 Bye-bye. Next up for discussion is the Transit Financing Report. Sorry, yeah, we have Steven Febel. Yeah, Marshall, did you want to introduce this? Sure, yeah, I'd be happy to. And Steven, I just want to make sure you have screen sharing, right, so you should be able to share your presentation. Okay, good. So yeah, good evening, everyone. I'm Marshall Distal. I'm on the transportation side of things here at the CCRPC. And over the past year, we've been working in partnership with GMT and V-Trans and Steven Falble of Steadman Hill Consulting on a study that's analyzing different approaches to financing public transit in Vermont. The current system that we have is heavily reliant on local property taxes, which is problematic for a variety of reasons that Steven will address in his presentation. Other reasons that we were looking to reevaluate the funding was to find opportunities to support permanent, fare-free transit and also just identifying new opportunities to generate additional resources at a local level that would serve as match for increased federal funding from the infrastructure bill. So we've shared the results of this study with a variety of stakeholders, including both the House and Senate Transportation Committees, and we look forward to sharing it with you tonight as well to hear your thoughts. So I will turn it over to Steven now. Thanks, Marshall. I'm gonna share my screen and I assume everyone can see that. Okay. So this is not a very long presentation, there's only seven slides, but there's a lot of material to cover. And so we hope to give it a full treatment and then have a good discussion afterward about ways to improve the method of funding public transit in not only Chittenden County, but statewide. So this study which started last summer had a main goal of finding a sustainable source of revenue to maintain current service as well as to leverage new federal funds to increase transit access for all of our monitors. As Marshall indicated, the current funding mechanism reliant on property taxes as well as the state transportation fund has often been running into trouble not only in the urban areas, but in rural areas where property taxes are very much constrained and under many demands for local services. And in Chittenden County, there have been efforts stretching back to at least the 1990s to find alternative ways of funding public transportation at the local level. And most of these studies in the past said, well, it's a real problem, but there's no really good solution and here's a list of possibilities and then nothing happens and then the study is redone a few years later when it comes to the same conclusion. So we're hoping this time with this confluence of new federal funding and the effects of the pandemic and the fair free status and all sorts of issues coming together that we can try to solve this problem once and for all. The scope of the study was to conduct research on the means of funding public transit around the country and around the world to consider replacement for or supplement to these existing revenue sources, the local funding as we said based mainly on property taxes, state funding from the Transportation Fund as well as fair revenue which has been suspended on a statewide basis since March, 2020. The study was also intended to consider public private partnerships. It had a scope in Chittenden County as well as looking at other parts of the state, the more rural areas and the end product was a series of options for the Vermont legislature to consider not necessarily one specific recommendation but a slate of options with an evaluation so that the legislature can work through committees to decide which way to go and to try to take action on this. Before we get into the substance of the study there are a couple of principles that the report discusses and these apply to the different means of funding public transit. So there's the SEP or someone else pays principle versus the WAPOL principle or we all pay a little. And a lot of the prior studies going back to the 90s ended up with recommendations to say, well, we should raise the rental car tax or we should raise hotel taxes because somebody else pays those. That's not paid by Vermont residents, it's paid by tourists. And the result is that if you try to raise a lot of money through those kinds of taxes and fees they end up being quite high and have negative impacts on tourism. And so those were not implemented. In opposition, the WAPOL principle says rather than try to focus taxes and fees on certain populations what if we spread them broadly? And so it turns out that if you do think of broadly supported public transit that the fee for any individual turns out to be very little. For instance, total local funding statewide is about $6 million and with 600,000 people in the state it works out to about $10 per person per year to replace all local funding. So we're not talking about a lot of money if all Vermonters participate in that. A second principle that comes up in the discussion of various alternatives is that regional transit systems generate benefits regionally. And this gets to the idea that the traditional funding mechanism at the local level has dependent on whether a town has a bus route running through it or not. And if it does then that town is expected to pay a portion of the local share for that bus route. And if a town doesn't have a bus route then it pays nothing. But the benefits of transit don't apply in such a narrow way around a given bus route. Demand response service covers all towns in a region. And the benefits of transit in terms of supporting the economy and improving access to jobs and access to medical care really apply on a regional basis and not just to specific served towns or even the specific riders. It benefits everyone on a regional and indeed statewide and global basis by helping to reduce emissions. So those principles you'll see them come up in some of the discussion as we go forward. So one thing about the WAPOL principle that we all pay a little is that it implies that if everyone's paying something for transit then everyone in Vermont should have access to transit. Now we know that only about a third of Vermont towns are currently served by a bus route. We do know that all Vermont towns have some access to demand response service but there are eligibility restrictions to those specifically you have to be age 60 or older or have a disability or if you're a Medicaid recipient and you don't have a car then you can have access to Medicaid transportation. Those two programs for the so-called E&D program in Medicaid cover the vast majority of demand response. And so if you don't fit into one of those two categories and you don't live near a bus route then you could very rightly say I have no transit access. And if we're asking people like that to pay then we should be thinking about ways to expand transit access statewide. So VTrans has been considering this issue for some time with various pilot projects and with some language in the recently completed public transit policy plan to think about a statewide community rides program that would provide access to all of our monitors without any eligibility restrictions. It would cover work trips as well as other trip purposes. And in order to do this sort of service in rural areas which outside of the core of Chittenden County we're talking about a very rural state. It would likely make extensive use of volunteer drivers assisted by technology similar to micro transit which I can discuss more but using smartphone technology and other technology to allow people to reserve rides in an on-demand basis rather than having to call a day in advance which is the traditional way of doing it. And then perhaps this sort of statewide transit system this community ride system would be operated with vehicles that are supplied through a public-private partnership. And the report talks about the potential of working with vehicle manufacturer like Volkswagen per se which is just now introducing an all-wheel drive version of the ID4 which is an electric vehicle. And if you can imagine a fleet of these being sold at low cost or no cost to the state operated by volunteer drivers then you can think of a system that would have a significant positive impact on greenhouse gas emissions while providing access and giving people an option to get around without driving themselves. So that's what a community a statewide community ride system might look like that could be funded by this new funding mechanism. One last issue about the WAPOL principle is that non-riders already pay for transit service through their property taxes as well as the vehicle taxes, gas taxes and so forth that go into the statewide transportation fund. So to say that, well, suddenly these people who don't have transit access are gonna pay for transit, it's the answer as well they already are, they may not know it but it's not a wholly new phenomenon. So when we talk about replacing existing funding sources what are we talking about and how much? So total local funding as I said before mainly property taxes is about $6 million a year total state funding from the transportation fund is about $7 million a year and total fare revenue and this is based on fiscal 2019 which is the last full year when fares were collected was about 2.7 million per year and the great majority of that was in the urban portion of Chittenden County about 500,000 for the rest of Vermont. And so that adds up to about $16 million and so we included included on top of that an extra 5 million for service expansion in rural areas so that the target would be $21 million annually and that's a sizable amount of money that extra 5 million would enable to say to pull down another at least 5 million in federal funds so that the expansion of service that we were talking about could be funded by $10 million which is about a quarter of the existing transit program so we're talking about a substantial increase in service to provide that statewide access. It's important to note that a new source of funding would mostly replace existing funding streams and therefore reduce pressure on property taxes and on the T fund. It's only that extra 5 million that's really on top of existing funding sources. An important question that's discussed very much in the report and it's come up in all the presentations so far is whether public transit should be funded based on automobile-based fees which has been the traditional source when it comes to state funding. The T fund is made up almost in equal parts of gasoline and diesel taxes, the purchase and use tax on vehicles as well as registration and license fees and these are all associated with cars. So in the literature there's especially in urban areas a lot of discussion that while making driving more expensive by raising gas taxes or raising registration fees or other things helps public transit by making it more cost competitive. However, it's the case that these taxes and fees would have to be raised by a lot to have a significant impact on people's choice of mode that raising a gas tax by five cents is not gonna say, oh, now I'll take transit because gas is that much more expensive. And if you also think about where do people in the state have a choice between driving and taking the bus is really only a viable choice in the core of Chittenden County where you have a lot of transit service and the rest of the state you might have no bus service at all or just very sporadic hourly bus service or once every half hour. So if we're trying to say, well, we're gonna make driving more expensive for you so you take transit they'll say what transit and they'd be right to say so in a lot of the state. So for these reasons, we did not really consider raising automobile based fees as the means of funding public transit in the new paradigm. There's also recognition that gas taxes in the longterm are not really sustainable and that there will probably be a mileage based fee to replace the gas tax given the increasing electrification of the fleet and increasing fuel efficiency of automobiles. It's also the case that if we free up $7 million out of the T fund by not using it for public transit that creates a lot more local match for roadway and bridge projects and the federal transportation law that Marshall mentioned at the beginning is gonna increase funding for public transit substantially but it's also gonna substantially increase funding for roadway and bridge maintenance and the state may well need additional matching funds to draw down the maximum amount of federal funding. Final point here is that the existing funding sources which are largely based on automobiles as well as property taxes are really not sufficient to maintain even the current level of service indefinitely, let alone an expansion of service. All the transit providers bump up against budget constraints because of limitations of these funding sources and if transit's going to play an increasing role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well as increasing access in rural areas and serving an aging population, service is gonna have to increase over time and that means more money will have to be available. So the last couple of slides here talk about the alternatives that we considered in this study and there are eight categories of potential taxes and fees that were analyzed in this report. The sales tax is a very common means of funding transit nationally if you look across the country at various states as well as counties, they often use something like a quarter percent sales tax to fund either capital projects related to public transit or ongoing operations. And as I said, this could be on a statewide basis or a state could allow counties and cities to add a quarter percent sales tax to the state based sales tax to generate funding for their local transit system. This is not necessarily recommended for Vermont, the sales tax is currently dedicated to the education fund. It's also generally regressive tax. And so there would be issues with portioning some to public transit out of education and generally people who are least able to pay would end up paying a higher percentage of their income to support it. So it's here because it's common but it's not necessarily recommended. The next two options are based on the concept that public transit is very important for the economy and for access to jobs generally. And so that employers should shoulder a good portion of the burden in making sure that the transit system is viable. So the second option, the payroll tax on employers is not commonly used in the US but it is the primary means of funding local public transit in France. This is a tax that would apply to employers rather than employees. And it would be collected likely along with state unemployment taxes on a quarterly basis and it would apply to all payroll for employers and it could be restricted to employers with five or more employees and exempt the smallest employers. And the analysis did assume that. The business revenue assessment option is similar thematically. Again, getting business to support transit because transit supports the economy. It's based on business revenue rather than payroll. This is not one of the more recommended options because this would create a whole new administrative structure in Vermont and new reporting burdens for businesses because they do not currently report business revenue other than annually on their tax forms. Some states do this in Utah. This is a means of funding local public transit but did not rise to the top in Vermont. The next option is the county property tax. And the idea here is instead of applying taxes, property taxes at the local level they'd apply at the county level and therefore spread the burden among all landowners not just those in-served towns. So this follows the Wapp Hall principle. It's a relatively stable source of revenue. It's a relatively progressive source of revenue. It's not necessarily politically popular because it would show up on people's property tax bills and they may not be able to tell the difference between a local property tax and the county property tax. And there's also administrative issues because county property taxes currently fall under the jurisdiction of the side judges and the judicial branch and the legislature would have to take action for another administrative body to set these taxes, impose them and deal with the revenue. The next option is an income tax. This is perhaps the most progressive option but we judged it very challenging politically. The income tax would not have to be raised a whole lot to be able to generate the $21 million we're looking for but the legislature probably every year is bombarded with advocacy groups to say, well, if you only raise the income tax a little bit you'd be able to fund our very worthy cause and it would be great and it's progressive. And the legislature generally says no to everybody because the legislature feels that income taxes are high. They're certainly perceived to be high and that they don't wanna drive affluent families out of Vermont. So while it's true that we could raise a lot of money with a little more money, a little higher rate it's probably a non-starter when it comes to the legislature. The next option is a utility fee. And this came up because part of the analysis of fair free service that was done over the last couple of years looked at a peer system for GMT in Corvallis, Oregon where they eliminated fares and made up the revenue by imposing a fee on customer's utility bills. And it was a relatively small fee, something in the order of $3 per household. And that was enough to generate substantial revenue to supplant the fair revenue that they eliminated. In Vermont, we're thinking about this as an option for a couple of reasons. Energy use is certainly tied to greenhouse gas emissions. There is a tie in between transit and energy use especially as the fleet gets electrified beginning here in County and now in Rutland. Utilities are required under their tier three requirements to fund the projects that result in reduction of greenhouse gases and transit projects certainly would qualify there. But it's also the case that a utility fee would satisfy the WAPOL principle. And it would be relatively small. We're talking about something like $3 per month for residential users on average and for commercial industrial users about $14 per month. And those fees would generate the $21 million. So everyone would pay a little bit and it would generate a sufficient amount of money. The last two options have to do with real estate transactions, one is the property transfer tax. This is a progressive tax. It does apply in the long run very widely, but in the short run it applies only to people who are buying real estate. And this would be a not insubstantial increase by a couple of thousand dollars depending on the value of the property to the real estate closing costs. And while some homeowners may say, oh well that's just one among so many closing costs and may not notice it, it's not a small amount of money. And it is progressive, but it is problematic in that way that property transfer tax has already perceived to be high, especially for larger parcels of real estate. The last one on the list here, the mortgage recording tax is on the list because it's used right next door in New York state to fund public transit. It's also progressive, but it may miss out on the wealthiest individuals who may buy real estate without a mortgage at all. But as with the property transfer tax in New York, it tends to be sort of hidden on a closing statement along with all those other lawyers fees and other transfer taxes. So they have been successful there and using it to fund public transit on the local level. The last slide here looks at all of these options and scores them according to four evaluation criteria. So the four criteria are the stability of revenue at something that we would want to see in a revenue source, not one that goes dramatically up and down with the economy, but something that will be pretty stable year to year. The second criterion, ease of implementation has more to do with administrative implementation. Is there a means of collecting these funds that does not require setting up whole new agencies or whole new reporting mechanisms? So you can see the sales tax scores a plus two on this because it's just a matter of changing the rate from 6% to 6.25%. No new administrative burdens are involved. The third column or the third criterion is political feasibility. That's self-explanatory. We talked about that with the income tax, which is rated a minus two here. You can see none of them are rated anything positive for political feasibility because nobody likes to pay more money generally, but a couple of them are rated at neutral, the payroll tax on employers and the utility fee. These are judged to be either not applying to individuals as in the payroll tax or with the utility fee, so small $3 a month that it wouldn't generate a huge amount of blowback. For instance, I just saw on my Green Mountain Power Bill that they're planning to go before the Public Utility Commission next month and argue for a rate increase of 275 per month. And I don't know if this is gonna generate any negative press or anything. It will likely be approved. And so this kind of, that's all we're talking about is 25 cents more than that to fund all local public transit. So if that kind of rate can just sail through, I'm not sure it will, but it probably will, then it seems that a small increase in utility fees for public transit could also be politically feasible. The last criterion is equity having to do with whether the tax or fee is progressive or regressive. You can see the various scores there with sales tax getting a negative two, most of the others being either mildly or strongly progressive getting plus one or plus two ratings. And then the right most column, the total score is just a simple sum of the four different criteria. There's lots of ways this could have been done with different weights and so forth, but we just chose to do a simple sum for this purpose. And you can see that if you compare the numbers in that final column, the utility fee rises to the top with a plus four rating with the county property tax next at a plus three. And then several others are in the plus two or plus one range. The final thing I'll mention about this table as we go back to the left is, what is the rate or tax rate increase we're talking about for these different options? Sales tax about a quarter of a percent would raise the, all of these would raise $21 million. Payroll tax and employers were talking about two tenths of a percent with the business revenue assessment. We don't really know for sure because we don't know what business revenue is, but presumably business revenue is more than payroll so that the rate would be less than 0.2%. County property taxes would go up about 23 cents per thousand dollars of value. The income tax would go up by only five one hundredths of a percent. The average income tax paid by Vermonters in the range of 4%. So we're talking about moving from four to 4.05. Like I said, a small increment, but that's what everybody says. The utility fee, if we did it on a per kilowatt hour basis would work out to about a half penny per kilowatt hour to apply to residential and commercial users, not to industrial users who use a lot more power. So that would be a much smaller fee per kilowatt hour. Property transfer tax would be 0.55%, which is not insignificant since the regular property transfer tax is around one and a half percent. And then the mortgage recording fee would be about 75 cents per a hundred dollars in value. So I've given you a lot of information, talked for a while. I will leave the presentation up for the moment in case people have questions on it, on specific things, and then we can take it down and continue the discussion. But at this point, I'll open the floor. Steven, it's Bard Hill from Richmond. I have a question. First, I really like this kind of table with the Bardock policy analysis, because it lets you people make their judgments. But I was pondering the values here because if I were scoring some of these, I probably would have come up with some fairly different values. So I guess a question about process, how did you assign the values in this evaluation table? Well, I made them up and then I ran them by Marshall and Charlie and the rest of the steering committee said, what do you think? Do you agree? And then we made some adjustments, but generally the steering committee was comfortable with this. But I certainly agree with you that other people might have different opinions about how to rate these things. It's not, there's not some objective, obvious, clear standard for this. Dana from Charlotte, getting back to the volunteer driver concept for the rural areas, I'm just wondering how realistic that is and whether there are models of other states that have been successful? It's, we hope that it's realistic. I mean, certainly there are plenty of volunteer drivers in Vermont now who are providing that service for elders, for people with disabilities, for Medicaid recipients. Now, whether that can be expanded into this kind of statewide community rise micro transit project, that remains to be seen. We'd need a lot more volunteers to sign up. The public transit policy plan discusses this in some detail. And I saw Kurt is on the call because last year I did a study for the tri-town area, Jericho, Underhill and Cambridge, and talked at some length about a volunteer-based micro transit system for the tri-town area and whether that could be a sort of a pilot project for this on a statewide basis. Technologically, there's no reason it couldn't work. Micro transit works thus far, at least in the GMTs pilot project with professional drivers, but there's no reason that volunteer drivers couldn't have a tablet in their car, tells them where to go to pick somebody up, tells them where to go to pick somebody, drop somebody off. And I've talked to micro transit vendors as well. There's no technical reason why it couldn't work. It's just a matter of whether there would be enough volunteers out there to do that. And that's, I can't tell you for sure one way or the other whether that's true, but that's the concept anyway. Here it has his hand up. Two things, one, as a model, I'm not positive it's still running, although it may be, but for many, many years, there's been a, this has been all private, van running from the Bristol area, Bristol, Lincoln, may have gone as far as New Haven, two-month pillar and people have chipped in every year commuting over in the morning and back. Oh, it also included Stark Spurl. And that, I know it ran for at least 15 years because they went through a couple of three different vans. So there is some history of that working here, although that one, as I said, was completely private. One other comment is the utility fee concept. I would have to say that from my point of view that every bit as regressive as sales tax, I don't think there's a person in the state that doesn't have electricity. Well, of course there are people who don't, 99% of the folks in the state have electricity. And the fact is, is that lower income often have poorer insulation or iffy heating systems and end up adding in electric heaters. I would say that particularly if it's per kilowatt hour, that could very well be considered very regressive. A straight monthly fee like the $3 would be a little less regressive, but I would really change those numbers around on utility. Okay, I appreciate the point. There is some discussion in the report that most that the lowest income remonters currently receive assistance with the utility bills through the larger providers. And that could apply here as well so that there could be some income sensitivity that could apply. Bard, I see your hand up again. Yeah, thanks. I was pondering the same thing about the utility substance subsidies, but then wherever subsidies end, there's something we typically think of as a benefits cliff. So you're doing fine until you hit that point and the person was just above that feels like they're getting wet. So that's sort of one of the political and financial things on all this. But really I was also pondering the volunteer issues. So I think the people who currently rely on volunteer drivers and have worked hard to recruit them might be lukewarm about this expansion. Like if I've recruited volunteer drivers for older and disabled people and now they're siphoned away to do something else, what happened to the older disabled people? And so is there really a supply of volunteer drivers above and beyond those that are doing things like meal on wheels delivery, home delivered meals? I'm wondering about the United We Ride initiative that I haven't heard much about that for a while out of United Way. And then there is also, I ponder the impact of COVID in at least the near term, because I have a sense that people's willingness to have a stranger get in their car and share air with them may be less than it was a few years ago. And there may be at least for the near term some reduced opportunities to recruit more volunteer drivers. Just a couple of comments. I really like the conversation about how we do this. And then the other thing I'd say we've pondered in Richmond is we've never gotten quite over the hump is can we get, we've talked about a van that would do a route and just keep going even if it's only weekends, you know, this stuff is not gonna work for commuting, right? But working around, get people to the grocery store, the hardware store and the physician office, things like that that are not so much scheduled, one-on-one volunteer drivers, but more modified kind of temporary fixed route for what that's for. Thanks, I appreciate those comments. I'd like to follow up on that a bit when it comes to volunteer drivers myself. Wayne is here, he's also part of the Tritowns committee and we like the idea of the microtransit, but with a volunteer driver, are they just thinking about the car insurance or are they getting somebody providing a van or is it gonna be their own car? I mean, then you've changed into the, all of a sudden the volunteer driver is putting out a whole lot of money in terms of extra insurance and everything else on it, but wear and tear on the vehicle. You know, I just wonder how that makes more sense if it's a professional person in some ways. Yeah, I mean, the report does not work out all the details of this concept. And if Volkswagen, for example, could be convinced to sell or give, you know, a few hundred electric cars to Vermont, then for a volunteer driver to get mileage reimbursement, they would have to have some sort of ownership stake or lease those vehicles. And so there's lots of details to work out. Insurance is not one of the biggest issues because volunteer drivers are currently covered by an umbrella insurance policy by the Vermont Public Transit Association. So that's not a specific issue, but there are certainly details that would have to be worked out if this kind of statewide community rides program were to come about. Thank you. Dan has a comment I can see. Yeah, quick question. Does the report talk about impacts on the gig economy driver Uber and Lyft drivers? Not specifically Uber and Lyft drivers could participate in this microtransit service if they wanted to act as drivers like that. And you know, if certain riders were willing to pay for those rides, you know, it's not been decided whether it would all be fare free or whether some rides would cost or some rides wouldn't. There's lots of potential options there, but I would certainly say that if there are Uber and Lyft drivers, especially in Chittenden County, where the majority of them are in Vermont, that they could be included into the system if they wanted to opt in. But they'd have to be paid, right? Otherwise why do it? Right, but then the question is what's the funding source? I mean, they get paid by somebody, not necessarily by the rider, but if we have this, you know, $10 million in funds available, then they could get paid through that means. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? I have, I have, I have just a clarifying question up front. By the presentation, it looked like the only improvement in service, transit service was looked for in rural areas that I misunderstand that. That's, that wasn't meant to be conveyed that only in rural areas would more service be provided. Now, certainly we want to focus on that because rural areas have no service now, but the availability of that extra funding will help to sustain existing service and allow for service expansion. You know, the 21 million is said, well, that's where we're gonna start, but that'll allow us to draw down more federal funds. And, you know, if it's $3 a month now for utility fee, and we can raise that to 325 in a couple of years, that will generate additional funding and help to support bus services in all areas. So, so the understanding should be if we are talking about service expansion, we should understand the bill upfront before we figure out a way to finance it. My comment was going to be that if we're only talking about $21 million right now, plus maybe some additional matching so we can spend in a rural service, part of the reason that, and I'm a recovering locally elected official who funds transit, who funded transit for 10 years through the property tax, all we did was pay for lousy service with that property tax. And the reason that people did ride and the ridership wasn't higher was because the service wasn't frequent enough and we couldn't afford the bill to make it more frequent so that it would be good transit service. And so that was, you know, so when we do these funding things, we shouldn't start with where we are right now. We should design a system that should work and figure out what the price tag is and then try to figure out a way to fund it because that'll tell us a good part of the reason why none of this stuff has gone forward in 20 years because we are still mainly funding an inadequate service with our property taxes and we don't have enough, it's almost like the childcare issue. If you expand more market rate slots, it doesn't help because people can't afford the market rate slots. So we have a business model issue, I think number one. And I think a lot of the reason why a lot of these funding sources, studies haven't gone forward is is we haven't figured out a way how to design a good system and then to make the collective decision about whether or not it's worth funding it at the level that it needs to be funded at to be quote-unquote good service, which could maybe get people out of their cars. I don't know on that. My second issue, that was a comment, not a question. Sorry, Stephen. My one question is, my one suggestion is, is I think on the property transfer tax and the mortgage recording fee, your zero or neutral sustainability score on that, it's actually worse than sales and use tax. And the evidence that I guess I would say is, is that gross property transfer tax revenues in Vermont for fiscal year 2018 or $40.9 million. And by 2021, they had risen to 73.9. So they're highly volatile. They're highly driven by crazy things that happened in the economy cyclically to a much greater degree than even sales and use tax because the sales and use tax actually went from about just under $400 million in 18 to $507 million in 2021. Those are actual numbers. And last year was a year with COVID. So I don't think they're neutral. I don't think the recording fee would be neutral because if they follow real estate markets, they're highly volatile. They should be almost a minus two because they go up and exaggerate the ups and then they come crashing down. I guarantee you, we have a full real estate cycle once every 18 years. I don't know if we want transit funding to be subject to that because they collapse as much as they go down. Thank you, Jeff. I see Dan has his hand up. Yes, thank you. Kind of piggybacking on some of what Jeff said when he was referring to the transit system that's provided at least in Chittenden County and ridership. There are many issues, Steve, that go into this whole thing, factors such as the weather we're talking about. People taking the GMT bus have to stand on the side of a road in freezing cold weather, wait for a bus for whatever time. I mean, I know with phones, you can kind of time it approximately when they're gonna arrive, but it's very difficult. And the fact that you get on this bus that may not be able to stop exactly where you want it to go, there's just a lot of things that play into it. I look at the bus often as I go into Burlington for work every day. And a lot of times I see very few riders on the thing. It's expensive for the amount of people that are using it, I think, personally. As we go into the more rural areas outside of Chittenden County or even some of the towns within Chittenden County, the ridership obviously would decrease because of fewer people, but the distance traveled required to get them to where they need to get, whether it's a doctor's appointment or a shopping or what have you, is much greater. So fewer people and greater costs for the transportation. And then getting along back with the whole thing of Volkswagen up providing these electric cars. As we had a presentation by the individual that works with the state on implementing electric vehicles in the state of Vermont, one of the questions I had was the efficiency of those, the batteries and such. And obviously in cold weather, it's diminished. And knowing how cold it gets here and chance for an accident on those rural roads, you're in an electric vehicle in the middle of Canaan, Vermont or Norton, Vermont, and the thing dies down, you're really in tough shape. I don't know, I'd like to see within our community or Chittenden County improvement on the GMT buildings or huts where people sit because it's just cold. It'd make it much easier. I'd also like to see if there's any way there could be a public private working out so that maybe a coffee business or a bakery works with the transit to lure people onto a bus so they can get things that they would likely do but they had their own car stop at Dunkin Donuts or what have you and get a coffee on the way to work. If there was something provided on the bus and that might draw more people on it too. That's why I've always said that providing free donuts on all bus routes will have a dramatic impact on ridership, so I endorsed that idea. I should say GMT is in the process of doing a transit strategic plan to try to think about the future GMT's role in both the urban area and the rural areas to improve service to really recover from the devastating blow that COVID has dealt to it. And so these issues will be dealt with over the coming year as that strategic plan is developed and I'm sure you'll hear about that as it goes forward. Well, thank you. Charlie? Sorry, just want to wrap this up first. Thank you, Stephen, for all the work that you put into this, but also just for the board to know that we really just wanted you to be aware that this report was out there. We really did it to give some options to the legislature. At least I personally believe they're gonna run into some issues in the next year or two with having enough local match for the transportation funding that's gonna be available from the federal government. So even though we've been very focused on transit, it's really just kind of part of the whole pie. And they may come back to some of these revenue options. I don't think they're gonna really address it this year, but next year. So I think we're more planting seeds and we'll see which ones, if any of these take root and grow. So stay tuned on that subject, I think. Hopefully they'll fund the transportation bill that they've authorized. We hope that they will. And that's, yeah, thank you, Jeff. And Congress needs to take some further action. Yeah, knock on wood. But you're right, all of a sudden, we've had some great discussion, but we do have the even bigger one on the I-89-2050 study that's next. Yeah, so I'm gonna turn this over to Alayne and Jason, but I am going to run the show for them or at least push the button when they say to. Are you able to see that? I will sign off. Thanks, everybody. Thank you very much. Thank you, Steve. Yes. Yep, I can see it. Can you hear me? Because I've been having trouble with Zoom. Okay. So good evening, everybody. Jason and I are here to give you an update on the I-89 study and we're focusing exclusively on bundle two, which is the TDM bundle. And I'm gonna talk about it in a second. So, Charlie, if you wanna move. So I'm just gonna provide the very brief project background. Just to see where we are in the entire process, it's been a very long study and hopefully we'll wrap it up this summer. But I'm just gonna provide that very brief background. I'll talk about the focus group that we put together back in the beginning of the summer to help us develop bundle two and the TDM bundle. Talk about a couple of evaluations we hired RSG to help us develop a strategic model to assess investments and policies to meet some of our goals for bundle two. And the major goal is to decrease VMT and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as do a telework evaluation. Basically look at data, pre-pandemic, during pandemic, pause, and then just have some maybe future scenario for the post-pandemic world, how many of the employees will be teleworking by then. And then Jason is gonna take you through the model evaluation and results and then we'll just finish up with the advisory committee action that they met last week and took action on bundle two and next steps. So you have seen this slide before many, many times. It has been updated to correct some of the timelines as well as some of the sub tasks and the reach of the task. We are now squarely in task five. We have finished task four, as you remember. We presented the interchange evaluation back in the spring of last year. So we are now identifying alternatives and evaluating alternatives under each bundle. And I'm just gonna go over the bundles in a second. And this task is gonna take us probably to the end maybe like late spring, early summer. And we'll come back to you sometime in May to provide the results of those evaluations. And so I talked about five bundles. So these are the five bundles. We are again focused on bundle two today which is that we call it the TDM bike pet transit and TDM stands from transportation demand management. And as you can see it defines there, this is kind of like the park and rides and the ride sharing and the telecommuting which is kind of we did a separate evaluation I'm gonna touch upon in a second. But once we develop this bundle two, the idea is that we're gonna be using this bundle two as the base for the subsequent bundles three, four, five which actually we're gonna bring the interchanges that we discussed last spring and we just basically we selected some preliminary designs of those interchanges for 14, 13 and 12 B. And we're gonna be adding those to the bundle two to run and see the results of that modeling exercise. So I think I covered what I wanna say here. So if you wanna move on. So I mentioned it at the very beginning that in the beginning of the summer, we basically formed what we call a 99 TDM focus group. And as you can see, we had a representation from in like a variety of organizations, agencies that help us basically define bundle two. And as you can see, we had representatives from the Transportation Equity Coalition, municipal representatives, staff from V-trends as well as GMT, CADMA, local motion. We invited BED to join us because they have done some strategic planning for their purposes and we wanted Jennifer Green to just provide us some input on that. We also have a conservation law foundation sustainable Vermont, transportation Vermont join us. And we got really invaluable input from all of these people through three meetings between summer and fall. So the actual, you know, like the role of the focus group was to, as I said, assist us with defining bundle two but they also acted as the advisory committee for the strategic model, which I'm gonna just talk about in a second. They also, so they help us inform the policies to include in the investments as well as the assumptions and the values or the levers that we needed to pull within each of those policy packages. And we'll talk about it in a second. They review results from the strategic model as well as the telework evaluation. And also they provided this direction on which policies to move forward and which policies to make it into bundle two. Starting with the telework evaluation. So R and G develop a methodology, you know, separately from the strategic model, telework was not, we were not able to just incorporate that into the strategic model. So we felt it was very important to do it. So the methodology basically, it was developed to estimate the most probable scenario for the percent reduction in VMT, vehicle mouse travel due to teleworking. And this is post-pandemic. We have information about teleworking, pre-pandemic, some during the pandemic, but this is basically an assessment of what's gonna happen in the future. They started with the review of a national data. And what they looked at is the teleworking trends for three work categories what they call professional mixed and on-site. And I'm gonna just show a slide in a second that basically tells what jobs are under these categories. And they actually look at that during the second year of the pandemic. And then from there, we came down a level to basically the regional level, which is the greater Burlington region, which I believe includes a part of some of our neighboring counties. And we looked at what is the percent of the employees that fall within each of those three work categories. We looked at the commuter breakdown of travel. And I believe this was pre-pandemic. And then we basically investigated two future scenarios and we selected what we think is the most probable one. So on the left, you can see like a list of jobs that we included under each of the categories that I mentioned before, the professional, the mixed and on the on-site. And on the right, you see the percent of, like jobs within our region that fall within each category. And I think one of the takeaways from the pie chart on the right is that almost 50% of our employees are working for jobs that they require them to be on-site. So that would be very difficult for them to telework for those jobs. And I think if we wanna move forward, Charlie, I mentioned that we looked at the commuter travel breakdown and pre-pandemic, the majority, the vast majority of people commute full-time, 74% of it and only 9% telework full-time. And then you have like people that basically stay at work from home like one, two, a few days a week and that's your hybrid, that's your 17%. So we developed two scenarios for teleworking, as I said. The first scenario, we basically increased the telework participation by 50%, which we think it's a doable, an aspirational kind of scenario. And if you do that, then you basically you decrease or you reduce your daily commuter VMT by 11%. And that is a subset of all the trips, right? This is, we're talking only about commuter trips and commuter VMT here. So scenario two, we looked at a very aggressive scenario, 52% reduction in daily commuter VMT and it was based on the very initial pandemic data that we had. But if you, as we all remember, during the first months of the pandemic, under the state of emergency, a lot of people stayed home, they didn't commute to work, but it was some of the reason was because all the jobs were closed and not all people teleworked at that point. So we are proposing to move with scenario one, which is basically 50% increase in telework participation. To include in the bundle two. Moving forward with a strategic model, RSG developed this model. And as most of you know, we have a very robust travel demand model. So some people with us why not use that. And the reason is that travel demand models are not geared to be evaluating high level policies and investments. And strategic models are the best tools to do that. So for our purposes, for the ID9 and for bundle two, our goal was to reduce vehicle miles travel, VMT and GHG greenhouse gas emissions. And the strategic model was again, one of the best tools that we can use to do that. It is an econometric model. It is not, it does not relate. I mean, it doesn't have a transportation component into this model, but it is very sensitive to a variety of policies and investments. It looks at multiple modes. And very importantly, it looks at how pricing affects travel. And we're gonna just, you're gonna see the results as we actually play around with different kind of policy changes for gas tax, carbon tax, VMT tax. So this is a very high level summary of the strategic model process. And this is specifically for the ID9 study. So for other types of studies, you're gonna have different goals, but you always start with your goals. And for us, for the bundle two, is to reduce VMT and GHG, as I said before. And then what you do is like you choose the different areas, we call them key drivers of change, that basically will have changes within those areas and policies and investments within those areas will have a major effect on your goals. So you're gonna help you achieve the goals by making changes to investments within these areas. And then you develop your investment packages. Within those packages, you also have different levels of investments. And Jason is gonna go through our assumptions that we did and we brought into the model. And of course you have your outcomes and you can define your outcomes at the end after you run the model. And just before I hand it over to Jason to talk about results, I just would like to let you know that the strategic model area includes, of course, Chinatown County, but we also included the five counties around Chinatown County. So we can capture the commuter sheds and those trips that they come from the outside the county, into Chinatown County, especially for work, with the caveat that within Chinatown County, we had a lot more specificity in our data, a lot more granularity in our data because we had a lot more data with a travel demand model and other data available to us. So with that, I will pass it along to Jason to talk about the evaluation and the results. And then I'll come back in the end to discuss next steps. Okay, thanks, Eleni. And you can hear me, right? Yes. Great, it's always great. Okay, the next, I would say eight or so slides are gonna follow this similar format. So just to get you oriented as we walk you through the scenario testing structure, we have levels on the left, that's the one through four. And then we have our policy or investment options, the six options across the top. So starting on the left with land use and community design, going all the way over to commercial vehicles. And you'll see there'll be different levels underneath each of those policy or investment option. And then at the end, the strategic model runs all the possible combinations of those. And it spits out somewhere north of 400 different scenarios that you could take a look at. So starting with the base, it's our metropolitan transportation plan. And you all know that, but for the millions of viewers watching at home, that's our long-range transportation plan that looks out to 2050. And some of the highlights from that are that we're calling for 90% of our household growth in our areas plan for growth. And those are the beautiful blue areas on the map on the right. Also calling for significant expansions to infrastructure for walking and biking, transit route additions and increases in frequency, increased participation in transportation demand management such as the services that Katma has to offer. And lastly on this slide, we're calling for 90% of personal vehicles, which includes light trucks are electrified by 2050. Starting with the land use and community design, we just have one level under this policy. Just two components of it though, the first being a different land use than what we're calling for NRMTP. And that looked at increasing the population and housing in Chittin County by 10%. So seeing what would happen if we brought people closer, hopefully to their jobs and goods and services and whatnot. And then the second component of this was a community design element that increased the mixed use neighborhoods by 50%. So building more homes in a mixed use type fashion that would hope to increase people's walkability or their ability to walk to goods and services and not have to get in their car. Next up, we have bike and transit. There's two levels under this. And for levels two and three, the bike element of it stayed the same, which was taking a look at what were to happen if we were able to double the number of trips made by bicycle. And under level two, the transit piece of it was a 50% increase in frequency and miles of service. And then for level three, we increased that even more to 100% increase in frequency and 200% increase in miles of service. For demand management, similar to bike and transit for levels two and three, we doubled the participation in transportation demand management programs, such as guaranteed ride home, carpooling or vanpooling. And then on the parking side of things for level two, we looked at a 50% reduction in residential parking spaces and an expansion of paid parking areas in downtowns. And then for level three, it's the same in terms of reduction in residential parking spaces, but expanded paid parking to villages and also increase the actual price of parking to see what sort of effect that might have. Under pricing, there were three levels. And first up was a carbon tax, this is a $50 per ton of CO2 equivalent. And then doubling the cost of fuel, and that's not just limited to gas and diesel, but also the cost of electricity for EVs. Remember in this scenario in 2050, we're looking at hopefully 90% of the vehicles being electric. So it was important to include that component. And then last is a mileage base fee at 5 cents per mile. And under income, we took a look at what would happen if the middle class shrunk and whether or not this would have a significant impact on pushing people towards less expensive modes. So increases in like walking and biking, perhaps public transit. And then level three was the opposite of that. What would happen if the middle class expanded and the household travel budget for a large majority of people in the area increased, perhaps they would tend to drive more. And lastly, we looked at commercial vehicles, which only has one level that we looked at. And that decreased the cost of ride hailing. If you're not familiar with that term, I think of taxis, Uber or Lyft type services. And also increased the amount of electric vehicles, making commercial vehicles 95% electrified. And when you put it all together, these are all the different levels under each of the policy and investment options that we looked at. Next couple of slides, just to give you a sense of what the actual model looks like when you're using the tool. And so up across the top, you'll see the six policy and investment options that we just kind of walked through. And then below that, you'll see the model outputs. So right now you'll see it's showing all 431 scenarios. And those are all the different bar graphs that you see on the bottom for transit trips, walk trips. DVMT is daily vehicle miles traveled. You'll see that for per household and in total. And you'll also see on the right side, you'll see the air pollution emissions and a couple others in there as well. It's important to talk about how we use this. It's a model, it's not a prediction or a forecast of the future. Like you just saw, it gives you over 400 scenarios to look at. And so the way we use the tool was to try to focus on if we want to decrease vehicle miles traveled in greenhouse gas emissions, what are the policy and investment options that are most likely to help us achieve that future? So this is insight to how you can use the tool. So you'll see the daily vehicle miles traveled per household graph that's circled in that pink-ish box. And there's a slider bar option. So you can see only those bars to the way left. So at the low end of that bar chart are highlighted. And if you look right above it, this is indicating that we're only showing 35 out of the 431 scenarios here. So those are the 35 scenarios that are most likely to get us in that low DMV deeper household category, which is also on the low end of the air pollution emissions. And with this, we selected all the levers that we wanted to pull. And this is our preferred future. The future we're hoping to try to achieve, which should hopefully decrease our daily vehicle miles traveled per household, the greatest along with our air pollution emissions. And still have a good kind of middle of the road for walking and biking throughout the area. And if you wanna look at that graphically, which levers we decided to pull for that scenario, this is how it would look. So we're looking on the maximum or high end of bike and transit and demand management. In terms of pricing, we were looking at a mileage base fee as a reminder that was five cents. We didn't choose any of the income options. They've seemed just kind of out of our ability to really influence, it was neat to look at, but when we dove into it, they actually didn't really have as great of an impact as we might have thought initially, but that's kind of one of the reasons you have a model, be able to test those sorts of things and see what's possible and what might happen. And then yeah, increasing EVs, but not decreasing the cost of ride hailing services. That did serve to increase VMT and also severely decrease the amount of walking and biking in the area, which as you can imagine would lead to a whole host of other health related issues. Only last thing I wanna highlight is that we kept it to our base land use. We did not choose to pursue the 10% increase in households in Chinatown County. It definitely had some merits, but we think we were a little too ambitious and started to get into some politics issues with the amount of household growth that we were looking at. So we decided to just leave that one alone. Thank you, Jason. So this slide basically says pretty much what it, you know, the previous slide said, but so this is a list of their commanded policies and investments to be included in bundle two. So just to reiterate, we are increasing teleworking by 50%. That was scenario one that I talked about a few slides ago. The MTP land use density, it is 90% of households in existing developed areas or develop areas planned for growth, as we know it. And that is the MTP. So this is a current kind of like land use goal in the MTP. But we're not there yet. So we are almost there, but we're not there. I believe we're in the 85 to 87% right now of new households getting built into the areas planned for growth. So we have a little bit ways to go. We are including doubling the trips made by bike, tripling the transit service and improving the frequencies like reducing the headways. We are doubling participation in TDM programs like car pulling, van pulling and car sharing. And we're increasing the cost of parking. And very importantly, we are actually moving away from gasoline taxes and any others and moving to the mileage-based fee, which is five cents per mile. And if we actually accomplish all of this, our model estimates that the total VMT reduction will be between 10 and 20%, which is substantial. But again, just so we are all clear, this is an aspirational model. And this is something that it's a challenge to the community. And it's something that most of these things need to happen to have that major reduction in VMT. They all work together. We had a public meeting on this back in January, January 26th. And we had numerous questions on the data and the use of the strategic model and how the model was used. So if you're interested in that, please go to the Envision 89 website. There is a link right there that we have meeting notes. And within the meeting notes, we have a question and answer. And I believe that I hope they're spreadsheet with the question and answers are up too. So we had a great kind of input then. And we also have a lot of the members of the public that they attended the meeting to express thanks for this work and the attention that we're giving to the climate friendly kind of policies and infrastructure, which was a little different that the reception we got last spring when we were talking about interchanges. So we brought this to the advisory committee, the 89 advisory committee last week and the committee unanimously decided to support the investments that we just talked about for bundle two to move forward with them for further evaluation. So that was great that we got the unanimous support on that. So we are now, yeah, I'm moving forward. So now what we're doing right now is that we are taking the results of the strategic model, the outputs, the percent VMT decrease through the telework and through the kind of like a bag and pet and transit changes and trying to just basically integrate it with a travel demand model. So basically at the end of this effort, we're gonna have a bundle two travel demand model which will be used as the base to run then bundle three, four and fives which they include the interchanges at 14, 13 and 12B. And all this work will be done in the spring. We are really hopeful that we're gonna have another public meeting maybe April, probably May to review the results of all the bundles and the next advisory committee will be after the public meeting and we would like to come back to the board to present all these results to you. Hopefully in May, it depends kind of with the timing a little bit. It might slide to probably July, but we'll see. And that's kind of what their next steps are. We have a lot of work in front of us this spring but we are very excited to move forward with this study and finish the evaluation of the bundles. And the last bullet there is basically just for informational purposes. A couple of years ago, the advisory committee basically decided to inform us, well, let me just back up. I don't know if you remember, but during the interchange evaluation phase, the task four of this study, we started with a number of interchanges, which we basically, so we have phase one evaluation. In that phase one evaluation, we looked at an interchange at Bolton and Milton. Those two interchanges did not move forward within this study in phase two, but the advisory committee asked us to look at the existing plans and just to do just a simple technical assessment of those existing plans as far as geometric kind of standards that change since 20 years ago, 25 years ago that these plans were created as well as environmental issues. So we did that and we just kind of, this is informational, letting you know that that's forthcoming. Hopefully by the beginning of March we'll have the report and we'll add it to our website. And with that, I thank you so much. I'm sorry, this was the third presentation you guys had to go through today. And let's open it to questions, comments. Dana? Dana has one. I'm just sort of curious. A few years ago, I read an article that said that there was a precise gallon, gallon per mile an hour, not mile an hour, but at a point at which there was like $4 gas or $5 gas or $6 gas that actually changed human behavior and get us out of our cars and into ride sharing and public transit. And so I'm wondering if like $6 a gallon, that's sort of where California is headed soon. And is that like a crazy notion if we get to $6, 7, $8, is that gonna get us out of our cars or is that like a metric at all? Yeah, I just, you know, so I don't know if $6 is the magic number, Dana, but I feel like yes, like basically increasing the cost of driving pushes people to other modes if they have available other modes though. And that's a big if. And the other issue that as we're moving into EVs and the push to move away from gas power, you know, like gasoline power vehicles that we need to have another way to pay for infrastructure. That's why I think that the VMT tax or the mileage based fee is probably a way to go for the future. But I think yes, the answer is yes. I don't know if $6 or $7 or what is that magic number? Yeah. Thanks. You're in? Helps if you unmute. Many parts of California are already well over $5 and it is restricting vehicle miles traveled. Unfortunately, they do have much better public transit in those areas where the prices are higher than we do. And to be able to pull raising the gas prices that much off, you have to have both good public transit and alternatives for people or you end up hurting the people who can least afford it. And we don't have that in Vermont. Maybe sort of close right in Burlington in the course, but nowhere outside of that, where public transit is really a viable replacement for a car. And the transition to electric, that's an expensive transition for many people as well. And you look at the people who are driving, particularly Teslas and the like, but even the Leafs, they are not generally speaking low income. So the trick is how to do it so that it doesn't adversely impact those who can least afford it. My two cents. I've got a question. In your study, did you look at all about the viability or the impact of self-driving vehicles? It seems like there's big efforts out there to try to make that happen. It's like it's still a ways away from it being viable, but given that our studies are almost a 30 year one. Right. So autonomous vehicles and connected vehicles, we didn't look into that in the strategic model, but we did look when we did the 2018 MTP. Remember, we did like a number of scenarios and we did two scenarios with autonomous and connected vehicles. And it really is kind of a where if the autonomous and it's going to be a shared mobility or is it going to be everybody's going to have their own vehicle. And that is a big if we don't know if it's a shared mobility. If it's an autonomous vehicle, that is probably going to be decreased VMT, maybe. But if it's definitely going into like an individual, each one of us has their own autonomous connected vehicle, then it's not going to help us. It's actually going to hurt us because those vehicles are probably going to be going back and forth even empty. So we haven't looked, I mean, we didn't look into the autonomous vehicles, but it's something that we're definitely going to be looking into when we are updating the MTPs in years to come. Yes. Sure. Any other questions or comments before we move on? Well, thank you, Elaine. We've had some really interesting presentations and comments and discussion tonight. So even though we're probably running late, but it's interesting. Thank you. Moving on, it's the appointments to the Basin Water Quality Councils. Yeah, this is, should have memo in your packet. Sorry, I'm going to go back to mine and I'm going to, sorry, sidebar apologies for all of the presentations tonight. I know that was a lot. Sorry, I'm trying to scroll through the packet to get to the right page. So you may remember as part of Act 76 a few years ago, the state is establishing Clean Water Service Providers. You may remember that we've talked about being one of those. And those are starting to get started now. They're trying to get appointees to the Basin Water Quality Councils that override advice on investment decisions to the Clean Water Service Providers. We have three basins in our county, or at least parts of three basins in our county. So our Basin Five, which is the direct-to-lake kind of the smaller watersheds, including the islands, the Lamoille Basin, which is our northern towns and the Winooski Basin, which is the biggest part of Ginny County. And we have, we asked for volunteers to represent the RPC on each one of those councils. So there's two RPC seats. Our neighbors who are working and supporting those other councils as Clean Water Service Providers have kind of offered that we can have one seat on each of those councils with an alternate. And so we asked for volunteers and what's in the memo is who volunteered and our recommendation back to you. Karen Adams from Colchester as the member for Basin Five with an alternate of Miles Waite. And then Kate Lally who works in Westford as the member for Basin Seven, the Lamoille Basin. And then for the Winooski Basin, Darlene Palolo from Huntington and alternate is Garrett. Thank you, Garrett, for volunteering. So that's the recommendation, but this is an action item for the board. I'll move approval. Second, Mrs. Garrett. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Rachel, any maize, abstentions, the motion passes. Thank you very much for all those who volunteered. Moving on, back to Charlie. Thank you, we'll try to make this short. UPWP, we are having our second meeting. We got, we have about 50 applications on the table for the UPWP committee, totaling close to $1.8 million. So it's probably the biggest number proposed. So we'll be spending some extra time over the next few weeks kind of really looking at our staff capacity to support all those projects in particular. Fortunately, and as just Jeff made reference to, assuming Congress follows through on their budget, our funds are increasing 30 to 40% for our MPO funding. So it is going to allow us to do some more. It doesn't, it also creates other pressures though on our dues. So I just want to kind of flag that as a little bit of an issue in that we don't have enough dues to really bring all those dollars in. But if the town has more local match available, there's probably gonna be more money available to be invested in your community. The capital program, I think we attached things to Christine, a summary of the projects in Chittany County that are proposed by V-Trans and the capital program. So take a look at that. It's in your packet. Let us know if you have any questions or anything on those projects. Regina sent out a legislative update that we got from the Vermont Planners Association. It doesn't deal with all the legislative issues, but those that are most interested or likely most interested to the planners or planning commissions in your town, let us know if you have any questions on that. And then just to let you know, I think you probably all saw we have a job out out there for an equity and engagement manager. So we're starting to get applications in for that. If you know anyone who would be good in that role, please ask them to apply. And with that, Madam Chair will end my report unless there are any questions. Thank you. As usual, the committee and liaison activities and reports are in your packet or available online. So the next agenda item would, are there any future agenda topics? What can we discuss? Yeah, on the back of the agenda, you'll see the items that we have for the coming months. Hazard mitigation plan will come back at some point, public hearing, warning for the work program and budget, the Board Development Committee going on FY23 nominations. And then we'll see if the Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy or the ECOS Annual Report are ready for next month. But any other items that people are hoping that would get on an agenda? Thank you. Seeing none, then are there any members, items or other business? Don't see any hands either. Of course, I don't have a full tone screen. There's a few people that are probably missing, but if there are no other things to discuss, then we need a motion to adjourn. I'll so move. Second. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Bye. So thanks everyone for a great discussion. Thank you everyone for your patience. Yeah, have a good night. Thank you. Thanks everyone.