from the sua as in panama canals come up our mississippi river um and then has moved along many different states and highways and you guys probably know a lot about that as well as ports um so that being said we're surrounded by water and so our livelihood is attached to it and that means that our economy is based on it whether it be ports shipping oil and gas and energy uh as well as food production and so on with our lush waterways also comes with a lot of pain and so my family has experience flooding from hurricane vets at a cameo and in my first experience direct experience with hurricane katrina which hit the day before my 16th birthday so i lived through many of the things that you are talking about um over 10 years ago and now almost 20 um if you're in if you're counting and i've learned a lot in that process i started as a youth organizer uh in 2006 to really figure out what does it mean to live in a city that is dealing with the ideas of redevelopment rebuilding and all of the challenges from housing food insecurity homelessness um and also redefining resilience resilience was placed on us as well and the idea that people in Louisiana could deal with uh the challenges because we've dealt with them for so long since the French and the Spanish came so i'm saying all that to say that we have a long history and with that comes a deep understanding of collective trauma around policies and so when we talk about resilience in Louisiana it is oftentimes attached to this concept my organization was kind of boring out of that and so 2014 a document called the urban water plan which is actually just made 10 years actually it's in a big celebrated and anniversary event not long ago um that document was kind of i would like say our holy grail or a bible around resilience and and green infrastructure and re understanding or re engineering our landscape to learn how to live with it one of the reasons why Louisiana continually floods is not just because we're at Delta because indigenous communities along the Mississippi River had been living there for over 5 000 years it was because we decided to build slab on braid it's because we decided to pave over many of the wetlands and coastal areas and we also decided to pump all of those things created a deep amount of subsidence flooding and nowhere for water to go um that was the result of hurricane Katrina where the levees had failed there was nothing on the inside of the bowl known as New Orleans to take on that amount of water and thus you have a massive and still one of the United States largest most expensive natural disasters in the history thus far i've been working in this space as i mentioned for a long time and just to give additional context i am a commissioner for the state of Louisiana for the coastal protection restoration and i am also the co-chair of a national academy of sciences engineering and resilience so i'll leave you guys with a few different things minorization does quite a few things and mainly focusing on education and policy as well as advocacy and workforce development so we do many things and we have over 12 programs running from lead line abatement as well as a community engagement frameworks for the state of Louisiana since last year in 2023 there's an over 23 billion dollars in natural disasters 90 percent of those were caused by flooding globally that has also increased flood insurance which in some areas has gone over 300 percent and in homeowners insurance in states like Florida Louisiana and California no longer have it and our last option of resort is the state insurance plan which is not properly funded if there were a disaster today most Louisiana residents would be unable to rebuild leading to a mass challenge around equity around housing and around just general rebuilding where do you go if you have no tax base what does a state do if they lose half its population in fact the climate crisis is so bad in Louisiana that we rank fifth and highest amount of people that have lost residents across the entire country we are ranking in the middle between cities that have extremely high cost of living and our issue isn't cost of living our issue is the ability to live through floods hurricanes tornadoes drought and heat waves so i leave you with something that i always think about which is the four r's of resilience resilience is not a catchall term it should be considered a four level term or there are four r's under that term one you need resources and you guys probably very well well aware of that and by resources it's not just financial resources is people people power skills and knowledge the second thing is redundancy one of the reasons why Katrina was such an epic failure was that there was no redundancy in the system there was only so many and i say so many about three agencies that were the go to for natural disasters that's the other issue you need to be able to have community and neighborhood support that can provide resources necessary for resilience then that redundancy and those resources need to be done rapidly they need to be directly supporting communities as quickly as the event has happened fema is actually we as a part of the national academy's resilience roundtable and as a part of a coalition of folks in Louisiana the fema's new policy change about giving families money immediately was something that the state of louisiana had been lobbying for a long time so i'm glad they have heard that but it's not just fema you cannot just depend on that and i think you guys are fully aware of that and lastly is robustness they have to be big and far-reaching and overarching innovative and multidisciplinary ideas around these concepts they cannot fully depend on green and it cannot fully depend on gray they have to be in multifaceted ideas of solutions that are brought to the table for resilience all of that to say that in order to tackle housing which louisiana did not do particularly new warlands new warlands did not have a housing problem pre katrina post katrina 20 years later we're still missing 40 000 housing units what is that done that has caused a housing crisis where most of the housing stock has doubled in value even though the housing stock is lowered in quality because of so many natural disasters we are in a conundrum where we can't even get insurance for our homes because most insurance companies deem us too risky not because of flood vulnerability but because of the challenges around our housing stock being too old and not willing to or able to withstand climate disasters so we are looking at a multifaceted amount of solutions but with those four rs in mind you have to invest in green infrastructure and coastal restoration there is no way forward and particularly for louisiana where half the state is a flood plain we don't have another option i'm also on a climate migration working group in caucus which i'm actually working with harvard university on to figure out what does it mean to move people during when it's no other option left and i can tell you that the solution is not easy in reality it's not achievable in a planable way how do you find a receiving community that's willing to take communities that no longer can live in that space and what does it mean for your tax space if you all are elected officials and half your community has to leave because of flood plain what does that mean for your state and how does it move forward what are the economics of that what are the housing challenges around that it is easier and in terms of trauma as well as economic development to live with your ecosystem than to force millions of people to leave and go somewhere else louisiana was the first experiment in that not just in katrina but a concept called ill of the genre and charles which the indigenous communities of that area have deemed an epic failure you have to root your work in all of this i should say and i repeat this over and over again in community voice it has to be a situation where communities are not just at stakeholders at the end of the design but they are with the process from beginning to end additionally community members are more than equipped to deal with policy challenges and are able to create policy that is best for their communities in their neighborhoods i'll use the very short example that we're creating the first ever community led stormwater utility fee for new orleans because we don't have one and the community members wrote it with us the organization and the agencies and balls and water management and elected officials from beginning to end learning about green debt financing bonds and so on and so there is a way forward but it's going to require those four r's it's going to require new multidisciplinary thinking it has to be rapidly done it has to be robust it has to be redundant to do all of that it needs to have community at every single level otherwise when there is a natural disaster when there is a flooding event or when you have a housing shortage you will be in a situation that new orleans is still digging itself out of almost 20 years ago and so i i would love to go into like really about all the things that we do and the technicality but i wanted to move you all with an overarching concept and i'd be happy to dive deep in another time when it is appropriate thank you so much thanks so much jessica and i you know i would recommend people look at all the stories that you've collected of your work with communities i think it's such a sobering and powerful look at when water is your source of trauma and your source of livelihood that you shared and all the systems you have to think about when considering that so thank you so much for everything you do and i know you're a partner of mine and i think hopefully for our work as we move forward and we just really appreciate you yeah thank you so much yeah thank you for joining us it's a sentimental note not really relevant to what my daughter was married in orleans and when i spent time there i said there were a remarkable and beautiful place so well it's funny because i had to remind myself to say jessica dandridge smith because the weekend after our obama leaders convening jessica got married that's right that's right i am a newlywed and also got married and recently gotten married in ron so i'm very happy for your daughter i'm sure she had a wonderful experience it's a great place to visit in and hopefully we could be here for another 300 years so that more people can get married in i think we all need to be lying in southeast asia expiring to make up about services to return yes oh yes so thank you again um we are gonna continue taking testimony and our next guest is andriga marganti a former select board member in heinsberg and uh his marganti thank you for making a trip and joining us here today good to see you um thank you first um allowing me to share my experiences of living in what was a rural community um i like to say that when i moved to heinsberg in 1970 to a 200-year-old farmhouse i lived on the edge of the historic village i now live in the middle of the village um and i'm very very proud and glad to be able to do that i can walk to my grocery store i can walk to the hardware store um i can walk to town hall um i now have uh 24 soon to be 26 units rental units on the hill above me that was the pasture that the cows grazed on um just over that hill is another 24 units of senior housing with 24 more units being built um so there'll be 48 units um and uh standing on the top of the hill looking down on the elderly housing i look across it um 80 units of uh condominiums all of these were built in the late 1980s um high and dry on the um east side of route 116 if you're familiar with heinsberg at all route 116 is the state highway that bisects the town um heinsberg was a manufacturing town uh we hosted one of the the second largest uh cheese factories in in the town right in the village i could look out my my window at the cheese factory milk from all over the state kind of lower quality milk uh came to our cheese factory we have a sewage treatment plant in our town because we had a we had a um cheese factory and because we became the receiving town for a regional high school in the late 1960s so as the clean water act was being enacted and there was federal funding for building a sewage treatment plant heinsberg benefited greatly from uh being able to address um water quality most of the houses in the village were um farm houses with the farmland extending to the west which was um heavy clay soils so 116 goes on a on a geological um hard bedrock um bridge which um provided you know good resource and all the development that happened in the 1980s um because we were encouraging compact growth trying to do that and at the same time preserving our farmland um we benefited from being at the southern edge of chitenden county sometimes we like to think that we might be the northern edge of adison county and maintain some of our rural lifestyles um we have worked very hard to have compact growth and settlement within our village and we were able to achieve that because we did have water and sewer but none of that water and sewer um served the um was connected to the housing in the lowland that had been agland that was heavy clay soils very similar to and the same as in adison county the cheese factory burned and it was a major the major employer in town and um the major user and the way that we afforded our sewer treatment plant they paid at least 75 of the costs of our sewage treatment plant along the way we were the sewage treatment plant was a um we had to upgrade it always to meet the new phosphorus requirements and um we finally got the cheese factory to build some pre-treatment plants because the easiest way for them to deal with overflows that the cheese factory was to just send them to the town and so if anybody remembers driving through hindsburg in the 1970s and 1980s we were known as the smelly town pretty bad um and so um we're now faced uh so we've worked very hard at revising our zoning and I will provide some written testimony after hearing what everybody has had to say today um but just want to explain the nature of relying on municipal regulations um and the importance that act 250 has um played in addressing issues that um a municipal town of our size has not really been able to address um we've worked on doing the zoning to increase the density and to show on paper what looks like perfectly developable land um what we have not done is recognize and and I see this time and again in our references to act 250 into regulations into neighborhood development areas is to recognize the really important ecological services that need to be maintained and act as prevention for flooding and for allowing wildlife to continue through our riparian corridors we can't think about compact villages and settlement patterns and in our minds picture 19th and 20th century villages because we have seen the result of those settlements in hindsburg we never had any flooding issues because it was farmland on the west side of town and those farm fields were highly productive farmlands because they did flood because the sediment settled there and provided the nutrients to grow really good crops um we thought we adopted regulations that would protect people from flooding um oftentimes our regulations regarding rivers and streams have sought to protect the houses in the property they have not been written to protect the systems that think about the watershed and water resources in the whole and so our regulations that are adopted by municipalities to address flooding and river corridors are parochial they are determined by who owns that land that looks like it's really well could be developed but our mobile home parks were developed on oftentimes throughout the state on the least productive land the leftover land which we've seen are the lands that flood hindsburg has three mobile home parks which actually happened to be up on the high and dry areas but their problem was that they didn't have potable water and so we expanded our water line to give them potable water they still don't have the best septic systems and we can't really do that so um i would just like to say that our concept of what a compact village and settlement pattern needs to recognize our opportunities for prevention we have a small river the laplot river um i oftentimes joke that the source of the laplot river is the sewage treatment plant there is almost as much water flowing and with the future development that is predicted flowing into our sewage treatment plant from the the homes then there is from the natural rivers and streams that flow there we've worked really hard in the town of hindsburg to conserve land with the help of the vermont housing and conservation board with the vermont land trust we've conserved thousands of acres for farmland and forest land we're in a very interesting geographic place within the state of having excellent forest and excellent farmland the situation that we're in is that uh recently through the development review process housing over the last 15 years has been allowed within what had been farmland and through a series of loopholes i'm calling them loopholes um between how we regulate wetlands and river corridors houses have been built in the floodplain july we didn't see two well we had a hundred year storm event it didn't impact people's houses because they were sitting on fill and the regulations were if you build your house one foot above the base flood elevation you're protecting that house but what is happening is that our public infrastructure is being flooded because the water has no place to go um there is currently a new proposal to add on to this development that was built like 15 years ago of adding additional fill that was allowed in our regulations because our regulations deal with the statement about additional fill within the floodplain is it can create no undue adverse impact the state regulations call for no adverse impacts there was constant testimony given at the development review board to recognize that this was not going to meet the act 250 criteria but it got approved anyway and we in heinsberg want to encourage housing we've adopted inclusionary zoning which private developers have reluctantly added into their projects but always finding a way of shoving those housing units or apartments are rental off to the side um i urge you to think about this tier one designation by assuring that municipal regulations can at least meet the standards that are recognized within act 250 the same thing happens with stormwater regulations is that the stormwater regulations look at a particular development what we're missing is understanding how these ecological systems are functioning to prevent um bad situations to prevent the flooding and that we can use them so i urge you as we're thinking about tier one that we recognize the important ecological services that are being um that are functioning so prevention an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of of uh mediation or whatever that expression is right it's like ounce of prevention um i also have um accumulated a fair amount of knowledge of of watersheds beginning in the late 1980s by recognizing that we need to think about our rivers and streams beyond the boundaries and by initiating efforts to create watershed organizations and so we have the data it's really important that that you both committees are sitting here because it's not an either or it's a both and we can have these vibrant villages but we might in the middle have this really protected flood plain so we have two villages and you know maybe it's a 20 minute walk and not a 10 minute walk between them so um thank you very much for the opportunity to speak and thank you so much for joining us and our final guest of the morning goes out the meeting is Nicole Maloney of Moortown good morning and thank you for beaming in from Moortown good morning thank you all so much for your time and to both Jessica and Andrea I just caught both their testimonies they are so on point and so valuable so thank you both for um sharing that I'm very much in line with both of what those women said um so I'm here to share my experience as a lower income community member navigating this nearly impossible housing market uh I'm a local librarian here in Moortown I'm also an artist and entrepreneur I've had my own business for 10 years I'm a manual laborer community organizer I sort of just am um and I am finding it very hard to live here um it's it's been I've been living in unsafe and insecure housing for three years now and despite my best efforts I have found little to no relief um and have actually found myself being less resourced and less effective as a community member because of this experience and I know that this is I mean this is the case when we're being faced with insecure housing we cannot live up to our full potential um and we're we're just we're carrying a very heavy burden right now um so and it tells us you know people in my position that we're we're not valued and we're undeserving of safe housing and I'm just yeah we're very unsatisfied with the resources available um so my story definitely has something to do with scarcity of housing as well as flooding and other environmental factors that are is more it is impacting those of us who are vulnerable in a different way than property owners but it also has to do with neglect abuse of power a disregard for the health and safety of tenants by those who are resourced enough and have the privilege of housing others um so my particular situation I've been stuck living in my the same living situation for three years now in Moortown Village it's a multi-unit tenant building um it's also been the lowest point of a floodplain it's a wonderful community I love this village I'm we're surrounded by nature everyone is just my neighbors are fantastic I love being able to walk to live the library to work but the building I live in um is has been neglected for decades it's one of the many aging houses in Vermont um so it's it's owned by someone who can only be described as an absentee landlord who owns many properties in the same state of disrepair whose only objective seems to be to maximize profits minimize spending on property maintenance and who targets vulnerable people um as tenants that they can intimidate what I just said is textbook definition of a slumlord there's no meaningful effort to safely house people in this building or any of his buildings and this is not a unique situation this is this is happening all over Vermont and the nation um but it's a serious issue because there's not a lot a tenant can do in these situations and we don't have a lot of other options so just an overview this is a non-exhaustive list of the conditions here but there is inconsistent access to utilities such as heat running water internet electricity so forth um this slumlord hasn't paid any of his bills so the the electricity is constantly getting shut off we were flooded back in december which affected our water pumps so this whole month i've had inconsistent access to running water for you know days weeks at a time um now we're dealing with freezing pipes because there's a hole blown through the basement from where it flooded installations on the floor huge risk of electrical fire um there's many infestations happening there's rats in the walls there's carpenter ants there's squirrels um there's a whole system of tunnels in the yard where you're just sinking into it so you know the structural integrity is up for debate there's mold everywhere uh in mostly you know where we can't see it but you know in the ceilings in the basements in the walls um drafts inoperable doors and windows and other just major health and safety violations that have been confirmed by our health town health officer by the um fire marshal as well as the state because we have been to court over this uh over a year ago this man is currently two hundred dollars in um in debt and fines he's accrued that much in fines over the past here and has done absolutely nothing to remedy any of this um so that's a hundred thousand two hundred thousand dollars right yeah five hundred he's been getting fine five hundred dollars a day since February to coerce him to address some of these issues which he has not done so that's the condition that i'm living in and you know it's very stressful it's very stressful when you can't take a shower you can't wash your dishes the heat's not working my downstairs neighbor hasn't had heat for five years so she usually comes in showers in my apartment um because she has no hot water either and we're we're sick we're all unwell here um and we're also the rent we don't pay we have to pay our own utilities and the rent is already 1200 dollars um which is more that is three fourths of my income so it's just if this is not this is violence this is an extreme case of violence there is nothing else we can do even if there was other places to go the current rate of the market we can't afford it we're we're grown adults who all have full-time jobs i mentioned i'm a librarian we have a postal worker who lives here we have someone who works in voting we have a um construction worker i mean we are we are the people that live here um so um what else i have my little list of notes over here so i think the biggest frustration here is i've i've gone down every avenue of legal aid capstone community funds there's just not a lot of people there's not a lot that can be done that is a meaningful long-term situation you know maybe they can help pay a bill here or there but there's no you know this is not sustainable um and it's unacceptable that these landlords or people that are in these positions that are responsible for housing others are able to operate like this and collect you know any sort of government aid that you know isn't available to tenants anything that is a resource for tenants actually goes to the landlord whether it's rental assistance or grants or whatever the tenants themselves have no autonomy um because i've tried i've tried to apply for grants to fix my my roof but unless the landlord is participating there's there's no relief um and and i know that my landlord has collected state funds when ireen came because this building was flooded to the second floor he did nothing with it he took it not a lot has been done since then um and he just he prays on people that are desperate so you know this is about this is a very unique case this is about a individual who's acting this way but this is also about the system that allows this to happen regardless of how many laws exist to protect tenants they it doesn't matter it really doesn't matter because our only option is to leave and that in and of itself is an incredibly large investment not only emotionally but financially to pack up your life move out of your home and find somewhere else to go where in my case if i left this village i would have to get a new job i would have to build a new community and support system like this is i'm part of this community um and you know we're also facing you know food is unaffordable along with the cost of labor or the like cost of services or you know building materials for me to be able to house myself in a meaningful way i i just it's inaccessible it's a large it's a huge issue and so i really appreciate what jessica was saying about this being a community issue if we want to house our community members it needs to be the burden needs to be carried by more than just the individual because this is not working um you know we also have the oldest housing stock in the country and if nothing changes in the way that we are able to maintain these homes we're going to lose houses as fast as we're able to build them in it and just like andrew was saying is that what we really what we really want us to build all these new units when we have perfectly viable housing already available um but just the way that you know tenant landlord relationships work it's it's medieval we have no we have no way of actually safely and securely housing ourselves which i know most of us are willing to do we want to be able to play an active role in housing ourselves um speaking of there is plenty of viable housing available right now it's just not accessible and it's because it's being used as short-term rentals where it is occupied for a couple nights a week for insane rates you know 300 400 a night which is not realistic and then they're empty they're completely vacant and they would be perfect housing opportunities for single people artists entrepreneurs like myself small families single moms there there's no reason i mean other than the fact that it's private property and it is up to those individuals to make those choices whether they can afford it or not i know a lot of people have these airbnb's to sustain their own situation but you know if the state was putting their resources into those types of situations instead of the hotel motel situation which is you know short term and not really dignified for the people that are staying in those situations i think we would be able to come together as a community and you know know each other and want to house each other and have it not just be this business transaction where landlords are literally just making their money off of taking the better part of our income as working people um so i think i think that's my biggest point but this is my situation it's not unique um i am so grateful for my support systems that have allowed me to sustain living in this situation but i'm watching people just end up on the street because this is very hard to navigate i have used so much of my time and energy and resources to advocate for myself and my fellow tenants you know going to select board meetings on the phone fighting bills dealing with the the psychological torment of having to deal with a human being who just has absolute disregard for everyone else um and they're just they're they're responsible for all of this yet we are carrying the burden so i i really urge you to continue to invite people like me and other people in this situation to help solve this problem because we want to we want to be a part of this we are frustrated that we don't have more autonomy and means to be a part of the solution well thank you so much for joining us and you know adding your really essential voice for the conversation just as we've been talking about here from everyone it's a very complicated whatever ecosystem of people land owners landowners tenants and um people who are now in a difficult position like yours i think are too often not at the table when we have the import i think nicole i i have spoken to the vba because i think you'd mentioned uh needing some prosa for help and so we've got maybe have some help on the way with the the remont bar association so because your testimony was so compelling two weeks ago it was so well i i appreciate that for you know it would be great to have some personal relief in this matter but really considering this part of the puzzle that is creating such pressure on the housing market um because there's no way i i mean the wages we make are the wages we make so unless everything is coming up to match the market we're we're going to be continually drained of our resources and not be able to house ourselves and have to rely more heavily on systems um that thing yeah and you're speaking to an experience where a lot of people in your position don't have the time and the capacity and the wherewithal to speak to us so you're representing one of the least heard and most important voices in this conversation and i know that takes time that you don't have out of your schedule so we really appreciate this and so much you shouldn't be living in conditions like this in vermont or the country and i'm so grateful that i do have a roof over my head i know that i'm trying very hard to um not rock the boat too much because everyone here right now has a roof so we're not trying to condemn this building or be evicted with nowhere to go so this is a very delicate situation it you know we know we're living in danger but it's better than being out in the elements which is no one should be out there right now we have enough housing to get these people under a roof and that's that's all i have to say we need to do better to get them into safe housing and prioritize our community members before tourists or you know whoever it is that's renting here short-term we're right with you thank you so thank you thank you everyone uh um thank you miss melody for for bringing the the the closure for the morning yeah we're gonna release a informative and helpful morning on lots of levels so uh thanks to my alley and around himstale for helping put together a joint meeting i'll tell you too yes nice work yeah good to have the two committees sitting together uh you know we're so often we know what it's like to be in a hearing that's yes no yes no um and i'm just really heartened that we just heard a lot of agreement and a lot of the unmet need is shared work between us so it's great with that we are we're all here we're gonna