 All right, we are rejoining our morning session here at General Housing and Military Affairs with witnesses from the Department of Housing and Community Development and I'll let them introduce themselves but we are graced by their presence and they're going to help us understand by the outcomes of some of the programming that we were able to work with them last year and in developing and funding through the Corona Virus Relief Fund and we just continuing our kind of our testimony that we've received over the last couple of days on this issue. So without any further ado Commissioner Hanford welcome. Thank you. Glad to be here for the record. Josh Hanford, Commissioner of Housing and Community Development and I'll have the rest of my team here introduce themselves quickly Chris. The favorite word of this year and last year. Good morning, my name is Chris Cochran. I'm the Director of Community Planning and Revitalization and a lot of kind of what we've been working with in your policy areas is zoning and reforms to support more housing development in and around our walkable centers. Another area of policy that I managed that can touch you guys is the tax incentives that support redevelopment of housing and commercial properties within the state designated centers. Thanks. Sean. And yeah, good morning, everyone. Thanks for having me. My name's Sean Gilpin. I administer the Housing Division of the Department Housing and Community Development and was closely involved with designing and overseeing some of these CRF programs that you guys have heard about over the last few days. Great. So thanks for having us in. I'm not sure if I should share my screen for the material or if Ron is sharing his. What would you do? I can. I'll make you. Yes, right now. Making. As he's doing that, I'll just co-host. Okay. Trying to get to your name. You're in there somewhere. There we go. Coming. All right. You're co-host now, Commissioner. Okay. Sure. Can you all see my screen now? We can. Excellent. So just way of introduction. Welcome, new members, folks that I haven't met before. Just a quick background. I come to you as a longtime state employee. I've been a state employee for 15 years, was first appointed to a governor appointed position by Governor Shumlin as a deputy commissioner. I worked under Jen Holler from VHCB at that time and then was appointed commissioner by Governor Scott a few years ago, worked in federal programs before that rule community development work from some large federal programs. And we're going to give you a quick overview of how we fit into the housing world. There's a lot of acronyms out there. You've received a lot of information about housing already. And I just want to set the stage of how we fit in. Much of this information is not meant for me to go through in detail and answer, you know, tons of questions. It's to give it give you the background and information for future questions about what we do in our role. So you have it for the record. So as you know, the Department of Housing and Community Development is part of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development. There's three main divisions, Department of Economic Development, Department of Tourism and Marketing and Department of Housing and Community Development. We're the smallest agency in state government, you know, 80 staff. We were at one point up to 110 10 years ago. We're the only side of state government that really brings much of revenue and growth into the equation, the bottom line so that there are resources to spend in state government. We have a very small general fund budget compared to most agencies and departments. I'm going to move to Department of Housing specifically. You know, we have under a $3 million general fund budget. Most of our funding is federal and special funds. We have four main divisions, the Community Development Program, Community Planning or Vitalization, Historic Preservation and Housing. We are authorized for 32 staff. We have 29. We leverage a lot of funding. We invested close to $20 million. These numbers are last year. So, you know, diving into them doesn't make sense. We'll have new ones soon as we've wrapped up reports for this year. But we do a lot of work with that funding. We leverage a lot. We support the creation, retention and preservation of over 5,000 housing units just in one year and we create jobs as well and we help nearly every community in the state on a yearly basis. This next few slides, I'm not going to spend time on them, just so you have them. This is the details of each program that we run. What sort of work we do in housing and what sort of economic and community and planning work and our mobile home park program. All this information is here for you to look at and have questions, have us back in for more details. I know you want to spend more time on housing specific. So, I'm just rolling through this quickly so you know you have it and you have a place to go for more details. You know, community development program above where most of our federal money goes out, community planning and revitalization, Chris's team with the downtown program and all of the great support there around bringing more zoning and for more inclusive housing into our communities. Our historic preservation team, which also operates on a good chunk of federal funds and operates the federal historic tax credit program for our state, which on a per capita basis, we're the largest user in the country. Even separate from a per capita basis, we punch above our weight in much larger states than us in the utilization of those funds and most of it goes into housing projects. And then we have our small housing division, which is involved in a lot of housing policy work, coordinates the housing council, the consolidated plan, the housing needs assessment for the state. And of course, our mobile home park program. Just wanted to give you a few statistics to show that, you know, we are a player in developing housing in the state. This is just from the community development program over the last 10 years. You can see sort of the total amounts invested in these different categories of housing, economic development, public facilities and planning. And that, you know, under the housing world over 3000 units of housing in just the last two years, what that consists of and that the resources leveraged, as well as the jobs and the public facilities and services, you know, serving over almost 41,000 people in the last 10 years. And further breakdown of housing units of these 3000 27 housing units, you know, what what what was in the form of rental housing, almost 1600 units, you know, serving 2000 persons. Home ownership. We do a lot of home ownership of repair and rehab for low income Vermonters, nearly 1500 housing units in the last 10 years on the home ownership side. 2100 representing 2100 Vermonters. And we also support transitional housing units across the state. You know, this is just a couple pretty pictures of the some projects that we've been involved in, you know, from Bennington to Bradford to Barry, Woodstock for gens, and then significant investment in parts of Rutland through a long term neighborhood stabilization program to sort of purchase and rehab homes that had been foreclosed upon and we're sitting vacant, some seized by the US marshals from big drug seizures that we've supported the city of Barry and trying to bring those neighborhoods back to life. And then we also are relied on for disaster recovery programs. We after tropical starts from Irene moved about $40 million of federal funds. And as you can see, the largest share went to housing from even those federal funds, you know, creating 82 units of housing with that with that federal funding and rehabbing nearly 70 units, buying out flood damaged homes, moving people to safer places. And, you know, here's just a few statistics from that disaster recovery funds. You know, 136 rental housing units, 14 homeownership units and 146 buyouts to help folks secure more safe housing. And once again, a few pictures of some of those disaster recovery projects. You know, Chair Stevens knows about the Hunger Mountain Children's Center. That was a sort of historic investment we were able to make with those funds to bring that back to life, but also, you know, bringing grocery stores to communities that only have one grocery store that was flooded out in Johnson and other housing such as senior replacement housing in Browderboro. It's very rare for us to be able to put the $6 million into one project like that. Red Clover Commons was in Browderboro. And so just wanted to highlight that. And we're going to jump now to, I think, the highlight of what you wanted us to talk about. But before I move on, I don't know if you want me to pause for questions now and all that background work. Yes, I have a question with us. Does this represent a triunal? Please go ahead. Chip. Yeah, Josh, welcome back. Good to see you. I guess my question was when you spoke about rehabbing properties and homes. My question is, do you work with weatherization at all on that when you're rehabbing an apartment or a department house or dwelling? Absolutely. So the weatherization, I mean, the home repair funding, we use our federal CDBG dollars. We haven't really had, besides VHIP, funded with CRF money, which we'll talk about, we haven't really had a state appropriation to do much of this work. So we rely on our federal funds, which have even lower incomes. We can only help households, homeowners that are below 80% of AMI. When most of the other state programs allow that to go up to 120%. But we award grants through communities that then sub grant those funds to our homeownership centers around the state. And they work with low income Vermont homeowners to fix their homes that are in, you know, life safety issues and, you know, roofs, furnaces, windows, foundations, septic systems, wells, everything you can think of. And if they possibly have a weatherization component, that work is done. And those organizations try to match up, you know, weatherization from AHS or from our regional partners, efficiency, Vermont incentives, that's always a part of the program. It just makes sense, saves them money in the long run. And then we're hoping to talk about at the end of this presentation, give you a little snapshot into what the governor's proposals are for housing this year. And there, there'll also be a weatherization component of that in those initiatives. That's great to hear. I just have one request, Josh. I've got an elderly single woman in Hardwick, and I have yet to been able to find a way to get her a new roof, which is really in terrible condition and leaking and destroying her home. Is that something you could steer me to on an email? Absolutely. Yeah. We should be able to that's so hard work that should be in the rule edge territory or down street. Some of those communities and they have funding through us to help and seniors often those funds go in as grants, you know, deferred until sale loans. So we should connect on that. Absolutely. I'd appreciate it. Thank you, Josh. Other questions on some of this quick background? Yep. Representative Murphy. Thank you. Just looking at this CRS slide, I my eye was drawn to the fuel tank replacement for homes. I know when we put the bill through the legislature to have the red lining of home fuel tanks, I did have a concern about it, meaning people weren't going to be able to live in their homes in the winter because they wouldn't be able to get fuel. So I'm just curious. I see there's not a dollar allocation. Was this very much supported? Was it just incidental? Is it ongoing? Yes, a great question. So when we worked through the Department of Housing Community Development allocation of CRF funding, you know, through this committee and others last year, we had a total of about 36 and a half million to award under the four programs to the left of this screen. And what became clear was the red tank issue. You know, folks were going into the fall with these red tanks, not being able to receive fuel deliveries and the state had already burned through its allocation. And we had had conversations with VHFA under the Mortgage Assistance Program. We were the granting agency for all these programs. And they had anticipated not spending all their money. In the legislation, we had these various checkpoints throughout the year that we had to formally ask our subgrantees, can you spend the money? If not, we need you to return a portion to reallocate. And VHFA was feeling that they were going to have about $300,000 left over. At the same time, we started to hear this concern from folks, many mobile home parks from our partners at Department of Environmental Conservation. And we said, aha, we think we have the flexibility in this funding to help folks in this scenario because they are homeowners. And they have a need that's going to, you know, displace them. And so they identified 300, they were originally only asking for $150,000 because that's all they thought that they could accomplish in the few short months we had in the fall. The fuel dealers and others said, no, we'll work weekends, we can double that and satisfy the backlog. So we granted them the $300,000 and it's been a tremendous success so far. I haven't heard that anyone's been denied because they've ran out of money yet. You know, this is an area that I think we should continue to pay attention to. And it doesn't take a lot of money to make these fix, but it doesn't really help people if they can't heat their home. So thank you very much. More. Yeah, it ties in a little bit with a focus on seasonal housing for me that we were looking at yesterday. And so just making sure homes are year round in Vermont, not just a facade. Thank you. Yep. Representative Kalaki. Thank you. And hello, Josh. We're on your Corona Relief Fund slide. I'm why is I'm just trying to put all the pieces together. Why is not the Vermont Housing Conservation Board on this for all the new units they acquired for homelessness? Yeah, I mean, pretty simple question there. They were allocated the money directly. Oh, you know, they're accounting for their units separate. And you know, I'm going to have Sean sort of take over the presentation from here on this the CRF stuff that maybe, you know, answer more questions that come up for these programs. If that's if that works for the committee. Sure. If I may, chair. Okay. Yes. Yeah, go ahead. The one thing I maybe it would be Sean, that you know, we've been hearing from the different groups and it's it's been remarkable. I mean, this slide is incredible. But everyone's done in a collaborative way. It's so thank you all that money that was returned because of the tight timeline originally, which was what mid December and now that's been extended for a year. Can that money then go back to the rental housing and the mortgage assistance programs? Or is that money gone somewhere else now? So I can answer that. See the reallocation to other programs that the column on the very right. Yeah, most of that money went to those programs so that everyone eats program received over a million of this reallocation, the fuel tank replacement. Some small went to the economic recovery grants because they had a continued unmet need already calculated that can be spent like that. And a lot of it I don't know where it went because it went to the joint fiscal office for redistribution. So those funds that were reallocated were reallocated and most likely have already been spent to date. Okay, because it was very clear in the legislation that we could and we were operating under the condition that this wasn't getting extended. I mean, we were checking with our federal partners weekly, please, please we're going to waste money, you know, and they signed it on what the 27th of December. I mean, we had no time to do anything other than what the law told us we needed to do unfortunately. Okay, thank you. Yep. Yeah, and we'll have more conversation about that, I'm sure. Because you know, we took testimony from the state housing authority and they do have a backlog of unanticipated money. And I'm sure that will work out. I hope we can work out a solution for, you know, the immediate amount of backlog that they have, which runs counter to how the new money is going to work. But that's not for today. That's forward. And I want to go a little bit backward. Two quick things I want to ask Josh before we go to Sean or just to point out is when, as you know, and I wouldn't be remiss if I didn't talk about the, in the case of say the municipal planning grants that is funded through the allocation from the property transfer tax to the to the to you directly. And that has been, I would say under capitalized over the years, we took testimony last year when we were talking about the issues that Chris had mentioned, that of course, one of the problems that we have is when we do when we want to change zoning or whatever it was we were doing last fall, that a lot of times we pay with this with municipal planning grants. And that number has been static for a while. Is that that's that's am I accurate in my thinking on that? You're correct. So I just I just shifted up the screen and on this chart for the community planning and revitalization program, municipal planning grants is the fourth one down. You can see where our investment was last year, you know, what it leveraged, how many communities we served. It also touches the Regional Planning Commission grants, that's probably where more of the property transfer money goes. And, you know, we we are a large base funding for the Regional Planning Commissions, you know, $2.9 million last year. And, you know, that's what we have as a county government to help our small communities in the state plan for what they need. And it hasn't increased it's it's been pretty level funded. Yeah, and that's that's just something to point out. And just to the committee's historical perspective when Josh was talking about all the work that they were able to do through after tropical storm Irene. That was the last time that the property transfer taxes transfer that pretty much is statutory level to all of these organizations, primarily to the Housing Conservation Trust one, but also to the other because so much work had to be done in these categories, following following tropical storm Irene, but we, as you can tell, it's a pretty complex web of money and of interaction with all the other agencies that we've already heard from. So we'll, again, we'll be learning more about this in the weeks to come about how interconnected everything is. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner. I appreciate. I appreciate the background stuff and it gives us a good jumping off this slide that gives us a good jumping off point for the near future. All right, so I figured it would be helpful for Sean just to give a real quick overview of all these CRF housing programs. You've heard from the individual groups themselves, so we won't spend much time, but just want to make sure we connected all the dots and then we'll jump into the rehousing recovery program, which is what we called CRF funded VHIP because we were trying to rehouse folks, you know, and use the resources we had to move folks out of the hotel motel temporary situations into this recovered housing didn't want to confuse the VHIP, but it's so closely linked. It's it's moved into super VHIP. So VHIP VHIP stands for Vermont Housing Investment Program. And that was it. This is an initiative that was introduced by the administration two years ago with that with that acronym. And we were considering this as part of H739 and the last biennium COVID really accelerated the acceptance of that program because we were able to use not just what we were seeking, but but 6.2 million dollars at the least to to jumpstart this this type of program. And when I say super VHIP, I just this is the funding that was originally sought was a million dollars. And as a pilot type program, this was this was jumping over the pilot and going full on into into implementation. Correct. So Sean, do you want to just walk through this quickly? And then we'll I think transition to the short video that we have uploaded that is specific to the rehousing recovery program, give you a flavor for what was done, who we worked with, and then go through the statistics of that program for the whole state, not just the region that the video highlights or that sounds great. So again, thanks to everybody. My audio coming in. Okay. Yes. Alright, great. It seems the obligatory question these days. So again, Sean Gilpin with the Department of Housing and Community Development. So I actually, I must say, I appreciate Representative Kalaki using the word remarkable, because the word unprecedented is really getting overused these days. And I'm kind of tired of hearing it. So this is truly a remarkable amount of work that's been done. In actually, it's in basically six months time. So I won't belabor much of this only to say that these are the programs that were funded through the CARES Act coronavirus relief funds that went to Department of Housing and Community Development. So we ran programs in parallel with some of the things that Vermont Housing and Vermont Housing Conservation Board were doing. So we're kind of the two entities that were administering housing related CRF funds. Our funds went to primarily rental housing stabilization program. So the rental assistance program that was run by Vermont State Housing Authority, doing an incredible amount of work. And I would also be remiss if not to repeat or echo, I should say the message that I know you've heard from others, the level of interagency collaboration to make all of this happen and to run as smoothly as it did, although not without without bumps or lessons learned was also remarkable. So that served, you know, nearly 10,000 households and over over 21,000 tenants. The mortgage assistance program, I know you heard, and excuse me, I should jump to the sort of the fourth column here, that landlord technical assistance that was what went through Angela Zaikowski's shop, the Vermont Landlord's Association, formerly the Apartment Owners Association, working with Vermont Legal Aid. So now we have two VLAs, which has just been real fun. But they, they worked together to, to assist landlords who were seeking help with accessing the rental arrearage program, as well as, as you know, working with Vermont Legal Aid to establish that mediation program and, and work on, on the stipulations, which was part of the rental housing stabilization program as well. Frankly, that, that program, RHSP, evolved a lot. And as Josh mentioned, we were meeting with them weekly, them being the Vermont State Housing Authorities lead on that team, as well as Legal Aid and the Landlord's Association meeting weekly. And I actually got daily updates of their, their applications from the State Housing Authority. So it was something that's interesting. And I imagine that that Richard Shaw, Richard William, the head of that agency mentioned this, we really anticipated an evolution of that programs, that programs applications. We expected that as the program opened up, there would be an awful lot of arrearages that, you know, had occurred before COVID. We also recognized that and made the argument, frankly, to Guidehouse and other folks who, who were in the position to authorize the use of funds that any eviction or displacement that was happening during the pandemic was a public health issue. And that is how we justified using funds from CRF to pay for arrearages that happened prior to COVID actually coming to the state and the emergency being declared. Throughout the program, we saw a spike at the very beginning, and a lot of, a lot of large applications for rental arrearages towards the end of the program. We figured that because people had to be in arrears in order to apply for that program, meaning they needed, they need the rent needed to be late, they couldn't pre-apply. So if you, you know, if, if you applied in October but knew that you still weren't going to have a job come November, you still had to wait until, you know, November 2nd when the rent was passed due in order to reapply for, for that November rent. We expected, because of that structure, that as we got towards this December 20 deadline, and actually we, they stopped accepting applications December 11th, recognizing there was some processing time required. We expected that the number of applications would probably go up as more people had heard about the program, but the asks would go down because they were asking for smaller amounts of past due rent. That did not happen. And in fact, we saw a huge spike towards the end of the program, which is why we were in the unfortunate situation of throughout the fall thinking we were going to be in the bad spot of not having spent the funds and being forced to send them back to Treasury. We're grateful that our congressional delegation was successful in, in working towards getting that extension. But as Josh mentioned, it came, it came really late beyond the 11th hour, as I've been saying, past the deadline we already had. So that reallocation happened in the, in the fall under certain pretexts and our best guesses. Moving on, the mortgage assistance program was run out of Vermont Housing Finance Agency. They, you know, helped a number of the way that that was structured. They had sort of two, two application time frames. So they had people sort of in the hopper prior to us exiting, you know, the fall season. And that was partly designed that way in order to address just the nature of basically slow moving financial institutions who actually held these mortgages and the need to negotiate with them for longer amounts of time than any particular landlord. And I will, I'll actually jump to the last one. So those, the reallocations, as, as Josh mentioned, we all of the funds that, you know, are in this sort of bold on the bottom of these columns that reallocated went to, we got into some pretty creative thinking about basically justifying various things as, you know, as housing needs. So to Representative Murphy's point, the fuel tank replacement was justified again by saying if people can't heat their homes, they're going to be displaced and displacement during a pandemic is, is a public health issue. So that did receive 300,000. And again, a great example of interagency cooperation with Department of Environmental Conservation and also reaching directly out to the fuel dealers who were able to really step up. And again, Everybody Eats was another program that was running out of funds and we were able to reallocate to, to that, that program to enhance that at the at the end of it, along with some economic development, development work. So it was certainly unfortunate that the US, our US Congress couldn't act a little faster so that we could keep funds where they were, because I think all of these programs could have used the entire allocation that they got, but we would be poor stewards of the money if we had played chicken with, with that situation. So the, the other program that I don't think you folks have heard that much about and forgive me if that's inaccurate, but is the rehousing recovery program, which as, as Josh had mentioned, was based largely off of what we had been proposing in the Vermont Housing Investment Program, which is also occasionally called the Vermont Housing Improvement Program that I seems to be a little, a little non binary. But the rehousing recovery program was intended to recognizing that we needed to bring units online quickly and that we have an aging housing stock throughout much of the state. And much of that housing stock has issues with it that require an investment that doesn't easily get a quick return based on the rents that are, are chargeable in various areas. You know, this is less of a case in Chittenden County, although still certainly some municipalities that have this, this struggle as well. But to put it another way, you've got landlords out there, property owners, I should say out there that are sitting on vacant units because they don't have the amount of money to invest in a new boiler, you know, a new roof, various other things in order to bring those units back online because they can only charge, you know, the going rate for that area based on, you know, incomes that are earned in the various areas. So we, we created a program that and actually, Josh, if you want to jump down to the next slide, I'll just go over that real quick and then we can jump to the video. So we created a program that would provide would provide a grant to landlords. In this case, it was up to $30,000 per unit that came with a couple stipulations, including working with the continue of care, which is in other, in other words, is our homeless service providers throughout the state. It's a network of providers of services to those who are experiencing homelessness. And we worked with the five home ownership centers throughout Vermont. So that's, let's see if I can do this off the top of my head, Champlain Housing Trust in the Northwest, Neighborworks of Western Vermont covering Addison, Rutland and Bennington, Wyndham Windsor Housing Trust, which the name is self explanatory there, Downstreet, which is central, central Vermont, and a rural edge up in the Northeast Kingdom. So before I dive into this program, just to add a little, a little more color, I'd love to share with you folks. And it looks like we've got the time a, just a brief video that was produced on behalf of Neighborworks of Western Vermont, just to kind of show some of what they were working with and what they were able to accomplish. And Ron, if you don't mind, or Josh, if you don't mind streaming that at that link, my, my partner is testifying in front of Senate Ag in the other room. And I don't know if our Wi-Fi can handle all that. I'll hit play right now and see how this works. Great. Thank you. Members, I suggest you go to speaker view to get the biggest screen that you can. I'm not sure we have the bandwidth here. You seen it? It's, it's pretty choppy and not a lot and no sound. All right. Maybe stop, stop, stop sharing. Let me give it a try. Yeah, maybe you can do from the committee's share. Thanks. Thanks, Ron. Forgive, forgive us, everybody, for the inevitable technical difficulties. Same bandwidth issue, but I'll give it a try. Just a moment. Just a second. It's coming. I just want to get it running first. Are you hearing the sound? Unfortunately, no. Not on my end, at least. No, it's pretty choppy still. Yeah. All right. Well, say la vie. Let's, let's, but we have the links to it on our website. And I think if we, I mean, I'd like to see it, but it'll be in our own, the privacy of our own, I think. Sure. And so I will, and I suspect some of our friends at Neighborworks are watching on YouTube and cringing right now. But so sorry, guys, for not being able to get that through. But this is, this was done by, this was done by Neighborworks of, of Western Vermont. Yeah. Yeah. And just, just quickly, though, I mean, this was done around this program. Yeah. Let me, can I, can I jump in, Sean, just quickly kind of the thought here and this is the short version. This is about a nine minute video. They have about a 25, 30 minute video as well, which digs into even more of the property owners, the landlords and shows more of the work that they did. So you can see the extent of the weatherization and the roofs. And, you know, you're, they're talking to a number of property owners in this video that agreed to participate in this program. And you can see the struggles they've gone through. They've had vacant units around these, this is Bennington, Addison and Rutland Counties, landlords from all those areas showing the vacancies, the units that have sat idle for years in many cases and what they needed to replace, a furnace that asbestos insulation, lead paint, windows, a roof, and how they recognize the homeless problem and the folks that are down in their luck. And even during this pandemic have been, had to say, no, I can't rent you this place. It's got code violations. And then they show you just how to drive through a couple of these communities home after home after home that is boarded up and is serving no one is bringing down the community. You know, no one attacks is and then it goes into explain the opportunity here. Neighborworks of Western Vermont did 61 units with the grant we gave them. The average grant was $23,000 to bring these units up online. And they talked about how this is just the tip of the iceberg that there's so much need for reinvestment in our infrastructure, especially our housing infrastructure in our historic neighborhoods. You know, these are our neighborhoods that built Vermont. These are our neighborhoods around our historic communities that many of you know, if you've driven through them are in rough shape and we're not seeing investment and they can be a quick, efficient, effective housing solution for folks at a lower cost than than many programs. But we have to meet these private owners somewhere. They can bring a unit online for $23,000 of state investment, have a affordability guarantee for 10 years and a commitment to serve homeless people. This is a solution we need to deploy in order to solve some of our housing needs. It works better in some communities than others. And so that that was the goal. They did this on their own. They thought that it would be helpful for folks to hear directly from the landlords, hear their own words, see the condition of these properties, and hear the empathy that exists in these communities to try to help people that are in need. It's not a lack of unwillingness. It's a lack of I can't house someone in this property and I can't go borrow $50,000 and collect $600 and rent and pay that back. And so the video does a great job of explaining that and how they were involved. And this is just one of the five grantees. And what's important about NeighborWorks of Western Vermont, if folks don't know, they started NeighborWorks of America. They were the organization 30 years ago that started this national movement of NeighborWorks that receives federal funding now through reinvestment in West Rutland and other areas. And so they've been at this for a long time. And we're the first NeighborWorks of America chartered organization in the country. So they took it upon themselves to kind of tell this story. And I do hope, you know, it's really easy just to click on that YouTube video if you do it on your own and and really see the impactful stories being told there and how this program has saved some landlords, businesses, and has housed homeless people and has uplifted a community in a small way. And there's a lot more to do. So I'll sort of leave it leave it at that and have Sean jump back into some more statistics on the program and answer questions. So yeah, we'll have a couple of questions. And I think Representative Parsons, this is what we were talking about yesterday to answer to your question. The balance here is because it's because it's a new program is finding the ways to make sure that the state funds are used in a way to promote everything that the commissioner was just talking about. That's the, you know, the carrot and stick. But if this if someone can take a put a unit online, if the if the grants that were available can put a unit online. It's clear it's a worthy investment. And the owners aren't just relying on the $30,000 or $23,000 to be the only costs involved. But now I'm looking forward to seeing what they've done. Representative Triano, then Howard. Sure, thanks. You know, I can't speak for the whole committee, but I think it is safe to say, Josh, that this is exactly what we envisioned when we put this money in last year. Um, and it's really, um, um, great to hear this type of progress. I just have one statewide. Do we have a number of how many of these apartments where we have? Yeah, it's 218. Um, you know, 143 of those were finished by December 20th. The remaining 75 will be done by mid March. We got in. We already even before the year extension of CRF money, we were able to, um, submit supply chain disruption extensions for 90 days. Many of these folks are waiting on, you know, um, stoves and washers and dryers, windows. There's been a whole disruption of construction supplies, and we were able to document that. Um, and we're already had this problem with 75 units not not coming in the supplies not coming in time to finish. Um, what's exciting is in, in, um, they the homeownership centers, despite them working day and night and having all these challenges, they want to continue this. They have reached out to more. They turned down a number of property owners that wanted to do this work. They've surveyed them and by and large, they all want to continue this program with, um, the remaining CRF funding that we have through the rest of this year with even stronger commitments to serve the homeless that they will commit to as many applications from the Continuous Care as needed to rehouse a homeless person, um, family and continue this work for the rest of the year. And so that kind of leads into what is our, you know, housing proposals from the governor going forward and talking about that with all of you. Um, but, um, Sean, you know, you kind of got cut off on some of your slides here. You might be able to talk a little bit about the affordability covenant, how we're ensuring that, how we know that the rents are affordable because of the, um, filing with, uh, rental rebates that happens and just give the committee some sense of how this is all, um, documented. And it's not just like we give a grant walk away. There's ongoing commitment, but it's less than perpetual affordability for what we're what we're providing as much as 10% of the cost of a normal investment in developing a new perpetual affordable, uh, housing unit. It's, it's slightly different. It's, it's a public-private partnership, but that's where our housing stock is and it exists. All right. And, and again, let's just go through some quick questions, Sean, before we get back to you here, um, I have representative Howard then Parsons. Thank you. Um, commissioner, I couldn't help but notice, um, the boarded up burnt out, um, house on in Rutland City on Forestry, that I go by every day that is not far from where I live. And for two years, I have been trying to, um, to see if anything could be done about that, that place. I have been told that there are two holding companies involved and apparently they, um, they can't come to any agreement. Um, I have spoken to the mayor. I've spoken to the board of alderman, uh, neighbors have written letters. It is, as you can see, it is quite an eyesore. Uh, do you have any suggestions for me as to where I should go next for who I should be speaking to because, um, this is quite upsetting for, for, uh, my district. And frankly, it's in my neighborhood. Right. I mean, library street, uh, Congress Street, Pine Street, Forest Street. I mean, I've been in that neighborhood and we've, um, invested probably close to $3 million over the last five years in purchasing some of the homes that you can get ahold of with NeighborWorks of Western Vermont, totally gutting them, rehabbing them and providing a new family, a chance to purchase that home, um, out of subsidized rate. Um, also, you know, some of these, this, this money has gone into apartments rehab. But when you have a situation like that where it's a holding company, it's, uh, you know, long servicer from somewhere else, um, getting them on board, um, is a challenge. You know, I think that you're talking to the right people and clearly NeighborWorks of Western Vermont would want to participate, but, um, you know, can they purchase that? I think the program, one of the governor's proposals that I'm going to talk about at the end here may be a chance to get it, uh, homes just like the one you're talking about where, uh, if they're willing to sell it and someone's willing to buy it and has some funding to reinvest in that and become a home, a new home for new, uh, first-time homeowner in Vermont. Um, why wouldn't they sell it? You know, what, what, what, unless it's held up in some other reasons, you know, a few of these properties were actually purchased and they were in such bad condition, they were leveled and turned into a community park, some beautiful park in the neighborhood now that used to be, um, frankly drug dense and several of those homes were seized by the U.S. Marshalls and we put money in to help, um, either raising them because they were too dense, they were too big or reinvesting in them and, and making them, um, new homes. But, uh, um, we can chat offline about this specific, you know, address and some, see if I can find information from our partners in Rutland if they've tried to contact that, those holding companies on, on that particular home. But one of the landlords in this video that talks about their investment points to a home across the street, which I think might be this one and how, um, that, that, that's four units there that is could be housing and how just how troubling it is how there's so much more we can do. Um, so I, I, sorry, I don't have a more clear answer for you. I do know that the city attorney has been in contact with those, um, um, holding companies, but this, this property is right next to, uh, high school. And, um, I mean, the neighbors are pretty upset. And at first I was told that the, the school was going to buy it. Well, that wasn't true. So, and like I said, this has been two years. So, um, thank you. Any help that, uh, that you can give me, I would really, really appreciate. Thank you. All right. Representative Parsons and Collenkey. Yeah, thank you. Um, Sarah Stevens is exactly what I was talking about. Um, Josh, I just had a question or a couple of questions, actually. Um, first one being, uh, it is great that in order to, uh, receive this help, they do have to agree to keep rents affordable. Um, you know, help with the homeless program, uh, population. Um, how long do those stipulations last? Sure. Sean, you want to, this is some of that area you were going to give some more information on. Yeah, happy to jump right in. So for this particular, um, phase of the program, uh, the requirement was, uh, basically a five year affordability covenant, whereby the, um, the property owner couldn't is not allowed to rent the unit for more than either the HUD fair market rent, um, or a housing voucher, um, payment standard. So if somebody came with a housing voucher, um, whether that's from the state housing authority, um, our friends at AHS or, or otherwise, um, that voucher standard would be acceptable. Otherwise, if, um, if they're paying out of pocket, um, then it had to be set at the HUD fair market rent. And that actually is, um, the property owners were required to sign a, um, a deed covenant. Um, so that is actually filed with the land records on that property for the, and so they're required to maintain that for the five years, regardless of the ownership of that, of that unit. Um, we put in some options, um, if, if for whatever reason the property owner needs to sell, um, they have to contact us at the Department of Housing and Community Development and, you know, negotiate what the, what the new stipulation was. So there's, there's some, um, opportunities to address specific situations as they arise, but by and large, it's, it's a five year, five year covenant. Um, along with that, just while I'm, while I'm talking about, um, they also, the property owners were required to communicate with the continue of care. And again, that's the, the homeless network of homeless service providers and receive at least three, or review at least three referrals, um, from those organizations. And, um, we actually, and I can get into these details in a moment, um, after, after the other questions are answered, but, um, not only did that house some folks who were otherwise at risk or had checkered, uh, rental histories, I think. Um, but also, uh, we've found really opened up lines of communication to private landlords and between private landlords and the, um, homeless service providers that didn't exist before. Um, so we're hopeful that this actually, this requirement will, um, result in better communication, even for units that come online that are not or come vacants that are not, you know, affected by this program because it's basically, uh, setting up a, uh, referral system for, for property owners in these areas. Um, so I think, uh, did that answer your question about the affordability? It certainly did. Um, my secondary question was kind of a, uh, question to whether a certain program exists or if it's been talked about. Um, I'll let you know, uh, conversation was about a few properties in town that are beyond repair. Um, is there any type of this, this type of program where, say some of them, you could have an investor come in who would build that two or three unit place, but can't really see how you make it affordable with spending the 20 to $30,000 to take the building down and all that. Is there any, any type of funding for that? Like on the front end to cover costs, if the same type of agreement is made, like a five year agreement that I will build, you know, going to build these buildings, they'll be affordable for five years. Help on the front end of acquiring the property without a abandoned building on it. Right. So I think, I think the short answer is not presently. For just to add a little flavor, we did actually utilize the rehousing recovery program to create new units through, you know, conversion of a garage or splitting up, you know, an oversized home into into smaller units. So there was some new unit creation with this, but nothing to the extent of demolishing an existing structure in order to rebuild. We didn't, I think in part we probably would have considered that. But the timelines that we were working under were just untenable for that that level of work. It would be an interesting element to consider when we going forward, building off the success of this program for sure. Yeah, just to add to that, I don't know of any programs that would allow for what you are asking for that the state currently funds. It would have different conditions and much larger scale to do that work, typically through the nonprofit housing developers. You know, one thing I'll just add to what Sean said about the five year affordability, you know, many of these property owners, they weren't shocked about that at all. They had no problem with the rents that they could charge because when you look at the HUD fair market rent in some of these communities, it that's the going market rate. They're not the affordable rent requirement is not above what they charge without a condition. So they had no concerns. You you know, these are set by market and so that's what the market bears. And so that hasn't been a problem for us at all. Right, representative Kolecki. Thank you. And we'll get right back to you, Sean. It may be the bridge into Josh's, the government, the governor's asked. But I think it's a two million two hundred million dollar question that all all the work you've previewed on the slides today was part of the what probably eighty five ninety million dollars from Corona Relief Fund. And now in the new thing, it's two hundred million dollars, but it's tightly earmarked. It seems to rental and utility utilities rarages. And so how are you imagining the implementation and design of that if it remains as constricted? Sure. So I'm happy to jump in, Josh, unless you want to take it. Well, I'll just say we have probably two hundred questions into treasury and we've copied our congressional delegation to try to get clarity around this. I know one of my goals would be to use any flexibility we have. If we're going to pay rent for folks going forward, we want that unit to be code compliant. And if it takes a little bit of bit of money to make it safe housing, we want to provide that to to to to to fix any code issues before people get rental assistance in an ongoing way. That just makes sense to me and would be appreciated by all parties involved. And so we're trying to make the case that that's part of rental assistance is a safe unit that's been certified before you give so in rental assistance. Yeah, John can add the rest happily. Yeah, I'll add that. So I know our general counsel, Maxwell Krieger has been working tirelessly to compile questions from from our own department as as well as numerous other other agencies to to inquire with treasury and implore them to give more guidance. And I know that those mirror pretty closely, but probably have additional specificity to many of the national advocacy groups who are who are inquiring about the same. I think two of the major questions and I know that this this they've been posed to this group already are the ability of utilizing, you know, CRF to this next round of funding in the emergency rental assistance, whether that can be utilized to offset some of the rental assistance that was already paid through the first CRF rounds that had more flexibility. That's a huge question out there. There's some differences of opinion about how that can be done. I know that you heard from Stephanie Barrett from JFO yesterday and we've been working with them to try to answer those questions as well. The second major question is what what what what I'm calling the 10% 90% question. And I know you've heard about that. There's some some confusion, I guess, some some disclarity, if you will, about the Treasury guidance as to the of that $200 million that's coming to the state of Vermont for rental assistance. They say that 90% must be used for the specific things that are laid out, which, you know, summarily are rent and utility payments. And that 10% can be for other housing services. Then it goes on to say that there can't be more than 10% spent on administrative costs. So it's unclear if housing services and program administration are in that 10% chunk of the whole or if 10% of each of those two things can be can go to program administration. And obviously, you know, 10% of $200 million. We're talking some pretty serious amounts of money for program administration. If we're able to use that, it would be wonderful if we had $20 million that could be used for sort of broad housing services. So that I think is, those are sort of the two top clarifying questions. There's like Josh said, there's quite a list of other ones as well. As to how we envision it, we've been working obviously, continue to work with the Vermont State Housing Authority and despite their staff being completely overstretched with the first round of this funding, they are graciously willing to be the lead partner in applying rental assistance with the new amount of money. We've also been working diligently and I'm looking at my calendar now. I think Josh and I have probably about four hours a week that's not standing meetings with all these inter-agency groups. And that includes Department of Public Service, our friends at Agency of Human Services. And we're envisioning possibly dividing up the $200 million into different tranches that would be utilized specifically by different agencies. So perhaps not all of the $200 million would flow through State Housing Authority, but a piece of that would go to Department of Public Service to deal with directly with utility payments since that's an explicit use. We're also working with AHS to identify groups of folks who might sort of pre-qualify, if you will. As you mentioned, this is a bit, the money's a bit more restrictive. There's more means testing that's required. So could we tap into the list of folks who are on temporary assistance for needy families on reach up on the Public Housing Authority's wait lists? People who have already gone through and been vetted, so to speak, that would fit these means testing and sort of identify those groups of people quickly so that we can move some of this money out and assist those folks while we continue to set up programs for people who haven't been touched or haven't touched the state or federal assistance programs but would otherwise be eligible for this funding. So thinking about a lot of those systems and how we can best get away from paper because that was one huge element for the Vermont State Housing Authority, but obviously that comes with its own connectivity issues for folks who might not be able to. I'm hopeful that part of that housing services funding or even the program administration funding could go to Vermont Legal Aid and Vermont Landlords Association to continue their work because they were pivotal in making sure that we got out as much money as we could and assisting individuals who struggled with applications or were unsure of what they needed to apply or whether their application had been received, all the things that go along with that. So we're inquiring as well about whether that type of, that would be considered part of program administration. So really, in short, it's all hands on deck and trying to do as much of the work upfront to identify the populations that would best be served by this funding. As you know, we have the looming September deadline to obligate 65% of the funds or else US Treasury reserves the right to reallocate. Another major question is what does it mean to obligate? If we've established a program and say that, however much money is going to go through that program through the end of the year, is that obligated or do we actually have to cut checks to tenants? I will say while I'm on the topic, one question I know has been brought up in the committee that I think is incredibly important. One of the major differences between the first rental housing stabilization program and this emergency rental assistance program is that the forthcoming money does not require that the rent be in arrears. So we can actually forward pay with this money, whereas the original rental assistance required that the rent was passed due. That will change dramatically the number of applications and the frequency of reapplication. And our understanding, and this is again, something that needs to be clarified with Treasury, is that there's sort of two different amounts of time that are able to be forward paid that depend on how somebody qualifies their income. You're allowed to look at the previous month's income to qualify and that basically, for lack of a better term, buys that person up to three months of assistance before they need to recertify. However, if you can provide proof that the income levels were below 80% of area median income, and you fit the other criteria for the entirety of the prior year, so it'd be 2020, I imagine, we can actually qualify that person for 12 months of rental assistance. And so that's a huge difference between obviously between reapplying every month for an entire year versus being able to forward commit 12 months of rental assistance. So those are some of the things that we're trying to get clarity on that will have huge implications for how we roll this out and how this program is administered. Thank you. Sean, how is this money treated in terms of income for people? That is another question on the list. So we don't know if it's treated as income or if it's taxable. So that's unclear. Okay, because I mean, if they were receiving this, if this were considered a gift or income, this would take them out of the 50 or 80% pretty quickly. I suspect it wouldn't be treated as income, but that is something we want explicit clarity on. Great. No, I think that's so that's I don't, the process for this committee is going to be, I would imagine in Josh and Sean, you can correct me, but you, the administration will make proposals. And when it comes to the allocation, you'll be partnering. I mean, the legislature has its role in the financial aspects of this and we'll be working with you as we did last year in determining what levels and understanding. I mean, we're just getting back to work. You guys have had all of two weeks of headstart on us in terms of understanding it, but my understanding is that we'll be working pretty closely because we were quite successful working on the last year's programs. And to last year's programs, Sean, did you have more left on the recap from last year? You know, I think we covered most of the program parameters and you folks have obviously have access to the slide deck. One thing that I will just reiterate and this will segue a little bit into, I think what we want to wrap up with here today is that shockingly enough, despite, as with everybody else that worked on these programs, the homeownership centers really stepped up to the plate and really did an incredible job of reallocating staff resources and just trying to get as many of these units over the finish line. Just to reiterate again, 218 total units brought online with more interest than expected. And after our last standing meeting with, well, our most recent, I should say, it will not be the last standing meeting with the homeownership centers, they all agreed that assuming resources are available, that they would be willing to continue this program for the remainder of this calendar year, which is what the CRF-1 funds have now been extended to. Like I said, we're working with our colleagues at Agency of Human Services and the Continue of Care to tweak some of the requirements in order to more pointedly focus on ensuring that a majority of these units go to folks who are exiting homelessness. Admittedly, when we set up this program, we thought that having stricter requirements than what we had would lead to pretty low uptake. We were happily proven wrong in that and there still seems to be quite a bit of property owner interest, although I would also posit that that's probably because of some of the successful partnerships that have been fostered in this first phase. So with that, and as you all know, well, as has been alluded to, this rehousing recovery program was largely modeled off of the VHIP, the Vermont Housing Investment Program structure that we have pitched for a while. And I imagine are going, well, I know for certain are going to be proposing again what vehicle that takes, I think is still up in the air. For those who are unaware on the committee, we also help staff, although do not have a seat on the Rental Housing Advisory Board, which I believe was spoken about by Wendy Morgan, who has a seat on that board as well and has been working for the past couple of years to institute a rental registry and also shift responsibility for rental housing code inspections from volunteer town health officers to the Division of Fire Safety. So they have also been supportive of VHIP in the past and maybe including that in the bill they propose, but with that, I'll turn it over to my boss before I get too far over my skis here. Yes, so if I can, I'll sort of jump into what the governor is going to be proposing this year and big picture, hopefully we'll have some, something more detailed to share with you, some draft bills coming your way and whatnot. But it is taking lessons learned from this program and adding those to the VHIP proposal for rental rehab. $7,000 is not enough to fix these units. We've learned that quickly. We've learned that landowners, landlords are perfectly willing to have a match and so we're gonna keep a match component. We're going to explicitly have a weatherization component, a level that needs to be there and we're going to continue with affordability covenant, perhaps expand it to 10 years. And we're also going to have a sort of a two levels of assistance. One could be a forgivable grant, forgivable loan and one is a deferred loan based on keeping that affordability. This is where it gets a little technical, but you'll wanna see the specifics that we're laying out, but for someone that's gonna receive, make a commitment to rehouse someone coming out of homelessness and go through that extra risk and care, we wanna provide them with an incentive that's a little bit more meaningful. If someone wants to fix up a unit and have a established rate rate that serves affordable people and if they wanna keep that affordability for 10 years, we can have a loan that is forgiven 10% every year to ensure that that remains in place. And so we wanna encourage people to serve the most needy but have an option for them to also serve folks that need a safe decent place to live as well and the benefit would be a little bit less in that scenario. So the interesting part is that, we have about 1.55 million, so about 1.6 million of CRF money already dedicated to this program that we have yet to deploy because the time ran out. So I think what you'll see is the governor's trying to be mindful that we don't have a ton of general fund dollars to, and to use what federal resources we have right now to carry this rental assistance piece forward with the CRF money we have, but at the same time, get this program established, get this program into law that we can continue to operate in the future with future revenue, general fund, perhaps other money coming from perhaps that rental registry or who knows, but just establish the rules but not appropriate general fund to the rental side this year because we have the funding to carry this on for the next year. But we wanna expand the thought of VHIP. It's Vermont Housing Investment or Incentive, whatever, however you use the I program, that doesn't leave out home ownership. We know that many of these communities, Barry and Rutland, there is a desire to have more homeowners in these neighborhoods and we haven't found an easy way to address this. Those home ownership opportunities don't work well with other tax credit schemes and so forth because you need investment income to claim a tax credit against, it doesn't work. We think we've come up with a way based on some other models we've seen in pilot programs to use the same VHIP sort of thinking to incentivize new homeowner purchase and rehab into these homes in these neighborhoods that have great opportunities for low and moderate income from owners that want to become homeowners. They are our homes you can buy and many of our communities in the state for $80,000, $90,000 but they need $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 worth of investment and rehab to weatherize them, to bring them up to code, to life safety issues and we're missing an opportunity here. Many folks will be in these new homes and pay less in mortgage and property taxes than they are in rent and become homeowners, build equity and the governor wants to target and set aside a portion of this money for BIPOC, for folks of color and minorities in this state who do not share the same home ownership rate as white Vermonters. It's just a fact we need to deal with and we need to do something about. We're a high home ownership state, 72%, many low income people own homes in Vermont but that rate drops if you look at the statistics for people of color. They're not homeowners at the same rate. They have been left out of these opportunities and we think that we can develop a program that provides a sort of a cap on how much can go towards the down payment assistance because we already have several programs for that. Say 25% cap on this incentive. Maybe this incentive is capped at $50,000 total and the remaining has to go into the rehab portion and a portion of that, say 25% or 10, I don't have the exact final touches on this proposal to tell you would have to go into weatherization and that we can use the same players that we've been using to do the rental side. These homeownership centers already work with existing low income homeowners. We fund about 110 home improvements a year with our CDBG program to low income homeowners but they're already homeowners. We wanna get new people into home ownership. They can use their money, their spending on rent to build their own wealth and their own equity and ensure that these funds can carry forward by setting up a model where this is set up as a 0% deferred and tail sale loan much like we've done with the manufactured housing replacement program, the CHT runs. What it's proven is that's run the same way. They receive a 0% deferred loan to second loan. It doesn't require any payment but when they transition out of that home and sell it the money is returned to the program and it recycles. After five or six years, it's a self-sustaining program and it's already proven that to be with the manufactured housing replacement program. Yes, you lose a little bit of time and interest in money but it's not about making money off this program. It's recycling these funds. Hopefully someone's been able to purchase a home with this opportunity. Maybe their family has grown. Maybe their income has grown. It was a great first home. They're able to sell that, the money's returned and it's able to help a new family purchase a home and rehab it. And it's a small investment compared to how we do home ownership with other models in the state. It doesn't get at that level of perpetual affordability that it's also an important aspect of our tools. It's a small investment that we think we can also incentivize employers that are looking for new workers that one of the biggest things we hear from my other side of our agency is employers the number one reason that someone doesn't take a job is they can't afford the housing in the region or they can't find a home to buy. We do a really good job of building new luxury homes. We do a really great job of building affordable homes apartments but this missing middle housing once was here in Vermont. Now it's all these falling apart homes across our communities which the recent housing needs assessment says there's 19,000 of them or more and we need a program to address this. It's our historic housing stock. It's these are the homes of the Vermonters that built our communities that we love and cherish and they are falling apart. And we're seeing more homes come off of the availability of homes in our state than we're building each year despite our $50 million of investment in building new homes each year through our network. We're losing more than we're building and this program is an attempt to address that in a very fiscally responsible way with a shared partnership of the homeowner. These would be new homeowners with a set aside for minority populations that haven't shared in this opportunity, weatherization component and a returned investment that can carry forward. So I'm sorry I can't share a proposal. We hope we get support. We've talked to a few folks about this from really all over the place on a political spectrum and that think that this is needed and that time is right and we've, you know, can prove the concept and have a sustainable program ahead of us. Thank you, just I'm gonna be mindful of the time here. Again, we have a 12 o'clock and we have several questions here. My one question before I hand it to Representative Bloomley is you talked about the VHIP program being reintroduced and we're certainly open to hearing about it. Did you want to see it in the same, but proposed in a similar manner as it was, which was part of the component with enforcement? Cause you've talked about the need for rental housing safety in order to qualify these apartments for being back on code. And we talked a lot last year about how that balances out between, you know, you need to have an enforcement mechanism in order to have a certification program. Is that something you wanna see as part of the enforcement bill that's being worked on? I think we'll take as many avenues to get this done as possible. You know, I think that, you know, the administration is gonna have a bill that rolls these two VHIP ideas together, but we've also shared with our partners working on that bill that this is part of our thinking. And so, you know, I can't be a direct answer, but we want as many avenues to get this across the finish line as possible this year. And it sounds like it's a, well, let me go to Representative Bloomley than Hanco. Hi, thank you so much for this. I've taken a ton of notes and I'm gonna have to probably follow up with you for, with questions. But one of the things that I was struck by, but not terribly surprised by, I was at the set of sides that came out of commerce last year that for women and minority-owned businesses, the state didn't really have the working relationships nor did those working with small businesses have a lot of working relationships that were deep enough with BIPOC serving agencies or I mean, community-based organizations to get that money to members in that community. And so I'm wondering how well positioned you are and what kind of work you may need to do to ensure that, you know, that money really does get out the door to that specific group of people. Yeah, that's a great question. It is one of the first things on all of the CRF money that we ran into and recognized real quick. We didn't put even a citizenship eligibility on the first CRF money. One of the few states that took that approach that, hey, they didn't speak to it, we're gonna allow anyone. And we quickly realized we didn't have good systems in the state to translate across the board. We had to reach out to ALV and UACS and CBOEO and a whole bunch of others to say, we want them tell and form your trusted partners about this program because there might not be a direct connection to new Americans to think to talk to DHCD about this. Like we need to work with folks that are trusted parties of these communities share with them, market to them, outreach so they know it exists and have them tell the story of, no, this is real, you are being targeted because we don't have those connections in place. They're building, this has been an idea that I've talked a lot with Susanna Davis from the governor's equity director and others about how we can do just that. But there's more work to be done and we need frankly a statewide system to translate automatically what we do and to outreach automatically that we've learned a lot with this money and we need to do more. John, anything to add there? No, just, yeah, I think that's definitely all accurate. And yeah, a lot of work was done with ALV which formerly was the Association of Africans Living in Vermont, the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Group which now goes by US CRI and CVOO as the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity, which is a community action agency that actually does a lot of statewide work with businesses as well as some of their community action work. And I've also been working with Alison Hart at the Agency of Human Services to try to combine our forces between the two agencies and come up with some of these networks. And I'm actually a Burlington resident and I've been speaking with some folks around here in Burlington and in the city of Winooski about other networks we might not be aware of that can touch on those populations. But yeah, work to be done for sure. Representative Hango. Thank you. I just want to take a minute to thank all of you on the presentation, which is really thorough and also all the work that you did in such a very short time to bring 218 units online so quickly. When we first talked about it and the money was first allocated, I had no idea how this was gonna happen. And I said this to the other advocates who came in in our committee that it's just really amazing. And I definitely want to thank you for that. So we heard from the other advocates that home ownership is health. And I'm definitely a believer in that. I can see that it really contributes to people's wellbeing to have the stability of knowing where they're gonna go home to every night. So the fact that you're interested in first-time home ownership for folks who are low income for the BIPOC community, whomever needs that extra help to become homeowners and to sustain their home ownership over a number of years, that's really important. I'm intrigued by kind of the comparison between the costs of home ownership and in the various programs that are out there. We've heard from VHCB, we've heard from you, we've heard from a number of different people about what it costs to bring some of these homes online. So I'm really intrigued in your $23,000 figure. Why that's so much lower than others that we've heard, is it because it's a rehab of an older structure rather than new construction? I think that that is a pretty significant factor that there are existing buildings versus doing new. So there's no need for acquisition, land acquisition costs, the rest. I think it is important to note, so that $23,000 average grant, I think is really impressive. It's basically a 10th of what it otherwise would cost. I think it's important to recognize that most of these property owners exceeded that 10% match. So it definitely was a bigger investment than simply $23,000 public investment, but far more it also leveraged as our other housing development colleagues often do, leveraged private funds as well. But I think the short answer is they were existing structures that needed work, but not an incredible amount of work. And that's sort of what we were targeting and obviously they have ripple effects of just improving the general nature of the community. And if I may to your previous point, I think I would implore the committee to always keep in mind that, well, sometimes we get caught in the trap of talking about assisting renters versus assisting homeowners. Any new homeowner is likely moving out of a rental unit and creating additional availability of rental units. So they do go hand in hand, especially when you're dealing with first-time home purchasers. Yeah, and also I just wanted to add that, in our proposal for the homeowner purchase rehab, we think we should be allowing duplexes and triplexes. I mean, that's a great way for someone to become a homeowner and be a landlord at the same time and build that wealth together. This is not meant to be exclusive. And to follow on Sean's why we could do this a little cheaper, these properties weren't purchased. They're already owned on the rental side and it's an investment. It's not needing to go through a whole process to repurchase and top to bottom look for the future indefinitely of what needs to be done. Many of these were replacing systems. If you watch that video, electrical systems that were 80 years old in some places that were fire trap, safety hazards. But it's just a different model that works for these type of units in a way that the sort of affordable housing investment doesn't pool 10 or 15 of these properties together and do a tax credit and a big $9, $10 million project with these units. That used to be a model 20 years ago more but it seems to work better for a multifamily building to have a different structure. One central boiler, a more efficient way to maintain those systems if they're gonna own them forever in perpetuity to have a scattered bunch of homes all over that's under an umbrella has been a real struggle. And that I think it works better when we keep the ownership small. It's in the small private owner's hands right now. It's a neighborhood and it doesn't take as much money in this model to bring those back up to life and serve folks. And did I, this is really quick. Did I hear Sean, did I hear you say that there are homeowners that towards the end of this grant period we're still wanting to apply and you just didn't have the time to be able to allocate the funds and take their applications? Correct. And we've asked our homeownership center partners who are the boots on the ground, they've begun surveying and I'm getting numbers trickling in as to what they think they'll be able to do within a year. Obviously, we'll likely be limited by fiscal resources this time around instead of the time frames. It'll be incredible to see what we could do with a full building season considering, I mean, we essentially got this program up and running in I think September by the time we actually had hammer swinging. So, you know, September to December to bring 218 units online is quite the lift. Thank you. Unprecedented. Remarkable, remarkable. Representative Kalaki. Thank you, profound I'd say. But anyway, especially about the interagency collaboration, all the service providers collaborated and it just is such a great model. But Josh, I got, I'm very much looking forward to the proposal you're talking about because it does seem to build on all of the successes. I got lost in one part. Sean showed us in this slide that any money that wasn't used was reallocated but then you talked about unspent monies in the rehousing recovery program. So why, is that from the corona relief funds and how much is that? And why wasn't that then reallocated to this general waterfall pot that we've been working with? Right, because it was when it was reallocated. So we started out with, I'm gonna get these numbers wrong but it was either 6.8 million for this rehousing recovery program. We put that out to all the home ownership centers. We got their applications back. It was a little bit less than that because that's all they could do. So we just locked in the 6.2 but then some point in the fall when we started to get money back, from us the housing authority every week they were like, we're not gonna spend this money. We don't wanna lose this money. How can we put it towards housing? We reached back out to the home ownership centers and said, could you do more units if you had money? And they said, yes, it was reallocated to that purpose but then we didn't get the extension. So it just was frozen. So it's already assigned to their use but we didn't deploy it because we didn't have the time with the extension. So it's sitting in account already allocated for this use to continue but we never deployed it because the extension came at the last minute. We were gonna have to give that back to JFO on December 29th and they would put it into UI. And so it's one of these things where all this money was moving around so quick and it's fortunate that we, as Sean said earlier, we kinda played chicken with this one because we knew at the end of the day 1.5 could be reallocated to UI at the last minute or it was gonna reimburse other state expenses and then we got the sort of the stay, if you will, of eviction here on this that, wait a second, this money's gonna continue. So at that point, we just froze returning it. And how much is that that you're saying? It's almost 1.6 million. Okay, great, thank you. I mean, we're gonna get requests to do more than that with these funds. We already know some of these home ownership centers are saying they can do 50 units in the next year. So I don't know what we're gonna end up with is a total pot of CRF money to continue this work. But right now we have this 1.6 and it already allocated to this program. Great, thank you. Yeah. All right, representative Triana, let's finish up with your question and let everybody go for a quick mention. And by the way, the meeting today, I was just looking at an email from Connor Kennedy from the Speaker's office and this meeting is security, it's an informational, it's not mandatory, and you can watch it or listen to it on YouTube as you see fit, unless you have questions that you wanna ask. They're recommending that we use the YouTube to follow along rather than the Zoom, but that takes a little pressure off, but not much, I need to take my break soon. Representative Triana. Just a comment, Josh, you mentioned it, we can't, there are more places going offline than are being built. So we understand in this committee that we cannot build our way out of this. So it's so encouraging to see that this is happening in so many communities around the state that it just, it is the way forward. We understand that housing stock is, the shortage of housing stock is really the primary problem in trying to cure homelessness. So, this is just really encouraging. I just have one question is, if you're looking at a duplex, does that qualify as two units with a grant for each unit? Well, under the rental rehab side, yes, that would be two units under the home ownership proposal, I kinda laid out, if someone was gonna purchase that and rehab it, there's a primary owner occupied, full-time resident living in one and they could rent the other. Yeah, okay, good, thank you. All right, I wanna, again, be conscious of the time. First of, but I do wanna say this, we've never suffered from a lack of ideas when it comes to housing, whether it's affordable or trying to work on these issues that you guys have just really explicated very well today. We have lacked two things, capacity, which is money, and we've lacked trust and the understanding that this committee, while it's a housing committee, yes, most of our focus has been around what we consider HUD-based affordable housing and what we're seeing with programs like this is a softening of attitude towards being able to work with private owners with state dollars and trying not to endanger the work that the nonprofit agencies and BHCB, et cetera, the trust fund, which is always short-funded. People are very wary about the amount of capacity and funding that they've been. So there's been two sides to this story and one of which is like the private owners, as you've been describing them, have been seeking help to try to bring it on and certainly the nonprofits have been saying, but wait, we don't want our work to be endangered by a shifting of funds. But more importantly, it's the trust between the two sides. When Angel Zakowski was in our committee yesterday and when Wendy Morgan and Gene Murray were in our, I don't know if you saw the testimony Josh and Sean, but it was remarkable to me, and I won't say unprecedented, but it was remarkable to me to hear Angel Zakowski on behalf of landlords to really empathize with the plight of tenants who are suffering through periods of time where they may not be able to pay rent and to have landlords who are overtly saying, we need to be able to understand that side of the story and then to turn around and have legal aid, which has traditionally been, oh my God, they're only for tenants and they hate landlords to say, no, we understand that landlords really do want to help, but that there are plenty of landlords who are in the positions and you've mentioned this today about the landlords who do want to bring on people as making sure it's a good business decision as well, but also just out of the understanding that people need a place to live and that people need a safe place to live. And so this idea that at one time, and it still exists obviously, but there's a black and a white between what we're seeking and it's really quite gray actually. And so to hear it become more gray is actually a positive thing. And the programs that you've been able to implement this year that we all have been able to take a piece of is really heartening to me and to hear that the administration, this presentation is done in a way, I mean, we will continue to work with you as best we can to try to make it work. This is housing is so important and it is a vaccine. It is healthcare and from the stability that housing can offer, I think all these other programs that we have in human services gets helped. So thank you for your time today. Thank you for your work and we will look forward to hearing more from you and I know we did not hear at all except at the very beginning from Chris Cochran, the elements that he brought to the table last year and we'll bring to the table about zoning and exclusionary policies, Commissioner, you touched on it. I'm reading a book called The Color of Law right now which is a couple of years old which discusses this really quite distressing involvement by federal and state governments in the redlining and the ability of people of our BIPOC community to not be able to gain the wealth that they would through equity the same way that many of us have had that opportunity through home ownership in particular. It's really important to see that we're working to try to really right those wrongs not in a way that is that is shallow but that goes to the heart of the problem which is what we're working on now. So thank you for your work towards that. I appreciate it. Thank you for your job and the work you're doing. Yeah, so with that, everybody have a good lunch and we'll see you.