 What's the most important thing to remind people? A donation box to help pay for the electricity and the fans and taxes, things like that. Is it a bat on your way out? Mark McDonald is unable to make it this evening due to a select board meeting that he needs to attend to in Williamstown. His road is under fire. Jay, you could make that part of your opening statement. He's under fire. So under fire. You should know representatives Larry and representatives Jay, I'm just doing first names. He's doing very quick about this. And then Jim Miriam is gonna moderate. Lightly, lightly. Lightly moderating, I'm sorry. So this is really about you guys talking about highlights of the session or positions and a Q&A mostly, your dialogue with the audience the way it's been done before. And we do have a moderator to lightly moderate and hopefully should not have to do any moderating. Should someone try to dominate the conversation that we're down around the whole for asking me questions, I will step in and take no offense. I'm gonna say it right now. That's why he's here. All right, thank you very much. So I'm representative Jay Hooper I'm serving my fourth term in the House of Representatives. I serve on the House Committee on Government Operations and Military Affairs. We were privileged to take on the jurisdiction of half of another committee as the speaker rearranged the makeup of the committees. This session, I'm in my fourth term. I'm pleased to continue to represent all of you in Brookfield in Roxbury, Grandville, Randolph and Braintree. My committee took on quite a few issues this session. We were probably one of the more productive committees, particularly in the way of addressing some of the specifics of town requests throughout Vermont. When a town request to change their charter such that maybe they would allow, for instance, 16 year olds to vote in the town of Brattleboro on town elections only, that would not be between governor or anything beyond, the legislature has to give permission to those towns. My philosophy always is that if a town and their voters, just like how Brookfield might say we signal to the legislature that we would like this change, it would make no sense to me that the legislature would stand in the way of that request from that sort of immediate voting group. Among other things that government operations took up, elections, reforms, bills, one came from, I don't know exactly where, but there were a couple of efforts to change the deadlines for registration for candidates and what it would look like, the sort of the threshold to become a write-in candidate. We also took up the concept of ranked-choice voting. For anybody who's not familiar, that's basically being able to decide, one, two, three, four, five, your favorite to your least favorite candidate, everybody on the ballot gets, you get to vote for your preferences up and down. More recently, so towards the end of the session, we took up a sort of a higher profile issue on the basis of immediacy, because it came to light that the state's attorney in Franklin County has for quite a long time conducted sort of a negligent and offensive workplace. John LaVoy, who had previously testified in my committee with considerable assertion asking us to impeach the sheriff of Franklin County, he came out as maybe not exactly the guy that we want to be representing Franklin County in his capacity because of the things that he has said in the workplace over the last two decades or more. So now we've got a double impeachment inquiry. The state legislature hasn't since 1976 considered impeachment measures. Now we are looking at two different individuals both from Franklin County. There's a specific committee of seven lawmakers who are looking into that throughout the summer. They will come back to the legislature in January and make recommendations as to the various options that we too and our colleagues can consider. And the way of action on impeachment. Sports betting, liquor and lottery, cannabis regulation, tweets to the office of professional regulation, all things Secretary of State, these are the things that my committee considers. But aside from all this detail oriented policy stuff, there are some more high profile topics. The Affordable Heat Act was one of the things that we championed this session as Democrats. That's my role. That's yours. I'm not an alumnus. I'm happy to let Larry take that word. We have a housing crisis in Vermont as you all know. The childcare bill was vetoed. I think the governor vetoed eight different bills or none. That's really count. Plenty number. I think it was a new record. He said it's a new record. So Jay Hooper, happy to serve you all and thank you for being here tonight. And my name is Larry Sackowitz and we all live in a two member represented district. So I serve along with Jay. This is my second term. I serve on the Environment and Energy Committee. And in my committee this year, we tackled a number of really important bills. We passed quite a number of bills out of committee. It was a very productive session. Some of the more notable ones that we worked on this year were trying to get all the numbers right. S100, which was the big housing bill. My committee basically took half of that bill and worked on it. And that was the part that had to do with land use because as an environment committee, we deal with regulations concerning land use. And the big ideas in that bill from our committee's perspective was about figuring out ways to make the state a little more friendly towards building more housing. It was one of the things that we heard most clearly from voters all across Vermont was that the housing situation really is a crisis and that we need to make it easier and more affordable to build housing. And one of the tools that we have for doing that is through zoning. And most towns in Vermont have zoning at all, but for the towns that do have zoning, the state is now telling those towns that there's certain things that you need to make sure that you do. There was a whole long list of them. A couple of the more prominent ones were things like any place that you build a single family house where you have zoning where you can build a single family house, you also need to be able to permit a duplex to be built in such an area. The other big set of ideas that this bill did was to say, well, we want more housing, but we don't want it just anywhere. We don't want to make it easier for people to build houses just any place. We really want houses in places where there's already development, right in our town centers in what are called the designated areas. And so Randolph, for instance, has a designated area in its downtown area. It's a designated downtown. Randolph also has a designated neighborhood which surrounds that downtown. And so this bill also made changes to zoning that will make it a little easier to build more dense and more affordable housing in those particular kinds of areas. Another bill that we worked on in the past was the clean heat bill, which was hugely controversial. And I suspect still is. And I suspect a bunch of you might have questions about it. That was the biggest question generating bill that I worked on this year. I got lots of feedback on that. And that's some of which I'd love to discuss further if people want to, because I know there's a lot of misinformation about that bill and a lot of just misunderstanding about the timing of it, what it's trying to accomplish and how it's going to be doing that. But the big idea behind the bill is making Vermont a more affordable place to heat our homes and moving us through this transition that we are already underway, but to try and do it in a way which will help most people get through it in a way which makes economic sense. We also passed two bills which have to do with producer responsibility, which is sort of an emerging way of looking at our economy so that we sell the producers of various items. Well, if you make something and you put it out into the world, your responsibility for that item doesn't end when someone buys it from you. And so we did that in two ways in this session. One was with the bottle bill, which is a producer responsibility bill. We're basically telling, we do this now to a certain extent, but we're going to be doing it in a more robust way. In the future, our Senate bill can manage to get its way through the Senate. I wish Mark McDonald was here to talk about this because he knows a lot more about where that bill is in the Senate right now. But the idea is that if you produce all these bottles, you have to figure out how to take them back and what to do with them. That's sort of the big idea. A lot more detail around that. It was a big complicated bill. And the other bill which had to do with producer responsibility was a household hazardous waste bill. And right now you can bring your household hazardous waste to collection centers. Around here, I think we do it with, there's a local district, which includes Brookfield and Braintree and Randolph and Roxbury and Northfield called the Tri-Mountain Alliance. And the Tri-Mountain Alliance holds two collection events a year. They go in Randolph and one in Northfield. And you can bring your items there and they get disposed of. And you don't pay anything to dispose of them at the collection site. But you pay for it indirectly through your municipal taxes and through your state taxes. Because it does cost a lot of money to get rid of these hazardous materials. And the way it is right now, producers can sort of let those things out into our environment. People can buy them. But then they don't have to do anything with them after that. What we're saying with this bill now, which was signed into law just recently, is that producers need to pay to get rid of this stuff. So it seems like that's a really good thing. That it makes sense that the people who are creating this stuff are gonna pay for getting rid of this stuff. Instead of making people pay for it, who have no role in producing it or using it or anything to do with it. And that was another bill I wanted to mention real quick. Oh yeah, the other one which I wanted to mention, which actually was enacted into law, I think just today, was the 30 by 30 bill. Which is a bill that directs the Agency of Natural Resources to do a planning, their mission is to plan a way so that we can have permanently protected environmentally sensitive areas across the state of Vermont, 30% by 2030 and 50% by 2050. Now, most of Vermont is already forested and due to the really wonderful efforts of, I don't know, hundreds, thousands of landowners who manage their lands in responsible ways, we have really remarkably robust ecosystems here. We're really lucky. What this bill would do is it will help us maintain those ecosystems and all the benefits that they provide us long into the future by coming up with a plan to really make what we already have now in place, which is sort of an tentative basis to make it a lot more permanent. So that our children, my children, my grandchildren, people who will be here dozens, hundreds of years from now, will be able to look out on our landscape and see a world functioning ecosystem which is much like what we have today and not see the sorts of development that you see in other places. If you travel just not far from here, right all across New England, it's very easy to find places where there's development and all the nooks and crannies and the sort of more wild places have really greatly diminished. So this bill will help us keep those places intact. And correct me if I'm wrong, Larry, but this bill, the 30 for 30 bill, 30 by 30 bill is essential to connecting Vermont as a corridor, forest-wise, that would connect the various other parts of New England that are doing this effort. And in order to make those efforts maximal, this bill is important. So like we're connecting other states and their efforts to do so by it. Right, that's true. There's, from the wild lands in Vermont, our corridors for animals to travel and plants and other kinds of organisms as well, between Maine and the National Forest there and New Hampshire and then in New York and the Adirondacks, the Adirondacks State Park is a huge natural area. And then there's large forests protected and unprotected north of us too in Canada. And we're right in the middle of all that. So both of our communities have taken on quite a lot. The way it's shared for form and environmental issues, we are both sitting on fairly status-y committees. They're not money committees, typically in the legislature, but those who serve on the committees that decide what it looks like for Vermont to collect revenue versus how Vermont appropriates dollars to state interests and public entities, those are where the more powerful politicians sit we're on committees that aren't very low on that cloutful committee assessment. What do we do now, Jim? We're, if you both are ready, we're ready. Oh, we're ready. And I'll actually take the names and I'm only gonna jump in. I mean, their hands. Sure. Mine only gonna jump in if it seems like something. So you guys look good and no one has to shut something. Okay, I'm here for you. Thank you, I'm here for you. Who's first? Anybody? Kevin? I know you can. But I have lots of questions, but I'll just ask to you based on what you just described. It's got a lot of crazy plot. I know that Larry, you talked about encouraging home building which is a big issue, almost this now as well in designated areas. It said, why don't you increase density in areas that are so designated but also make them more affordable? And I know that Jay just said, you're not really in the economic forum, but did the committee discuss some of the means by which we could look at housing for people? Because that's something I've heard a lot of all this, as well as you folks. So people, especially young and people with less needs are having really struggling to find housing. Yeah, no, thank you for that question. A big portion of S100 had to do with specifically allocating money for affordable housing. And the zoning part that my committee dealt with, that part of the bill basically it mandates designated areas to be able to allow various kinds of affordable housing and it allows affordable housing to be denser than other types of housing. And the reason why that, like for example, one of the provisions is getting kind of in the weeds, but it'll give you a sort of flavor of the kinds of things that we discussed. If you're putting up like a multi-unit building that has affordable housing in it that meets certain criteria, that kind of the building is allowed to build one extra story over what would otherwise be allowed by the local zoning. And the idea behind allowing that is that when you're already getting the site ready, while you're already putting in the foundation, sometimes getting that extra floor in is what makes a project economically viable or not. And so the idea is that by doing things like that, you're able to create opportunities which might not have existed otherwise. Yeah, I want to follow up on that question. I'm on the work field planning commission. We had a little club sort of answer a question that I just asked you a couple of weeks ago. And it seems like one of the biggest issues as far as housing goes that we're running into is we can change zoning, it seems like it's septic in Vermont. Right now our septic laws are still pretty archaic and there's no allowability of graywater systems made in New Hampshire on graywater. And especially with this new movement of like small area to use, small houses, that's the way to really tackle some of the affordability side to where some of these in a two, three, four, 200, 300 square foot tiny house and they have to be put in a graywater system and use a composting toilet, that is going to help with the affordability, it's going to help get some housing out there, because we all fill the cost of massive, we can't, you can't do anything about it as a state legislator, we can't do anything about it. But it's like, I feel like if I'm the planning commission in the work field and in the state, if we can do certain things to get out of people in the way and I understand septic is important, but the graywater thing for me is a tough one to start that there's no allowability. If you don't put it as a licensed septic, you're out of camp depending on what town you're in, you've got a hundred days. Right. So I know that's either of your committees, but I think that's definitely something that the state should look at and rethinking that, you know, what are our waste waters look like, especially for towns like Workfield, that do not have a public waste water system. And we're not like, we're just, we're not the few where it likes to inform the norm not having, you know, public water, public waste water. Yeah. You know, so all of this great planning, all this great, you know, sort of ideas behind rebuilding and repurposing or buildings downtown areas, so much of it around the country focuses around areas that have public water and waste water. So. Yeah, now your point is well taken and I've often wondered why it is like that in Vermont. I don't know the answer, but you're right. Our rules are more, let's call them less creative than some other cases that are more permissive with, and I don't know what the downside is. It seems like there are alternative systems which work perfectly fine, but we don't allow them to move on. Thank you. Do you have my wife that stayed in that garden when she works in the A&R? Yeah, I would talk to her. So is there a specific obstacle with gray water that meets in a can versus a? Well, there's just, you cannot, there's, you can't, there's no proof. You have to have an approved state-centered design which is mom system or, you know, perp or perp. You can't have gray water. You just can't, you know. Yeah, I think it's something that's learning to do now. You know, we, you know, and we as a town, we can't change that, so we can't say you can have this, right? You can have this A&R on your property, you know, if it doesn't tie in your septic, in your septic handler, you can't do it. Or, like I said, you know, especially because there's this big movement on the tiny house thing. Yeah, it's like, and not to do that, not to be too prevent, not, it's like, okay, so if I had a 400 square foot small house with a composting toilet and a gray water system for one individual, you know, am I gonna have that, am I gonna have a bacterial that we're going through my gray water system more than one cow doing its thing? Yeah, and it's like, and the answer's no. I think there should be safeguards. It shouldn't be like, you have your gray water system right next to, you know, like a lot of your water or stuff like that, but it's taking a lot of billable land and money out of it. As she said, it's a huge- Go to your committee, man. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, sir. Jack? You know, as long as you guys go to a poop situation, I gotta get this off my chest. You can't put a trailer on a piece of property and just dig a hole and use that as you set to get in trouble for it, but yet set to clean companies. And this authority happening here in Brookfield, trust me, I know, they clean out a set, they go over a barrier, and they bring this stuff over here, and they spread it on the fields. Untreated. Yeah. Yeah. All you need is to get a license for this town. So what these gentlemen are saying, we have these rules, right? People are made to do all kinds of stuff, jump through roofs and everything else. And yet we can take and put human sewage with all kinds of pathogens and everything else into a field. And Lord knows whether it grows corn or grass for cows or one of these trails that I heard a lady talking about before that you're going to take care of. The laws are on here, the Department of Environmental Protection, when I complained to them about some situation, they told me they couldn't handle it because they were too busy to get they go on the news, have TV, and they tell you about composting, and they talk about other stuff. What is our Department of Environmental Protection to? They're a big office, but they can't seem to take and get the right regulations out there and go after the stuff that makes the place look like hell. Sure. Yeah, we have. And even though it's not your purpose, but you're both of you are in positions to buttonhole people that can do something. Can I ask you a question, Dad? Go right ahead. Are you familiar with human newer and the concepts that some of the proponents of allowing, I guess, being able to dig a hole in this? Jay, think about it. A septic is a septic is a septic, right? It's a hole in the ground. You have an opening tank of the solids. You have liquid coming out, and it spreads out through the ground. In this state, they push like crazy for what they call a field or a bed with the pipes that go out. Those things cost fortunes. Lady back here, it's called, they cost $20,000, $30,000. I spent my life in construction. They don't cost that kind of money. The contractors screw you every time they put money. You came from New Jersey, eh? Yes, they did. I'm proud of that. Sorry, folks. And by the way, don't let this damn state look like New Jersey, please. It's not true. But the point I'm trying to make is we passed this law and that law and everything else, and we look around at some of the laws that we've got. And like you said, they are archaic. They're ridiculous. There's no reason why you can't put a small septic system in the ground next to a trailer. We all have them. I don't even know where it is. I'm going to be shortly leaving around to find it. But we've got to do something. We've got to change something. And you've got to get to the FBA agencies that are controlling the lives of people and make them do the job they should be doing and not let them spread waste on fields. You know, I'll go on for an hour or two and bring any veggie off in 30 seconds. You doing all right? The people in the North especially, up in Chittenden County, they love to attack the farmers, the manure, and the phosphate in this and that. No one is bothered to look at the fact that the problem with Lake Champlain is really not the farmers, because every year the farmer numbers go down and the population goes up. And we need to think of all that effluent stuff that's going into the ground. And if you check the soils and stuff, I'm not a geologist, but I would look to know which way the water goes. That's all towards Lake Champlain. So all the new houses on septic are sending their stuff into the lake. But yet, everybody blames the farmer. Right. Like, please shut me up. I'm going to shut you up. To look back to the subject of this stuff. And something we were talking about, I believe the timing in multiple different states and all that, Vermont has really weird rules. And what he's saying, and I can point out, you don't have to septic if you're considered a camp. So many people only live there six months a year. And that's where it's an issue that, OK, so that the other six months of the year I either maybe could get kept out of my life and get in trouble. And in Pennsylvania, and this is a legal thing in Pennsylvania, we were allowed to run our gray water. And we had a whole system for it. We had a neighbor try to save your pudding poop in it. We had our plan tested all that dirt samples. We had some of the best dirt samples he's ever seen. And he was known to all compost school products. But then for our waste, and I know it's a lot of sewage and stuff, like not public water, but it's something. Like in Pennsylvania, you're allowed to have a water body company come to your house and empty out your camper or any sort of whatever your folding tent is. And that's legal, but to do that here, it would make you consider a camp. But in Pennsylvania, it would make you consider a house. So if that's something you need to look at, like Vermont maybe puts in us some sort of way to take care of the waste and something, so then people aren't having to be that septic or you wouldn't get that. Because even if you have a camper, you can't dump it here past October at any public dumping station. That's very legal. Well, I've been camping here one October. I came up out of my houses and then October and we were frantic. Really? We were like, we need to drive in an amphibious, like literally, it was like burlington the whole way down. Totally. It's difficult. Because it free, I think like freezing. Are you aware you can do that in the Red Bell Center? But can you do it past October? Not too far past October 15th? Yeah. So like that sounds like, I don't know, car or something like that and moving tiny home about a tiny bit, it's harder. So it's like works during the summer but then during the winter is where people are facing in. Good to know. That's very good to know. Anybody else on septic? Anyone? No, it's not me. But I text him out to the employee that I know about what a scoop is. Because I thought these were great questions. Great. Not all houses need mounds as it depends on the soil type. Ramon treats great water as black water due to human germs in it. Yes, Ramon is different than Maine and New Hampshire. The gentleman with the complaint about spreading should call Carl Fuller of DTC. Gary and Brookfielder are in this jurisdiction. We're called the DTC complaint line. Agreed, mounds are very expensive and she's still typing. But that's some. It's all Fuller, Jack. You got a phone number for him to call. I guess you call the DTC complaint line. I might take a contact. No, you don't want to do that. Sound like you're going to. I'm going to win with a shot. I'm not going to write that back. Anyway, should we? More questions? Tell us about the Unforgettable Heat Act, where that came from, and how come you're pushing itself and that. Sure. So there's been a whole bunch of things that have been said about the Clean Heat Act. And I want to sort of push back on some of the things which I've heard over the last several months. One is that it's going to raise the price of oil and propane starting now. And the bill does not go into effect until 2025, if that's if it does go into effect. Because before the bill goes into effect, I shouldn't say it that way. The bill was passed, and the veto was overwritten. So the bill did go into effect. But what the bill does, the bill that we passed, is it creates a study group, and it creates the ability for the PUC to create regulations for how this will all work. And then in 2025, when the new legislature takes an effect, we will come back and we will look at what those studies tell us. And we'll look at the regulations which are proposed. And then we will see, OK, is this something that we want to go forward on? So between now and 2025, nothing is going to change from a consumer point of view. No one's heating bill is going to be changed by this legislation in the next two years. You just said crisis warning? No, that's what we heard. Is that people are saying, your bills are going to increase starting now, as soon as this thing gets passed. And that is simply not true. So now, the answer is, if you are now firing three people or more who are dismayed on this committee, why not do the preliminary for doing this kind of act to pass? Well, that's what it is. Because it gets a homework done. Yeah, because that's what we're doing, is we're doing the homework. It's just that the homework is very involved. And it's quite complicated. It requires setting up a whole set of regulations and finding out all the information that we need to find out in order to figure out exactly how those regulations, what they need to look like. And so what the bill really does is it appropriates money to hire people to stand this stuff up so that we can then take a look at it and say, OK, does this really make sense? And then in 2025, we'll come back and we'll look at this all over again. And then that's when we really are going to decide whether we want to move forward with the program that is envisioned by S5. So the vision is that there will be, it will set up an energy credit system. And we already have energy credit systems in Vermont. We have one through the electric utilities. It's been in effect for a very long time. This system would be different than that, but it's the same basic idea. And what it will do is it will add a cost. It's not like this will be free. There will definitely be a cost to this. That cost is unknown right now. This is one of the other things which we heard a lot about was the cost is going to be really large. We heard a 70 cents a gallon. We heard much higher numbers. Those numbers are not based in reality. The closest program that exists, which would be similar to the one that is envisioned by S5 is a program in Oregon, which has to do with automotive fuels there. And they saw increases in certain fuels on the order of five to 15 cents a gallon, something in that neighborhood, a far cry from the 70 plus cents a gallon that we've been hearing people who are against this legislation who are really putting those numbers out there to scare people. So we do expect it to cost something, but we expect those costs to be affordable. And what we've never heard from the folks who are against this bill, they would always talk about the costs, but they never talked about the benefits. Right now we live in a world where heating fuels are very, very expensive. They contribute to polluting our atmosphere. And we're relying on them. And the money that we spend on them, most of it goes right out of state. We want to move towards a future where we're burning a lot less of this stuff, keeping the money here and having the costs be lower all at the same time. It involves making a transition. Now the transition is already happening. Whether Vermont likes it or not. Well, but what it's happening in Vermont, it is happening in Vermont. But the way in which it's happening in Vermont is that people who can afford to transition are doing it. So as you look around and you see people putting solar panels up on their roofs, well, who's doing that? People who can afford to put solar panels on the roof. And if you wander around, well, Randolph Village, I see it around. Really, I live in Randolph Village and I see this as I wander around. Heat pumps are popping up all over the place. If you pay attention, you see them happening. But they're not cheap. They make economic sense. They pay for themselves. But not everybody has the money up front to make it happen. And so what this bill will do is this energy credit system will take that money, those energy credits, the money that's generated by those credits, and they're gonna help folks of lower and moderate income, the folks we think of as kind of like ordinary Vermonters, and it's gonna help put incentive programs in place so that when you say to yourself, well, my house is a really good candidate for a heat pump. Now, not all homes, heat pumps aren't a great solution for all homes. That is very clear. There are some people who are saying, well, they're gonna make everybody have heat pumps. That is completely not true. Only a fraction, large fraction, but only a fraction of homes makes sense for having a heat pump. But anyway, I wanna go back to this idea that let's say you have a house in which a heat pump makes sense. You don't have the money to get started, to save yourself money in the long run, right? This bill is gonna help you or people in that situation make that transition, okay? That's one of the things that it's gonna do. And I think it's really important that we do that. And to be clear, the bill started with this philosophy and sort of was diminished to something that wouldn't possibly take effect until another legislature is elected. So in 2025 is the earliest time by which we could adopt any of the suggestions that the study committee comes up with in the way of understanding the details and projections of a transitional marketplace that Vermont just will not impact energy-wise. This is a marketplace that is huge, huge. And Vermont just doesn't have any influence on it aside from understanding it as well as we can. And why would we not want to do that? So that's why we passed that one. What is the role of the PUC when they charge with and then my follow-up would be what if the legislature disagrees with or let's start with that. And I have oversight of the PUC. Sure. In the bill there is a few different spots along the way that as they're doing their work they're going to be checking back in with us even before January 2025 when the deadline is for them to submit their final. Which is about how? Which is the final plan. The final plan is basically the regulations that will be put in place to set up this energy credit market and the associated government apparatus that needs to make it all work. And what if the PUC says we want to run more power lines for my group but that because we consider that we move the resource even though it's on a digital slant. This bill is pretty specific in terms of what they're being asked to do. So it's very much related to helping us move our home heating thermal sector away from wild property. Right, but that's just like it's my problem is the PUC is supportive of hyper-covet and we'd be supportive of probably bringing it in more and saying it was renewal. And I'm not saying that because I know I hear what you're saying, don't you? Using, it's really about what kind of fuel you're going to use. And so the bill is really all about moving us towards, it is moving us towards using electricity because the heat pumps are used electricity. But this bill doesn't talk about where that energy then comes from. That's a separate issue which is an ongoing conversation. And that's another piece of, my committee is going to be talking about that piece of it next year in the second part of the session where we're going to be talking about what our renewable energy standards are going to be because we have renewable energy standards in Vermont right now that require us to do certain things with how we source our electricity. They need to be updated there. They haven't been updated in a long time. That's one of the big issues that we're going to tackle in the second half of the term. So my hope is, as states like Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, create climate councils. Committees like Larry's will figure out ways to bridge the distance between those councils so that there's a uniform effort regionally to consider these questions. So Jeff, thanks. You mentioned about the heat pump. We know that in certain programs, they don't work when it gets really cold. They have a real problem. They have a real cold winter and they have 25 to 30 below this winter, several times. Heat pumps don't work. That's one issue. And then you know about those houses you mentioned. Oh, we can get some houses for the pump. What about other houses? What do you say? Two guys who said that to them? Oh, goodbye? Yeah. It's it. You make it in your mind, and you say, this is what we have to do, but then we don't have a workforce. And I want to ask both of you in all of the legislature and all of Vermont with all this push, push, push. Nickelodeon has free energy over 100 years ago. Any of you familiar with that at all is anyone looking into a feasible reality of where the electricity is coming from? If we push all the EVs and if we push these lithium batteries that also are non-employed in cold temperature, just like the heat pumps. It's here. Yeah, I was like, you have to go and recycle. And do you know where all those lithium batteries come from? And you've seen the waste that it creates in the earth. And who's producing them? The kids that are in those mines. You guys are so environment to be happy, but you want to push, push, push, but don't do the background until you say, oh yeah, keep doing it, keep doing it, oh now what? Now we have to create a new law. You guys are just creating laws upon laws upon laws. Well, I think to answer your last fundamental question about electricity versus other fossil fuels and sort of whether we're blindfolded to the future or to the current, you know, the status of what that production looks like. We certainly aren't. And the people, I know Larry and his colleagues in that committee definitely consider those things. With tight hands, almost, I would say electricity has upward mobility. Controlling does not. So these are things that we have to figure out ways to solve as we go. And in the meantime, we have to create policy that encourages green energy. Green energy is far more electric than it is, you know, it's tar scans. So if, and to go, heat pumps, I'm kind of not hugely persuaded on heat pumps either, but if, when it comes to state dollars and climate resiliency, weatherization is the best bang for our buck. If we can buffen up the houses in Vermont, we have old housing stock in this state. And a lot of the people who own those houses can't really afford it. When the AP got closed and all that money was supposedly going back to the repairers that paid into them, and it didn't happen, and the legislature decided it was being used for weatherization, what happened? Why aren't these houses now in a better position than they were before that? I mean, I don't see that. It's just a little... Yeah, so you brought up some really great points. I'd like to respond to some of that. So in terms of heat, do heat pumps work? They absolutely work. And the reason I know that they work is because I have a heat pump in my 1890 Queen Anne Victorian for the last eight years. And we have gone from burning over a thousand gallons of oil a year to burning plus or minus a hundred gallons of oil a year. Our heat pump almost completely heats our house. Wait, wait, wait, stop, too. You're still burning oil, which means you're not getting your heat totally from the heat pump. Well, that is the point. Most, let me, no, let Jay, let me respond. Yeah, take a look at that. Yeah, you respond. So, because I really want to respond to this idea that heat pumps are ineffective in our climate, and it just isn't true. The heat pump that I purchased eight years ago is now old technology. The heat pumps that have come out now work even better at even lower temperatures, and do a more efficient job of pulling hot air out of cold air than the heat pump that I have. The heat pump that I put in my house eight years ago has more than paid for itself in the time that I've been. Yeah. During the period of time, now that all the rules and regulations are gonna be developed to set a stage for the legislature in 2025, I have as the committee envisioned what's gonna be happening, happening to the current energy supply community and businesses in the state. Because what I do know is on the corner of my home, West Street, across the road, I see an awful lot of oil trucks going back and forth, all over the area, or like it's probably crossing. How do you understand that the energy supply companies that we never rely on are gonna be able to cope with the transition because of what the kind of business thing happened there? Yeah, yeah, yeah, no thank you for that question. We heard a lot of testimony from the fuel dealers who are gonna be sort of on the front lines in terms of being affected by this legislation. And what we heard was sort of all across the spectrum from people on one end saying, this is horrible, it's gonna kill us, we can't do this, please, please, please don't do this, to companies on the other end who are saying, we're already doing everything you want us to do. And in between. The reality is that the change which we're asking the fuel dealers to go through, we're just asking them to do it faster than they would have otherwise. They're gonna have to do this to one extent or another. I suppose, you know, I'm sort of veering off a little bit here, but one of the things to keep in mind here is that the program that we're gonna set up is gonna be until 2050. So nothing's gonna happen overnight. It's not like the day that the bill gets passed, all of a sudden everything's gonna change. It's not gonna be like that, it's gonna be gradual. People are gonna change their fuel systems, their heating systems over time when they can. The idea really is not that you just take your existing system and you toss it in the garbage. The idea is that at some point you decide that it makes sense to get a new one. Like in my case, in my home, we already had a perfectly good oil-based system and for those really cold nights, like you're saying, we're not completely off oil, on those really cold nights when it's minus 25 and our heat pump can't keep up with the heating demands of the house, yeah, we turn our boiler on. But we're using 90% less oil than we used to. Like, it's a world of difference. Imagine if all across the state, everybody used 90% less oil. The amount of money that would stay in our economy here would be hundreds of millions of dollars greater. It would be an economic boon to people living here in our communities. This is a really good thing. And there's all sorts of good reasons to get off fossil fuels. But if all you're interested in is the bottom line, just the economics of it, it's a no-brainer. It's in our economic self-interest to stop sending money out of state on these very expensive fuels whose prices we can't control to a system where we keep more of the money in our state, in a regulated system, like the electricity system, where the prices are much more stable and we can control them. It's a very different world. Think about all the people. Again, I'm a good example. This past year, if I had not had a heat pump, I would have spent an additional, well, I used to burn a thousand gallons more than I do now. Heating prices went up $2 a gallon, right? I saved $2,000 in one year. That's half the price almost I spent on the heat pump eight years ago. Like, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could make that available to more people? Like, I am so much better off because I heat myself with this more efficient, economically regulated product than if I had stayed on the world marketplace for fossil fuels. Yeah, you've had to have it for a while. I'm super, super excited about heat pumps. Can't wait to get one. And we put it on because the inflation reduction has supposedly been inside a big pump of money in the summer of 2023 that the states were going to get control of that money to disperse it for these things. Is that something that you- My understanding is that you can apply, that this year that money goes into effect and you can get that money as a tax credit from the federal government. You don't need to wait around for Vermont. Oh, you don't. But one of the really nice things about this bill, about S5, and I wanna tell you, I was very skeptical about the clean heat bill when it came in front of my committee. When we first started hearing testimony, I was like, oh my gosh, this is really not a great idea. We're already doing all this. The Inflation Reduction Act, it's already happening. Why do we need to do this thing on top of all this stuff which was already happening? But what was really made clear to me and which really made me a big fan is this idea that the Inflation Reduction Act, the amount of money that's involved, while very significant, is still not enough for people, especially at the bottom half of the economic spectrum to easily make the transition. But when you combine the federal incentives with the incentives that we expect to be able to generate through the implementation in 2025 of S5, that whatever that new bill is actually, we'll be able to leverage so much more money. We'll be able to really help people go from not being able to do it at all to being able to do it in a way which really makes sense to them. And it's really very exciting. It went up a lot because heating requires a lot of electricity. But the electricity on a per BTU basis, the heat that you generate on a per BTU basis through a heat pump costs far less than doing it through oil. Like I said, I saved $2,000 last year because my electric cost didn't go up, but my heating bill would have by $2,000 if I had stayed on oil. And when you say you're so happy about this money in-house, we're not about this from Canada. What are you talking about? Yeah. Huh? What's that? Hydro-prepare. Yeah. Hydro-prepare. That's a good question. I don't, I don't, yeah. I don't understand what you're saying, that's a good question. I don't have the details off the top of my head. But when you do, when you do the analysis, a much greater percentage of the money that we spend on electricity stays in Vermont than if you spend it on fossil fuels. Can I ask a question? Why are you here? I will put a plug in for Larry that once the res reform bill goes through, 30% of the power would be local if that was the case. 30%. 30%. In Vermont. Where? Solar. Wind, solar. Wind that we don't want the things up on our hills. Some of us don't want solar with that kind of stuff that we can't get rid of because there's no way to recycle it. I'm not gonna get into the debate about it. The point is, is that we can't grow locally. Is the point, if you can't get oil locally, you're not gonna get fossil fuels locally. But my question is around SPOC. And it's about workforce training and development. So the one concern, I'll point out, is on S5, we're putting this bill into effect. We have a shortage of contractors. And perhaps you saw the Digger article, actually, L-Card, the legislative committee on this ministry of rules, just delay implementing the new efficiency bill together. Because we don't have enough people to implement it. Is there something in S5 that is actually going at, and you can pass the most tremendous bill, but if we don't actually have the people to do the work, it's gonna be stifled. And so I'm curious to see within S5, is there a workforce development function? There's not a specific workforce development in S5. But in terms of the mechanical stuff, like installing heat pumps, we're actually fairly close to being able to meet the demand for that now. The installers have been hiring people pretty rapidly in that field. The place where we're gonna have the big challenge of weatherization. And that's the part which Jay alluded to, but I didn't get a chance to say yet, is that for folks who, maybe a heat pump doesn't work for their household, but they have all windows, they have no insulation in their walls, we have lots of those houses. I think it's 90,000 homes in Vermont are still in need of major weatherization, and getting that done is gonna be our big workforce challenge. And it's jobs. It's gonna create jobs, but the other thing to keep in mind is it's not gonna happen overnight. You know, the bill brings us out to 2050. So nobody expects all these homes to get weatherized in the next, five years, or 10 years. It's a generational product. It's a project. I just wanna plug in a little bit, I want to go and I'll go back to my minute. Chris, you mentioned that rate up for quite a while as well. There are, though, pockets within this state. If you go to southern Vermont, particularly like Bennington County, and in that area, there's not enough contractors to do heat pumps, even at a low rate. It's crazy. And so it's gonna be for, to be a statewide implementation versus oriented toward more of the population centers, we really do have to think about how we make sure that rural areas don't get left behind in the transition because it's an insufficient workforce. It's far cheaper to go from house to house to house in Chippin County than it is to drive with three hours or even a plug. My comment is two seconds because exactly what you're saying, though, is all of these strange people, blue collar people, people who can do this work, if we don't fix housing, they can't live here, they can't feed here. Absolutely. It's all built. And think about what's Vermont gonna look like in 50 years. You know, my kids 21 and 23 now, neither of them think they can stay and live in the state. They don't even think they could ever own a home. And it's not just Vermont, but it's the big thing. But you're not gonna have somebody to drive your fuel truck or you're the installer to install your food pump. If you go down the central supply to buy a two by four to go out to eat, you can have all of these big, expensive houses and all that. But if you don't have a place, and I'm in the hospitality industry, if you don't have a place where working class people can afford to live, you don't have a society. Housing. It all comes down to housing. You don't get no argument from me, I assume. Emily. Emily. Would you? Yeah. Sorry. Big one. So just continue that, then I wanna go back. Are we looking into, okay, so if you're saying you want less oil, so that means obviously there's gonna be less jobs in the oil company because less people are gonna need oil. Are we looking into taking those companies, offering them incentives to say, hey, now we wanna learn how to install heat pumps and do you wanna learn how to do weatherization? Do you have workers for that? That's just a question. Are we looking into anything like that where we have these companies that if they would suffer, I'm not in favor of a lot of what I'm hearing, but this is just a question for if it does go through. And then, so I moved from Asheville because it was this great green meadow and it became a human wasteland. Our river now gets eat times the amount of people lying on our river. And then everybody in Asheville did this big push like we're doing right now. So they wanted us all to go electric and instead of pushing biofuel. I've not heard anything about biofuels with shocks. I mean, we have all this poop issue because we can make biofuels out of poop. And we're not gonna make that in-house. You could have farms make that in-house. You can store it. There's tons of things with biofuel. We're not looking into it. You can take oil systems and convert them very easily to take biofuels. So in Asheville, then we get all of this to go towards electric. You know who provides electric for Asheville? Duke Energy. You know how Duke Energy gets electric? Cold, very cold. And they tried to stop that a bunch of times and they kept saying, we're putting different regulations. We're doing this. Guess who has more money than civilians that want green energy? Cold and patrolling and she and stuff. So I'm just concerned we're gonna go so green and then go electric. So I turn hydro a lot of them or it's gonna go through native lands and then nuclear, which I'm not gonna get, like there are pluses and negatives to all of this. But I'm just concerned that we have so much focus on electric. What if our power bridge shut down or something? Like you can deliver a heating oil when your power goes out. If you're relying on electric when your power goes out to a buying and supply heating, you can freeze it up. And that's an actual thing that can happen. Yeah. No, you're right. The energy credit market will also apply to biofuels and it's in the bill. One of the things which is really nice about this bill is that it's technology neutral. So it actually doesn't really matter what your technology is. If it has a lower carbon footprint than oil and gas, it's gonna be supported by this bill to one extent or another. And so right now the technology that we have, which is the most effective for most people is electricity powered heat pumps. Not gonna work for everybody. So the bill doesn't mandate heat pumps. The bill doesn't mandate any particular kind of fuel or heating source. What the bill will do is it says, if you can meet the needs in a less carbon intensive way, then you get credit for that. And so if you can do it through biofuels or you can do it through wood heat, then that works also. Okay, now, and excuse my ignorance because I'm new to the area, but this is something that I- This is a big complicated issue. Oh, totally. And so I guess what I'm trying to learn with the biofuels, is there an infrastructure than to support this? Like, just is we're not looking into how a supply by a fuel is enhanced? Like if you're saying that is something we're looking into, like, I just don't actually- Yeah, so yeah. My husband makes biofuels. He was trained, he did a class with plenty of international proof that it does green energy all around the world and stuff. And he learned to make it on the docks of Philly with this dude that was one of the top biofuels engineers. I mean, it's not hard. And that's why that's something we could be like, I feel like really focusing on investing in biofuels. So there's two ways that biofuels enter the picture here in Vermont. One is in the Chittenden County area where they already have natural gas pipelines. And so it's relatively easy for them to add a biofuel gas into that pipeline. So using existing infrastructure. And the other way is through the fuel dealers who are many of whom are already delivering biofuels or biofuel mixes with their heating oil. And so people who do that kind of work will be able to get credit for it. That's a great question. Lots of great questions. Thank you so much for all of this. And to answer your initial question about encouraging the employees and the personnel carrying out the operations of petroleum outfits. The free market would take its course. We would help. And those folks would maybe adapt. But the other complex set of questions that you've offered will hopefully be answered in the next two years by the folks who, you know, the council, the study committee that this policy creates. Is there a spot to keep up to date with this? Yes. Okay, that's great. So before you leave, I will hope to get your email and your phone number so that you can be plugged into the public hearings. There'd be a series of them across the state. We'd love to hear your thoughts in those. So another critical piece to this puzzle is child care. This housing, yes, jobs, yes, child care, all those aren't just intertwined. What is the, I know that the veto process, the child care initiatives are also part of that veto process. What do you foresee happening to that? What do you see for the most important parts of what actually got passed? I see us overriding that veto and having that bill go fully to effect. Any bill that comes up on the override session will be overridden. And relating to the child care, which now was passed, what parts do you think were really important to get done? I'll tell you, in the final weeks of the legislative session, there were rumors that that huge bill, the big one, the biggest aside from the housing bill, was dead. That was false. I mean, I don't know where it came from, but sometimes in the state house rumors rise. They manifest themselves and then you chase that rumor around the building until you find out that was never true. And it turns out that the Senate and the House disagreed on where exactly we would cultivate the revenue to fund the program that we foresee, payroll tax versus income tax. I was very pleased to see that the Senate got their way on having a payroll tax because that's less burdensome. That impacts fewer, it's not gonna be so burdensome to more people than fewer people. I think that's a better way. The components that you feel were important to get passed were what? Well, it's gonna make it more attractive to be a child care worker, because it'll subsidize wages. And it's also gonna subsidize households who have small children to be able to put their children in daycare and have childcare. They're gonna, it's gonna, right now there are certain subsidies in place. They're gonna be greatly expanded with this bill. So it'll be affordable to a much bigger percentage of the population than it is right now. Offering full-time programming for three or four years is that part of what is gonna happen here? I don't know specifically about Brookfield. That is the intent of the bill. That's where the overall decision of the location, the prior location of the child states for a child. Sure, yeah, yeah. So that, yeah, so you could probably expect that. We discovered that the childcare sector in Vermont, we need both private and public sector, as you know. That the impetus that the legislature has had to take responsibility for is the reality that the onus is on the taxpayers to have to invest in the public sector. Kevin. This is a little bit of a follow-up. It encompasses a lot of what both of you said. So, and I know Larry and Mark really appreciate it. I talked to Mark about it as well. I'm set to be in the Ronnie Tickle talk about the heating situation. I think you've done an elegant job of trying to describe it. I just rent some numbers in my necks. I have some from the graduate list that I think he might have saved over $3,000 this year. Because we're complicated, everything is so complicated and used to be, just burned wood for a while. There's no easy answer to anything. I have an 1824 house. I cannot use heat as well, lots of small ones. But I went to a pellet stove. I have wood heat in the wood as well. Pellet stove, which I just did rent some numbers here again, saved me over $3,000 in my home last year because I saved it over $1,200 wood. Just because like you, I can only have to run the oil at 15 or 20 below. The pellet stove and the wood stove between them saved me a lot of money. So that's just one piece of the puzzle. I want to get back to economics a little bit. I know both of you are not in that. But this gentleman and others are set just getting before hard for young people to save their estate. And I had two children as well. Now, young 20s, middle 20s, ones already left. Another one's just in his college, which he's going to move out. And it's because of the cost of living. It's housing and other costs of living. We're losing a lot of young people that way. And I have a question that relates to that. Are tax rates still, in our towns here, are people are going up this year? Now, my understanding isn't the state of Maine. We're explaining that because of the federal emergency money that was plugged into the states. I've read different things, including out of the house right now, like people stated. All that federal money's dried out, we're almost done. That's not true. There are still tens of millions of dollars sitting in the coffers in Vermont right now. Education is one of them, by the way. It's huge. So I guess my question is, I don't think there was a correlation between the federal dollars and what you were trying to do to hold the budget in line as house and Senate members this year. Maine, I think, took a stand to look it up. I might be wrong, but they tried to take states up. Because of all the federal influence, no property increases. Now, my understanding that our tax rate is going to go down slightly for education, but because the revaluation of our homes is going to explode, it's going to cost people even more. So I'm wondering what types of things, and I know this is not on YouTube gentlemen per se, but no, it is a situation. And I want to know if people talked about it and the house and Senate. And they had an understanding from education and other agencies, just how much money towns had, et cetera. In Maine, they took the money, and you can't offset taxes with it, but they put programs out early for citizens to vote on that would offset costs they had to pay. We didn't do that here. We just kept saying, if it costs more to educate kids, we have to spend more money, right? And the schools and everything, there was no conversation that there was $350 million in extra state revenue sitting here to be spent, which is now we're spending out a contract. We are just forcing, force feeding money out of here, and I don't know if it's any kind of necessary, preschool or children's education. We're building construction projects, and the costs are off the roof, because people, we don't have enough workers that can charge, they're coming in for your answer, can charge what they want from it. I'll shut up there. I hope I made a point about it, it is. You did, is there a question though? I think the question is, do you see anything involved with any of the programs you've discussed? Childcare, education, the heating situation, whatever, that can also work back where we can talk to each other better, including federal people, which I always am not talking mistakenly about, to make sure that Vermont is getting this bang-roll of boxing out. In education, you mean? Yeah, in education, by crime, everybody. Kevin, you know probably better than most of the members of the audience how our education, our public education system is funded in Vermont. It's very complicated. You just referred to the common level of appraisal being something that will rise despite the fact that we are likely to see maybe three or four cents relief in our property tax value in these towns, Randolph Brookfield, surrounding towns in this district. The cost per pupil each year does indeed increase just about no matter what. And the idea that we should spend less or save money on education is not a great one to pursue. I guess if you're asking, can we figure out ways to better leverage federal dollars and be more in closer communication with the federal government? I imagine there are opportunities for that, but for as long as it's a... I mean, I think what part of the question is is that you guys know that. I'm not trying to look at it on the spot. Do you know why? I think the average representative... Do you want to... So this is maybe just my opinion, but I imagine mostly you might agree with me. The reason why we have the education funding formula that we have today. And it's 60, it changes every year. Those two things, but additional to that is the concept of local control, which is entirely a myth in Vermont. It isn't. It is a concept that isn't real. And the reason is because you're not in control of a budget that's only you can have an opportunity to say no to. So you're... The voters of Brookfield get to vote no to the budget. That would prop up Randolph High School. And that's it. And then if you succeed in collectively saying, no, we reject that budget, and the other towns that belong to that district do the same, then it's upon the school board and the superintendent and those who create the budget to come back with a new proposal, which theoretically would be a lower dollar amount than the one that you rejected. Is that control? No. It's veto power, at best. Talks. You guys know all about that? Well, I was on the House Education Committee for two terms, so I didn't. So I got, so the last two sessions prior to the one that we've just served, we explored what it will look like to update the variables by which we determined the cost per pupil in the high school at Randolph. What are the factors that we calculate to determine how expensive it is to educate one child in 10th grade versus one child in the second grade? There used to be about four or five variables. Now there are eight, maybe nine. Policy is being ironed out, the updated per pupil weighting system, weighting being the EIGHT. We have yet to see what the impact would be, but I guess today, so if you had, if your question was, your question was, are we looking into that, we certainly have, and that was a controversial topic. This session, most of the topics in the Education Committees were social in nature. We let the court system, typically, in Vermont. In Vermont, we lawmakers let the courts decide what policy opt to, what criteria a policy opt to have. Yeah, of course. So like, for example, whether or not public dollars have to go to religious institutions or independent schools versus, you know, all the different categories of schools and what regulatory rules they should be bound by versus what they should benefit from. It's just a legal aspect of the per pupil thing comes with every year. So you probably work with the April study for the past. Sure. Yeah. I know. Sure. I'm well aware of the formula. Right, so the update to the formula passed last session, we don't have to dig into that probably for another year or two. But it will be another several years. Until our new tax bill goes up. Got it. So the new replacement goes up, which is what this gentleman was referring to. Right, right. And the cost of everything, every year, goes up. And of course, especially, you know, expenses like, you know, our legislature, they need to double them when they make new money. The legislative compensation bill? Yeah. That came out of my committee. And now... I don't have my money back. What's that? I don't have my money back. You don't have your money back? Well, Jack, you'll be pleased to know that I voted against it, selfishly. And though I have no qualms with the contents of the policy, I agree with the philosophy. I do only think you guys really look at yourself in more like state employees than you are elected officials. And it's bogus. That could be the case for some of us. It's not the case for me. I can only speak for myself. Well, I get that. You have a different family background to a J. So I think it goes along with so-called criteria. Very true. So we have to go along with it. We're gonna kind of, we're gonna kind of this now. This is a Q&A. I appreciate your change. Anybody on that side of the room have a question? Because I think we're wrapping up. I'm getting the third right. So we have a couple times. And I want to announce that the right side has been, you know, a little less with questions. I want to encourage you to give a question. The right side of the brain, right? No, no, no. There's over more people on this side. I know that you have to, you have to borderline bearers. We shall be sure that many people raise the floor. I know this is a substantial question, but I'm just curious if you've heard what the status of the cannabis bill is. Last time we had a good sign came the document. Oh, that's true. It hasn't yet. Cannabis. I imagine the governor will let that one go into law. What's that bill so they can do? It's sort of some updates to the regulations, mostly. And yeah, we'll continue. So we do, so every committee, every session does housekeeping and what we do is we take in the stakeholders of the various industries that we're trying to regulate or decide how to. And they'll come and tell us what's working, what's not working. In this case, we got feedback from that community and also from the Cannabis Control Board and we'll continue to do that for the coming years, every year. Goodbye, committee. It's on the guy to talk. And I wonder if before we wrap up, also responding to Kevin's question, because I think it's a really important question. And that, I guess I'd have a couple of different responses. And one is that, yes, Vermont got a tremendous amount of money from the federal government. And that money is being spent over several years. So, and it's a choice, like you said. Different states have managed their budgets in different ways, depending upon what their priorities are. We talked about housing and the urgent need for more affordable, more and more affordable housing. Vermont is gonna be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on housing projects using a lot of that money over the next several years. So, a lot of that money, yeah, I mean, I suppose there's a world in which we could have chosen to not spend that money on housing and instead to lower taxes. That's a pretty tough call, I think, you know? Like, you know, the housing piece is so critical. I mean, I think that it is the right decision to spend that money on housing. I think it's such an urgent need. We heard from people who I completely agree with that if housing costs continue to rise, even if they just stay where they are, we're at risk of really destabilizing the structure of our society here, our local, you know, Vermont. Huge problem, we're spending money on it. And then, you know, the other big piece of this is, you know, when we talk about budgetary issues, we always talk about the costs that are very present in our minds for very good reasons. We don't often talk as much about what we get for those costs. And, you know, one of the things that we're gonna spend a lot of money on in the next few years, assuming we override the Governor's veto on the childcare bill, is on childcare, we're gonna spend a lot of money. It's in many millions of dollars. People are gonna pay it out of their taxes. But, you know, many studies over many, many years are very, very clear. Every dollar we put into this early childhood education, we get back all that money and a lot more. So, I think it's really important for us to flip things on their head and sometimes think, not so much what is the cost of doing something, but what's the cost of not doing it, right? Because right now we're paying the costs of not investing in our children and not doing some of the things which we ought to be doing. Of course there's limits. We can only afford so much. But we do always need to keep in mind that sometimes it pays to make that extra effort, come up with the extra money so that we can benefit from that and make our society richer over time. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. We're really curious. I'm just trying to be careful. And Kevin had one quick call. Go ahead. Kevin had one quick call. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, that's great. Sorry, I just wanted to... No, I'm actually, people look out of the blind. Oh. I just wanted to clarify the $30 or $15 or something. $30. $35, $35. $35, $35. Yeah. Um, and I was curious if that's federally protected land. Is that going to be purchased from private landowners or is that like a... Do you know the answer? Because I'm not like, oh. Is that, I think that you wouldn't think you'd know better if it was the FU. So there's a global initiative that's $30 by $30. And it is now also a federal initiative that is endorsed by President Biden not too long ago. Vermont right now has a combination of public and private land. We have a big chunk of public land that is our national forest. State also owns lands, municipality's own land. So there's a fair amount of public land also. There's quite a bit of private land which is already permanently protected through land trusts. What this bill specifically does for Vermont is it helps us figure out how to get the rest of the way there. So right now, it depends upon how you measure, but we're somewhere in the low 20s in terms of the percentage of land which is already permanently protected in Vermont. So if we want to get to 30%, we're like most of the way there already. How do we get there? That's the open question. And like a lot of bills, especially the more complex ones that appear before the legislature. One of the things that I think a lot of people don't really know about is that the expertise in our legal structures, in our state government really is in the state agencies. It's not really in the legislature. We have a citizen legislature that meets for a little less than five months a year. We're really a bunch of part-timers, right? And we have no staff. So nobody works for me. I'm it in terms of research, responding to constituents, reading my email. No one helps me do any of that stuff. And so if we want to do things which really require a lot of legwork in Vermont, talking about state government, it's usually the state agencies that do that heavy lifting. So what this bill does is it directs the agency of natural resources being assisted by the Housing Conservation Board to basically do an inventory, a much more detailed inventory than we have now of what currently exists and its land ownership status and then say, okay, we're here. We want to get here in this amount of time. What are some possibilities for getting there? And that's really all this bill does. It's really a baby step. It's not actually appropriating money to purchase land. It doesn't lay out a prescriptive way to get us there. It's basically saying, what's the world of possibilities? What opportunities do we have? What's the best way to do this in a prioritized way too? Like we don't want to just protect any land, right, there's certain places which are much lower priority in such places which are much higher priority. How do we actually go about preserving the land which is going to make the most impact, which is going to give us the greatest bang for our buck as we talk about going through that process? And it doesn't force anybody to sell the land. It doesn't force anybody to do anything. But it creates opportunity for people to do that. You said it does. Yeah, it doesn't force anybody to do anything. Thanks for your question. Thanks for your question. So it's 8.30 thinking. Kevin had a very quick update on the wastewater, which I really can't say anything. So, government, I'll just write the readers from when I got back in the city person. So, and people will not like hearing wellness but some of them I can't remember. Government is always easy to blame. There are conservative standards but a fully compliant system is essential. It will last, it will not produce pollution and other persons ground with it. Real estate brokers are the real culprit here if people are upset because they are the ones who force the state to run the program and took it away from the towns who were doing a, quote, crappy job, pardon the puddle, they put something else in it actually. And there were lots of failures which was becoming a legal nightmare. So there's a lot of breakdown. The other person, the other technician added, soils are very wet. This is not gonna make people feel happy to eat her. Microbes don't break down the waste and cheap systems that continually fail in the mud if they're not properly engineered. And they did agree with the person. He said that we should look into this. I said, there were costs people who played with the cost. We should look into how to manufacture and use technology like someone you have suggested and bring the costs now for the piping system. So I think it's a dialogue. And if I can say one thing else, communication, we have computers and we have phones. We do. Communication is the worst. I'm sorry, I'm a little bit older. Communicating better with the government. Impact. So I can get a couple of quick examples. I didn't ask my question, who put the ice in the spot if you're doing good work. I asked the question because it's amazing to me that we get so many hundreds of million dollars of federal money. And people, I call people stay house and centers. They don't even know what exists. And they're doing their work and they're doing it diligently, but they don't know what exists. And I'll give one other example. It's very close to home for me and people know Randolph Center, the state department of lab, which was built not following that 250. I had asked repeatedly for people. I was loyal and I was like, you just give it up. We broke letters. I wrote a letter to state government about why they built it 60 feet taller than they had a permit to do. I was supposed to see aftertreats in my storehouse. And I see a fact that it's so loud at night with windows closed, you can hear. All I hear is we're working. We have a sound mitigation plan. It's the latest I've heard that. Nobody in BGS doesn't talk to the state government, doesn't talk to the federal government, doesn't talk to VTC that they bought the plan from for a buck. Nobody will talk to anyone. And it is amazing to me that how with all the equipment we've got and everyone like you and everyone of us working so hard that there's such missing stuff going on. Yeah. Okay. I'll ask you guys later about the bottom of those. I come from Maine and they've solved your bottom of those. We're gonna read the letter. The question is in a candidate's hand. The question is in a candidate's hand. You can preform, communicate with them here. Let's go. I've got all the data all in the back. Eventually I'll sign it, but it would be nice to keep all the staff and chairs on the side. It's really hard to make a joke out of it. I'm gonna come to the first time. Not so. Thank you. Thank you.