 Okay. We are live. Welcome back. Thank you all for returning for the second half of the discussion today. We are going to, I just want to remind you, we're going to talk, we're talking about housing first and flood recovery second. We have a panel that we'll be talking about housing. There will be another time for questions and answers at the end of that. For those of you on Zoom, we are working through that technology, so let's try the chat again and hopefully it will work this time. If not, you can always email, ask JFO if you have any further questions. And so let's start with the housing panel. We have Mora Collins, who's the executive director of the Vermont Housing Finance Agency. Sue Minter, the executive director of Capstone Community Action, and Gus Sealy, the executive director of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. We have these three bringing different perspectives on the housing challenges that Vermont faces and they're going to do a panel discussion and then at the end of it again we'll have a Q&A. So I will let you all take over. Please join me in welcoming them. Thank you so much for having me. I'm Mora Collins. I'm with the Vermont Housing Finance Agency, but before I tell you about my agency, I want to get your brains thinking, grab a pen, grab a piece of paper or your computer, and I want to challenge you with a question. And no matter what you say, I know you're a competitive group, so this is, there are right answers here. And my presentation here is going to give you the answer to this question, but I want to see if you know the answer first. And the question is, why do—am I still good? Why do we have a housing problem, a housing shortage, a housing affordability crunch in Vermont today? Why do we have a housing problem? I'm going to go on the assumption you all think we have one, so why is it? Write down your answer. VHFA, the Vermont Housing Finance Agency, is where I work. Our agency will be turning 50 years old in April, we'll be having a birthday party that I hope you all come to. And in that time we started making mortgages to lower income Vermonters, usually first time home buyers, by offering below market interest rates to buyers. And that went on for many years, and then since the 2000s we saw that the need was really for down payment assistance, and thanks to your support of the state housing tax credit expansion, we added down payment assistance as something we could offer our borrowers. And then two years ago, you all gave us an appropriation to create a first generation home buyer grant program. And we've been trying to address the racial home ownership gap and the need to get people into homeownership by offering them $15,000 of a grant that can go to help them afford their home. A year ago you also gave us money to address the housing stock shortage through what we were calling as the pilot the missing middle income home ownership development program. So we have awarded those $24 million to help developers build affordable starter homes across the state. Some residents are already living in those homes that have been built. But how you all usually know me is through our rental housing development programs, because VHFA works in partnership with the administration, the department of housing and community development. Rental assistance often comes through the state housing authority or the local housing authorities and VHCB who you're going to hear from today. Together we all layer our resources so that we can fund the creation of affordable rental housing. But VHFA, and I in particular, because it's where I got my start at VHFA 21 years ago, is also known as the data nerds. And I coined that term, I wear it with pride, I love being a nerd, because I like rooting our decision making and data, and I'm going to fly through some data today. And I have the answer of what's causing the housing problem. Right now VHFA has been hired to conduct what HUD requires every five years of a housing needs assessment, and we are doing a comprehensive needs assessment of the entire state and each region, every county. And I'm here to break your hearts and tell you that that report due to HUD's timing schedule means it's not out until May. Not good timing for the legislature, but we have some early data and these numbers aren't changing that much every year that we can imagine where these numbers are going to land. So here is the start of the answers. I don't know what you put down for what's the cause of the housing problem, but I'm going to guess it's on this top ten list of ideas because I give this presentation a lot and I know that your idea probably falls among the ten. Raise your hand if your idea was on this list. And I am very quickly going to fly through ten slides, one per idea here, and show you of its impact on the housing market so that you can have that answer. But I'm going to move fast because I live at this building in the winter and I know you can follow up with me if you want to talk about any of this after, or you're terribly smart enough to go to housingdata.org and you'll find all these charts and answers there. But if you picked not building enough housing as the reason why we have a housing problem, you're right. Cheers to you. We have been dropping in the housing creation since after World War II. Every decade you can see we are adding fewer and fewer housing units. In the last decade, we have been adding about 3,000 homes a year. And in the last two years, we've increased that to about 3,600 homes a year. But if we're going to meet the projections that we think we need for housing, we have to be building about five to, could be 7,000 homes a year. So we're not where we need to be. Now, if you picked the growing cost of construction as the reason for the housing problem, you're right, too. That's also a problem. This data is what VHFA gets in terms of applications for the affordable housing that we construct. And you can see that those costs have increased 73% since 2018. Just in the past year, it went up 34%. And we're starting to get some estimates of applications for 2024. And we see that it's not stopping. Oops, I went too far. Sorry, thank you. So if you look at these numbers and you say, does that chart, I can't see it well enough, does that say that it costs almost a half a million dollars per unit to build affordable housing? You'd be right. But where we'd all be wrong is in the name of my agency and what we call this chart, which is called the cost of housing. And when I say that VHFA finances housing, that's not really true. You know what we also finance? The response to the climate change crisis? We finance the remediation of blight. We finance preserving historic properties. We finance the service costs that AHS's budget can't keep up with. All those costs are in these numbers. We are not just building a housing unit in a cornfield on an open land. We are investing in our downtowns. And that does add somewhat to the complexity of what we do. And that can show up in the costs. So if you were someone who chose shrinking household sizes as an impact on the housing market, not only are you right, but you are brilliant. Because this is one that not a lot of people point to. But I've been guessing that my housing general folks knew this answer. Because folks don't understand why household sizes would matter to housing. But you have to imagine that these are national numbers. This is a national chart because I couldn't find Vermont data that went back as far as 1960. But you can see here that nationally we've seen household sizes drop by 25% since 1960. That means that if the US population never changed by a person and it stayed flat since 1960, we would need 25% more homes. Because at some point as age goes on, our children become adults and they want to move out. And we want them to. That means that divorce is more prevalent. And we find that people who were living happily in one household need more than one home, things change. Vermont has one of the smallest average household sizes. So when you see the average household size on this chart says two and a half people, in Vermont it's only 2.35. And that in Vermont, that number has dropped by 9% since 1990. So if you're wondering why, if our population is not changing, why do we need more homes? It's because our household sizes keep shrinking. Now if you picked that the cause of our housing problem is the out-of-state movers coming to Vermont, can you guess? You'd be right. Look at this chart. It shows that there was a huge spike in out-of-state movers coming to our state. And you can see that the most recent data shows that it's not as much in 2022. And so this leads us to questions. Are these people going to stay? Will we see more of this due to climate impacts or a worsening political environment nationally? I don't have all those answers. But you may remember that last year there was a number going around that our agency was responsible for that had projected that if we were going to hit healthy vacancy rates in a healthy market, we were going to have to add 30 to 40,000 homes by 2030. And that shocked all of us. And some of you thought, well, gee, they really aren't that good at numbers because they don't know the difference between 30 and 40,000 homes. That's a big delta. And I would say it depends on which assumption you want to go by. If you want to look at the pre-pandemic long-term trend of growth in Vermont, then we only need 30,000 homes. But if you're a betting person who wants to, oops, I did it again. If you're a betting person who wants to say that the pandemic growth that we saw is going to continue, then we might need up to the 40,000. Now, if you're someone who thinks you want to blame it on short-term rentals is the cause of the problem, you're right. We have seen a 16% increase in short-term rentals just in the past year. If you're curious about where your town falls in this regard, you can go to housingdata.org and find out how many month-long full-unit short-term rentals there are in every community in the state. I will give you the short answer, which is there's about a dozen towns that are the heavy hitters where this is a big impact on their housing market. I chose Stowe as an example. And I looked at the percentage of short-term rentals compared to how many housing units Stowe has. And it was 25%. That is a huge impact on that community. There are other communities that it doesn't have the same kind of impact. Across the state, I work for a statewide agency, so I like to look at things all across all of us. And from a statewide perspective, I can tell you that we've seen since 2017 that the percentage of short-term rentals went from 2.1% of our housing stock up to 3.6%. But let me put that in perspective. We have long had a lot of vacation homes in this state. We're number two in the nation for having most of our housing stock be vacation homes. And 17% of our housing stock are vacation homes. A bunch of those are the short-term rentals. Some are other homes. So if you picked chronically low wage growth as not keeping up with escalating home prices, you'd be right. That's what's causing the problem. Look at this chart going back. I've been in the state for about 20 years, so you'll notice I like to have my data go back 20 years because I'm self-serving in that way. And you'll see that incomes have been going up 72% over that time, whereas the median rental price and the median for sale price have gone up by 137% or 148%. So there is a growing distance between incomes and what housing costs. And I label this one heading toward a brick wall because it's a little frustrating for the data nerds in the room to have been watching this chart grow and grow over the last 20 years and then to have a few reporters during the pandemic call breathlessly clutching their pearls saying, how did the pandemic break the housing market? To which I show them this chart and say, the pandemic may have exacerbated some things. We have inflation. We have higher material costs. We do have things happening since the pandemic. And yet the systemic structural realities have been at play for a long time. Now, if you're thinking more and you picked that the growing substance misuse or mental health crisis or some of these health care and human services challenges are the reason for the housing problem, you'd be right. These needs drive up housing costs because substance misuse is a big cause and reason for evictions. And evictions leave units vacant during turnover and cost landlords money and can result in higher rents. Often, this is an often cited reason that landlords use for why they convert from year round rentals to short term rentals. And we know that the kind of affordable housing that VHCB and VHFA finances, services are now baked into those housing budgets. We are paying for social services to address these challenges with our housing dollars. And it is hard when AHS's budget can't keep up with this kind of increasing demand. So now, if you picked Act 250, yeah, I'm not going there. I don't have enough time. I'm running short on time. I am very happy that there is a study committee that's looking at this. I can't do it justice in the three minutes I have left. But I am happy that there's a committee looking at how we can make the permitting process faster and more predictable, because time and uncertainty certainly does add to cost. And we clearly know that there have been homes that have not been built as a result of trying to avoid some of this spaghetti supper you see up here. Now, if you picked the local planning and zoning and nimbyism as a reason, you'd be right. Now, this one is hard. I don't have a housing data.org chart on this one. It is hard to quantify the cost of nimbyism, but you can see it in these headlines. And because it's hard to quantify the cost and impact of things that didn't happen, the Vermonters who couldn't find a home here and stay, the businesses that had to keep their ad postings up for longer, and the vibrancy that our downtowns and communities have missed out on because we haven't been willing to embrace density and growth. And so lastly, if you picked the sharp increase in interest rates, which I heard representative Stevens earlier having a question about, you too would be right. What this chart shows you is over the past two years, you can see how the median for sale price has gone up. You can also see how the average interest rate has gone up over that time period. You can see what a mortgage payment therefore has to be. We went from $1,700 to almost $2,600. And the next row shows what the income would have to be for a mortgage lender like VHFA to approve someone who's a renter who wants to be a first-time home buyer. And you can see that that median has gone up to almost $104,000. And the last row in the chart below shows the same thing. I know there's a black bar over it for some of us. But what that's showing is how many renters earn that median income so that they can afford that median priced home. And two years ago, it was 24,500 renters could have theoretically, academically, I don't know their credit score, but they could have afforded that median priced home at the going interest rate. That has dropped to under 5,000 renters. That's a problem. So I started with a challenge for you. And I welcome a good challenge, too, though. I'm up for the challenge. I would be very happy to play a game that my husband and I play. It's similar to the Kevin Bacon 6 degrees of separation game. He's convinced that at any cocktail party, when I get uncomfortable and run out of things to say, I can turn the conversation back to housing. And he quickly steps away to the restroom. And by the time he gets back, I'm talking housing. I'm a one, no, hit wonder here. So I think that I could think of all the committees in this chamber and in the Senate, and I could tie the work you will be doing back to housing. Housing committees, appropriations committees, those are easy, but I think we can easily think about how our energy and natural resources committees, their work is going to impact housing, commerce, economic development, institutions, human services, corrections, it all can go back to housing. But it's complex. And if you have a silver bullet that you think is going to solve this problem, the data does not support you. It's not one thing. We can't wait for the Act 250 study committee to solve our housing problem. We can't ask for appropriations to fund it on their own if we're not also looking at the human services and health care and other things. We need to look at all of us, all of this, and it's going to take all of us. It's going to take a sustained and continuous effort. I'd like to invite my friend Sue up next to take it over from here. Thank you, Mara. And thank you all for inviting us to be a part of your really important conversation as you begin the session soon. I'm Sue Minter, Executive Director of Capstone Community Action. I'm going to apologize. I am feeling under the weather. I'm going to mask butt for when I'm standing before you. But I would recommend keeping your distance. I won't give you a hug. And I have tested negative for COVID. All right, so Capstone Community Action is one of five community action agencies across the state. We are a network. We're called CAPS. And we are a network called the Vermont Community Action Program. We are anti-poverty organizations. Year 50, we are almost 60. Started from the war on poverty in 1965. Housing is one of the many things that we work on. And at Capstone and across the state, we are connected with a huge array of housing services providers. And I've been asked to talk about the challenge of the unhoused. And I'm starting with this slide, which I think comes from something called the point in time count. You will see, it reflects very similar trends that Mora's has. So we can understand that our housing shortage, which I believe was a housing crisis when the pandemic hit, has now become in the wake of July flooding, which we'll talk about later, a housing emergency. And I hope you all feel that sense of emergency and urgency around this issue. I think it's important for us to understand a little bit, if we can, of the data around why are people homeless. This point in time count, it's a one-day count in January of every year that all the networks around the state go out. And we visit folks outside in shelters and in hotels. And in 2023, January of 2023, it had been an 18% increase from the previous year. But when you look at children, children are youngest for monitors. The number of children in families unhoused increased by 36% in that last year. This worries me greatly, and we'll get back to that. So we want to talk about what is happening, and I want you to understand how your state agencies help to try to support and manage this growing challenge. I don't believe we have a system in place. We depend a lot on a network of local activists from the interfaith network of nonprofits, many of whom are fledgling and depend on volunteers, and in some cases, organizations like Capstone and others who actually run shelters and service providing. I want to say that it's really within the Department of Children and Families that most of this work occurs. The Economic Services Division is where folks go, for example, on a cold weather night. Maybe not today. They won't be eligible for the cold weather exception for our general assistance emergency housing. I believe it has to be under 20 degrees. And every day that it is cold and people have nowhere to live, they must ask whether or not they are eligible on that day by going to the ESD, which is overwhelmed by calls. Many times people are waiting two to four hours to find an answer to that question. Luckily, on December 15, we're going to go back to how we were doing this in the pandemic and have a season of sheltering through the hotel motel program. And I think many of you understand that we did an extraordinary thing as a state by housing everyone who needed housing as the pandemic approached. Because when disease could affect everyone equally, we made sure that everyone equally had access to housing. I wish we could sustain that commitment to everyone. And I want to also share that the Office of Economic Opportunity, which is also within DCF, provides essential housing called the Housing Opportunity Program, HOP. And that program has grown thanks to your investment substantially during the pandemic to help provide shelter. We actually now have, I believe, 428 shelter beds. Those are most of them permanent. Some are seasonal, so only in the cold weather months. Most of them are for individuals and not for families with children. But HOP not only helps fund shelter providers around the state and throughout all of your communities, it also provides services. Capstone, our focus in the anti-poverty organization is to help people in crisis and help give them the tools to get out of poverty. So one of the things we work on, thanks to HOP, is services. We help people with housing navigation. We have emergency rental units. We do prevention, trying to mediate with landlords and tenants, trying to help people become good tenants, better tenants. We also have some flexible financial resources to help people with first and last month's rent. So that is sort of the system of services. But I guess we want to think about why. Why are so many people unhoused? I think you saw 10 reasons in terms of a housing shortage. But when we're looking at the folks who really are unsuccessful in this moment, I think it's really multifaceted. It's obviously the cost of rental and home ownership. It's also the increasing cost and lack of access to health care and mental health care. It's the overall aging of our population, especially those with fixed incomes. It's our mental health crisis. It's our substance use crisis. But I want to underscore that underlying all of this is really the growth of the depth and breadth of poverty in Vermont, but not only in Vermont across this country. So why? We want to look at who. Who is it that's homeless? This is something called the HMIS, the Housing Homeless Management Information System. Some folks are constantly getting data for us to analyze. So we actually are tracking who is there, who, why are they moving out of homelessness or into homelessness? What are the demographics? I want to point out how concerned I am that 25% of the folks now in what's called the coordinated entry system, that's when people are assessed. And we know how to put them into the HMIS and track them over time. 25% are children. That has an impact not only on our Agency of Human Services budget, but our education budget. We know the story. I was talking to some staff this week of a father of two who became the partial custodian of his two children when his partner was no longer capable. And he had the care of his two kids. He had been working 60 to 70 hour weeks as a landscaper. But there was no child care. So he no longer could work. He needed to take care of his kids. He no longer could pay rent, found himself in the hotel. Child care. I want to also point out our aging demographic. This is something you may have heard yesterday on the NPR and VPR series. You know that we're an aging demographic. But what happens when you are aging, your income is fixed and your needs increase? The over 65 population has increased. In 2019, we had 152 people unhoused. And in 2023, 401. That is a very sensitive population who has special needs. And again, why? We had folks come to our office, I think, about a year ago, three siblings in their 60s. They had been renters paying their rent for 30 years. All three of them with intellectual disabilities supported in our office by another sibling who wanted help. There was no housing for them because the rental unit, the rent increased. They were essentially not able to pay, evicted, and ended up in our lobby. Thankfully, we had just worked with Good Samaritan Haven to open a new shelter, the Welcome Center, on the Barrymont Piliar Road, a former motel. So thankfully, those three siblings were able to find a safe place to call home. I spoke with the director of Good Sam yesterday. They are still there. And this is another important thing to realize that has really changed. It's the number of the lengths of stay in our shelter system and our hotel system. It used to be about two weeks. Now it's usually a year or more because there really aren't places, generally speaking, to help people. This is a complex graph, and I'm sorry for that. But it's why I want you to understand something that I only really came to clarify recently, which is our homeless population is not a static population. This shows you, I can't remember if it's the green, the green is either entering or exiting and the black is the opposite. So we have people leaving our shelter system successfully. But unfortunately, we're losing the battle because more people are entering the system and faster than we can help them exit. But I really want you to know it is not static that our programs are actually making a difference and that the investments that you have made continue to make a difference. And that's going to show you something. It's going to show you that we have housed, I believe it's 4,000, there it is, 4,000 people. There's a lot of hope in that number. Hope like the system in a young man who came to our office. He was Ukrainian. He came here before the pandemic, before the war. He was recruited to be a laborer. He thought he was actually coming to be a project manager. He has an engineering degree, but found himself a laborer who became injured. He could no longer work. He had no workman's comp. And a year ago, we had a legislative forum at Capstone. The member from Berrytown was there. He heard this young man speak and he became one of his champions, along with my staff. He went to Bernie's office. He was able to get his residency, but not only that, he had workforce. He was able to get an e-wrap, the emergency rental assistance program through Capstone. He was able to get workforce development through Capstone and our partners. And I'm so happy to tell you, he is now renting successfully. His kids are in school and you know what? He has a job in our weatherization program at Capstone. So I want you to know that there are successes, but it's a range of challenges and it requires holistic thinking. Services are essential. We do what's called supportive housing. I'm not gonna go down the list, but it isn't just about units. It's about the services. We'll just call it holistically wrap-around services. Everything from prevention to helping people be long-term successful in their new home. We obviously need to create new facilities, ones that recognize the complexity of the folks that are being, are unhoused now. We have to have a holistic view of the challenge. We realize Vermont is not unique. This is happening across the country and it's not unrelated to our changing climate across the globe and the impact of migration. I wanna really emphasize the problem is structural. And it is the result of the increasing disparity and economic dislocation in our economy. So just as we cannot treat diabetes or chronic disease, in the emergency department, we have to think holistically about health, behavioral health, and support. I wanna just emphasize this is not a one-year fix. It's not a budget problem. It's a problem for all of you in your various jurisdictions. I wanna make sure that everyone knows fundamentally there is great work being done and it is essential that you all prioritize the range of ways that you're helping our state at every level of this socioeconomic ladder. And of course, we need more affordable housing. So I'm gonna hand it to VHCB. It is a real privilege to be asked to come back. I have a good friend. Some of you knew the late Paul Brune and he would get me pumped up when there was something important to do by saying don't screw up. And I guess since you were having me back, Catherine, I didn't screw up last year. I'm delighted to be here with Mora who is always educating all of us about how this stuff happens and how we have to think broadly about it. And a few of you, Topper at least, knows that when I was a young man, I did the job that Sue is doing and I'm so grateful for your leadership because what you do and what you lead every day is a staff that's looking at hardship and despair and tries your best to turn it to hope. As I think about what to say to you today, the Housing and Conservation Board is an institution you invented in the 1980s back when real estate was skyrocketing in value and people were feeling displaced from their homes and communities and from land. And we have been at work in partnership with VHFA since those days in all the various programs that you see listed up there. I'm not gonna read them off to you. And as Mora said, whatever committee you're on, if you're on the Ag Committee, don't want us to stop serving our farm worker community. If you're on the Transportation Committee, you know we're having troubles with labor force, same thing with the Commerce Committee. Everywhere we look, we need your help and every committee I think has a role to play, not just the Housing Committees and the Appropriations Committees and we'll talk more about that as we go on. Because the hour is late, I'm gonna go pretty quickly through a number of these slides and report to you to begin with on what's been going on with the funding that you have made available to us and others. And this is focused on rental housing only. There's lots of other kinds of housing, but about $218 million has been invested in almost 1,900 homes around the state. A little over 1,600 of them are new homes added to the market. And those dollars that you've appropriated have brought in another almost $400 million to get that housing built. So the governor's very proud when he talks about the housing bond that he worked on with Mora and I and a great success. We did 800 units over just under four years. We're now talking about 2,000 units in less than three years. It's a big deal. The number that suicided a moment ago, 4,100 people households successfully rehoused is way more than AHS had ever worked on in any previous decades. A few months ago I was talking with a former DCF commissioner, Steve Dale, who'd been on the board of the Good Samaritan Haven back in the late 80s and early 90s. And he said we had a steady clientele of seven folks. We added 50 shelter beds with the funding you've made available in recent years. The problem has just gotten much worse, but we are responding. We work primarily not exclusively with a set of nonprofit organizations that cover every corner of the state. And about 2016, the governor asked that they set a target that 15% of all housing be available to folks who are experiencing homelessness. They've doubled what was then 12%. They're now up to 25% of the housing made available. So they've become a resource in this crisis to get folks rehoused. Just to go very quickly, these are projects that came online this summer from small towns to Colchester. About a year and a half ago, Sue called me up one day and said, we need a lot more help in Lamoille County. We've added 60 apartments between Stowe and Morrisville and a new shelter will open in Hyde Park. We're hitting West Burke. We're hitting all over the state in Brattleboro with unused buildings. And here's what's gonna happen this winter. And yes, we're using mobile homes on infill sites prior to the allocation of funding to it for that purpose and we'll continue to do that work all over the state. And here's what will come online this spring, a big deal in Hartford, one of the worst financially pinched communities for affordable housing. We'll add close to 100 apartments this spring and summer there and recovery residences across the state. You saw one a moment ago in Bennington, one in Barry. Both of those are for women recovering. This one in Chittenden County will be for a mixed group. I need to say a word about permanent affordability, which is in our statute and a purpose of us coming into existence. When we were invented by Governor Cunin, there was a big project that she and then Mayor Sanders were worried about in Burlington, Northgate Apartments, the largest rental complex still in the state and the developer was free after 20 years, a property close to the lake to do whatever he wanted and most people thought condominium conversion was what was gonna happen. And we saved Northgate and made it permanently affordable. It has a nonprofit board with people who live there as a majority of that board. It's been a great success for 33 years. If we had to replace it today, back then we spent two and a half million dollars in a $22 million real estate deal. Today it would be a $150 million proposition to replace it. So this policy of not letting the affordable investments you make disappear is one that I think is financially wise. But what's also important about it is that we don't displace people. And you saw a year or so ago that the Bo brothers were gonna displace 24 mostly new American families from their homes in Wanooski. They backed down from that proposition, said they were gonna repair all the apartments and everybody would stay. And about a week ago there was a story in Digger that they're gonna tear the complex down. This time they're saying they'll offer relocation assistance. But the question for all those families is relocation to where? Can they stay in their school system? Can they stay with their childcare providers? Can they stay with their community or are they gonna be somewhere else? And right now as in all of the state there's just not enough housing. We do this with home ownership as well and that little inset quintessential Vermont Cape we invested just $12,000 in back in 1992. Homeowner bought it, got divorced, then remarried, moved on to conventional home ownership. A divorced mom moved in, she got married, she moved on to conventional home ownership. It's now on its fourth homeowner. It's $12,000 spent 30 years ago has launched three people and four families into home ownership. We think that that's a great way to steward the public's investment. And there are about 1,500 homes like this all over the state. The other picture is a new homeowner in Barrie taking care, she's a widowed mom taking care of her adult kids with some disability. We think that this is a great way to steward the public's investment. And every year 30, 40, 50 homes come on the market and don't need further subsidy in order to keep them affordable. So we like this very much as one approach to solving the problem. I talked a bit about this nonprofit network we work with over the course of the pandemic as we try to solve that problem of where are people gonna go. They've taken more than 1,000 unhoused folks households into that housing. That's causing some strains. We need more support from the human service system but it is working. And since the beginning of this year 40% of turnovers have gone to unhoused folks. So they are I think a great resource and a great reason to invest in that network and in this policy. A bit about community support. It is growing. The city of St. Albans has used a TIF district to help create the capacity to build what'll be I think several hundred units when they're all done. The couple you see on Congress Street had been living homeless for a number of years and then at Harbor Place a facility that the state had provided support for for a number of years pre-pandemic. They're both in recovery. She's now enrolled to become a homeowner taking those classes and hope springs eternal for them. So TIF districts can be a way to help this crisis. Lots of partnerships, lots of partnerships between the human services community and the housing community. The domestic violence and organization in Chittenden County tripled its capacity in Colchester. Recovery residents in Barrie. Permanent support of housing in Bennington. A new shelter in part, you heard the story on public radio because of Act 47 has been permitted in St. Johnsbury, the only one that will be open this winter in the Northeast Kingdom. And then we hope next summer we'll see Marsh House in downtown Waterbury get underway and there was a partnership between Down Street and Upper Valley Services. And for those of you who've been working on future housing for people with adults with developmental disabilities, there'll be three apartments set aside here and three more in Berlin for that population. So the partnerships are really important. One other note, in addition to the rental housing, we've invested in the shelter system. We've added 198 beds across the state. We've made lots of shelters much more safe to be in than they were pre-pandemic when it was often one bed bunk bed next to the other. Housing shows up when there isn't housing in lots of ways in terms of cost. And this is a measurement done by the medical center when we opened Beacon Apartments, another hotel to housing conversion of how much they were spending on folks before they were housed and how much after they were housed. And the burden on them is coming down when people are housed. There can be regular appointments. People can, if you're a diabetic, you have a refrigerator for your medication. All kinds of good things happen when you have housing. A moment about regulatory reform and like Mora, I'm not gonna talk about Act 250, but I am gonna talk about a couple things that I think are important for all of you to think about. This project in Putney is in a designated village center. And that means that the community approved that designation. The Regional Planning Commission signed off on it and it was approved at the state level. A single person took it to court. They lost by summary judgment at Superior Court. They lost at the Supreme Court. They've taken it back, challenging the jurisdictional opinion that the developers got from Act 250. So Mora said we can't measure the cost. But what was planned two years ago and the pricing today will add $2.5 million in cost to a 25-unit development. That's just the reality. So delay does cost us something. I'm not saying people shouldn't have the right to appeal, but we've had a lot of democratic process to create this district and now we're in the mud, in the mire on this. New Hampshire's adopted a housing board of appeals that's making decisions by statute within 150 days and so far the board has been able to make them within 120 days and it's less expensive than going to court. So those of you on judiciary, let's take a look at this and see whether we have a model that can be faster than the court system to get us to resolution. The corrective action plan process, something that's administered at DEC is a very slow, long and painful one. Maybe the outcomes are always right, but developers are telling me that it's taking them 12 to 18 months to get a plan approved. In the case of Windsor, we will move dirt and our standards are higher than those of the Environmental Protection Agency. I'm not smart enough to tell you that our standards shouldn't be that high, but we're gonna spend a million dollars to move dirt off this site and probably into a landfill and we only have one in the state. So I'd say we need to at least figure out whether we can have a faster process, but I'd say we also need to look at the standards. I'm a big advocate and I said this to you last year and Howard Dean said it in his farewell address. We love our environment in Vermont. We don't wanna sprawl out and that means we need to grow vertically. The picture here is a building on one fifth of an acre built for veterans in Winooski, five stories tall. So if you'd like to tell your constituents what is 125 units an acre look like, there it is. The historic preservation folks in Windsor objected and we lost five stories on the planned building there. It was gonna be too tall, too near a historic building. They didn't wanna have to have a court fight over that. They've gone ahead and will have 25 units instead of 30. All of us need to ask ourselves if we don't wanna sprawl out to the countryside that we all love, are we willing to grow vertically and what can you do as a matter of policy to enable that to happen more easily? Catherine asked that we talk about what's not working so well. Where do we miss? My friend Michael Monti says that the real estate is the easy part when you're building housing. These are two buildings that we bought with coronavirus relief funds. For those of you who don't remember, we had to have those funds expended within nine months of the state receiving them. So people sprinted really, really hard. These are two hotels, one in Burlington on I think St. Paul, Shelburne Road. That was bought by a faith-based group. And the city wanted a low barrier shelter and they delivered it. And after operating it for two years, they said we can't staff it adequately. It's a problem in the neighborhood. We need to get out. Because of our permanent affordability restrictions, they couldn't just sell it. They've transferred it to the Champlain Housing Trust. CVOEO has agreed to operate it, but at a lower capacity. Two great organizations worked together on the Chalet, the GroundWorks Collaborative and the Wyndham Windsor Housing Trust. As I was talking with Representative Howard as we were entering here, the drug dealer took over one of the apartments, began to sell drugs. It's been a nightmare for community, for the police, really difficult. Too many folks with high acuity needs all in one place is not a good idea. And we also need, as we were talking about, the connections to other issues to have more treatment options for people beyond the recovery beds that we have today. So those are tough. When you sprint, you also make mistakes. We will repurpose both of these buildings ultimately, but we'll spend another $3 million on that building in Burlington. So while apartments are really expensive, shelter is not inexpensive, and it'll be $200,000 a bed by the time we get done getting it to a standard that we all want it to be. The market, the market sometimes leaves buildings behind. I've had this conversation with Senator Ingalls. We hope that there's gonna be new home ownership along with rental housing up at the old Sacred Heart school complex in Newport, great views of the lake, but it's been sitting vacant for, I don't know how many years, a long time now. Ben High in Bennington, we hope will be under construction next summer. It's also sat vacant for 20 years. Two successes, the French block here in Montpelier had been vacant for 70 years, the upper stories. Now good housing, your Appropriations Committee visited it last spring, and the Wilson Block right in the heart of downtown Springfield. There are four apartments for homeless youth in that much restored building. A word about climate. And that is to say, this is a picture of Barry which the Senate Economic Development Committee visited just a few months ago. It's a devastated neighborhood. And we need to think about where we build. There was a story, national story on the NPR program marketplace. There used to be seven homes on that site in Northfield. It flooded after Irene. We did buyouts. When the July flooding hit, the park was upset for about three days. The debris was removed. It's functioning as a park. We're gonna need to do more of that. And we're gonna need to do that across state government. Again, the map you see is a flood restoration project in Brattleboro, that is underway today. And the picture of Red Clover Commons is because a public housing development is built not in the flood plain, but in the floodway and it needed to be decommissioned. And we built 75 apartments for folks to move there. So as you're thinking about the range of housing issues, how we build, where we build, climate is an increasing consideration. And I will say, while we flew by one photo of a Net Zero mobile home park in Waltham, the energy policies that we have are not, at least in my opinion, adequately addressing equity. And so those of you who are on the committees that are looking at our energy policies and our energy investments and how PUC and DPS are gonna deploy those funds, we need to make those investments into housing. I would say to all of you, with all the funding flowing through the bipartisan infrastructure bill, that's another way to support developers by getting the cost of roads and sidewalks, water and sewer extensions off the backs of developers and out of the budgets that Mora and I need to finance. Pipeline. There is huge opportunity. The city of Montpelier actually went and bonded and bought land outside at the old Elk Scalf course, where they hope that there'll be both open space and housing developed. Gradleboro is talking about making the municipal building form a high school available for housing. We're at work in Greensboro. We expect applications for more than 500 units in the balance of this year. The funding still left to us will let us get to maybe 300 or 325 of those homes. Lots of people use the phrase full funding for VHCB. The reality of where we are today is that that funding formula is inadequate to today's need and today's costs. When we did the housing revenue bond with the governor in 2017, housing cost about half of what it is today. If we're gonna serve people of modest means and we serve people up to median income, though the appropriators often ask us to focus lower than that, we're not gonna do it with market housing. So I completely agree that we need to look at the regulatory process. You'll get a report not just on Act 250, but how to modernize the designation programs. Those are helpful. But without the dollars, we're not gonna be building housing for the people who are most in need. We're not gonna be building housing for the 400 elders and the many children that Sue talked about. But we're not gonna be building housing for the low wage workforce who keep our hospitals clean, who work in food service, who support our travel and tourism industry. $100,000 is not gonna get there. But I also wanna say a word of the importance of home ownership. Because when people don't leave the rental market and they make 80, 90, $100,000 a year and they're competing with the folks on fixed incomes who are making less than 20,000, we know who wins out, that chart that showed you how much rents are going up is really a critical one to pay attention to. We can't do anything about interest rates that's beyond all of our pay grades, but we can build more housing. And I think what we're at, the moment we're at from my perspective is it's been great that you've supported us with one time funding. I think the question every policymaker has to ask themselves is, if housing is critical to the workforce, to the demographic challenges we face, to protecting our most vulnerable citizens, how do we make a decade long commitment to change the trajectory when we're on? So I'm gonna stop there and let's see, we've got about 20 minutes left. And our plan was to ask ourselves to have a little bit of dialogue and then open it up. So do we wanna stay with that or should we just open it to the floor? We're just gonna open it up. So who's got questions for any of the three of us? Yep. I want you to grab a mic so we can all stand. I still have a question for Maura. You kind of alluded to it, but earlier when you talked about short-term rentals, do you have any idea what that looks like as far as how many of the short-term rentals are actually properties that have moved from traditional renting or is the majority of those houses and properties that wouldn't be on the normal running market anyway, so like second homes and things like that? We don't have good information on that and it doesn't exist. It's not for lack of trying, let me tell you, because I often tell the story of, I'm a skier and so sometimes for February break, my family will go stay on a mountain for the long weekend, school break and it used to be I'd call the mountain and say, hey, can I rent a condo for three or four nights? Now, I can do that or I can go on Airbnb and I can find that same condo. So when we see that uptick in Airbnbs, some of them are not new Airbnbs. They've always been short-term rentals. They continue to be short-term rentals. They just have a platform now that we all know about through these websites. Where I get worried is investor-owned short-term rentals where they are buying up tens, hundreds of units and these are not Vermonters who have ADU on their property that they're renting out but instead they are, this is quite a business item. So I can't say specifically but we do have, thanks to the Senate Economic Development Committee really challenged us to get more data and so this year I'll be presenting to some of the housing committees expanded information about how much people are earning off short-term rentals and we can compare those numbers of those earnings to what our regular rental charges are and I think you'll start to see the lure of this business opportunity that people have when they may have a second home or an investment property that using it as short-term rental is becoming much more economically appealing than a year-long rental that comes with other challenges. But no, I can't tell you exactly how many of these were vacant, now short-term rental or vacation homes to short-term rental, doesn't exist cleanly. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. We've got a couple of questions. I've heard, we've heard a lot about affordable housing for quite a number of years. Is it such a thing as affordable housing without state or federal assistance? There are lots of folks who rent homes, own property and rent them at a lower rate than they might be able to demand on the market. But you know, I can think of a tiny home in my village of East Calus that a few years ago probably one bedroom, 600 square feet, maybe 700, because I knew the lady who lived there for 50 years, she passed away and somebody else bought it and it's now 1500 a month or 1700 a month, one of those. So, but yeah, there are people who just are out there renting homes and the prices are affordable. But getting anybody to build anything new that's gonna be affordable is not gonna happen. It costs too much. That brings up my second question. What does Vermont Housing Consider Affordable as far as monthly rent or mortgage payments and go to make it affordable housing? Is it 600 a month or 1600 a month? It's really a ratio and so it depends on your income. As the housing committees will know I say, to Jeff Bezos all the homes in Vermont are affordable but to the working Vermonters they aren't. So a good rule of thumb if you're looking for a standard is can the median income household afford the median rental price or can they afford to buy the median priced home for sale? And right now we know that those answers are emphatically no, there is a disconnect. We also know that over half of our renters are cost burdened meaning that they're paying more than 30% of their income for their rent and we know that, I shouldn't say the number, I think it's under 20% of homeowners are paying more than 30% of their income for their rent and their mortgage and their taxes and the like. So when you have these growing numbers of people who are paying more than a third of their income then it means they don't have enough income for childcare, healthcare, unexpected expenses and all that. But really it depends on you want your median, your midpoint to be able to afford the median priced home available. Let me also answer your question a little different way. When I did Sue's job back in the 1980s the best thing we could do for a person of modest means was to get them a section eight certificate because that meant they could rent and they'd pay no more than 30% of their income. Whether they were on a disability income or they were a working person, the feds would cover the difference between whatever 30% of their income was and the cost of the rent, okay. Today in Chittenden County, the fair market rents for a two bedroom have just been moved up into the high teens, something like $16, $1700 a month. Three out of four people who've been given certificates by the State Housing Authority over the course of the pandemic, they get six months to find a place. Three out of four have had to turn their certificates back in because there is not enough affordable housing even though the feds are gonna help pay that fair market rent. I guess it depends what part of the state you're be talking about as far as what an average rent or mortgage might be. Yeah, the Chittenden County rents are clearly higher than other parts of the state. I can just add to that if I could. All right, thank you. Our organization serves Central Vermont, LaMoyale County, Washington County, Orange and parts of Windsor. And one of the challenges of this program is that we can't provide those subsidies even if they're there in a rental unit that is above what the feds say. And so many times we've had to just pass on even that opportunity. And I do wanna just point out that there are many great landlords who are providing the most important, which is some affordable rental units in addition to what we're able to build, but they are getting fewer and fewer and it's harder and harder for them. They work with us to try to make sure those tendencies are successful. Thank you. One last question. I saw on the video here there was talk of 165 homes are being built. I don't know which section this was out of here, but I'm just wondering how many of those homes are gonna be built in the Northeast Kingdom, if any? I'm not sure which number you're referring to. I'm not either, it was on the display. What I can tell you is if you're in St. John'sbury, you'd be very happy with the work that's been done and has been completed. If you're in your part of the state, there are two projects underway in Newport. This coming year that are rental and then there are plans for the Sacred Heart Complex for 24 condominiums there in the school building. So there are things going on and as you know, we were up there to begin the school construction. The Career Tech Ed program has begun a house as well. So we are working in the kingdom along with other parts of the state and you saw that rural edge would love to take on that building in Greensboro. Great, thank you very much, appreciate it. Topper, and then Laura. Can you hear me? Thanks for the presentation, it was real good. I do have a question though and I think maybe it will go to the Housing Finance Agency, but it may not. I'm aware that there are a lot of trail apocs, I guess we call them, with vacancies. They've been there for a long while. My question is, is anything being done about getting homes or putting people in homes that might already be on the slab? Absolutely, I actually think Gus is great to answer this one but there are several programs to have, to fill in those lots that are vacant. There's also been funding that you all have done to improve the slabs, sometimes more modern manufactured homes need wider, stronger, bigger pads and so there's ways to help communities parks with that. There's also more money to help with infrastructure, that's what we mostly see that communities need is water and sewer and that's really holding them back from achieving their full density and then a home ownership program to also help with communities. I know a lot of that's flowed through VHCB though Gus. So we are working with parks, park owners on a regular basis. We have done a bunch of infill. Recently also we made a small grant for Barrie to identify new infill sites because of all the destruction in the North End. So we're working to that end now. I'll call out just that one opportunity I see is that the state's funding through the Agency of Natural Resources to help with those infrastructure needs comes in after the project has been done, the money's available at the end. And so what happens is that VHF gets asked to do a bridge loan until that money is available from ANR. I know the Community Foundation also does that. That means that these communities are paying interest on a loan during a time that they're waiting for the state's dollars to come in and they have to get a loan from us to do that. I see that that's an opportunity that we could be working with the Agency of Natural Resources to see if there's a way that that money could be available sooner to these projects and save them that interest cost. In response to the flood in July, there is forthcoming a manufactured home improvements being made for impacted flood survivors in Montpelier. So we're gonna see some FEMA trailers, a new manufactured home for, I believe, it was trying to be 32 different families. I do wanna just say, because I haven't had a minute to, but we've had a tremendous increase in folks in housing insecurity and crisis because of the flood. 6,000 people have applied for FEMA. Right now, we know of 270 some odd folks who don't have adequate heating as we approach winter and we're very concerned about people living in those conditions. The FEMA manufactured home is one tiny piece of a solution for some lucky families. And I hope that they get going pretty quick because I know where they're stored and I was up there yesterday and I don't see any lines for sewage and all that being dug yet and it's getting cold. And that's not a negative comment. Yeah, thanks. Can you tell me how or if we are tracking investments in terms of units that are built, that are available for folks that are not income qualified or not subsidized, publicly subsidized, sort of building off of representative Smith's question, I think, but I've got some kids in their 20s that had a heck of a time finding housing. So how are we tracking that public investment in those types of units being developed? Well, there's not a lot of public investment going into that. I mean, we do have ways of tracking through permit data and starts and through town clerks and the RPCs. We can get data on how many homes are coming online. Sometimes we have a hard time knowing if those are primary residences or vacation homes, again, when 17% of your housing stock or vacation homes, you can't look at permit data and assume that those are all primary residences. So when we get excited about how many homes are starting or being built, you can imagine that maybe 20% or more are going to be for not your own use. But for public subsidy, there was, I don't know what the official term is, but the waterfall provision that in July, the financial teams got together, VHFA was able to get $10 million for a rental revolving loan fund program. That's a brand new program you all created through appropriations. And that is gonna allow us to subsidize interest rates to developers of rental housing. And the income limits on that goes up to 150% of the area median income. So much higher than the programs, the affordable programs that we typically administer. And that program, the applications are opening up next week. We've had public hearings around the state to generate interest. We are expecting tens of millions of dollars of applications for the $10 million we'll have available. Yep. So I would just note, before that was income restricted, it was the only housing that was being created, new housing that was being brought online in our region for working verminters that were not income sensitized. And I wanna be clear that so far, none of that money has been doled out yet and I don't know that we're gonna be able to hit every community with $10 million. And so there still won't be that resource available that brought it. But that resource is income dependent. Yes. And it was not previously, I believe. The rental, the rental. It didn't exist before. It's a brand new program with income restrictions. There wasn't, I can't think of a public source that didn't have income restrictions. Rehab program. Rehab program. I'll talk to you afterwards. There are sometimes deals we do where we don't restrict all the units in a project. So there has been that as well. And usually when we're funding stuff and it's affordable up to median income, that's at the market rents. So that happens as well from time to time. So you would have data on the unrestricted units that have been built? They're built within the context of some units where restricted and some were not. So I can get that for you. Thank you, Gus. Okay. I think there was a hand up over here a bit ago. But if not. Thanks. I heard that the state is being encouraged or has plans to purchase land for mobile home setup. And I just wondered what, if you were having any luck with selection or how that process is gonna work. I think what the state, what you actually did in the budget bill was to set aside $10 million. And you asked us to make it available for vacant lots in mobile home parks. And that, we've done a bunch of public information sessions on that. We have an application across from one provider for seven units across three parks. We have interest from a private sector provider up in St. Johnsbury to do four or five homes, couple lots in Derby. It has not taken off. We are in the counties impacted by the floods. We're competing with FEMA who's looking for lots as well. And one of the issues for rental housing is that many parks view themselves and wanna be home ownership places they don't want to introduce rental housing into the parks. So we're up against that. But you saw some slides where there's seven homes that have just been delivered to a park in Beddington where there were seven vacancies. So that's a strategy we are using, any chance we can get. Yes, I wondered if there was any data that you have in the average cost of a household. I think from your graph was close to $500,000, four to five to build a new home that separated out materials, labor, utilities, regulation. Is this something so we can kind of get a visual of where all that money is going and maybe we can get at that piece of it? Is there any of that kind of data? More correct me if I'm wrong, but in rental housing generally the hard costs are about 70% of the cost of a project and 30% are what are called soft costs. And partially because we often use this federal tax credit which has to be syndicated and it's a complicated financial transaction that helps drive that cost up. But another data point that Maura gave me last year was that the average newly constructed single family home in Vermont cost $550,000 a little over a year ago. And I can tell you, because my daughter wanted to do a deal with Huntington Homes that a 1500 square foot home from them last winter was gonna, two stories was gonna cost 438. That didn't include any of the infrastructure, the land cost, the driveway, drilling the well, putting the septic in. So that's where the market has gone. Every few years we do a study of the cost drivers in affordable housing. It's hard to get market rate data. A lot of private developers don't want to tell us what they're spending on everything. But we do know what the applications we get. And so in 2019 we studied this issue extensively looking at all the applications we've gotten across the state and looked at how much are we spending as a result of services and housing? But also on land, on developer fees, on material costs, labor, delays, permitting regulations, all that. And we have a report on our website, again from 2019 that lists out what those drivers are and compares it to both New England and national numbers. And we tried to get as much market rate information to compare what's happening in the affordable sector to the market rate sector and try to get as much as we could. And with that I can tell you that in Vermont our costs are in line with what we see in New England. They are a bit higher than national where some states don't even have zoning and don't have any kind of permit restrictions. But there were recommendations of what could be done to address costs and we are working our way through those recommendations. And so this is something that we take very seriously as these costs escalate. But I can also tell you that again, over the past 20 years at least, as we see the median price of a new construction single family home grow, we also see the median price of the affordable rental units that we fund grow in lockstep. And that has been the case for the past 20 years. There's nothing new happening now. I think we're just seeing a lot of these costs continue to increase. Now I happen to see a woman with a hook behind me. Maybe one more question. And if there is one more, I don't know. Are there some? Thank you. And I want to thank you for the work you do. I'm just wondering how practical it is to convert empty office space into housing. I'll take a first crack at that. I can't tell you a whole lot about how easy office space is. It really depends on the kind of building that it is and whether it will easily accommodate, for instance, a double loaded corridor. So there's apartments on either side or not. We did, we took a John Deere dealership across from the high school in Rutland and turned it into nine apartments at the beginning of the pandemic. And that was hugely expensive in part because of the, although today it looks like a bargain because costs have gone up so much in three years. But it came out pretty well. I think it depends with office space on how much interior space you actually have that isn't gonna let natural light get there and that kind of thing. It's not the easiest conversion, but on the other hand in Bennington with the old block there that's been the subject of a big investment, there's some very nice apartments in that building where the court used to be and so on. So it's building by building dependent. We get asked also about converting dorms at the state colleges and there are a couple buildings that look like good candidates, but most of them are too narrow for a double loaded corridor. On the other hand, we'll now have a conversation in some cases about could classroom space make a better conversion and we'll look at that. Any idea is a good idea. We're interested in any possibility. Yeah, I think every idea is an important idea. There are definitely cities around this country who are looking quite seriously at how to convert their real estate in their downtowns. We aren't trying to do that, but we sure are trying to add density. I just wanna say thank you all so much for taking time. I really want you to know this issue affects every one of your constituents, no matter what their income, but especially your employers who are really struggling to find the workforce they need. And every one of you can be a part of this solution and I thank you for your time. We can make a difference. We are a great state. We have done extraordinary things and you all have been investing and making a difference for the last, however long you've been here. And I know it's hard work and we appreciate it and we really appreciate your taking time to care about these issues. I don't think anybody can say more than Sue just did in the way of thank you, but I thank you. It is so great to be in a place where the motto is freedom and unity and working on this issue lets that happen. Thank you. Yes. Well, that was a lot of information to absorb and think about as you move into this session and we have now, we're moving on from the housing panel. We thank you, Mora, Gus and Sue for that and we're now gonna move on to a flood update and Douglas Farnham is the chief recovery officer. He's charged with coordinating recovery efforts along with ongoing historic community revitalization work and he's here to talk to you about where things are now. Thank you, Catherine. So it's good to see everybody today. Again, Douglas Farnham, I'm the chief recovery officer for the state of Vermont. I was appointed at some point in the middle of the flood event because it lasted from July 7th. From a FEMA perspective, there was a break between the 21st and August 3rd, but from Vermont's perspective, we were really being inundated with water from July 7th through August 5th in particular and at some point in that, I was appointed chief recovery officer. So of course, whenever you prepare a presentation, you immediately start to wordsmith as soon as you start to go through it. Leveraging FEMA funds is actually a bit narrower than what we're doing. We're leveraging federal funds in general. FEMA is our primary partner in looking at our recovery, but we are really looking at all different sources of federal funds. USDA Rural Development, Housing and Urban Development, Economic Development Authority, I'm sorry, I'm trying to stay away from acronyms. And FEMA, of course, Federal Emergency Management Agency is a big source of that and a central coordinator in it. I would also apologize before we get into this. This presentation is on recovery and it does not include or really mention or talk about much all of the amazing work that was done in the response category by a lot of our community partners, like Capstone, like our local select boards, local emergency management directors, it doesn't speak to that. So there was an amazing amount of work that went in between July, August, September at the local level, at the regional level of the regional planning commissions. And it's not, it's just focused on a different thing, but I wanted to acknowledge that our short-term response to the flood was amazing. Obviously it didn't go perfectly, but there were many, many hundreds of people working together in Vermont to get us through that. And it's not, you know, intentional. So I'll start off with the background, Vermont's flood experience. And again, with the wordsmithing, if I could go back and change the slide in time for this, I would say Vermont's disaster experience. Because really what we're gonna be trying to do looking forward is focusing on disaster resilience, not just flood resilience. Flood resilience is one of our biggest risks. It is categorized by Vermont emergency management as our biggest risk. However, it is not the only risk. We also have ice storms, we have the pandemic, we have a number of different disasters that we have to keep our eyes on. And focusing on floods is important in the short-term, and this event in particular. However, how we approach and react to it should be driven by overall disaster response and not just responding to floods. So that building long-term flood recovery, I wish I had wrote building long-term disaster resilience in number three in particular. Focusing on the July 2023, I already started to speak about this a little bit. I'm gonna try to move quickly through these slides so that you have the opportunity to ask me questions about how the recovery is going, what we're setting up and what we're trying to achieve. For those of you, not gonna read the whole slide, but of course, it was a statewide event. Multiple river basins were hit, extremely hard, four river basins in particular. And the full activation was on July 10th. The federal disaster, like I talked about before, was declared July 7th through the 21st, and then we have a smaller declaration on August 3rd through the 5th that was more specific to a different set of damage. The rain charts on the right are very interesting, purple's bad, purple's very bad. And it really looks at the total rainfall over the course of two days. We just received an amazing amount of water in Vermont. And now when I say it's an amazing amount of water, I think that our perspective, since Irene is starting to shift in that I don't think this was a 100-year event. I think I've talked to multiple experts that now have thrown out the term 100-year, 500-year. It's still a federal artifact because of the way that we do flood insurance. But our environment is changing and we need to adapt. It was an extreme event, and we need to become more resilient to it. So just this slide is comparing some of the high-level statistics around tropical storm Irene and the floods, which have the charming name of DR-4720, because that's very helpful for remembering. As you can see, we had over 300 applicants from FEMA Public Assistance. That's what the PA there means. And that's municipal applicants, non-profits. And we only had 210 in DR-4720. So it was a slightly different event being an inundation event. So it was slightly more focused than tropical storm Irene was, and had more severe damage in the areas it was focused in. Irene had all 14 counties declared for public assistance. Only 12 of our counties met the thresholds for public assistance in this event. And 12 counties in Irene for individual assistance and nine. And I know that we went through great efforts to try to make sure we could try to qualify Addison County. And I do think that we did not reach the individual assistance threshold, which meant citizens of residence of Addison County have fewer options for assistance than other members of the state. There was targeted heavy damage in Addison County, but as a county, it did not meet the threshold for FEMA. So that creates a particular human problem that we're not able to adjust through the FEMA channels, but I wanted to put it on the legislature's radar that Addison County didn't have the broad county-wide individual damage, but they did have pockets of severe damage. Ripton actually experienced the highest rainfall of any town in Vermont over a 30-day period this summer. And then on the PA damage, public assistance damage, these numbers are not adjusted for inflation, so there's a little bit of skewing there. 216 million in 2011 dollars versus 500 plus million in 2023 dollars. That still doesn't translate to a one-for-one. There was still more significant damage that occurred during this event than during Tropical Storm Irene from a public assistance perspective, which covers roads, bridges, public buildings, critical non-profits structures. And then on the individual assistance claimed, that 23 million is the total number from FEMA that ran for individuals. That 24 plus that we're at right now is still a point-in-time number and will still be increasing because there's about a year left on FEMA's rental assistance programs. All those dollars are gonna be counted in this individual assistance. It is ticking up more slowly, but it is still increasing as people appeal their FEMA awards and as rental assistance is distributed. Hopefully I'm managing to stay on the same slide. Moving into flood recovery. So we have Tropical Storm Irene taught us a lot as a state. The state legislature took a lot of actions, helped create some structures that really helped create foundations for reacting to an event like this. Obviously, we didn't have all the people and all the processes and everything in place that we need to have to recover from something like this. We have to react to an event of this size. But the state emergency management plan, that received a lot more attention after Irene and that forms the basis. It's a, I believe several hundred page document. I don't remember the exact page count, but I know it's more than a hundred pages because I tried to read it the other day. And it forms the basis of the emergency management system. It sets out what task forces and what you do when we hit an event of a certain magnitude. So that's really a response plan, a structural plan. And it talks about how Vermont's organized. And there's always room, that's a living document. It is cyclically updated, but I do think it's not intended to be the perfect answer. It's just the best answer we have at the time. The state hazard mitigation plan, this is something that really started after Irene. And we have a 2018 hazard mitigation plan and now we have just barely recertified with FEMA our 2023 hazard mitigation plan. And that plan rates our risks as a state, our probability of certain disasters. That hazard mitigation plan again is another multiple hundred page document, but it has a lot of really interesting information, really valuable information. It's at the statewide level, it doesn't get into the specifics of each community, but it is a really incredibly important resource for Vermont as we continue to try to deal with the risks of our environment. The integrated strategic plan, this is a new one-time event-based document that we're working out with FEMA. And it really gets into how do we work with FEMA? How do they help us coordinate with our multiple federal partners to secure more federal funds, to secure more federal assistance? And I just actually, before this presentation was in a meeting with FEMA leadership where we were talking about setting smart goals to achieve those objectives and identifying specific opportunities for federal funding and federal support that can be related to this disaster. So my hope is that during the session, I'm able to bring the legislature specific opportunities that we are using to recover and build back more resilient. And then of course, we're increasing the collaboration of all our state agencies. Not only, once I was appointed, one of my steps was setting a recovery officer on each agency, so that I have a single point of contact that I'm using to coordinate with recovery issues. Several staff around the state were reallocated under my supervision to try to coordinate the recovery activities. So we did dramatically increase our collaboration as I transitioned out of the role of Deputy Secretary of Administration and we started building that short-term, medium-term and long-term recovery structure. So our recovery goals and priorities this is pretty high level and all the things overlap of course, but individual recovery, that includes individuals, businesses, nonprofits, like the specific individuals or sets of individuals that were impacted by the flood and have had access to some resources, but I wanna say the system does not support making everyone whole and it is very painful in that way. So part of the job of the administration and part of the job of the legislature is to figure out who has the biggest gaps left over and compare the size of the pain that those different stakeholder groups are feeling. It's not a situation where everyone can be brought up to where they were pre-flood because like I said, there was over a billion dollars of damage which is compounded when you close a business, you get economic income loss. So that billion dollars is just a starting point. The infrastructure recovery, that's easier to see, right? Roads, bridges, the roads and bridges damaged in this event, less dramatic, less apparent than Irene and that's partly because the work that was done after Irene paid for by the legislature and paid for by FEMA grants held up extremely well in this event. The resiliency work that Vermont has been doing for the last 11 to 12 years performed extremely well. There are some great examples, Brandon's a good example of where work there kept the downtown from being inundated and from suffering severe damage again. That's just one, many, many more bridges were knocked out by less water and Irene than in this event. So, and then resilient recovery. This is a more holistic category of how do our communities adapt and grow in a resilient manner and recover from this event and continue to grow going forward. This is more of a long-term concept. Of course, it's how do we over the next five to 10 years put those communities in better place and prepare for the next event. We can't predict when the next extreme weather event like this will happen. Personally, it's not gonna be 100 years. Even if we had 10 years to prepare for the next event, that would make me happy. I'm not optimistic that we could plan for the next event not to happen in the next 10 years. There's instability in our weather patterns and we need to, we can't rush this. It is work that takes a long time, but we do need to prepare for that longer-term resilient structure. Back it's into this diagram which is from the state emergency management plan. I did not create this, I stole it. That's one thing you have to do. This preparedness, that has been the last 12 years. Vermont Emergency Management Division, sorry, which was created by the General Assembly after Irene has been working on preparedness, has been working on hazard mitigation for the last 12 years. They were critical in working on some of the short-term recovery response. I'm coming more into the picture on the intermediate and long-term structures and setting up what we're talking about when we're talking about recovery in the months and years. So this doesn't capture all of the detail of the structure but this is just intended to give you a high-level picture of how we organized. Governor Scott appointed me as Chief Recovery Officer. We created the state coordinating officers. Well, state coordinating officers actually an existing role in VEM and then the state regional coordinators. Now those are, there's three regional coordinators that are long-term VEM emergency management-focused staff and we're working now on standing up three recovery officers in those regions that will help support projects more holistically and help develop community buy-in for resiliency projects. Anytime you're looking at addressing resiliency in a neighborhood, you're talking about changing where the houses are built, how the houses are built. That's a very personal and that's a very local decision and it takes a lot of conversation and planning to really happen properly. And then of course, we have recovery policy communications. We have all our federal partners on the left. Those FEMA, Small Business Association, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Rural Development, Housing and Urban Development. Those are some of our major partners but of course we're talking with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. We're talking with the Environmental Protection Agency. We just didn't want to list out every single federal agency there. All right, short-term recovery. One thing that is critical to our short-term recovery is really making sure that FEMA understands how we're applying our floodplain regulations. This came up after Tropical Storm Irene in Waterbury, making sure that the FEMA knows we apply our floodplain regulations to ourselves, to the state buildings, as well as to municipal buildings. And because if they believe we don't apply that to ourselves, then there's very little mitigation work that has to be done and that FEMA would be willing to pay for. So even though this is not the most exciting thing, it is pretty critical in how much federal funding we're able to rely on for recovery within the capital complex in particular or any other state buildings. We're working on coordinating the insurance proceeds. The state's insurance policy won't come anywhere close to covering all of our damage. The same thing with VLCT's insurance policies for the municipalities, of course. So we have to make sure that we are coordinating that, applying it properly, backing it out of the FEMA claims. When there's confusion, FEMA tends to just delete everything from the claim. So we need to make sure that doesn't happen. And a lot of effort goes into making sure the municipalities get the right things on the claim, the insurance is tracked properly, and we don't have recapture issues down the road. A federal recapture is an extremely painful event. And most of our municipalities would not have the cash flow to really react very well to a federal recapture. Centrally coordinating statewide FEMA claims. This is one of the areas where we've put in a lot of effort and resources. There was some nice groundwork that was laid during COVID to where, because of the General Assembly really beefed up the resources in Vermont Emergency Management after Irene, they were able to create plans, and one of those plans coming through COVID was to set up a disaster response support contract. So we not only have the Vermont Emergency Management resources that are supporting towns and their construction of the public assistance claims, but we used a contractor to provide additional, just additional humans that could be in those meetings with all of the different FEMA managers. Because one thing that we've noticed is that if FEMA is just talking to the town, and the FEMA employee who is trained by FEMA but is making their own, doing their own work, there's a chance for them to get out of sync with the FEMA policies, and there's a chance for them to tell the town's things that are inaccurate. And if we have a state staff member there listening to everything they're saying and saying, whoa, that's not accurate, we can pump the brakes before some significant harm is caused. I would say not every meeting with the towns and FEMA has gone perfectly. There have been some real painful meetings, but I would say we have been able to react and to fix those, address those issues and make sure that they're not actually harming towns FEMA claims. They are painful to go through. They're not fun sometimes, but we've been able to intervene with the state and make sure that FEMA is following its own policies and that towns aren't receiving unfair bad advice. When you're dealing with as many disasters as FEMA is right now, it's very understandable that not every member is gonna be perfectly in sync with the policies and that's one reason we're centrally watching them and making sure when something gets out of sync we challenge it. And then of course we're maximizing overall sources of funding for individual assistance. We're not very experienced with individual assistance in Vermont. The last time we had individual assistance was Tropical Storm Irene. We've had a lot of smaller disasters where public assistance came into play, so our towns do have a lot of great experience around public assistance. But individual assistance is more of a new thing to us and I can't remember, I can't remember an event before Irene that where we had individual assistance, I don't even know if there was one. So this is something that's, oh, oops, somewhat new to us. And when something's new to you you just have to put more attention into it. So that's one reason we're watching that more closely. Those regional coordinators, those regional recovery officers I mentioned earlier are connecting with the long-term recovery groups. So this slide is mostly informational. This is the task forces on the left, and sorry my laptop one's asleep. The task forces on the left are the state structures and then the box on the right is the federal recovery support functions. Basically just trying to say we have eight state task forces that were activated shortly after the event that don't just include state employees, they include community stakeholders, they include many different agencies. And those task forces have been including the federal partners in their conversations and are working with those recovery support functions in order to produce recommendations for the recovery and also address short-term recovery and response issues. The individual and family needs task force of course has focused a great deal on the short-term housing pressures. Our existing housing environment, which I'm glad I followed the housing presentation, the housing environment we were in on July 6th dramatically increased the pain for individuals whose homes were significantly impacted or destroyed during this flood because even if FEMA gives them rental assistance or waiver or voucher, et cetera, it's very difficult for them to find a place to live. So it made the impact of being unhoused from the flood that much greater, that there was no cushion, there was no available stock in our housing environment. So it exacerbated the impacts of the summer flood from an individual perspective. So these four key areas are focused for long-term recovery. Now there's a lot of detail under this, there's a lot more areas that we are focused on as well, but these are four of the key areas. Resilient housing growth, of course, as we talked about, we had a problem before the flood. We need to keep focusing on it, but we need to create housing in a manner that's resilient and for instance, there are certain locations, if they were flooded, some of those locations won't be able to be mitigated. No matter what work you put into them, what reasonable investments, you would not be able to mitigate them so that they're not at risk of flooding the future. So we need to figure out where we can build as a state that is gonna be more resilient. Obviously we're not, no one is willing to abandon our downtown, so we're gonna have to do some resilience work inside our downtowns, but we need to make sure new development isn't in a high-risk area. The capital complex, the nature of damage there is one of the things driving that $500 million-plus number that I mentioned earlier. Water break complex was significantly impacted. When we had 109 and 133, the state pavilion and the tax department building, impacted, that was two structures of a similar magnitude to what was impacted in Waterbury. And then we of course had a number of other structures close to the river impacted. And that recovery of the capital complex, there's a lot of decisions to be made there that the administration wants to work on preparing options for the General Assembly to consider this session and which direction we go with that. There are a number of different ways, but I think for Brevity we'll probably try to prepare three or four major options as was done after Irene, that the General Assembly can react to and tweak and modify. Wastewater treatment facility management. That was another driver of the damage figures. It close to $100 million of damage, I believe, to wastewater treatment facilities in different communities. And that is very challenging for some of these communities to manage. So we stood up a task force to specifically focus on helping those communities navigate what they're gonna do with their wastewater treatment facility. And then of course this work needs to kick off regional discussions around watershed management to reduce the flood risk. Some of the things that we need to do to reduce risk in our downtowns can't be done in our downtowns. They really need, and they can't be a decision made by a single municipality because some of the changes would be outside of their borders. So we need to just sit down and discuss as regions and come up with those larger hazard mitigation projects Now, the 500 million I referenced earlier, that translates under the FEMA formulas to 15% of whatever that number ends up being will be allotted to Vermont for hazard mitigation. Now there's a match and it gets complicated. But after Irene, we had 32 million of hazard mitigation. We did a huge number of very, very positive projects that saved us money and saved and reduced risk and saved lives in this event. So we're receiving more than double, we're likely to receive more than double the money in hazard mitigation after this event than we did after Irene. So I think it's critical that Vermont takes full advantage of every dollar of hazard mitigation funds that FEMA allocates under their formula to us. That money will fund projects after Irene. It took, most of the major projects were done within five years, but we had just closed out the last Irene project a couple of weeks before the floods. So from a financial perspective, the work had already been done, but those long-term hazard mitigation projects are where we'll see the risk for future of Vermont is really going down. All right, so that was my presentation. I apologize for the sprint. Thank you. Does anybody have, we have time for maybe one or two questions. That's okay, Douglas. Yes, please go represent. Yes. Thank you, and I want to thank you for all the very hard work that you and people who work with you do to make life safer for folks here in Vermont. I represent part of Franklin County, we border on Chittenden County, two communities, the communities of Georgia and Fairfax. Not much of Franklin County received enough damage to qualify for any of the FEMA funds, but that's okay. The point I want to make for you this afternoon is not one you have to respond to, but I want you to be aware that there is a group in Franklin County called the Friends of the Northern Lake. We have been existing for about 15 years, and our main task is to improve the quality of the Northern Lake to reduce phosphorus, farm runoff, runoff from dirt roads, and many of our smaller towns, including the two I represent, have mainly dirt road in their rural community, not much paved road. Anyway, this storm came along, and earlier this week, I became aware of a presentation made to the Lake Champlain Basin Committee, a much larger and much more well-funded than Friends of the Northern Lake Committee, but we work together and do a lot of good work. At that presentation to the Lake Champlain Basin Committee, it was reported that the amount of TMDL, the amount of phosphorus runoff in one year that we had been working with the EPA and farmers and local communities to reduce that runoff. That's called the TMDL. The amount that we had achieved for one year was eliminated in that one storm, that one time, the July storm. So all of our work to reduce phosphorus in the Northern Lake was just gone after that one rainstorm. So I was thinking as you were discussing your point number four, the regional discussions to reduce flood risk. Flood risk is more than just to the human population. Well, Lake Champlain's health affects the human population, but it's also the health of our environment. And certainly the work of these two committees now we have to start over, at least go back 13 months and start again on that TMDL reduction. EPA is gonna be coming in to check us out to make sure that we are keeping up with our end of the agreement. And I know I'm going on too long, Catherine, but the EPA is gonna be on our necks for not reducing the phosphorus, like we said we would, but we did, and it was a natural disaster that eliminated our work. So keep that in mind when you do your work to reduce danger. Thanks. I know I'm at the risk of the hook at any moment, but one of my goals today was so that all of you knew who I was and that you could come to me with issues. My other hat, because wearing one hat would be boring, is the clean water board chair. So this issue has direct overlap with our clean water board efforts. Shortly after the disaster, we reported that as a risk, the increase runoff to Lake Champlain, and it's not just a Lake Champlain issue. And we haven't given up on trying to find supplemental federal funds to help us reverse the effects of the additional phosphorus that was pushed into Lake Champlain and other lakes from the event. So I think it's a good issue to flag, and absolutely, again, it should be reduced to disaster risk, not just flood risk, in that regional discussion box. Well, please join me in thanking Douglas for his time and presentation today. Thank you all for coming today. We hope this information has been helpful. Again, you can email ask JFO if you have follow-up questions. We look forward to seeing you on Wednesday, January 3rd. Have a good holiday season, and we are adjourned.