 So welcome back, we're here with Gus Selig from VHCB on age 232 and this is, while it says it's an act relating to promoting land and home ownership and economic opportunity. Gus this bill very much affects the board makeup of VHCB and also asks that VHCB enlarge their scope of mission beyond what's already in statute. So I just wanted to have you address it from this perspective for all the years that I've done housing in this building. I've not really been asked to look at the board makeup of VHCB and it's kind of a, it's not unique but VHCB is a creation of the government and it's not totally independent of the government. So I just, if you could just give us a little bit of history background and your thoughts on, on what's in this bill and what it means to VHCB that would be great. Okay, well, I will do that so for the record I'm Gus Selig I'm the director for the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. And I'm long in the tooth I was, I've been, I was the first employee hired. And it is a pleasure always to be with this committee and to talk about our work. And I think what this bill. Let me just start by saying I want to thank Representative Sims and Dolan and Blumly, who've been engaged with us talking about the drafts before they were introduced and we really appreciate the back and forth and the opportunity to exchange ideas. Very briefly, let me start by saying that we support the goals of age 232 we have some questions and concerns will have suggestions and clarifications there are a couple of pieces of the bill that I think from our perspective maybe problematic. And let me also say that we are supportive we know that we're past crossover. So whether the bill passes this year or next, we will as the board, as the bill asks report to you in the in our next annual report on how we are doing. As that section of the bill requires, we have annual note, Mr Chairman, that when we submitted our annual report this year there was a letter inside the back cover that spoke to the deaths of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd that we issued and that our board passed a resolution about. I'd like to talk before I dive into the specifics of the bill about the role of the board. And the work that our partners are doing in this area which has been going on for some time. And, but also why these issues are for me really important at a personal level. And, and, and from my perspective, you know, we have always talked in this committee about the work of the board being about transformation and this, the language is posed. I think just asks us to think about and enhance what transformation means. And I would also say to you and I'm sure you're dealing with this in many other ways with other legislation that that this is an issue that is ripe for Vermont to address on many fronts the governor has been challenging all of us. And, and really from the point he became governor and spoke with the housing and conservation coalition been clear about the need to change our demographics and to welcome people to the state, and, and I'll talk about that a bit. If I were in my office and just to start with a personal, and I ask you to indulge me for a minute, and I hope I don't get emotional about this. If I were in my office in Montpelier and I'm not today, and not most days above my desk sits the inner frame, the program from the 1963 March on Washington. And the program doesn't say that this is just a march for freedom it said, it was a march for jobs and freedom. And I think that Dr. King understood that without economic equality, voting rights, other rights were not going to be enough to bring people into the full promise of being Americans. And for me personally, and I was, you know, a little kid that day. I'm not that old, though I know I look old. The movement was really at the center of our home life. My stepmother's dad was an associate of Roy Wilkins and actually served as the National Secretary of the NAACP my dad's work was as a labor organizer with the Union you now know as SEIU and he organized primarily African American and Hispanic people who did what we all know to be essential work today and call essential work as the people who worked as nurses aides and orderlies and cleaning staff and janitorial staff and food workers in hospitals and nursing homes and I think when I was 12 across New York City they want a major strike. And those the headline was that their salaries went from $80 a week to $100 a week. It was a very young age in an auto accident and and just really filled the Riverside church a large church in New York was overflowing that day with the folks that he had worked with my summer camp. Excuse me for this but music's important part of our lives. I'm sure representative Blumlee and maybe some of you know the music of Bernie Sreagan Johnson she took several summers away from the civil rights movement to, she's the founder of a group called sweet hunting in the rock to be the music counselor camp so our Passover saders were filled with the songs that she taught us at camp. I note that while we're in the midst of the trial dealing with George Floyd's death, I opened the Times Argus today to see that it's Holocaust Remembrance Day. And I know you've been working on the eugenics issue. My mom is a Hungarian immigrant who arrived here in August of 1939 as a six year old. I've only been to the Holocaust Museum. Once in my life I was in DC. It's a pretty heavy experience to go in there but there is this bin and in my memory, I was only there for a couple hours. It had been probably 10 by 15 feet just filled with shoes and they are the shoes of people who did not survive and you walk by it and you wonder were some of those shoes of cousins or aunts or uncles. And I would not be here today had she not gotten to this country that August and probably if it had been December or January three, four months later perhaps she would not have been here at all. The work that I've done at VHC before that at the organization that's known as Capstone has been at the center of and the follow up to what I think of as the civil rights movement expanding economic opportunity and access and fighting for inclusion for all folks. So, while this does expand our mission. Some years ago, you expanded our mission by David Dean when he was chair of Fish and Wildlife called me up one day and said, Can we make water quality part of your mission and I said to him, Gee, I always thought that it was. And he said, Well, can we make it explicit and I said of course. So, I see the need to do this as fundamental to not just our board but I think many boards and many organizations across the state. To just to add a little bit more perspective for me, my. When I first started a community action representative walls probably remembers a fellow named Ben Collins who was then the executive director he had been part of the Hoff administration. He was the secretary of civil and military affairs and when he left Governor Hoff's work as an direct employee became the director of the New York Vermont youth project. Those of you who know the history of that time know how controversial that project was a partnership between the governor and Mayor Lindsay and bringing inner city youth to Vermont. And some years later, I was working with the Vermont land trust when they received a gift of a farm in Reading and they turned it into they found a proposal and somebody wanted to operate it again for inner city youth. And in the early 90s, the same controversies and ugliness hit them. Those of you who saw the civil unions debate in our State House know how hard to debate that was. In 2007 or 2008, I recall reading a column just before the Barack Obama's election by Frank rich who was at one time the drama critic for the New York Times and it become an op-ed writer and he was talking about the song. South Pacific the musical and the song about the knee about how we need to be taught to hate. And we don't we're not born hating people. We are we are taught it and and so it's clear to me from all the events of the last year and from the reality that that we still have difficulty in Vermont that we have work to do on a policy level we have work to do to create better understanding of the challenges to open people's hearts and if we don't do that work, we won't be the welcoming state that we want to be and need to be for any number of reasons. So our work today I think has always we've always described our work as I said a moment ago about as being about transformation. The sponsor this bill of this bill are asking us to think about transformation in a broader and larger sense. I just want to note one other thing which I meant to say a moment ago one of the books I'm reading right now is a Isabel Wilkerson's book on cast. And you've probably discussed it I didn't listen to discussions about eugenics but I am just 8090 pages into it. I'm not surprised but of course horrified to read that two years after the Hitler was elected in Nazi Germany there was a he pulled together 17 bureaucrats to figure out how they were going to pass racial laws and where did they look but to So I know for some people that the question of these issues is a hard one to deal with but it is so ingrained in our culture that we have a lot of work to do to overcome a long legacy here to speak to the board's mission for a moment and to move away from the personal I view our work as about being about inclusion and about access you give us funding every year to provide access to housing and to land and and you ask us to focus on the people who are economically at at the bottom of the ladder and in fact some years ago Senator Lucy actually added to our statute asking us to focus on areas of the state that are of high unemployment and low per capita income And we know that people of color indigenous peoples have suffered economically so certainly that that is there as part of our statute in terms of our mission we are clearly a funder of projects and that's what we do with most of the funding you provide us We also provide technical assistance to our community partners we function we do research about various topics related to the mission so we are just getting a report on farm labor housing again a sector of our housing that is housing people of modest means and probably of much higher percentage of people of color we've we've and we function as a convener and we have for a number of years been bringing people our partners the nonprofits we work with regularly but others as well together around issues of power and privilege and diversity and equity and inclusion And there are a number of projects we've funded that that I think speak very much to these issues and they include fun having funded the Daisy Turner homestead in southern Vermont. They include supporting the Clemens farm working with the Vermont land trust on the Pine Island farm. I'm pleased to tell you that the Champlain housing trust has been hard at work on these issues for a number of years and I think they report what are their residents are persons of color. We're about we just funded what will be a new development in downtown when new ski home ownership development for 21 homeowners and they're working with the Association of Africans living in Vermont will do extensive outreach and work to have people of color from some of the homeowners there. So there's a lot of work going on we are convening both our housing and conservation partners on issues of diversity equity and inclusion we we are putting together three different sets of activities one will be workshops on issues like that we think block inclusion like using credit scoring to determine who gets into housing criminal background checks and I think CHT would tell you that as they have looked at who gets into their housing despite their good work despite the fact that 15% of their staff or people of color. They are reviewing their policies around using criminal background checks and using credit scoring because they turned down more people of color than they turned down people who are not. And so they know that they still have work to do despite their success. So there's a lot of good work going on on this issue, but we're at the beginning of a journey we are spending time with our own staff on these issues that are staff meetings representative Colston spoke to our board and our board retreat and we've done some follow up work there. So the time is absolutely right for for our statute. To get into the statute in particular, I guess what I would say to you that is that the two most important parts of the statute from my perspective is the is in section 322 the allocation system, where you ask us to expand access to low to land and home ownership to owners who've historically suffered discrimination or unequal access to benefits and services including black indigenous and people of color. I think that that's very powerful and really important and then second in you in the annual report section of our legislation. You ask us specifically the or the proponents due to identity. Section five in the report is to identify and evaluate. Provide identification and evaluation of structural barriers that are contributing to racial at ethnic and economic disparities in housing and home ownership. And access to publicly supported open spaces actions that the board is taking to remove barriers and to increase equity and access to board supported programs and metrics to monitor progress in removing those disparities. I think, just as adding a few words that made explicit. That we should protect the surface waters of the state those things will have an enormous impact on us and by translation to our partners who will ask for more information. We've already in our annual grants asked everybody to report on these issues. No surprise the organizations that have the most resources, the largest organizations are way ahead and working hard on this. And it's very small organizations with staffs of two or three, you know report that they're doing all they can to obey the fair housing laws, and they need help. And that's why we're doing the convening and the workshops that we will be doing, but we're anticipating a speaker series. We've been talking with the Community Foundation, the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston to financially help support that work. We will, we will get that kind of support along with a national affiliate we work with NeighborWorks America. And we're planning a leadership series where we will bring leaders together to talk about how this work can be done effectively so those are our short term plans for how to be involved in this. And we have some questions or issues about, I guess, you should hear from our conservation partners on section 325, which suggests that all of these events should provide for gathering for indigenous people. We, we are open to that as a suggestion, I think will be that there are already use agreements in place. It is better to put those things in something we call management plans rather than conservation easements themselves. And so that's something we should certainly take up and discuss in a future time. We also have a question in the definitions section and how the language proposed would play out. And what it says is what it does is creates a new category of housing projects eligible for funding and it says housing that serves for monitors who've historically suffered discrimination or unequal access to benefits and services including black indigenous and people of color. And our questions on that section go to the question of whether it is the proponents intent to make that housing available to such households, regardless of their income. Because at this point, only people who are below 100% of median as rental housing or 120% of median for homeowners are eligible for the housing so it's just, it's one of those things that is unclear. It's also unclear how we will define how this will be defined. So if you imagine a household applying for an apartment or someone trying to determine and document if they fall into this category. What does discrimination mean through history with certain nationalities those with disabilities are all just, we need to discuss that. So our most significant concern about the bill. Well, let me before I get into significant concern let me just also say to you. In terms of our, our board I should I should talk about the work that our board does. So you have a clear picture of it. And before I do that I just do want to tell you and you may have seen because there was a public announcement. We had an opening on the board and he has appointed Clarence Davis of Shelburne to the board. Those of you who know Clarence know that he has served on the Burlington City Council in a past life. He's worked in housing. And when Martha Maxim was ill, Governor Scott appointed him as the interim deputy secretary at the agency of human services. So we had a board that had a majority of women on it. And now we'll have a person of color also serving with us assuming the Senate confirms him. So that's the good news to give you a sense of the work of our board. And we are our board is currently 11 members we had been nine originally. We have four ex officios on our board and seven citizens. Three of the ex officios are members of the administration. They are the secretary of agriculture, secretary of natural resources and the secretary of human services. The fourth is the director of the housing finance agency. So three members of the governor's cabinet. There is a value to having any governor's cabinet, even if it's a governor that we're where we are not the favorite favorite program having that that interaction on our board for a variety of reasons. And one of them, I think is embedded in the great work from Anna's done around smart growth. So we have historically had people across agencies talking to each other and having to figure out what their differences are, and had a blend policy. We would build proposals that the secretary of human services no longer be on the board. I don't think we can support that. And I think at this particular moment in our history, as we try to get more than 2000 for monitors out of motels and into housing, and knowing that a large number of those people need services, the connection with the human services agency and having them at the table is is really important. The board is a working board. We meet usually six to seven times a year and have a board retreat as well. The board meetings because we try to move those that take place, not during the legislative session around the state usually take a full day. There's usually something in the order of a half day or more of prep time. There's also committee work. We deal with the issue of all boards and commissions and not which goes beyond the scope of age 232. One of the things I will tell you about getting more people who are represented on boards, whether it's our board, the housing finance agency, perhaps boards like the health care board or the human services board are different. Well, the health care board actually pays a salary the human services board I think pays just stipend in 1987 when I began this work, the stipend for somebody serving on a state board was $50. It is $50 3334 years later. That is a barrier for working people. It is a barrier for people of modest means so it's something I just suggest to you you need to consider. Our board is is a hard working board and one of the great things about it right now is that it is unusual for us to have less than nine or 10 members at a board meeting. They're very engaged. They're very active. My experience and in the training I've had about board development, the larger a board gets sometimes the less participation you get in a board. Not only do they review and approve most of the grants and loans that the board makes there. They are the keepers of policy. They're the keepers of the balance sheet. They have responsibility for supervising hiring and firing an executive director. They aid us greatly in strategic thinking, and they're a bridge because of the combination of citizen members and members of the cabinet. They are a bridge bridges for partnership. So, and they have helped us resolve, and I think we have helped them resolve conflicts among state agencies, just because that that dialogue goes on. I would also say to you that citizens end up being the backbone of the board in the early years, the ex officios all attended themselves in more recent years we get designees. And that's a little different when you have a staff person rather than a secretary or a commissioner. So the citizen members are really important to us. We need board members in general, who both bring expertise, but have an interest in things beyond their area of expertise. So if we get somebody who is only interested in natural resources. And we have a lot of discussion about housing. And we've put out of their minds and feel like they're wasting their time. And we've had that experience. We have had, and it would be true the other way around to if we have so. And it is what we need and what we've had most of the time have been really good problem solvers, good thinkers, broad perspectives. David Marvin, who some of you may know, he's the principal at Butternut Mountain Farm. Great forestry background. They bottle about half the maple syrup that's made in Vermont. He's a consulting forester, and he's a great community person and problem solver. And he gets our housing mission, as well as any housing expert, you are ever going to come across, and has a sensitivity from a Memorial County perspective. So, so that's, I think, what we need in a board. And I guess, so I would suggest to you that that our biggest problem with this with what's been proposed is losing the secretary human services as a member of the board. And I know we had a discussion with the proponents of the bill about expanding the board. I think the statute, the amendments as proposed. I think intentionally at a 12th member. We don't. We were happy to talk more about it, but I think just growing the board is not. We'll end up producing less engagement. We. The speaker of the house points to members of the board. President of the Senate, along with a committee of committees also appoints members and I think it's incumbent upon all of the appointing authorities and I think this should be in the bill. To consider people who will represent communities of color, represent people who've been marginalized on the board. And we will work with them on that. The last thing I'll say to you, and then I'll stop. Because I've been, I feel like I've been talking a long time is that we have to show up in your committee every year and in the appropriations committee and we will submit annual reports on the progress we make on these issues. And our statute has been amended sometimes in the appropriations bill. And so this is not the last discussion we'll have about how we should be accountable on this or any other set of issues with you. And, and we look forward to continuing to work with you to advance these issues, but, but those are our quick reactions, maybe not too quick to the bill as proposed. I'm happy to answer your questions. Representative clacky. Thank you chair and thank you guys. For all the great work you do. I wonder, Gus, if you have any aggregated baseline demographics of the loans, the money you've given out to the agencies, who, who has been served by that. Well, what I can tell you, you know, the Champlain Housing Trust is our largest housing provider. And we know that something like 25% of their rental residents are people of color. You know, if we have that data for all of our partners, we know that across the state, we're at about outside of Berlin at outside of the Champlain Housing Trust which with whom we've done half of our home ownership deals were at about 3% for persons of color. And that's why we've been engaged in this dialogue and education and learning. You know, on the farm side, one of the things are we are doing right now is working with a new group, the New England Farmers of Color Land Trust, as a service provider in our farm and forest viability program and in our farm land access work. And in the same way, you know, the Champlain Housing Trust has reached out and worked with the Alliance of Africans living in Vermont. We will need and I think our housing partners will need help. I don't know that we have built that kind of infrastructure in parts of the state outside of Chittenden County, and I can try to get you a more precise answer to your question about who's being served. But what I can tell you as a matter of income as opposed to as opposed to ethnicity or race is that in tax credit housing, something like 58% of the residents of tax credit housing, which we are a funder of, are people who are extremely low income and the that's like second or third highest in the country, maybe highest the last time we checked and way higher than most other states. So if if low income, extremely low income is a is one barometer of whether people have a background in that suggests that they are from a marginalized community we're probably doing pretty well but I do not have more precise numbers than that for you today and obviously when we report to you. In our next annual report we will try to give you more precise information. Do you have statistics on people with disabilities that have also been serviced through all of the money. I believe that we do. We've also done about what we call service supported housing. And so of the 13,000 homes and apartments that we have funded about 1400 arts. We are disabled people absolutely in all of our regular housing but so in addition to that. We have done projects all over the state. We help with the closing of the brand and training school. One example there are, there's, but they're all kinds of in your neck of the woods. There's one project that we did that is for people for adults with very significant mobility impairments and there. There's another project we did that's a partnership with the Howard Center for people struggling with persistent male illness. Lots of housing for frail elders. We've worked with most of the organizations that serve battered women in the state. So there is a long history of working with the disabled community. And as a matter of our standards, all of our housing needs to be accessible. We also run a program through the Vermont center of independent living that's that provides accessibility improvements to people who need ramps bathroom or kitchen modifications. Thank you. You know, I think that statistics of everything will help me to understand who has been left out. And as we, as we look into this bill the framework of, of who needs to be let in when we had our walk through with our legal council David hall he said that he urged us to be consistent with a number of individuals we are working on in terms of the kind of framework of, you know, who is this, what can you what impact of communities that we're trying to reach here. And so, you know, I just, I think that the more statistics as we have it'll be helpful to understand. Right. And that's why I said it. I know this bill is being considered after crossover and my first commitment is, though it likely won't pass this year that in our annual report, we will try to get you information more quickly than that. But we will utilize the proposed language for our annual report as a lever to say, when you come in next January will give you an extensive report on how we're working on all these issues but I'll try to get you more data sooner than that. Thank you so much. Thank you chair Stevens, you did touch on this Gus that there are certain criminal convictions that eliminate the possibility of section eight vouchers for housing. Now, I wasn't sure the context in which you presented it. Are we working to change that I mean for instance an assault conviction can eliminate you from a section eight housing voucher. It seemed unfair to me and in my work I had to work hard on a number of cases to try and get something done so that that would not happen to individual well I heavily on it obviously on a section eight voucher. I can't speak to and Jen may be able to help me about the rules around section eight vouchers we do a lot of housing that does not involve section eight and I'm just saying that most property management companies most property management. When you're screening tenants they use both credit scoring and criminal background as an issue and what I am telling you is that they don't necessarily have to eliminate somebody from consideration because of that but I think that those are issues. We have one organization that actually does not use credit scoring to qualify people for their housing down in southern Vermont. And I think there's more to be learned about that. And by the whole network about when do you put aside a low credit score and say we're going to take you in anyway and I think a similar question around criminal background is you know that we have a whole program across Vermont. Not in my expertise there's probably somebody on the committee that's more familiar about restorative justice. And so the fact that somebody once made a mistake shouldn't mean you can't ever rent an apartment again. I do want to say as we examine the issue of structural barriers, you know, and particularly as it pertains to home ownership. There are problems that go well beyond what the board can do. And so, you know, if a bank will not accept somebody for a mortgage, it doesn't matter if we're going to provide a subsidy. It just will not get through. So there are going to be structural barriers that we're going to uncover that go beyond what the board can do. But I do think that looking at those issues as two examples of why people do not get housed or what makes it harder or really important. Further questions for Gus or Jen. No, Gus, I thank you for coming in and thank you for sharing your, you have never come into our committee to share personal stories and I want to just acknowledge that you did and appreciate it. And that was, I was struck in the Holocaust Museum by the same, the same thing you saw the Holocaust Museum is so full of replicas. But when I turn the corner into the room where the shoes where you could smell them. And that was really that's that sense memory of, of was was just just just rocketed through my system so thank you for sharing. Thank you for sharing your story. Thank you. Committee will stop right here this is some as with most of our work this is not a simple little bill. No matter what the intent is behind it so we will pick up testimony on this next week as well. Some of the people mentioned where we have invitations out so we'll we'll follow up on this bill. Okay, and we will offer some language in a few places. If we can if that would be okay Mr Chairman. Absolutely. Yep. Committee let's let's finish here. And we are. I'm just trying to see what what our schedule is for this afternoon. We are back this afternoon to time permitting to walk through age 273. Which is a different take on some of the issues that we've talked about this morning. Thank you very much.