 For the record, my name is Matt Koda. I'm the Executive Director of the Vermont Field Dealers Association, which is a trade association for heating and motor fuel suppliers in the state of Vermont. I thank you for the opportunity to testify regarding Action 50, just for your background. I appreciate what the Normal's endeavor has been to address this planning plan in Action 50. I served five years as a planning commissioner in the town of Plainfield, Vermont, and I'm currently the Vice-Chair of the Development Review Board in South Georgia, Vermont. So I know the challenges with planning, I know the challenges with affordable housing and the inevitable debates between neighbors when it comes to citing large-scale developments. That's just this background, my main concern here and why I have to testify and I appreciate the opportunity is to talk about the provisions with regards to climate change in Action 50. There are three essential questions that I have as I look at the text of the bill. One is, from a planning perspective, are we dictating, or housing developments, are we dictating what kind of heating equipment to go in? Are we requiring any housing development with oil or gas or propane to mitigate emissions from there? Then how do you calculate those emissions? That would be an outstanding question. Maybe the answer to already, maybe something that we have to figure out. But if you are having to buy carbon offsets, if you want to have an oil-fired furnace rather than an electric heat pump, that's something that a developer should know before they create plants and supply for Action 50. The commercial developments such as those from ski areas that have very large tanks, propane tanks that have ski area like Stratton or Jacksonville, maybe 60,000 gallons worth of propane storage for cooking or to supply the condo units with fireplaces and for heat and for the water heating for tanks and hot dogs and such. How would they buy offsets for those types of developments? How would they mitigate that? Would they be required to have electric heat and not have propane cooking for their restaurants or fireplaces that run on propane? Certainly we know that you can use electric heat. We know that electric heat pumps work. They don't work in every application. Well-designed homes, you can heat electrically with the heat pumps much better than you could with resistance heat. But it doesn't work in every application. And furthermore, we're a winter heating state. So last night, the electricity that was powered by the heat pumps that kept us warm was running on natural gas. In 15 days in January last year, we used 84 million gallons of heating oil to run the power plants because there wasn't enough natural gas to run those power plants. Just for perspective, we used 75 million gallons a year of heating oil to heat our homes in Vermont. In other words, it took a year's worth of Vermont's heating oil to keep the lights on and doing them for just 15 days. 15 days during the bomb-side clone, ISO knowing would use 84 million gallons of heating oil. It hadn't used heating oil because there wasn't enough natural gas to power the power plants. During peak winter demand, we rely on natural gas. But there's not enough natural gas. We rely on heating oil. And ISO knowing would use 84 million gallons in just 15 days. That's perspective, we used 75 million gallons a year to keep our homes warm. So the idea of boiled, fired, ledger heat is not this far. Could you clarify, I mean, our Vermont share of the ISO New England or were you talking about the entire ISO New England grid? I'm telling you about the entire ISO New England grid which we rely on during peak winter, which is distinct from the range, if you will, of the active 50 legislation. We're talking about affecting Vermont, not the ISO grid. Okay, good. I just want to make certain I know what those statistics were from. Do you have your notes on here? I didn't see it online. Okay, will you be providing it? Thank you. The third comment, so one with, from a planning perspective, how do you create both small A and literally affordable housing if you have to buy offsets in order to install oil, gas, fire, heat appliances? Second, commercial development, how do you figure out what your emissions are going to be when you have such multiple uses for your fossil fuels for heating, heating, fireplaces? Third, how do you apply for offsets or how do you mitigate climate change impacts or emissions when you need an active 50 permit for bulk-storied fossil fuels? How do you build a Costco gas station and get active 50 approval under this weekend month? If your primary reason for development is to sell emission-causing fossil fuels. Can you say that again, Matt? So if I'm a seller of propane and I need to install a bulk plant so I can sell propane to my customers or if I'm a gas station operator and I need to put an underground tank so I can sell gasoline to my customers and I need to go through an active 50 permit as happens, not in every case, but in some cases, is it possible to purchase offsets? Is it feasible to purchase offsets in order to build a fossil fuel storage tank if you need an active 50 permit? Is it possible to mitigate that? In fact, I think the answer is no. So my response to the proposed legislation is that particularly when it comes to deciding gasoline, heat-oil bulk plants and propane bulk plants, diesel bulk plants what we're effectively doing is creating a ban on fossil fuel infrastructure in active 50 yards. And if we're not, then let's exempt. Let's exempt heat-oil, diesel fuel, gasoline, and propane from these regulations. So let's eliminate this requirement. As a background, we sell 600 million gallons of liquid fossil fuels in Vermont every year. We sell 300 million gallons of gasoline. We sell 100 million gallons of propane. We sell 200 million gallons of distillate. Distillate, half of which is heat-oil, used for heat. The other 100 million gallons of distillate and it's diesel fuel used for on-road vehicles and off-road vehicles are far bigger for the portion. So we have 600 million gallons that we currently sell. We know we're going to sell less. We know government policies wants us to sell less and wants from others to use less. We understand that. But we still, in the near term, need to store the fuel that we sell safely. And we think that we provide a good bargain for developments in terms of finding a affordable way to keep your home for your commercial. The Wii. When you say Wii, who is in Wii? Is that a code of fuel or is that the state? That's a great question. Why say Wii? I'm referring to the Vermont retailers of motor fuels and meeting fuels of which we have today represents a non-profitary association. Okay. And I work for 17 board of directors that are listed on vermontfuel.com backslash contact. You probably said this at the beginning. Any businesses do you represent? So we have about 500 retail gasoline stations in Vermont. There's about 150 retail heating oil and propane providers in the state representing 10 to 15,000 workers. All of them. Telling 600 million yells. Yeah, we just think this morning we're kind of a cold right up here. And I know we have some cold spells every now and then. What's your supply in the state? I mean, how much capacity do you have in how many days or months do you have on hand in the state? So we don't have a port. We don't have a seat port. We don't have a pipeline. At least not one with an off-ground. The Portland pipeline but there's no way to get access. All of our fuel comes by rail or by truck, tanker truck. The average fuel dealer has bulk storage that will cost them a day and a half in within the way. Tertiary storage is how most of our fuel is kept. Tertiary storage is the tanks at your homes. The propane tank. The renewal of your kerosene tank. That's your home. That's where most of our storage is. And careful transportation of fuel from Montreal by rail to the Polaro Terminal in Burlington or to the Burlington Terminal from Albany or trucks going to the Selkirk pipeline which brings up a propane from Texas or the trucks that are going to Springfield Mass or of course between Hampshire. That's how we get our fuel so we are heavily dependent on rail and in truck because the amount of storage we have gets you through a couple days and that's about it. I'm representing Morgan. During the summer months does any fuel come through the blocks up through the lake by ship, by boat? No, so not since 1984. If you go down to Burlington, the Oakledge Park you'll see the old dolphin which is where it used to bring up barges of oil from Albany. That has stopped. That's been banned. So that terminal oddly situated in the Mobile Thermal now owned by Mobile Patrol and oddly situated in Burlington's lakefront because of that purpose now it's supplied by rail. So neither Vermont nor New York utilize this water. Well, the Hudson River New York is coming into the lake. I'm trying to get this so these fuels you only have enough for one and a half days everywhere except for what's in people's homes and businesses that they have in their tank. And so that's coming in that much every day every day and a half you're replenishing all those gas station tanks and everything else. Those truck and trailer trucks are either picking up fuel from rail cars or there's propane heat and oil diesel through our gasoline or they're driving out of state to bring it in the whole thing. So this is the point of interest and ability so the tertiary I'm imagining we in our homes have what, a weak average storage in our homes for 90 what it represents of course depends on the time of the year and the temperature outside but you know today, last night you used five gallons and you'll use five gallons tomorrow, tomorrow night you know so less than a month probably for the average home would have a buffer to get by half the homes that were moderated with heating oil the vast majority of those tanks are 275 gallons about 20% of our homes have propane tanks in the most varying size because of the purposes for those are typically 240 gallons I'm just point of interest for energy security that's really all I'm trying to get at so I could go flat out from an energy security we know that we're moving to electric car infrastructure we understand that but we're losing gasoline stations and we have good environmental laws in Vermont and across the country that require double walled tanks this committee was key the chairman dean of ensuring that the tanks that go into the ground have to be double walled and that to see walled tanks come out of the ground that's a good environmental policy started by this committee but then there's another side which is why did the mom and pop the country weren't selling gasoline anymore because it's cost prohibitive so we're losing gasoline stations over the past 30 years we've lost 40% of retail gasoline stations in Vermont over 30 years over the past 30 years if we pass this F-250 with the climate change I don't know how you mitigate the installation of the tank we'll find another even F-250 in the permanent area we'll never have another fuel tank again that's an energy security problem I agree with that thank you Richard does have an online screening testimony presentation rather than asking Matt what was this going on I'll ask you I'm not aware I'm not aware of the bill where climate change creates the issue under criteria one we create greenhouse gas and it has an avoid and minimize mitigates and in the mitigates it says in that section it says what page is it I don't know the page but it's criteria one it says we didn't see that I didn't understand that I'm for the record I'm Richard Phasey I'm living in the Starsboro principal of Energy Futures Group I'll give a little bit more back of my background so I was asked to come in to generally talk about energy in our F-250 I will be I'll give you a little bit more about who I am and my experience here in Vermont just remind the committee of some of Vermont's energy and climate goals try to address the question of how active 50 can help support those goals explain a little bit about beneficial electrification I'm not sure how much knowledge the committee has on that but I think it's important to set a foundation as we move forward to slide specifically some recommendations on what I think active 50 should do to support energy efficiency so just a little bit of background in terms of who I am I've been in the energy efficiency field for about 30 years in Vermont 20 one of those were with Vermont Energy Investment Corporation and then 10 years ago or so spun off and started Energy Futures Group really I've got a lot of residential primarily as my experience had the certifications from LEED Home Energy Rating System and SDOE so no lot about the building but then also about the programs and policy as well too so trying to take the experience in the field and apply it to programs and policies that can make sense involved in the energy industry in Vermont in the chair of the Energy Club of Vermont members we're a fuel dealer that is transitioning to become an energy services company so the Energy Club of Vermont based in Colchester and operates a weatherization business and heat pumps we sell pellets as well as fuel so really trying to figure out how to become the energy service provider of the future so that's an interesting challenge and trying to take what we see as the future being and try to apply it today and make that work also on the board of the Building Performance Professional Association which is the trade association in Vermont that represents the weatherization contractors the whole performance contractors and we've had an organization sort of the token non-contractor gets good insights into what's going on in the weatherization industry there the chair of the Starksboro Energy Committee involved in some Addison County initiatives there as well and mentioned partner in Energy Futures Group in Hinesburg so EFG is we're a seven person firm we have been we do have a number of various expertise focused on energy efficiency and including energy as well too so that would include renewables in addition to efficiency so you can see from the slide a number of various expertise clients really all over the country in Canada and do some work outside of the country as well too our office building is the 150 year old old police station on 160 in Hinesburg that we renovated a couple years ago it's now in that zero office building so we produce, it's all electric we produce all of our electricity we use for heating, cooling lights and hot water from the solar panels you see on the roof there so it could be done in Vermont so in terms of a framework energy as you well know is core to environmental stewardship one of the one of the elements that's key in Act 250 and as well I'm assuming this committee acknowledges that climate change is real and needs to be considered and really sort of the way we think about it in the industry is in three sectors there's the electric system that's the grid how we produce and use electricity there's transportation and then there's thermal so it's just helped to sort of understand the different systems each one is unique and somewhat different but has some overlap and then some frames to consider here as well that I'll dive in a little deeper on each one of these but Vermont has 90% renewable energy by 2050 gold it's part of the comprehensive energy plant there's also we've got greenhouse gas goals that are important to consider as part of your work in reframing Act 250 and then we also have a goal to only construction being designed to meet zero energy like our office building that was a retrofit for new construction both commercial and residential buildings by 2030 and so that's been part of a couple comprehensive energy plans but those are sort of the frames that I thought would be useful for you to consider as you think about updating the plan updating the Act 250 to the law and so as part of that too just thinking about each decision and each criteria thinking about how efficiency works in there as well as resilience we know that climate change is having real effects and the way that we build our buildings needs to anticipate future weather situations that may not be we may not have experienced it previously so specifically the energy and climate goals sorry a nursing of coal so I think 15 months so Vermont's Comprehensive Energy Plan has a goal as I mentioned we need 90% of our energy needs through efficiency and renewables by 2050 so by design that means we need to significantly reduce the amount of energy we use at the same time we need to shift off fossil fuels towards renewables typically renewables would include solar, wind, hydro, biodex as well we've got as part of that the first milestone is 25% renewables by 2025 and I'll show a couple charts in terms of where we stand with those from the energy action network inside Vermont is part of the Paris Climate Accord as we joined a coalition with some goals of 26-28% greenhouse gas emissions reductions from 2025 levels by 2025 so we have this 2025 goal both in energy and climate that's good to consider and we aren't as a state doing as well as we need to be towards those we also have our own statutes with even more ambitious goals that set 50% reduction from 1990 levels by 2028 so those sort of build on each other so what does that look like so these as I mentioned are from Energy Action Network 2017 annual report they have a new one coming out in a couple weeks so these will be updated based on the most recent data and information but we've got in this green bar we've got some work to do if we're going to get on the trajectory that leads us up to 90% renewable by 2050 so businesses usually can see as the dotted line there and we're sort of in the middle of that or in the beginning of that green zone where we need to by 2025 get up that climb up that green line a little higher than where we are so this next slide from their annual report last year also sort of shows where we are so the blue represents the amount of greenhouse gases that we've used since 1990 this goes up through the data is only available through 2013 but you can see there's a little dotted line at the end above 2015 our greenhouse gas emissions have actually gone up the last couple years I'm not sure what we're going to find in the next annual report from EAN but we need to be on that blue line which brings us to 2025 with a Harris Accord and also the clean energy plan goals you can see there above 2025 we've missed by a long shot the bottom green line which is the 25% reduction by 1990 levels that was set a number of years ago so we're climbing in terms of greenhouse gas emissions when we really need to be on a decrease in smoke so that's just sort of some reality check and if these goals are really what we're striving for we have to work and I think that active 50 can help be the way there I mentioned as well that the third goal besides the energy and climate goals we have a comprehensive energy plan there's a new construction zero energy goal that calls for all new construction to be zero energy by 2030 so that basically means that all of the energy required for that building needs to be produced with renewables it needs to be I actually should have put the word designed here designed to achieve zero energy because as we know people live in buildings and if they don't operate them the way that they're designed to then it may not be those goals but this is an aggressive goal California did this ahead of us there are a number of other states out there that have similar goals but 2030 isn't that far away and it's hard to see this graph in these numbers while I'm not here representing the Department of Public Service we are under contrast to them to update the the energy codes in the state part of that work we work with this National Institute National Organization New Buildings Institute to help us figure out based on where we are what it's going to take to get our buildings to the point whereby 2030 we have enough space on the roofs we have enough panels and make those buildings zero energy produce all the energy for the buildings from the square footed area on the roofs so that means that's again that's that combination of efficiency and even make sure that the buildings use a small enough amount of energy so that when when the solar is put on those buildings it can produce the annual amount of energy that that building needs but we need to step down from where we are at 49 and this is a BTUs per square foot target so we actually need to cut in half the amount of energy our buildings use to meet this standard by 2030 can I just take a pause you said I'm curious you said California has done this they've set the goals or met the goals or what does that mean good question they set the goals for 2020 for residential and 2030 for commercial so they've taken they took a step last year it was international news that they're requiring solar channels and all of the construction then I don't think that they're requiring something like 2 or 3 kilowatts of solar which is not enough to about half of what a typical house might use California weather is more mild than ours so it might be similar between half and 80% so they're taking the step in that direction my guess is that that goal of having all new construction in California residential construction with zero energy might slip by a couple of years but 2020 was their goal and they're on their way there and so the other states have set goals as well for different states of having new construction with zero energy nobody has accomplished that any other countries um I don't know representative McCullough comprehensive energy plan is that the Vermont yes the Vermont this is our plan there are a couple there's I believe a 2011 version and it was updated in 2015 and basically the 2015 version provided some more detail and specifics that 2020 good morning maybe you'll get to this but my question is to follow up on a point you made indicating that you're working with the new buildings institute to update the energy codes I had heard two conflicting perspectives on our energy code for the state we don't have many codes, building codes but we do have energy efficiency building codes and I've heard it's adequate but the enforcement is still wanting and then I've heard it does need upgrading can you shed some light as to how we're doing on the art we've spent a lot of time talking about the code I can hit on it I can hit on your questions now and if you happen I actually should have asked you how much time do we have I just want to make sure you're in Tiltown about 25 minutes I just want to make sure I'm halfway through my spine I stick to what you presented let's say on track can I come back to that we can have you back but I can address that the code question when I get through the end because it is one of my recommendations at the final slide so it'll come up there so how can active 50 help I think it's important as you develop something to the plan to ask whether each of the criteria helps for climate and energy goals as a framework there we there's also we have biomass as well as an important consideration in here local fuel that is a renewable resource we should talk about setting the highest bar for energy efficiency when thinking about the best available technology so typically criteria 9F has driven as the terminology and best available technology essentially has been interpreted as being the energy code stretch code so our code has two levels of efficiency and active 50 has required the stretch code which is the higher level I'll talk a little bit more about that and as well think about and it also mentions energy conservation I see that you're proposing efficiency throughout the bill as well too the distinction I have here just in terms of thinking what is the difference between conservation and efficiency just thinking about conservation it's turning off the lights as opposed to efficiency replacing an incandescent light with an LED bulb you get the same quality of light actually better, it lasts longer but using less energy so I think that's a good move that you're making for efficiency and there in addition to conservation which has been throughout the the older active 50 language think about this goal that we have for planning for zero energy design by 2026 and then I'll go a little bit more into beneficial or strategic electrification sometimes called prioritizing beneficial electrification off of fossil fuels so think about biomass and electrification as you move forward so what is beneficial electrification I don't know if this is helpful or not I don't know if this committee has had this conversation but I'll provide a little bit of background of respect essentially I think that there's a lot of momentum, a lot of conversation happening it started in Europe and it's grown to this country all the states are having this discussion now about what does our energy future look like and electrification really seems to be sort of a pervasive theme so the thinking here is that we need to transition off of fossil fuels to meet our climate energy goals at the same time electricity is becoming greener 43% of Vermont's electricity comes from renewable sources right now in fact we've got a couple of utilities Burlington Electric Department and Washington Electric Co-op are 100% renewably sourced so at the same time we also have Vermont's renewable energy standard another piece of legislation that's a couple I think 2015 is what it was passed so that requires 75% of our electricity to be renewable by 2032 so that's statewide on this slide your question 43% of Vermont's electricity is from renewable sources the renewable sources include economic energy that they include water from Hydro Quebec includes Hydro Quebec I don't believe it includes I know in our overall design for electricity use of electricity in the state of Vermont a year ago 10% of our statewide electricity was coming from the nuclear plants I believe it's still is yeah you shut down but we are still purchasing nuclear electricity from sea brokens and elsewhere yes I don't believe that the definition of renewable includes nuclear I think it definitions carbon free includes nuclear that's the distinction that I've made representative Morgan what other renewable resources would would so McNeil and McNeil generating plant Hydro Quebec is the big one wind and solar yeah and so so as well we're sort of on Vermont sort of taking a step in this direction the big way in terms of beneficial electrification is through the renewable energy standards there really are sort of three tiers and I should have probably labeled these tier one, two and three the way that the legislation is organized tier one requires 75% renewables by 2032 tier two requires smaller local renewable sources so not only buying Hydro Quebec power or large wind but also encouraging the utilities to meet that 75% through a mix of smaller generation sources as well a lot of those are the smaller solar farms we might see and then it's a tier three which is really this is one of the more innovative policy approaches that Vermont has taken that nobody has and I talked to a lot of audiences outside of Vermont and this is one of those initiatives that I think makes a lot of sense and it's really on the right track so this piece of the renewable energy standard requires utilities to basically wean their customers off of fossil fuel use so they've got some goals that start out moderately but they grow over time and the utilities are basically encouraged or by because they don't meet these goals they get penalized and have to pay into a fund to help their customers transition off the fossil fuel so for instance Burlington Electric Department by meeting this is transitioning they're buying electric buses and so they're not burning fossil fuel they're about to bring in a couple buses there Vermont Electric Co-op has helped sugar makers bring in the electric power lines to sugar houses so that they can so those sugar makers can run their equipment off of electricity instead of burning diesel when they're generators Wiemount Power has helped Johnson Lumber in Bristol bring in three phase power to run their kilns and their equipment so they didn't have to run diesel generators and burn fossil fuel and then there's a lot of residential programs too including weather station a lot of those distribution utilities are now offering and running are in support of these tier 3 efforts I think in Hinesburg you had a new tier 3 insulation of a Tesla Power wall yesterday or this week that ran on power both by power back from that person the power wall that they're storing electricity so it's a great way to encourage utilities to innovate and puts them on the path towards electrification and it's in their benefit to promote this because they sell more electrons and that actually benefits all rate payers because it spreads their fixed cost of poles and wires over a larger number of sales so it's a win-win really it produces our fossil fuel use it's in the utilities interests for keeping costs down it's in all of our interests for meeting our climate goals so it's an innovative initiative that's out there that doesn't directly pertain to active 50 I think it's important for you to understand that we've got these larger goals that are moving us towards electrification utilities are sort of on board as well helping us get there so I think this is probably a good spot to ask this question and it's your opinion on distributed generation in the state of Vermont versus a merchant generator and so the merchant generators that we have are commercial wind projects would be merchant generators and those electrons that are having trouble getting them to their end users which are largely out in the state so could you comment on the future the future of large generation projects in Vermont renewable generation projects in Vermont versus distributed generation and promote one over the entire thing I'm not an expert in this area but I do think that if we're going to meet our lofty goals we're going to meet all of them and I think in the energy world we don't have clear we don't have one clear winner we have a bundle of different resources that we need to bring together on the efficiency side and on the supply side if we're going to meet our climate objectives we've got a lot of work to do and I think we're going to need to figure out how to have both merchant providers and smaller scale projects and do the electrons that leave the state that we make here help us qualify for our our Vermont goals I don't believe that I can't answer that for sure it depends whether our stats are solid yeah thank you I was just thinking of the biofuels most of the biofuels they're carbon based what's the tradeoff with biofuels versus trolling based I think biofuels are another piece of the solution as well too right now most of the biodiesel that we see out there really loves 5% maybe up to 20% of the most is biodiesel blended with fossil so when you buy biodiesel a year there are a couple of providers in Vermont and you really have a hard time getting a winner because it jails but most of them are really predominantly fossil based biodiesel I think that Matt Lee, Matt were here he would he could report that his national industry NORA the national oil the oil heat industry is doing a lot of research because they see their way out of this fossil fuel conundrum that we're in by moving towards biofuels liquid fuels have a lot of benefit and we if we can replace oil with biofuels there isn't much that needs to be changed for our systems but right now they are still predominantly fossil based I think it's part of the solution as a solar and void and other sources as well so where do we stand how renewable are we right now so as a state we are we're not quite as green as we would like to think while the electricity you can see on the right so these ties are all relative to the total and I sort of talked about the three different buckets that initially the electricity, transportation and thermal so the total thermal lack of total we're all about 20% renewable right now thermal is about 20% transportation only 5% most of that is the biodiesel that's where that 5% renewable transportation is some EVs, some electric vehicles but a lot of it is biodiesel mix and electricity is at 43% as I mentioned earlier but if we're going to move that high on the left is 75% I'm sorry 9% renewable by 2050 we've got a lot of work to do in each of these sectors why electrification mostly supports for month climate energy goals it's cleaner it can be more affordable produce it locally it's a way to prepare for battery storage in the future this is going to be a huge way we talked about the Tesla Powerwall that Green Mountain Power had news event yesterday on the price of batteries is coming down significantly the public utilities commission is looking at rates that will encourage kind of use rates which will encourage us to put batteries in our buildings hopefully if we get it right so it's going to be the ability to integrate with distributed resources solar PV but then also our cars if we can plug our electric vehicles into our homes at night and use that for storage and use that for managing the grid that's going to be a huge resource and there's some great work happening out there too so electrifying our building stock moves us in this direction and supports the rest of these technologies most of you are probably familiar with some of that some of the equipment that's out there I think it's been a lot of time but I'm not going to be talking about heat pumps so this equipment works in Vermont as long as you specify the cold climate models 20 below winter last year our building did fine just to maintain 70 degrees year-round there are other heat pump technologies as well heat pump water heaters which basically air and are twice as efficient as electric resistance electric vehicles and industrial equipment are all support the electrification and biomass as well so your biomass has positive aspects of being a local renewable resource there's some great programs and issues out there that's what heating systems replace central fossil fuel systems and community projects too like the district heating plant here in Montpelier so with all that finally what do I recommend that you could do in terms of active 50 so continue requiring stretch energy code I think that's pretty easy to do and so the residential building energy standards or RVs is our residential energy code commercial building energy standards is a commercial code the stretch code is about 15% higher than the base code for each for RVs and CVs right now we are we're about to put the updated language out through the rulemaking process the department of public service we as an energy futures group as a contractor for the department of public service has been working on updating these we've had stakeholder advisory group meetings webinars presented at the better building sign conference so with all that input they're ready for the 2019 version which will go into effect in 2020 so this next version the code will be about 20% higher 15% to 20% higher in each of the codes so moving towards I showed you that new buildings institute step of how to get to 2030 we're making our way down that step so in addition to making sure that the code is supported as it is right now and this gets to your other question about code compliance as well too you're absolutely right we don't have any statewide code enforcement mechanism we have a couple cities that have code inspectors they aren't energy experts they're primarily looking at health and safety issues they might ask whether there's the builder has a certificate there's a certificate of CVS RB certificate it's a one pager that the builder signs off on they build the code and checks off some of the specifics of the property it's supposed to be provided on the building fix the building somewhere on the electrical panel sent to the town clerk and also a copy go to the department of public service but there is no statewide enforcement there is so let me get through this and I can circle back about some maybe I have it here so documentation of energy code compliance some mechanism for active 50 projects but to jurisdiction active 50 what we're talking about here making sure that that certificate comes back to somebody in the process because right now a builder a developer says I'm going to build to the energy code and off they go there's no verification that they actually built it so if they could provide that RB or CVS certificate back to an authority having jurisdiction I'm not even sure who it would be but I think that would be that would help ensure that there's a that those projects meet the energy standard you're talking about rural building right not in like a town that has code enforcement but in a town like Burlington Burlington Burlington Berry Bennington and maybe Robert so you're talking more rural but even Winston or Colchester there's not a code official nobody's looking at the energy code and any of those jurisdictions outside of those few cities that have a code enforcement officer that's all I was trying to do thank you so right now the Home Builder Association the Passive House Alliance the Building Performer Professional Association the AIA the architects and other groups have come together they have a consensus group that and they will be presenting to the legislature shortly two recommendations one is that all builders at least be registered with the states the Office of Professional Regulation has a piece of legislation that they're looking at so right now we don't even know who's building homes in the state who called themselves a builder and there's no way for opportunities for education or letting them know what's attacking out there but it's a precursor to ensuring that there's a level playing field that all homes at least get built to code there's an effort to register builders amongst all the building groups that's underway and then also a code enforcement suggestion as well so we'll see where that goes but back to your question before there is no enforcement outside of those municipalities and so some way to ensure that those builders that are building to the law most of them are active 50 builders they are building to code there's no competition out there that is not necessarily building to the other standards and so that puts them at a disadvantage so requiring all electric or biomass heated buildings as another recommendation future proofer building for electrified future would be a great component to include an active 50 and then as part of this too as we know our transportation sector is moving towards electric we heard Matt acknowledge that as well too think about charging stations in all housing developments so and with with that do you have my contact information I'd be happy to answer questions or come back another time with that would be helpful as well so we also I let the council know that we might need a little bit of time with you for an accident I have a 10-15 but we can have a good conversation yeah I was so that I can understand a little better can we go back to the building that you picked up in Heinberg and rebuilt it said it was really tight and energy efficient tell me what you're doing there it's totally supported by those solar cells it is the natural gas line runs right under the sidewalk out front and we chose not to hook up to it we don't want to pay $18 a month and we don't need to because we can generate all our fuel that's just for the hookup fee plus the use of gas if we can use it but we we designed the building so that so that we had enough solar production over the course of the year from our roof square footage to meet the needs of the building so we took the 1850s farmhouse and we basically did a gut rehab so we built new walls two by four walls inside and basically filled it with a foot of cellulose insulation around the perimeter we replaced the windows with triple bay windows we paid a lot of attention to air sealing details so the building is very tight but it has two mechanical ventilation systems in there heat recovery ventilation systems that provide fresh conditioned air it's actually our our office is in half we built a half of the building is a new construction and I'm familiar with the build up so the white part is our office and then we have three rental spaces out front and oh you can't see the rest it's about half the size of the rent building out front so there are two offices upstairs and one downstairs so the and then the whole building is heated with five heat pumps each floor and each space has its own head so it has individual control for heating and cooling and then there's a heat pump water heater the basement is fully insulated as well too so the envelope is tight and well insulated so it doesn't lose or gain much heat and the heat pumps provide all of the heating and cooling electricity that the building uses is produced from the solar panels okay so do you have square footage costs that would be associated with I'm trying to think that if somebody wanted to renovate you know their home and meet that kind of a standard you know what that would mean or if you were building a new building what would that add to the construction cost well we also we have no energy costs in the future now too we basically prepaid all of our energy costs and rolled it into our mortgage that's how we looked at it to answer your question we calculated that because we presented on this building at not the better building by design conference this year but last year all that information is in our presentation there I'd be happy to send that to the committee I don't remember what it was it wasn't had a line it was for a commercial office building it was a couple hundred dollars but I don't remember exactly what it was the reason I'm asking is that we're talking about finding solutions for affordable housing and I'm wondering if we would hire something like this on buildings what that would add cost and I'm really fascinated with what you've been able to do with your building yeah well the affordable housing groups in Vermont are doing an excellent job in this area they get it they are taking this approach to building and they're realizing that if they can take the expenses central heating systems out of these buildings and take that money and invest it in the building envelope and put in less expensive heat pumps they can achieve much lower operating costs so there's a balancing act between envelope and equipment and given where the output of the solar panels has come and the cost of heat pumps has come down there are a lot of opportunities to do the same thing that we did with other affordable housing projects thank you yeah Harvey's brain and my brain work together sometimes he had the same questions I was going to have but I am curious as to what you spent to remodel that building to get what you've got now and were there grants involved what did you have to pay for we did actually I need to finish submitting our remade to Efficiency Vermont because there's one after after you've been in a building a year and you can demonstrate that you've met the standards so we did get we did get us the 30% solar tax credit as the three partners that built the building we did participate in Efficiency Vermont's zero energy building I don't know but there's a top tier for the commercial building program that we participated in the building cost us about $700,000 all in so that was purchase, renovation and as we like to think about it we prepaid our energy bills forever so so I hope we can segue to back to action safety we have Richard just for a few more minutes and we're trying to get his input on the 50 changes that have been proposed so I'm going to ask my question on it just to do the segue so in the bill as it currently exists there's language around avoid minimize and mitigate new criteria one of you have a chance to look at that and we just heard from Dakota who had some real concerns about carbon requirements and mitigation is that anything you can help us understand better uh no I don't know that I can specifically have you looked at that section of the avoid minimize and mitigate for construction I did not look at that section of the bill um I wanted to go back to a point you made and this somewhat gets to this about equalizing the playing field you had mentioned that um that some builders who are trying to comply with the codes are at a competitive disadvantage perhaps because um other builders may not be um applying to code and therefore can not for lower cost perhaps could I think that gets into some of the incentives for the structure of this bill and how to structure in such a way that we level that playing field can you elaborate a little bit more about that point uh so every three or four years the department of public service does uh a statewide they do do a number of statewide baseline studies to understand how our building are being built in terms of energy efficiency and the last one um the most recent one hasn't come out it's due out should have been out by now but it's you know it's about to come up but the last one showed that about a third of all new buildings aren't built to code and are there indications that that won't be significantly different from the most recent study so what the builders say is that this isn't fair if they're trying to comply with code and somebody else is bidding on a project and they're coming in at lower cost because they're not building the same energy machine standards do you think that rather than having a whole system of like they've got in the three possibly four times if you linked you talked about a year later you get a rebate if you show that you that you meet the um standard to work so do you think that rather than having a whole new infrastructure that would cost something to if you really just said we would do a structured rebate program that that would incentivize people enough to meet the enhanced building code I can't remember stretch code I can't do it rather than we will never, Vermont will never fund the statewide code enforcement mechanism I didn't have enough time I thought they were thinking about it well they want to enforce it somehow but it doesn't have to be through having individuals in each town there are other creative ways like requiring half the towns right now that have certificates of occupancy require that this RV certificate that's a great way of the builder signing off on a certificate that they built the code they better have done that because there's a chance of liability if somebody finds out they didn't have it so we also now as part of the new code we will be requiring that a lower door task be done with every new home this is a key measure it's been part of the national model code for a couple of years for Vermont we've got 130 certified lower door testers in Vermont the cost is relatively minimal we know that air leakage in buildings is probably the number one opportunity for energy savings so there are probably some creative ways of having some of those lower door air leakage testers provide some insight as they do that work again because we know that not all builders follow the code or does everybody get a higher air leakage tester but if there's some check along the way as part of the mortgage closing require that the RV certificate be provided or closing attorneys had it on their list along with the town clerks there's some other creative ways we did a whole study actually on this from the public service five years ago on innovative ways for code compliance that we could look at acknowledging that Vermont is not going to pay for infrastructure of individuals is it your testimony that if we require this there are creative ways to meet this going forward that would not that would meet goals but but not be too much you can structure it so it doesn't cost the general fund anything in reality somebody's going to have to pay for those so the developer the builder who's the one who benefits most likely would probably be the best entity to pay for those costs in the end where this has been done in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and New York state they actually find that the builders benefit from having a third party side of eyes in the building to look at things that they overlook that they're sub-slided so there's some unanticipated benefits that come with having an energy professional in the home who's there just to look at air leakage but beyond beyond the economic development opportunities for a large number of independent business people there are other benefits that will end up improving our housing stock at the same time so we have a bank Dylan in the color thank you you're really a testimony from a a little in the wood business they talked about combined heat and power plant in terms of something being biomass spent by biomass heat of CSR mill we took the problem today to do that to convert and go in that direction we have a permit from both Act 250 and the public utility commission and I'm just wondering in terms of your talk about source efficiency and seeing buildings that are independent and have their own kind of system like that how do we make that distinction how do we go forward to make sure that the the regulatory agency was the one that had a whole jurisdiction so you wouldn't have to go through both you would get it by going through one did it? well I can speak from experience in going through permitting of our building in Heimberg that we will talk about and I must admit it was burdensome it took us a year and a half we had to go store and water permit and 50 and it certainly would have been more expedient easier from our perspective to have one deal with one entity and have clarity up front about what the steps were as well too going into it we're energy consultants we're not building developers and we were working with town we actually bought the property from the town so they were experienced we had to go underneath their Act 250 permit as well too so maybe that complicated but having a clear path forward and understanding what that is from day one certainly would have made it a lot easier and less expensive for us so I don't know if that addresses your question but from personal experience that that would have been an easier solution it would have gotten us to building sooner than it did do you have any opinion as to which should have that kind of jurisdiction? I don't I don't know we didn't have to do I should have been worried about no question alright so first some homework for you please and then second a brief question so you were in the room when Matt Kota was speaking and he is rightfully very concerned for his entire industry but I'm not so convinced that he needs to be concerned about our Act 250 bill and how it's going to affect fuel storage and selling the fuel per se in the state and if you would please help me understand the committee understand how the climate change section in our bill really would affect the transportation storage and sale of fossil fuels per se he was even talking he was even saying how are we going to even put in a storage tank so if you could give us some insight from your how criteria one I think it was criteria one criteria one and my knockoff question is right here on the screen EVSE charging stations in all housing development why not commercial commercial and industrial as well probably should say that as well okay and when you get to that level we're going to need so there needs to be a certain number of handicapped parking spaces in commercial and industrial projects we would have to have an understanding of how many charging stations per square foot per anticipated use of that building and maybe that information is out there somewhere the next version of both RVs and CVs the codes do speak to increasing the number of EVSE locations to be level two ready that is when you're before you pay the parking lot leave some conduit leave some space in the electrical panel for future use when there are more vehicles that need to be serviced to feed the wire out put in the facility in the parking lot you can add the circuit breakers to the panel and you're ready it's not going to require a lot of expense so for a little bit of upfront anticipation of where the future is you can start to get these you're absolutely right to take commercial as well as housing development projects ready for the future commercial industrial commercial industrial not just housing right I guess I do have a follow up question you had described on your particular project the level of fit up to accommodate your needs and I imagine some of it would happen anyway because you're using it for your business the other portion though is the investment in weatherization described the net zero benefit I think the information related to that with respect to your return on investment or the debt payback period will be helpful to know since you as you mentioned you up fronted those costs into your mortgage avoiding those ongoing costs of fuel ongoing maintenance costs I imagine you could bring that all on to net present value to determine the payback we did that for that presentation I'll just have to go and pull it out I'm happy to share that with you I'm curious if you have other witnesses you think we should hear from that people you know of that we could help with the information the broad time we have a plan of changes are you talking to Jared Duvall from Energy Action Network the charts that I pulled from come from his organization and they're they're nonprofits sort of non-aligned group that basically is the only entity in the state that's looking at these three sectors the the electric sector thermal and transportation all the rest of the pieces are divided up amongst agencies but they're trying to look at how the state as a whole is making progress and should be maybe 90% of the energy by 2050 so he might be useful to hear from we need to wrap up I just want to say who's asking them to do that work they're board of directors I mean it's sort of they've been the state has I'm not sure who has tasked them with that there is involvement from state agencies and the Department of Public Service and UC and others they have board of directors includes the SECU and other non-profit organizations to go to so I'm not sure you know I know that the Hymenic Fund has been a supporter of their efforts and so I don't know it's just a philanthropic initiative but there was a lack of anyone in the state doing that so they were informed years ago to take on that task thank you very much thank you thank you she's here our appropriations letter so we get done today and then I'm going to ask okay I thought we were going to have someone from less than council please do it's you sorry I was here okay so Michael sent us two updated letters she post those 15 grades are they under Michael? yes so we're back there she's missing mine I don't want to take it she's here she's here okay because I love working here is it yours? can I put this down? okay I just said I can't do it I'm sure you want to know if I get to talk to you guys so if you put them to her in case she doesn't see the tax I'll plan on that okay I hear differently okay Richard Lee I don't know if this is his I don't know if this is his or if this is his I think we can make something else these are the letters he was using our advice right but he knows we just checked the seals okay so let's dive into the appropriations letter we can get all the way through it yesterday and so I want to now I do want to make sure we're looking at the right ownership how we do that to the fish and wildlife part of it we did and so let's pick up that climate commission recommendations because I don't think we got to that one page four is starting a lot on the screen do you have helped in this drafting and I don't know where you're at in terms of walking us through here just to take notes and any recommendations for provisions or anything that this committee may have I was actually just getting this this morning so I'm not too familiar fair enough that's why I asked so you could though click on that letter to house appropriations and I'll be on this roll so here we are committee want to just take a minute and read it paragraph four so how do I find this under Michael as a witness has to date today it looks like Michael's just in the right moment I asked if you want to join we need to yeah yeah okay we're just looking at paragraph four so do you want to walk us through this I'm not sure what you want help us get through it we're just going to read it ourselves okay you asked for two recommendations from the governor the climate commission to be added into your letter one of which was to use the whole flag settlement funds for electric vehicles and the other was regarding doubling the funds for weatherization both of which were in the governor's commission report much of the language is drawn from that before last page you'll see the committee of the climate commission's recommendations using the BW settlement funds were by the senate for the purchase of electric vehicles and two government funding of weatherization programs in the state does the committee have any questions about adding this in great and then this letter we have is updated when you said this do you remember what it changed in the appropriation loader sure the second page you wanted on the targeted approach I wrote a new paragraph then the second to the last paragraph of page two BHCB's target approach conservation by the committee support for fully funding the board for selection of this conservation land focusing on the work of national areas threatened and endangered species with weapons and teleplanes that enhance the resiliency of our lands critical habitat for the wildlife was drawn directly from the board summary of its conservation efforts moreover land conservation in general was returned on investment not nine to one hundred nine to one and that one dollar invested generates nine dollars in the particle event I literally was writing this just a decimal point let's fix that nine point one one you also wanted to reference how BHCB has been working with ag water quality programs so that sentence of the paragraph raised with local club that it says BHCB additionally is providing assistance to the working farmers investing in our company and water quality and you wanted to reference intergenerational transfer and having new people enter this sector and so the last paragraph the third sentence BHCB also utilizes this process to help the next generation of farmers and farmers on land to start their careers and these solutions benefit the state as a whole then on petition wildlife we have a question like I guess on the I know that BHCB also their investments also help to meet our TM young goals water quality goals you can state that up front it just reinforces less funding we need to worry about for our water quality goals sure Barbara do you think that had it we know let's see we have the third other state um um we understand conservation protects not for instance fragmentation and degradation as well as achieve our clean water goals help the state of Vermont achieve clean water goals which paragraph under the more over paragraph you can either tack it on at the end of that rather long sentence sorry maybe even longer or you can say on the next one conservation of land is important for meeting state clean water goals as well as additionally has provided significant support to farmers investing I'm talking about the conservation of flood plain restoration is a passive approach to achieving restoration of our natural resources both flood plain river quarter and wetlands and that helps that's required for the TMVL restoration actions I just wanted to highlight the water quality benefit from that conservation in meeting the TMVL okay part of the dish and wildlife I took out that paragraph regarding the increase of fees that you recommended to the community of ways of means their paragraph is new to offset the flood and shortfall the FW originally proposed to become programs in support of protection of the state's fish and wildlife including the hatchery grants and UBMs research union and fishing quotations however the department has since offered an altered proposal to increase all of the visual lessons for $2 and off foundation lessons for $5 this proposal will close much of that all of the flood and shortfall in the county natural resource and city supports license fees increased with both the FW community strongly recommends a community appropriation fund other revenue that we have for the community the state should have the fund important programs to meet budget shortfalls and the rest fits the same representative Odie the paragraph offsets budget shortfall so the department has offered alternate proposal to increase all individual license pay by $2. Okay, so, and the other one by five. So, what did they do about the people who were 67 getting permanent licenses? Because we, we thought they should just say the same. Well, that's, I don't know if they did, but that's neither an individual. Well, that is an individual, I suppose, I don't know if they did. So, what do you think we should do about that? Yeah, I think it's, it's, we gotta get this letter in the, all right, well, I just, today, so I, people, yeah, any other, are we ready to, the, the minor changes suggested getting a couple of zeros out from a number and, I'd like to have the whole thing proofed, isn't that something to take on now? Yeah, that's great, and then, but then I can just read it and we can send it. Yeah. We could go to Pasquim and we need to approve it. I know we're supposed to do this quickly, but the only reason I'm bringing this up is that I think it's such a big deal that we actually had to make us a new bill about it in the beginning of the last biennium. And I'm concerned that if we don't address it in this letter and then it goes through and it's to everything, then we're gonna- I don't think there's a problem with this stuff because they were experiencing that as well, but we can find out. We'll find out. All right. If we need a sentence in their room today. And that's where we have one more thing. But representative Shai has a bill about disabilities not having to pay anything. But that's a different deal. Yeah, that's a different deal. All right, so we're going to pay for the letter the way it is. Except for the one thing that I- And clean water. So do you need a motion? Yes. I move. Thank you. Is there a second to go? I second it, but would that include a slight addition to add clean water objectives for the TMDLs? That's always a good question. Yes. I second that. What's your favor? Say hi. Hi. Any opposed? Great. I'm staying, I don't know where we're going on. We're voting on sending this letter to appropriations. Okay. You don't want to do it. You misfire. Yeah, okay. Let's look at the water quality, so I think it's not what we would also like to get going. What were the changes that were made? The numbers on page one, the 25 and the 33, remember I had the wrong number, so I corrected them. That's kind of it. Oh no, Senator, Representative Browning's language on page four, the Natural Resources Committee has been signed in 64, it's introduced by Representative Browning, related to findings in water quality programs that have been interviewed in 64 brief, let's continue to make a further review. Yes. And I believe we made a slight change to the paragraph beginning with however under A, just to give more generally that the increase is to acknowledge the ONM cost as opposed to directing it for us. Is it in there? Yeah, I think it looks a little more general. It looks a little more general there. It's good. You know, I did this late last night, so I don't have total recall. I think those are the changes now. All right, so, are you ready? Representative Browning? Well, is it just your name on the letter and the vice chairman, or are these names going to be on this letter? He says the majority of the committee is somewhere in here, and then my name. He doesn't say all of the committees. All right, so what I'm saying is your name is going to be on this letter and nobody else's. Correct, and there's a sense in there that says the majority of the committee. Thank you. Make a motion. All second now. All those in favor? Say hi. Hi. All opposed? Me. So does this one need to go to anything else? No, this one has been through everything. So I want to move that those who want to go to Ways and Means today, when we're on the floor, I'm going to go with this letter. How would you like it delivered? You usually. Right. Normally the chair will sign it and scan it and we'll mail it. No, I can. You can invite me sometime. Okay. Sure. You did a great job. Thank you. Thank you. 25. 27 to please come back. 1040. Come on, move. Are you trying? Are you trying? Are you trying? Good morning. Good morning. Yes. MCL now. You're all ready. Because I have more of a script. Thank you. That's really good. Two people and me. Two people who don't use an electronic device. Who likes to have paper copies and stuff? Whatever reason. I have a question. It's better than having it last year. We had everybody have paper copies. Thank you. This is the worst seat in the whole entire place. It is or it is not? It is or it is not? It is. I don't. I don't. What's wrong with that? I have a sliding door here. You shouldn't have said anything. They're going to push the table over the table. Have we ever had an executive session? You could have, but it's difficult having an executive session. You could have a session where you discuss a deliberative session. Correct. When you're here in this building, it's kind of hard to have an executive session. Because what we say is so important. Exactly. It's like, Mr, this is nosy body, our hair. Oh, I forgot the camera's in the way. I used to that. Yeah, I do. I'm in front of the stupid thing we have solved. Working around it. Oh gosh, huh? I didn't notice. I don't know. They're going to be here. They're getting a tour right now. And they're going to eat lunch with us. And then they're going to be in there. So I can have them stand up. They're going to clap for them. And then they're going to be here. Just be here. They were talking. So it's going to be a big day. Yeah. It's not our work. It's a tragedy. We are going to get started. Thank you. It's time. And congratulations to you on developing this legislation and forwarding it to bring out 250 back as a Vienna tool to coordinate language policy in the month. In fact, there. I'm Peg Yelmer. And I live in Cabot. And I'm representing myself as a citizen here just from, because I'm a veteran land use planner in the state. And I've got more than 40 years really in the trenches in the front line of a lot of the issues addressing in this legislation. So I was a town planner. I was owning an administrator and hosting Title 24, Chapter 117 in Chittenden County in the 70s. Shelburne, Jericho, and Richmond. And then I went to the environmental board when Darby Bradley was chair administering Act 250. I was trained in the details of Act 250 by Ed Stannock, who I know you've heard from and he has one of the best. I was recruited from there to work for Len Wilson, who is the secretary of the agency of natural resources at the time and I worked over. That was just before they had deputies. There are no deputy secretary of the agency at the time. And Governor Cunin had very high expectations for the agency and natural resources. So I was hired to do special projects. It was maybe the best job I ever had. And one of my daily jobs was to coordinate the Act 250 Club, which I inherited. It was happening for a long time, which was a weekly meeting on Fridays with all the state agencies, representatives of all the state agencies. And Friday afternoon, I put together an entry of appearance to go to the district's missions, summarizing the positions across state agencies. Not just in Act 250, but we did that on park in section 248 and all state permit programs. Was that the development cabinet? No, this was created to precede that. Wow. This is a place for a long time. I don't know why it went away. But another thing that would happen is I was alone to Governor Cunin, to staff the government's mission on Vermont's future, which led into Act 200. And when Act 200 passed, I moved to the NRC to really pretty much take part in these crazy positions 30 years ago to really work at stirring and supporting citizen involvement in planning because I was just really trying to get a resurgence going on local plans, regional plans and citizens being involved in that state agency planning that was going into the place for the first time. But in the process of doing that as well, I was interested, so I was the registered lobbyist on Act 200, Act 250 and jumped into October transportation in the beginnings of that and created a little alternative transportation near the legislature and Mary Sullivan, Kurt McCormick and his brother were brand new legislators and they all draw back and I believe Kate's doing something similar. From there I went to the commerce agency with the homeless secretary and led the state's smart growth efforts for probably more than a decade. Samantha was part of my staff during that time and we had her concentrating on programs that were state funded like smart growth because of the Hatch Act where she was here in the legislature part time. And during that time the disaster started hitting hard and fast. I think we'll call it a picture here of all the flooding events that were occurring then and emergency management just didn't have the capacity to deal with the amount of money millions coming to the state to go out to towns and hazard mitigation was new DHTB where I was working department housing and community development has all that structure in place to send money to towns so I and my staff dealt with hazard mitigation funds for quite a while and part of that in 2005 FEMA started requiring a hazard mitigation plan in order to get those funds and some means of having local and regional hazard mitigation plans as well to be eligible for those funds and so my staff and I drafted the first hazard mitigation plan and that was when under Governor Dean the development cabinet was put into place and the development cabinet didn't meet that often because it's really hard to get all the secretaries in the same room at the same time it was extraordinary actually how little they were able to get I don't ever saw them all together but there was a sub development cabinet that was a staff like me and I mean that every week and when I so from there I moved down to law school I used law and policy and while I was there I was appointed by the governor to the smart growth seat on the downtime board so I served on the downtime board for a couple of years all the pieces of this bill that I've been involved with but I want to focus on the climate because I feel like there's some holes and I'm not sure you're hearing from the people that would fill those holes and I can get you started there at least because I there's so much that actually can do really affect what we can do to adapt and mitigate climate change on the ground you've heard plenty of testimony on the expertise on the energy issues like this morning and I'm flooding greenhouse gas reduction but there's very much that active 50 influences that would lessen our future impacts from power outages and heat effects so what I'm going to do is show you the state has a mitigation plan was approved in November just this past November so it's very new, very broad effort having had any background on it at all so I know that it's approved because I remember the concern in Act 200 about having regional planning commissions approve local plans a lot of fear about that FEMA requires that Region 1 approved every last little local hazard mitigation plan and they are very tough to get through they almost never approve it the first time through it's a rigorous process that's why we say not adopted November 2018 that improved by FEMA and it's one of those state plans that active 50 in particular if you're updating it to address climate change should be noting and coordinating with other state policies and thankfully you can see here that the state's mission and goals echo the policy foundations of active 50 that you've been working on not a lot different but the state's data this particular plan they can address man-made hazards and the plan that was in fact at the time Truckable Storm Irene hit was very big on terrorism because it had been written right after 9-1-1 this plan just focuses on natural hazards and develops the state's priorities for those hazards I put it at this green table so you can see the process where they try to come up with a thank you they try to come up with a process to more objectively score which of the worst hazards for the state and this is done through a very public process with a broad staring committee and you can see that flooding winter storms fluvial erosion and ice storm right as most significant hazards but then tide right after that you see wind, heat, cold, drought and wind slides so I'm going to get into the warming piece and how it's affecting us the northeast region of the country is the fastest warming area of the contiguous in the United States and is warming at a rate 50% greater than the global average we're predicted to experience increases in heat waves intense downpours and flooding more heat in the southeast actually it's hard to believe but the trend lines obviously you have trend lines and they just keep going up or wetter and rainier in the winter and the summer is when we're just getting less rain where we're actually being having drought creeping in certainly in the summer in the southern part of the state so less soil moisture FEMA region one in Boston is demanding that we start thinking about forest fires like they're being dealt with up west in the tropical storms of all time this local has a mitigation plan in most towns at this point and they're very much ramped up from the experience we had in the tropical storm that had a major effect on us and I I really sort of twisted what I do in life to community resilience and has a mitigation after I read because of the experience of having administrative FEMA and my broad experience across all planning it just was helpful to really get into that so the next thing I'm offering you is these pies from the St. John's very plan pie charts that that I produced but these pie charts look the same very very similar because percentages don't change all that much across the state so on the right-hand pie you see a massive slice of blue is flooding because that is by far the most costly event that we experience in terms of dollars but the events that impact us most often are the three on the left-hand side the left-hand side is how often these things are happening to us those three large pies the purple, green and light blue are winter storms, wind and storm they add up to 84% in the case of St. John's very in the declared disasters but about 80% war of the declared federal disasters that we experience in Vermont so power outages extended power outages are a thing that we experience a lot but I'm having them at home in my house this week and utilities are leading the way planning and distracting microgrids and we've heard from Richard Fasey about battery storage being the way I was disappointed in years that we've been doing so much for network work but when the grid goes down those houses go down too and there needs to be a different answer for that and that's where battery storage comes in so just stop and think about the combination of extended power outages with extreme cold and heat and it becomes more deadly and think about how the design of development can help mitigate discomfort and avoid that misery I wanted to give you some numbers from the Department of Health on that and people on the Act 250 Commission have been hearing me on this for a bit so this information is just from the Vermont Department of Health on climate if you were to have someone come and speak to you it would be Jared Elmer from the Department of Health this position is on climate impacts but hot weather just the biggest extreme there is in red the Vermonters are at greater risk for serious heat illnesses when the average temperature reaches 87 degrees or hotter the National Weather Service advisories are set to go off when they hit 90 and where it was earlier than that the Vermont data shows that in days when the state average temperature reached at least 87 degrees there was one additional death per day among individuals aged 65 and older and eight times more heat-related because we had seven deaths during our last day and they flew eight years ago you can see from this there are more death and you're not hearing about it enough for heat the health department has just begun really keeping the data on when somebody's death says heat just two years ago and they're happening and some of these deaths are heart failure or stroke or something else so Vermonters are particularly at risk because we just don't have much experience with hot weather we're not well prepared at all and so do we want to see everybody put in air conditioners? I don't think so that's not the answer and there's so much that we can do in the orientation design and construction of our built landscape the best illustrations come from work in the 1970s and the energy crisis from Jeremy Carter as president and it just it's all been so much waste that has happened over the last 40 years and not having done more about that the design options not only increased comfort but also increased affordability the life cycle cost of buildings so just adding the language I asked it from Karen wasn't here public input and South Royalton and I asked if they asked these questions and she just said the language isn't there and we're supposed to be consistent across the districts nobody's pushing us to do this so just to have the language in the criteria the district coordinators and commissioners ask would make a huge difference for the landscape architects the architects the engineers knowing that they need to address that and demonstrate something and without, there's no further study needed no appropriation and then another piece of information there was a little lady I'm hearing that I was running for the Hartford Hazard Mitigation Plan who hadn't said anything all evening just sat there quietly and she made the effort to get there so I asked her if she had something she wanted to add and she said she piped right up she said I live on the fourth floor of a senior housing building in Whiter projection it's all electric the heat, stove, refrigerator and the elevator what do we do in the electric when the power goes out so just having questions to get people to ask questions and then I added this graphic from the 1980s I the planners the other day were pushing back on saying that the changes would happen in both the regulations and working from the ground up but actually 50 is really pushed across the board changes over time so from the 1980s just from the criterion 3 water conservation I mean just performer that you, when you went to the public supply house, you'd only find those fresh toilets and that was the best that I could do the same with our values and insulation and what was understood and built and it was much more than what was happening in New Hampshire and Massachusetts other places we would hear about that in the little rooms that came out of the city too that we were far above the HUD standards and electric heat right around now but electric base board heat was just understood by the population as being inathubous, being too cheap to install and too much to pay for over time so you can lead the way with Act 250 and have a very large influence even if it is just 30% of the development you see so I have a lot of questions from her so some of the areas would like not to have 250 applied then and you said just having a question to ask makes the building better, makes the landscape architecture better, think about it and so forth what would you say to the places where Act 250 doesn't apply to have them ask those same questions you mean at the level level I can tell you the PowerPoint from 20 years ago on putting into the local subdivision regulations and zoning regulations and it just doesn't happen voluntarily I think if you can only really affect what you can do in Act 250 in this legislation right now over time maybe it would happen in the local regulations, is that your question? well since your answer is that then my question is should Act 250 have a piece of that or should it be a separate legislation should it probably be chapter 117 on the regulatory side and all of these things I mean when I was doing Act 200 that was the planning half of Title 24 that covers what the municipal municipalities do and then when I was working for Howard Dean we did the regulatory half and it was based on what was triggered by housing forability that was the last time that was done Act 250 has not been looked at in this comprehensive way that I can remember it's been polled and polished and picked at year after year but not looked at in this way it's a huge effort it doesn't have to come around very often it's only 25 years or in this case it's 50 years it's about 15 years that Title 24 gets looked at there is an effort that the planners have been pulling together to look at the regulatory side again and that's where you want to and looking at the planning elements I don't think it's right yet so it's I think you've got enough you're trying to handle right here with Act 250 but in another year or so please go after the regulatory side so actually what I thought I heard Carol asking was we're considering enhanced designations and so should that process include some of the language that you're suggesting enhanced designations are a bit so your view the downtown board hasn't really looked at it's did start looking at flood plains after Irene it's really a historic and economic development program enhanced designations I haven't seen that you were completely language there I think it's been enhanced in the administration they kind of the task force and make recommendations oh do we have language now for the so yeah for the enhanced designations I'm sorry I didn't look at that I also this is more of a comment but we are also looking at the consistency between local planning and regional planning and that too may be helpful to ensure that we're achieving that kind of that consistency could be helpful in trying to achieve these overarching goals of greater energy efficiency in others that's on the planning side which is you know general it would be on the regulatory side we could actually get changed on the ground and so yeah so I did include just some just a few language changes to employee orientation and criteria one and landscaping you can do so much with just plantings and earth parks earth sheltered housing some of this is my suggestions are for fluvial erosion as well to seem like it could be before tweets to address because what we get are those flashlights enormous amount of damage in a short amount of time and knockout roads and bridges so a couple of those where you have the criteria to deal with erosion call out that it was a steep hillside and had it with all birds so under energy conservation and efficiency where you could get the most just incorporating building and landscape design to maximize the capacity of the pool and opportunities I'm just glad to see that you have somebody coming to talk to you about the passive house it doesn't have to be an expensive design it's really if you had roads going east west in subdivision so that all the houses then tend to have a large base the front or back the south would be in a lot and then on settlement patterns this comes from the work in Hartford and the little old lady and thinking about they have a section of peachy highlands development that has never been built out all went through active 50 and was very professionally reviewed at the local level it has one access and after arguing they realized it's really it can't really go forward the way it is it should have been it's a lot harder to do that after a piece of the property purchased to ask the questions it would help a lot and then adding the reference to have administration plans regional plans over time the mitigation plans that pushes out there to have them incorporated into town plans but right now they're separated and they're very detailed things that affect land use it should be a lot about at the same time thank you can you tell us how are hazard mitigation plans used now the statewide one and the local ones need to have them in effect in order to be eligible for the hazard mitigation money that comes from FEMA after a declaration and it is by county so if you have a a federally declared disaster in the county all the towns are able to then they want to have priorities laid out in their local plan for doing some work on say the Burnham Library and Lincoln if they're familiar with that was rebuilt with hazard mitigation money the fire station in Lincoln was rebuilt to be more flood safe with hazard mitigation money now you need to ostensibly have reference to those projects you need in your plan and it's competitive to get the money so if you've laid it all out specified what you need to be doing in town to be more resilient in the future it helps to get the money to do that but do towns use it more proactively or is it really just to access funding and show that you are going to meet the plan after the disaster happens well that's the argument for select boards to get them to move and update the plan they're required to be updated every five years so quick I'll return Gamer Region 1 will not approve it unless you've got an implementation chart in the back that says who's responsible by when you can't just say I'm going as you know by when they're really pushing for action on the ground congratulating for really pushing the envelope much more than usual plans I have a question do you submit I did I apologize I submitted it earlier this morning but I did bring hard copies for everyone and it is up there I'll open it thank you for inviting me in for the record my name is David Sinettiker I'm the Executive Director of the Northeast Invermont Development Association we're the Regional Planning and Development Corporation that covers the Caledonia section of Orleans County of the Northeast Kingdom so again thanks for having me I noted on the agenda that I've been given quite a bit of time to speak I don't think I'll use my phone a lot more time but I was able to be joined by Adam Mluji from the Addison County Regional Planning Commission and if you would be allowed to give safety words as well that would be appreciated and it's fellow RPC so beginning Chair Sheldon and members of the committee again thank you for the invitation to speak with the committee on the proposed changes for ACTI 50 to the regional and state planning it is important that ACTI 50 local permitting processes support community, economic, environmental, and land use planning goals at all levels it is also important to have permitting processes at all levels that are predictable in both time and expense that minimize duplication at all levels of review and have permitting responsibility resting at the appropriate level of government so that community and or state goals that predict the environment the northeast kingdom region has 50 municipalities more than 50 municipalities and covers approximately one fifth of the state's land area the area which NVDA serves has long been the most rural and economically challenged region of Vermont given our low incomes typically high unemployment and limited development opportunities at the same time our communities have preserved a high quality of environment that in my opinion exceeds many areas of Vermont what we have observed over the last decade is that more municipalities are adopting municipal plans and this number has increased significantly when I began at NVDA back in 2002 of our 50 towns we probably had 28 or 29 that actually had municipal plans in effect we are now in the mid 40 range because I think towns are now seeing that planning is important and so they have taken steps to give themselves a greater voice in state permitting processes as to the types of developments that we see in the rural and northeast kingdom region today we see the establishment of barn farm enterprises things like breweries and greenhouses home based businesses we see info redevelopments in designated and non designated areas utilizing existing buildings and we see a lot of place based outdoor recreation developments that's really popular now with given the opportunities and interest in trails and outdoor recreation we are concerned that proposed changes to active 50 will inhibit some of this development and negatively impact our rural economy regarding some of the proposed changes beginning with revisions to and greater use of the capability and development plan renewing use of this CDP is positive and potential to improve active 50 review by creating additional predictability as proposed the process for developing the CDP is up-down we would argue that the process should be bottom up I think there is a lot of local knowledge and local input that would be very valuable this happens a lot as we do our regular municipal planning and regional planning all regional planning commissions have mapping programs and undertook a similar process with mapping when we did our recent energy flight updates to get improved standing in the section 248 processes and we believe that the best planning begins at the local level regarding the requirement that to be used in active 50 local and regional plans must be approved as consistent with statutory planning goals we believe this is already happening there is already a process under title 24 for reviewing and approving the consistency of local plans regional commissions are required to approve a plan if the plan meets the following conditions it's consistent with goals established in the statute it's compatible with regional plan it's compatible with approved plans of other municipalities in the region and it contains all the elements included in the subdivision 4382 of this title creating another review process for local plans would be duplicative and problematic RPCs have recently been given the authority to certify local plans seeking energy compliance if they adhere to all requirements for that certification we think if local plans do need to be certified regional planning commissions would be the appropriate entities to do that certification regional planning commissions were created by member municipalities and as the representatives appointed by these municipalities adopt the regional plan 24VSA section 4348 outlines the requirements for regional plans and all regional plans must be consistent with the goals established in 4302 prior to hearings for adoption regional plans are submitted for review to the following the chair of each legislative body of the municipalities in the region the director of each region of the regional planning commission the department of housing and community development under the agency of commerce interest groups that may request notice and writing and the agency of natural resources and the agency of agriculture food and markets we also submit our regional plans voluntarily to agencies of transportation Vermont emergency management and other agencies that we work regional planning commissions working on a regular basis it's important to note that any of these foregoing bodies or the representatives may submit comments on the proposed regional plan or amendment to the regional planning commission it may appear and be heard in any proceeding with respect to the adoption of the proposed plan or amendment very recently the department of public service has been given a review and approval for regional plans as RPCs pursue determinations for energy compliance and again this was to give us a greater standing in the section 248 certificate of public good process now we have a proposal for the natural resources board or a new environmental board to determine consistency of regional plans with statute especially for the NRB given their role in the regular part process state agencies and entities have different responsibilities and sometimes those may be conflicting it's our opinion that giving more state entities a review and certification role takes responsibility away from the municipally appointed regional planning representatives that have the authority to adopt the plan next regarding active 50 jurisdiction and enhance designation areas and expanded jurisdiction in other areas the state permit process should encourage development in appropriately planned places and carefully consider or discourage development outside of those areas reducing or eliminating activity jurisdiction in existing and planned settlement areas are delineated and approved by municipalities and regional planning commissions with local regulations and development review processes are robust existing state designation programs are both complex and constraining and creating new designation will add complexity the designation programs aren't designed to accommodate the four range of settlements that exist in Vermont's villages, downtowns and surrounding areas we agree with the VPA testimony that was provided to this committee that defining areas for limited active 50 jurisdiction should begin with areas identified in the municipal and regional plans we agree with comments from the Chitton County Regional Planning Commission that improving and expanding existing designation programs will be better than creating a new designation proposed changes for active 50 will greatly expand jurisdiction even into areas where development may be appropriate including working lands and critical resource areas many Vermont villages and downtowns are located along river quarters in my region those communities like Lindenville, Barton and all these villages are along river quarters and these communities can have and continue to make investments in buildings and public infrastructure limiting active 50 jurisdiction communities like these all with robust regulations for existing designations is robust or is appropriate the regional planning commissions the association of regional planning commissions will be 24th recommendations on the use of river corridors and state permitting processes in the near future lastly we also agree with some of the following comments delaying changing the jurisdiction elevation triggers from 2,500 to 2,000 feet seems important we recommend the study to identify the amount of land that would be brought under jurisdiction and the sensitivity of that land that was a VPA comment we also support VPA comments saying that to revise the proposed language to retain the exemption for farming, logging and forestry even in critical resource areas there are other and better ways to ensure the farming and forestry and then we support an appeals process that can allow coordination and consolidation of appeals of municipal and state permits to one entity to ensure consistency and decision making unaligned requirements between the environmental court which oversees enforcement local zoning and environmental review board which oversees appeals from district commissions and A&R permits that was the Chittin and Coyote recommendation also in summary proposed changes for Act 250 that are being considered are substantive given the expansion of land uses and the land areas that may fall under Act 250 jurisdiction if these proposed changes are passed it would seem to be prudent in my eyes to take any final version of the proposed changes back to the public through a well-noticed series of public hearings for comment before being passed by the legislature and sign into law it's extremely important to hear from local communities landowners and residents before enacting such significant changes thank you for your consideration should I seek to share this with you? Sure. So the committee does not have a thank you allowing me to take some of Dave's time and speak I was not on your schedule I do not have things pre-filed with you but I do have copies here for hopefully it's certainly enough for the committee and then we'll see how many of the rest of them can go around Excuse me, would it be possible to get a left time version so we can have it? Absolutely. Thank you. Yes, I will file them this afternoon Thank you very much for allowing me to speak to you today My name is Adam Lucci and I'm the director of the Addison County Regional Planning Commission Dave did a very broad overview of the bill I'm going to be a little more succinct and focus in on just a couple of areas that I think are super important and use a couple of examples of supporting basically my testimony of those are the things that are attached in the last couple of pages so let's see the Addison County Regional Planning Commission we serve 21 municipal members we participate actively in the Act 250 process the agency permits and I'm offering my testimony from that perspective I would tell you this is a very idealistic bill and that it seeks to use the 50th anniversary of Act 250 to create its own environmental legacy and it does so I would say by proposing massive jurisdictional increases for state regulatory solutions to very broad poorly defined areas and I'm thinking slopes greater than 15% is a huge section of Vermont I assume elevations over 22,000 feet are also significant rural and working lands is a definition of this bill that is super broad so I look at these definitions and I think there are real challenges there it really expands the scope of Act 250 and if does it for climate change certainly climate change is an important issue facing Vermont but I think we could be more targeted in that and the jurisdictional expansion will affect economic development but I don't necessarily believe that we'll have significant impacts on climate change I think there are other things that we can do that we would do better similarly the bill assumes that forests and rural countryside are facing significant development pressure that's not necessarily my experience in Madison County and I'm not sure if it's the experience of large swaths of the state of Vermont just I recognize you all did a large report on partialization and forestry one of the things that I attached here is the 2018 current use program the tax department and it actually shows that enrollments in the current use program so the chart on the first page so the top line, the black line that goes up shows enrollments in the forest section of acres of forest land that are enrolled in current use 2,498 acres as of 2018 18,000 parcels so as you can see that ownership has significantly increased over time the number of people participating the number of parcels participating and the number of acres in the program are going up all of those acres need to be managed for forestry so they need to be managed for both forestry and for habitat connectivity and natural resources impact so I I'm using this as an example to show that I think this is a program that works for forest landowners that provides economic opportunity for them in a managed way that also preserves the forest habitat connectivity and the natural resources within those forests I would assert working landscapes are struggling and they need support like this I agree that Act 250 and state planning regulation should work together but this legislation largely does it under the auspices of state control who would much rather see the economic development programs tied to local planning and regional planning and the next example I'm going to use is on the last page it's a map of the town of Bristol actually it's a map of only the village planning area of the town of Bristol and insider zones so if you look at the big red blocks on the outside the dots on the outside that's the village planning area and this is about one tenth of the town of Bristol you can see the orco-photo underneath and you can kind of see the neighborhoods and things the little candy cane got in the center of the picture so the very small area in the very center of the map is Bristol's downtown designation so it's around basically the main intersection of the town of Bristol and hitting compasses I'll say two maybe three square blocks within the town of Bristol certainly not all the developed area but certainly the most developed area it's the commercial main street in Bristol this designation wasn't set up to enhance economic development for broader purposes or for the purposes of that we're looking to use it for under this legislation it does support grant programs for the town of Bristol it certainly uses them but it was designed intentionally very small and it's really not going to do a lot to help other economic development areas and other areas where the town of Bristol the village planning area has said that they would like economic development if you layer on top of how small it is all of the requirements that this bill includes to have the enhanced planning area water and wastewater and other requirements they won't work for the town of Bristol but they've done a very nice job in creating a village planning area locally and they're doing a lot to promote economic development within their compact village center but it's much bigger than than what would be provided for in these designated areas so I use it as an example because I think the existing designation programs don't really work they need to be if you're going to use it for this purpose they need to be expanded substantially and I would argue you should look at the local planning areas for the town of Bristol and in Addison County all of the towns have plans there might be a couple that are slightly out of date but all of them have plans all of them have local zoning 19 of 21 have subdivision regulations so I would urge you to look at the local and regional plans and rather than trying something you want to promote economic development in this scenario the existing planning areas village planning areas that are out there and work with the local communities and regions to do that that's the scope of my testimony I don't see if I get this instead of what's in the draft bill about designated areas you think that's not good it's instead tied to existing planning areas to existing local plans local planning okay I would at least in Addison County most of the town plans have and I'm not going to use a technical term but it's a village planning area it's a village district area it's a place where they do encourage compact settlement they're all to find a little bit differently locally and then you might fix that but generally just say every town shall create a I don't know if you want to call it a village or a city planning area around its existing most densely settlement areas for enhanced economic development but you could create a relatively simple definition of existing settlement that would that most towns already have plans that support that rather than a relatively complex and then earlier in your testimony in the second paragraph of the letter the state however expanding the jurisdiction to virtually every commercial development in the state which would be the consequence of this bill will negatively impact economic development and have a little impact on the change we can do better what do you mean so the reason I gave the current news program for example of a program that directly addresses forestry forestry concerns and preserves natural resources is a I think a positive step that promotes economic development in rural areas and basically protects natural resources and supports the working landscape if you look some of the definitions in this bill are very very broad and I pointed to you know slopes greater than 15% on what scale you know we have lighter that goes down to a foot but I'm wondering when you say we can do better will you so I would say supporting for the current news program will you just listen to a bunch of climate change I'm sure I don't get we can do better on the local level you'll just do it or not do it and if you gave the opportunity for people to basically use their for towns, municipalities to use their existing settlements and the planning areas that they've created in their town plans around their existing settlements as a place for enhanced planning and provided you know more funding for local planning and infrastructure that's necessary to support that I would say water and wastewater and broadband for our local villages I think that would be a better solution to promote more economic development within our existing settlement areas than trying to marry this bill to the existing state designation programs that are complex and very small very limited and probably won't work for most of the municipalities within the state for example in the bill the requirement says to be in enhanced security you would have to connect to water and wastewater well in Addison County that means towns with water and wastewater are little buried for gens and to a lesser extent sure them and for wealth and none of the other 21 towns currently have water and wastewater in a very small area that's already served right in this designated downtown but nobody else would be able to basically meet the enhanced what we're calling the criteria for the enhanced local area the enhanced local planning area so by marrying it to all these to the existing state designation programs and a number of other requirements you are limiting that pool to a very very tiny percentage of the state so I think in the Act 250 reports that you issued this summer it was 1,400 of the state of Vermont so 0.25% was covered by existing designation areas so pretty small area already if you then add on the other limitations like requirement to have water wastewater zoning subdivision etc it becomes even smaller than a quarter of 1% so the trade-offs if you will I don't believe exists if you tie it to those existing areas and require such and tie it to a lot of stringent requirements that are never materialized in most towns in the state if you relax those requirements and acknowledge some of the local planning that's going on like I said I believe that if you looked at a map of the state and went to most towns you would find a planning and zoning area around the existing and I'll call it village although I'm not using that term technically or city center or whatever that promoted more densely packed areas and it was a product of the knowledge of the local planning process does that make sense? I understand what you said I'd like to know how you can propose legislation to expand the active 15 termitation to virtually every commercial town well if you look at all the it contains a lot that are very broadly written so if I don't know what percent of I haven't done a study as to what percent of Vermont involves slopes of greater than 15% and I don't know on what scale you're measuring 15% but I imagine knowing the topography of Vermont that's a pretty significant area similarly greater than 2,000 feet is probably a relatively significant area but I don't know how big it is working in my testimony another area was rural and working lands areas and tying into that I don't necessarily know what rural and working lands are but I would assume that most places outside of these designation areas are rural and working lands and if you're going to do a project that has a size greater than a commercial development greater than an acre you would be in so I would say it expands given the definitions that are contained in the bill it expands it will expand active 15 jurisdiction or as I predicted would expand active 15 jurisdiction to just about every commercial development outside of right now the small very small designated areas that I'm talking about as you make that prediction no with looking at it after reading the bill that's part of it you didn't look at the land area about 2,000 feet or how many well I don't know you're right I can't tell you precisely where all those areas are but I can tell you that there are a lot of places in the state of Vermont that are greater than that that would fall into this definition of working development so yes I that's my prediction reading the language any other questions thanks for coming in both you and David talked about your belief that plans are better when they develop the bottom and percolate to the top and I'm wondering in terms of your regional plan I've gone through the public service in terms of looking at regional plans to see if they are energy compliant with the state polls and what kind of any kind of feedback you're getting in terms of how heavy and how basically complementary the public service is improving your plans so to the best of my knowledge they have approved every regional plan for an enhanced energy plan within the state of Vermont so all of us have gone through the process and all of us have had the plans approved that do a number of things for energy to address climate change that drew what you did David yes it is and they've also given us the authority with the approval of our regional plans to certify local plans and we've got in that process we've done communities like Brighton I think we're working with Peachey right now but the department has essentially given us a checklist of what plans must contain and we've kind of just certified that as we do our reviews and to think that initially regional planning commissions were given set aside funding to work with municipalities to come up with these enhanced energy plans and that was for a two or three year period but we're still seeing interest from communities coming forward so communities are thinking about climate change and they're thinking about efficiency and modernization and improving transportation systems and things like that so yeah so this is a recognition that the world has to reach on both the plans of exhibiting a higher higher level of sophistication in terms of taking into the characteristics that the Spain has always seen through our community still good morning I guess my question goes back to the incentive that the draft bill was trying to establish with these enhanced designations it's fully an incentive doesn't necessarily require communities to participate but I guess I'm struggling with how to achieve an objective to create a set in in support settlement development mixed views residential commercial that achieves the traditional settlement pattern focus that I think we're so famous for without some sort of path forward a direction forward in understanding how to achieve that kind of vision into the future for example when communities and I'm in a rural district and we're constantly struggling with these issues and we recognize that our existing village designation was to accomplish separate goals not necessarily lined here so the path forward is to try to think about how do we get to a position where we can keep our work if I may use that term working landscape working to prevent that fragmentation of our agricultural land even on the bands outside our historic villages without thinking about a path forward and that path forward in my mind if you're going to try to encourage that kind of multi-use pedestrian friendly bike friendly settlement pattern you have to think about the steps obviously you can't achieve that because you might not have the infrastructure to allow that and fill we struggle with that in my towns because of well heads around our drinking water and right next to our septic systems that we struggle with but I don't think this designation is to just carte blanche assume that we'll just carte blanche allow for that type of existing designation to meet the requirements but to provide a path forward so can you respond a little bit about that? Sure, so I applaud you for wanting to supply a path forward for towns to basically support the type of development in their downtown that we talked about what I'm suggesting is a path forward as outlined in this bill is so restrictive that it won't work in 80% of the towns in the state of Vermont, maybe more if you want to provide that path forward you need the path needs to be easier for the towns to get to so the reason I showed you Bristol you can see a photo behind it it's a busy map but you can see basically the planning area of Bristol and it's actually just the village planning area if I were to blow up the town of Bristol the town of Bristol would be about 10 times bigger than this the village planning area is only about a tenth of the town and you can see the neighborhoods and you can see some of the mixed use areas beyond it the designation is just the little candy can creating a path for just that little candy can doesn't necessarily help the village of Bristol develop in the way that we were talking about and we were talking about because that's the place that already has the most development there's not a lot of opportunity there but in the village planning area the bigger area there is opportunity and Bristol is doing some really good things in the commercial development downtown you know the Stoney Hill Development is one of the three of Bristol works is one thing that's got some really good downtown stories but it will never meet the path that's laid out in this legislation and I think that's a shame I think that if you're trying to lay out a path to encourage municipalities to to build compact centers and an incentive for for economic development then most of them should be able to to meet that that path most of them should have the resources and the ability to do it so I'm asking you in my testimony to think about the path that you've laid out and make it a little more town-friendly and a little bit more focused on the planning that the town has already done because most of them do have planning areas and supported by zoning for smaller denser commercial commercial areas thank you thank you very much hi we're we're here on carillon yet Vermont to coalition for disability rights this is our disability awareness day and I brought Nate Visayo with me today he works at the Vermont center for independent living and he was going to comment on your H74 which is the plastic bands and the restriction on plastic straws that a lot of folks with disabilities make use of so I'm here because sometimes he is a hard time hearing so I may just so speak loud and I can you can turn let's turn the coffee pot off because that's loud I should be able to curate this that's good thank you well I just want to give you a quick update this is one of our priorities but I believe I'm getting a bill from the senate that will be similar that we will take out a crossover so we haven't taken any testimony on this at all but I understand that you're in the building today and would like to give us your thoughts on this yes yes yes so thank you very much for hearing my testimony so for the record this is state year named my name is Nate Visayo I work for the Vermont center for independent living in our building so I live in Colchester and we do it on the downtown area in Burlington and I just want to make my comments on for I think this is an important bill I understand the need for environmental safety I just want to make sure that the BCIL will make sure that the disabled community is involved in the decision process and that it is not an important tool that straws are for people with disabilities for a lot of people with disabilities using straw isn't a matter of convenience it's actually just the only way they can drink or eat or take their medications and for a lot of cases having that straw available when they go into a restaurant is helping them be independent to ask people with disabilities to provide their own straws is a step for a lot of cases that adds a lot more complexity to what they need to do the first one is disabilities might not be able to get the straw themselves so they might end up having to ask for each step changing the straw for me they might say no underneath ADA because that changes the ground for what they work they might think that's too much for reasonable combination many people some of the straws don't work as well as positive straws so it is a concern that we want to make sure it's addressed and I do see it is addressed in part B of the bill it says no food or certain establishments shall sell or provide these signals to a customer and some photography question then medical or medical disability or medical conditions and that's a good issue but we just want to make sure that people who ask for the straw aren't being asked to disclose too much whether you might have people with kid with disabilities who are these people going to say customers are going to say what's your disability well that's illegal disability act so we understand the question we understand businesses holding straws and making them available we want to make sure that it does not infringe on the rights of people with disabilities when they request them and also making sure that restaurants still have these straws available straws though if a lot of people are using these straws our restaurants are not going to supply these straws and therefore that takes away another likelihood so it is great law I think it's really workable we do want to make sure that people with disabilities give their feedback and make something that can work great, does anyone have any questions representative Fordes how would you consider paper straws as opposed to plastic straws well so there's a couple of issues with paper straws I don't know if everybody's had them I had them when I grew up so for example coffee paper straws do not do well with coffee they basically dissolve upon contact with coffee so a lot of times they collapse a lot of times people might need higher integrity of a straw you might have somebody who might might have job issues could bite clear through a paper straw so I do think in certain conditions paper straws are great but they aren't really made for hot drinks that's my experience depending on what they drink paper straws can be great alternative but it is I don't want to be seizing that I'm speaking universally for all people using straws because I only have one type of disability there's people with all types of disabilities universally plastic straws have been used for I'm sure there's reasons but I'm sure in certain circumstances paper straws can be a good filter representative word do people ever use metal straws like stainless steel or some reusable type of straws there's certainly people out there who use them a couple of the issues with metal straws are number one they're hard to clean so you have to basically a lot of times you literally have to use a pipe cleaner and push it inside and again you might have people with some people with CP for example spasm biting issues that can break their teeth so I actually I carry around silicone straws in my backpack just in case of situations but again if I go into business and I say can you get my straw and give you my backpack a lot of times I kind of go and then sometimes in my case where I use a straw I put in my backpack and I forget it for about a month and it starts to crawl so you know there's a lot of cases for that I just heard that before and again for a lot of people metal straws are okay but then also you know we go back to hot drinks metal is good after heat so you might as well bring a cup of coffee if that people can dump it through the metal you mentioned the problem with drinking hot coffee yeah and I haven't seen the bill but is there maybe the bill says but if not would your recommendation be to actually as as part of the bill where it says you can't do straws except for and then then specify you mentioned the silicone straw is there a type of straw or brand of straw who can't use brands generally speaking that you would recommend that are good for hot or cold well like I said again I'm speaking about my case my case and the silicone straws work the best for different temperatures but the problem with silicone straws a lot is they're not very pliable they're not very bendable so you can either one that's a straight line or you can have one that's a cup if I have to say one silicone is the best so silicone options are also the most expensive type of straws out there so plus all the business is going to take the straws and clean the straws to make available if there was a straw I would recommend using silicone but again you also have a population of people who don't have much in terms of disposable income yes it's a pack of 4 or 5 straws silicone straws can cost anywhere between 6 and 10 dollars they're not single use and so the question would be is there a single use straw that can do hot or cold that restaurant could have on hand satisfy the need again to my knowledge plastic straws are basically the ones that are clean about every other kind of material material to the business basic plastic straw could suffice for a hot coffee in my experience when I go places where I have a bunch of straws and they give a good there are certain places that I go that have disposable straws in my area halfway through the drink the straws is gone not good you've been drinking it my questions were asked and answered I'm wondering if you looked at other aspects of the mill in terms of from your perspective there's something else we haven't caught in terms of plastic bags those other items in terms of plastic bags I haven't really thought about anymore from what I've been hearing in my feedback I've dealt with more the fact that you know we need to drink some straws I think in the case of the bags you know asking somebody to bring their bags so as a disability could be an issue because a lot of people who who are mobile or have mobility you might not be able to bring all those bags with them and bring them back with empty bags with them so I mean it's a it's a tricky widget I mean it's really a tricky widget we tried to do some help for the environment people are meeting their needs certainly you know in that aspect I actually for my students it's kind of easy I'm having a mobile moving cart my wife actually hangs a brochure on the back of my chair because I'm like you all so for that case can't expect it to work but there's always going to be a situation where somebody might need something different and I think if you're asking about disabilities again income comes into it but the women have money to produce their own bags and have their own bags with them it could be an issue honestly I haven't really thought too much about that part I've got to say is there anything else you want to share with your community on this thank you thank you thank you Karen thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you Madam Chair members of the committee my name is Richard Cowher I'm the principal with the regulatory assistance project RAP and my colleagues with me today are Frederick Weston and David Farnsworth we are here because we were asked by the JFO to conduct a quick study and a review of a study that has been commissioned by JFO by resources for the future I don't know if they can so we were asked to take a look at that study and compliment that study and that's what we've done and I guess I should pause for a moment and ask would you like us to introduce ourselves sure well so Richard Cowher regulatory assistance project I should start by saying that this is one of my favorite places in the world to date we work all over the world and there's no really no better place than the Vermont legislature I always appreciate the work that is done in this building I was chair of the public service board for 12 years very good very good okay let's try to bring our meeting to order this needs to be a little casual the most recent version whose name we can find in them right now there's Frederick Weston but there's also Richard Cowher here on our list so which one should we use Richard Cowher okay thank you we will use that version and hopefully it will get through you can click on it and then we can follow on let's see if it goes up it wasn't going in earlier it might work so do you not have an iPad? I think you would just touch your name you could refresh refresh refresh that little arrow Madam chair members of the committee my name is Richard Cowher I'm principal with the regulatory assistance project RAP and my colleagues with me today are Frederick Weston and David Farnsworth we are here because we were asked by the JFO to conduct a quick study and a review of a study that has been commissioned by JFO by resources for the future and I don't know if they presented you that so we were asked to take a look at that study and to compliment that study and that's what we've done and I guess I should pause for a moment and ask would you like us to introduce ourselves sure, I'll be there for the record well, so Richard Cowher regulatory assistance project I should start by saying that this is one of my favorite places in the world to date we work all over the world and there's no really I mean it's quite sincerely no better place than at Vermont Legislature I always appreciate the work that he's done in this building I was chair of the public service board for 12 years I've been at RAP now for 20 years the last 10 years or so I've been setting up a program and working in Europe on a lot of the same topics that we're talking about today and for 8 years I was chair of the electricity advisory committee of the US department of energy during the Obama administration so I've worked in the US this far so and I'll ask my colleagues to say a couple words Rick Westman also regulatory assistance project for the last nearly 20 years as well and before that I've been a hearing officer and economist and public service board for the last 8 years or so I've been running our China program I'm no longer doing that so I'm here which is great I'm chair of Dave Farnsworth I'm an associate for the regulatory assistance project I was a staff attorney and hearing officer and service board at the time for about 14 years and I've been a rat for about 10 years we provide technical and policy assistance to regulators and legislators and others so we're all if you're multiple busy people as you all are and I should also let you know that I've been associated with Vermont Energy Investment Corporation for a long time and presently service chair of the board so let's get going as I said we're here because JFO asked us to take a look at the RFS study and in addition to taking a look at it we have engaged two other expert groups Energy Futures Group from Hinesburg, Vermont and Consulting Fern that specializes in low carbon transportation MJ Bradley Associates so we're giving you the analysis based on all of their work in order and I'm just going to begin with an observation the topic of the day is carbon pricing you were asked to the legislature asked RFS to look at the idea of carbon pricing as a way to drive down global warming emissions and they came in they did a big model and looked at what carbon pricing could do and couldn't do and one of the conclusions I'm just going to lead you one to our main conclusion today is that carbon pricing alone is not going to be sufficient it will cost more and deliver less than a set of Vermont based low carbon programs principally focused on energy efficiency and electrification that will be far more successful and cost less than relying on carbon pricing alone that's our basic conclusion and I should say that's not inconsistent with what they said they acknowledged that as well if the chart on the wall right now is something that you may have seen a few times before but it's an assessment of by the McKinsey firm using a technique they use to look at how much it costs to reduce a ton of carbon and how many times could be reduced by two different techniques and the those beginning on the left hand side are techniques mostly their energy efficiency you don't really need to study the details that actually save money so these are ways that we can reduce carbon emissions and save money at the same time and so the interesting question is if those things already save money we have learned over the years that there are lots of barriers to delivering low cost energy efficiency and that's why we have programs that aim to do that and the reason I'm putting this up here is to sort of make the point that pricing alone is already proven not to be the technique that by itself would deliver their low cost energy efficiency or carbon savings in the next slide I'm showing you the results of a study that we did in this particular study was in the United Kingdom and it was done by one of our colleagues who had run energy efficiency programs in the UK and so it's based on real data and the question there is the question asked is in the UK by itself reduce emissions or should some other programs be used in order to perhaps be more effective and what you see here on the little blue wedge at the bottom of this chart shows the conservation that would result if you raised prices on natural gas in the UK by 3% it doesn't really matter what percent we're talking about these ratios and what you get is you get some price response but you don't get very much conservation because people heat their homes and the 3% price rise doesn't make much difference they don't do much and so we then asked the question well what if you took the revenue associated with that 3% cost and invested it in a well designed efficiency program in the UK they did this they took an amount of money by doing what we do in Vermont actually which is putting an obligation on regulated utilities and they they ran a water heater natural gas oil work replacement program which in the UK is the main way people heat water and heat their homes so they ran a program to help homeowners improve the efficiency of their furnaces and the consequences that the amount of savings in energy savings, dollar savings and carbon savings is shown in the area underneath the red corner so saving nine times more money, carbon and gas through a program than they would have saved just by raising rates and that's a lesson that we know in Vermont we have succeeded over the years with efficiency first thinking in Vermont for quite some time and as you know through section 248 standards that the PUC uses energy efficiency dockets efficiency Vermont Vermont gas programs etc we've been saving energy now for 25 years through programs we spend about 7% of total power system revenues on efficiency compared with over 90% of course on supply and delivery and what's interesting about that is the savings build up over time and efficiency is now supplying or displacing if you want to look at it the other way about 20% of the total electricity that demand in the state demand would have been 20% higher today than it is without those programs so even though it's a relatively small fraction of spending because the savings grow over time it has become a very big part of our power mix and it has generated well over $2 billion in electric energy savings for the Vermont customers we've learned on the electricity side and in natural gas that these programs really work they really save people money they lower our demand and Vermont is known around the world frankly for doing that but I woke up recently realizing oh that's nice we do that but I put this slide together now for the hard part our emissions aren't any longer coming from electricity our emissions are coming from two main sources transportation and home heating and we need to turn our attention from just thinking about the regulated utilities and think now about how are we going to save energy through efficiency in transportation and buildings it's not doing away with what we used to do we need to keep we still need to keep doing that but it's adding a focus on buildings and transportation why should we do this you know maybe you all you know that you're totally aware of this fact but I keep being surprised every time I was looking at it that we are spending $1 a year to import carbon that we don't actually even want to burn we have a state-wide goal to reduce those emissions by 80 or 90% and here we are spending $2 billion a year to buy it and bring it into our state instead of doing things inside our state that would lower that that's equivalent by the way to two times the size of the Vermont agricultural economy altogether and the total income of 35,000 median Vermont households now that's a big bill how can we spend less and save more here I want to get to the question and I'm now going to just get ready to turn this over to my colleague that I in this slide called carbon efficiency and this is because a lot of the discussion around carbon focuses on carbon price economists love to talk about carbon price as a bill payer I like to answer the question how much is it going to cost per ton to avoid a ton of carbon in our economy so the questions that I would urge you to ask about programs to reduce emissions how many tons will it save how fast will it work and how much will it cost per ton of oil alongside that we need to recognize that whatever we do it needs to be fair and inclusive to everyone and look for ways to advance ways to serve the working Vermonters, working families and vulnerable populations alongside the goal of carbon reduction so now I'm going to turn it over to my colleagues as I said in the beginning we commissioned two studies on transportation and one on housing and Dave's going to talk about transportation. Thank you. Folks I'm just going to take the next several slides just to explain to you a little bit about MG Bradley's analysis of the transportation questions we put before them and to explain how they approached the question what I think are important takeaways from this study. First, what they did was look at two scenarios one of the business as usual scenario and the other 80% production by 2050 scenario. The business as usual scenario has no change to US CAFE standards that's fleet efficiency standards, federal fleet efficiency standards no policies to promote renewable fuels transportation fuels and relatively low levels of EV adoption that's the business as usual approach and what they modeled as steps for Vermont to take involved doing something about CAFE standards increasing those standards, increasing the use of renewable fuels and electrifying transportation. Basically what you have up there are these specific strategies broken out. What they originally did for us, we asked them to take a second look at was to take a look at all the transportation sector and what it would cost to decarbonize it by 2030 and 2050. When you look at all of the transportation sector you're looking at a Nissan Centra and you're looking at a semi-truck and you're putting it all together for one sort of analysis under a model and that just, we didn't find that particularly helpful. We asked them to break it out to light duty, medium duty and heavy duty. What we found was very interesting news with respect to light duty vehicles they still had the average so there's an average car they're looking at and that average car looks like an F-150 it looks like a medium-sized SUV it looks like a mid-sized automobile and a small automobile it's all glommed together so that's the way modeling works I can't help you with it much more than that but the good news about light duty vehicles is that with some support Vermont can get on a path to electrifying transportation with respect to that slice of the transportation sector we think that's really important as far as the specific figures go Rich talked about what is the price per ton avoided because we think that's a really good way of measuring what otherwise would be apples and oranges and what you see when you when you look at that with respect to light duty EVs for $16 metric ton avoided Vermont over the next 10 years at least up to 2030 can basically change the market, transform the market and that means Vermont can step in with some supports to make up the difference between the price of a conventional light duty vehicle and an electric one provide supports but after 10 years they can almost completely step away so for about $7 million a year between now and 2030 they could model and demonstrate that change could take place it ends up to be in about 2 cents a gallon when you look at medium duty on the other hand and heavy duty there's a big challenge there the model assumes people drive 12,000 miles a year 1000 miles a month if you have a $10,000 car a $20,000 car you can do the arithmetic but if you have a car that's much bigger or a truck that's much bigger with much greater power needs much bigger batteries then the price goes way up and if you're still driving 12,000 miles a year it's just not going to pencil out so there's some big numbers cause a little backlash when you look at the medium duty and heavy duty but the news about light duty vehicles it's a very positive news and we're really encouraged by it I guess I'll leave you with that and have a break we also looked at the building or heating sector as transportation in the heating sector we identified a number of programmatic actions that we thought would be of high value chances are that they would have significant reductions in carbon but we didn't do a full fledged one of the best programs you could possibly imagine sort of analysis of five programs you see them here low income weatherization residential non-low income weatherization retrofitting boilers and furnaces with cold climate heat pumps and then retrofitting as well water heaters, domestic water heaters and the last program we looked at is replacing school boilers public water boilers and you can see roughly we looked at the object was to get about roughly anywhere from 40 to 50% of the eligible market in the next 10 years so this is a menu of programs the heating programs here you see the costs and benefits these are all in the present value to 2018 dollars and that was true as well of the transportation numbers by way of comparison the RFF report looked at 2015 dollars but they're roughly comparable a couple years of discount and they want to keep in mind we took a look at these programs from two perspectives one is what we call the total cost perspective and that is the cost of the program plus any of the costs that the participants in the program would pay so if I'm getting my house wet our eyes the program pays for part of it and I pay for part of it in the low income program in leatherization it's paid for entirely by the program the other three ones there's a sharing so that's the total cost perspective the program cost perspective is of course the public dollars that we would be talking about that would support the program and what we found again going after 50% of the eligible market in 10 years which is quite aggressive we found that these programs save money straight up, they are economically efficient they're cost effective these are things that you want to do because they save Vermonters money from the get go before you even think about the carbon benefits so these as you can see there are some significant numbers here these are millions of dollars in 2018 dollars and the benefit cost ratios as you can see from the various perspectives are all well over one when you take a look at them from the perspective of the tons of carbon that they avoid this sheet will give you an idea this table will give you an idea on the left are the tons of carbon that these programs would avoid and on the right is the program cost the far right the program cost per ton that you avoid because these are all cost effective programs from an economic perspective you get the carbon savings for free so if your object is to get carbon you want these are lower than low cost carbon savings these are negative cost carbon savings go the slide that Rich showed at the beginning that cost curve from lower left to lower right all those things on the left hand side of that curve were programs that you can do to save carbon that are economically beneficial so you get the carbon for free and that's true of the heating programs that we looked at for this for the purposes of this study now just for sure I just got to say I'm normal with tables like this and if you would just walk me through let's take the biofuels with pellet because those are pretty simple numbers simple as best for me so in the total cost perspective we've got 20 million is that correct in current dollars 20 million of costs of costs and 46 million in benefits that's correct in its total benefits those are the costs that are avoided by doing this thing so what you're doing is you've got a wood pellet boiler instead of an oil fired furnace primarily what you're saving in that 46 million dollars is the cost of wood you are also avoiding some replacement capital costs if you kept your furnace down the road or five years down the road or 15 you'd have to replace it so that's the value of avoiding capital replacement is there too but it's primarily avoided fossil fuel costs and then we have 26 million dollars net of savings zooming all the way over to the far right well I guess the current net benefits not quite far right that's 30 million dollars it costs us 30 million dollars to get the 26 million net is that what that means he's on the bottom he's at the 30 million two perspectives total cost perspective the total cost perspective includes that NPV of costs the 20 million includes the costs that the program pays and the participants pay so there will be some sharing from the school primarily in fuel costs but maybe some casual costs as well on the right side we're only looking at what the program puts into it so that 16 million dollars is the is what the program would pay for which means you subtract one from the other the sharing by the participants is 4 million dollars but the benefits the total benefits are still 46 million dollars from a program from a public dollars perspective we spent 16 million and we get 46 million back and 30 in net and this will get about 90 schools over 10 years out of an eligible market of about 180 from the program okay, thank you very much that was a great question and what just got written they were using 3 real well that's the 3 percent real and of course inflation is not good okay, thank you okay, so just back to this one and finally it's a negative negative cost per ton of carbon now I just wanted to summarize that this is the the chart that you and I just looked at a moment ago I took all five of the programs and added them up and if you were to do all of the programs and of course you can do all, none parts of them or whatever but on our analysis if you were to do them all this is what it would look like 786 excuse me, 524 million dollars of public investment for 954 dollars of gross savings of benefit cost ratio of 1.82 again that's aggregated just to give you an idea of the magnitude of the potential savings so roughly saving $1.80 for every dollar you spend sorry, my fault okay so now just a couple of wrap up conclusions we begin this work with a real sense of urgency about climate and I'm also motivated as a former utility man who really cared about what the mothers have to pay highly motivated by the fact that we are sending so much money out of our state by fuels that we could keep it home by being more efficient and we know how to do this I'm going to start with sometimes legislators ask me alright, I know we can't do everything but what could we do that would really be the best way to start and I would say in addition to the programs that Vermont already has in place which are some strong energy efficiency programs by utilities and efficiency Vermont and Vermont gas we have the weatherization assistance program that is cost effectively assisting low income households to live in healthier and less expensive homes and I would start by encouraging first that we at least double the size of that program there is something like 50,000 eligible housing members that are in need of treatment and are eligible for treatment under this program and we've been serving less than a thousand a year at that rate we'll never get the low income housing start renovated to healthy and efficient standards we could easily do much better we have a question for you how much does the weatherization program rely on federal funding and how much is their state funds currently 80% of our programs state funded we only get 20% and that tells you something about how weak the federal program has gotten in a couple of years if it weren't for the state program our program would be incredible now my second small bullet there has to do with how we pay for programs we should just face the fact that over the years we have been successful in raising money through the regulated utilities to investing energy efficiency and as I said at the very beginning we've saved well over $2 billion by doing that but we have not been successful in attacking the thermal side the liquid fuel side the delivered fuel is however you want to refer to that category we just haven't done it we have a very small contribution to the program we are spending a few we have tried to attack thermal in a couple of other creative ways but for the most part we should just face the facts here that we are under investing in thermal efficiency and thermal fuels contribute far less proportion to energy efficiency than electricity and natural gas they are just not on a level playing field I think the rate for electricity is something like 10 times higher than the rate of revenue we are getting from fossil fuels as I say here thermal efficiency and housing is a priority and we have programs in place that we can build on to continue those programs and to make them stronger advanced wood heat in Vermont schools I personally think this is a terrific idea it's good for Vermont's forestry resource and forestry business and saves money for the schools and keeps the money in Vermont on the transportation side we recommend that the legislature stick to the resolution that you have already enacted encouraging a strong regional transportation climate initiative that program is starting now and deserves your continued support and it would be a good thing to launch a program to improve access to low emitting vehicles for working and low income families that are currently being when they are assisted in the transportation area they're being historically assisted to buy very low efficiency relatively high cost vehicles and I'll close to that one thing that's not here but is in our report is the final table that compares the relative costs of these programs in a way that we thought might be helpful to you Rich has emphasized when you're thinking about carbon efficiency the cost per ton avoided matters and the lower the cost per ton avoided that's why I like doing the buildings part of this because I get to say negative cost per ton and I feel good about that compared to others there's a slide that we don't have here operator malfunction that compares the average cost per ton avoided by the buildings programs or the heating programs that we've described it's about $141 negative on a program cost basis the transportation like duty vehicles as David said about $16 a ton from that program and past 2030 those numbers go negative again because EVs are more than comparable with light duty EVs are more than comparable with traditional cars lastly the RFF report gave you four price paths for carbon on a pricing only basis if you were to price it here's what's going to happen the trajectory that they gave you for the horizon that they were looking at it's something that they called WCI the western climate initiative expected prices to have that would produce savings per ton at a cost of savings at a cost per ton of over $400 you see there's a huge difference and the only other thing I would add to that is some of the programs some of the costs of the programs that we've looked at and again they are illustrative these are not deeply well designed but if you were to do them you'd want to be putting a lot of work into program design and delivery and really sharpening pencils on that but the public dollar costs of the programs are significantly below the total cost of a price path under the lowest cost price path that RFF even began to talk about just to give you an idea of the orders of magnitude and then we show those numbers in order thank you, thanks for your patience we're excited to answer questions representative forgates early on in the presentation there was a figure of cost of $2 per something was right no I'm not remembering $2 per set $2 billion I remember you know I'm thinking that it was $2 per chance oh no $2 per gallon of gasoline $2 but maybe it was $1.2 $2.0 actually anyway two cents a gallon would give you the $70 million between now and 2030 that would support that market transformation for like-duty vehicles that I described as the I think the best take away from the MJ Bradley analysis I've got can I ask one more question and this may not be an area that you're associated with I was at a state budget appropriation hearing in Springfield Monday night and it was all people with asks and one of the asks was for a person who is extracting limestone from the atmosphere to save on carbon is that anything that you would want to comment on well there's a Swedish company excuse me a Swiss company is trying to do this as well I have the question you ask is how much is it going to cost per ton of carbon dioxide that you get out of the atmosphere and they can answer that question and I think you'll find it's pretty expensive I suspect I hadn't heard of that one before the various carbon capture and sequestration technologies so far have all proven to be more expensive than people want to pay and I just go back to I guess almost my very first slide this one I just go back to here and say why are we ourselves up on the right hand side of this slide when we have so much to do on the left hand side that saves money for homeowners while we go about it so the two cents a gallon on gas gives us money for going to electric vehicles I have a question about that and then for efficiency building efficiency where do we get that money so we're in the right building to say it's your choice of course but I'm just trying to be really straight to do about the disproportionate way that we fund efficiency in Vermont today and we have historically avoided raising money for efficiency on delivered fuels and one of the best ways that we could take a step would be to do better on that side and you're thinking that there's an equitable argument there if you're getting if you're using gas or electricity if we have natural gas we're paying if we have propane we're paying it on what so the regulated fuels electricity and natural gas and this is because of initiatives begun by the regulators a long time ago and maintained for 25 years since we knew the regulators and such a person we knew that it was better for ratepayers to spend money on efficiency than it would be to spend money on power plants and transmission lines and buying fuel and all that and because those programs were proven to be cost effective we created energy efficiency programs for the regulated utilities electricity and natural gas the unregulated fuel suppliers have been for the most part not participating in supporting or paying for those products and therefore thermal savings in have been left not entirely fine because we have some thermal programs but they have been under supported so I would recommend that you take a hard look at that and consider a charge on delivered fuels that's somewhat closer to what we're spending on electricity and gas for the purpose of giving it back to customers in the form of energy efficiency and at a minimum you can do this I urge you to think hard about doing it for low income housing but if you do for low income housing does that mean where people are renting? Is it the renting when you're giving it to landlords? How that program works is something you should ask for whether it's an assistance program mostly in those rental units it's the tenants who are paying the bills so you're actually benefiting the tenants when you lower them So as this relates to Act 250 what would your recommendation be that we should go with the enhanced building So I haven't studied the actual legislation that you're considering but I have long supported the energy efficiency standards in Act 250 My first jobs in Vermont government actually was Executive Director of the Environmental Board learned about that program then and I would say for new construction in Vermont we should definitely adhere to high standards I don't know if that needs to be perfectly high standards to encourage efficiency So the two cents a gallon on gas for light duty vehicles where are we going to get these vehicles? I have a Honda theory and I those electric vehicles we're going to get them Are you going to share Chevrolet if you want You can go to the Chevrolet dealership in Barrie and go online and buy a used EV for $7 or $8,000 when this just come off the lease it's got 30,000 miles on it and plenty of life left with the technology going smaller battery vehicles are being put to the side and people are getting newer nicer vehicles but there are a lot of EVs out there that just happen not to see them because there aren't a lot of them in Vermont Where are there a lot? California Massachusetts California actually per capita Vermont is doing pretty well the uptake in EVs is pretty good in Vermont but it's slowly growing last year 200,000 EVs I think were purchased across the US I'm really intrigued by your focus on putting carbon aside that's an extra because the real benefit is to the resident that is living in a drafty house and they're uncomfortable much of their income is going to be more heating and it's expensive so what you're implying is there are strategic ways that we can make policy decisions that can meet result in helping Vermont residents keep money in their pockets that's absolutely essential here we have an affordability issue we hear often that people are struggling whether it's their mortgage or whether it's their rent and so these are real strategies to help us address affordability do you have any information regarding the percentage of households that percentage of their perhaps their income that is goes towards just their basic necessities of keeping the lights on or their houses heated is there anything like that? there must be somewhere because that would be critical we do know on the climate side it's the second largest sector in terms of contributing but this seems to be a win-win strategy if we get to determine how to best finance it in terms of saving Vermonters money and making our places of a bow more affordable yeah absolutely I don't have those figures we can get them certainly other representatives probably better than we certainly the weather station assistance program folks they know those numbers inside out you should have you should certainly talk to them it varies quite a lot housing type I was just going to add that the same observation applies to electric vehicles so many Vermonters are rural they drive a lot to get to work to get to the doctors to get to a restaurant to do anything and they pay more probably more out of their income to fix their trucks fix their cars so to the degree you can get them into EVs that have lower maintenance costs lower the sooner you can do that the more money they're going to keep in their pockets we have another meeting but we can split if you still have questions one of us can stay let's see are there more questions yeah so the delivered fuel packs good benefit would you recommend excise tax for that yes we collect now a gross receipts tax that supports the weather station program at the the wholesale level and I would recommend extending that for the purposes I want to be clear here for the purposes of saving homeowners money on fuel and there must be models that you didn't include public transportation the opportunity to invest those dollars in public transportation and maybe heavy rail we didn't look at those the menu was really big huge so we just picked ones that we thought would be frankly would have a significant bang for the buck in Vermont from the get go we make that judgment call giving the time and resources heavy rail probably coming from everywhere else yeah okay thank you any other questions thank you very much thank you very much we're more than happy to come back answer any of your questions if we get a chance to give you a report and there are I reread it and I'm asking questions so by all means we're more than happy to come back and be on call feel free our contact information I think is in here thank you very much for the time we really appreciate it we will follow you out and ask you a question please