 We're on the record. Okay, so we're ready. Yeah, we are ready. Great. Well, thank you, thank you for having me here. My name is Seth Jensen. I am a professional planner. I currently work for the even planning commission in Morseville, Vermont. Just to begin, I'm also a member of the local planning commission in the town of Westburn and on the executive committee of the Vermont Planners Association. So I wear many hats in planning in the state of Vermont. I'm here to provide some information and background on that experience and that perspective, but the testimony is my own. It's not an official position of either that the local planning commission or my employer. So one of the reasons that I did want to appear before this committee is because it's very important to look at Act 250 from the perspective of our smaller communities that are collectively becoming referred to as the other Vermont. I've spent a large amount of my career working in those communities and the needs and issues are similar but also have important distinctions and unique considerations that really need to be on the table for Act 250 reform to be effective. So before getting into the nuts and bolts of Act 250, I do want to just take a moment to talk about one of the charges of the committee that began meeting 18 months ago, which is the vision of Vermont in the next 50 years and specifically what is the vision of our rural communities 50 years from today. And that is important because many of those communities are currently struggling. They're struggling with the decline of their grand list. They're struggling with the decline of the population. They're seeing a opioid crisis that is tearing apart the fabric of many of our communities. We're hearing every day about challenges of small farms and general stores. But that image is not a complete image as well and it does not fully represent my experience working with those communities. I have had the honor of being able to work with more than a dozen small towns in the state of Vermont and see the ability for well-thought-out planning and community engagement to unlock the potential of those communities. And in every case have seen after planning process new energy and many times new development that is in keeping with the character of the communities while creating opportunity jobs and housing in areas that at one time were passed over as forgotten. Most recently in my own hometown, Westford, the first permit in the last 20 years in our town center was issued for a general store on our common. The story in Vermont is that general stores are closing. That is true, that is the trend. But we have at least one example that is beating that trend. In the Memorial County's County seat, Hyde Park Village, at the same time the general store in Westford opens. There will be a new restaurant on Main Street opening. Again, this is a village that was considered undevelopable for various reasons 10 years ago. That is proven not to be the case. So the question then comes, how do we harness that energy and what role can Act 250 reform play to harness that energy? And this is where I think the important distinction between our smaller towns and the more urban communities come is that much of our current discussion really focuses on do we expand jurisdiction or do we reduce jurisdiction? And for some of the smaller communities, really the better question is how do we make the process more predictable for smaller applicants? Are these are not large developers doing these projects in these communities? They're often very small applicants, often independent people who are only gonna go through the Act 250 process once in their lives. And many of our smaller towns and villages just simply don't have the administrative capacity or the infrastructure or the financial resources to obtain what's required for the exemptions. But we still need to make sure the process works for them. So that's what I would like, I will spend most of my time talking about. And there's an important element of Act 250 to consider here. And that is that in many ways Act 250 has been beneficial for world communities in ways that perhaps we don't discuss enough. Act 250 ensures that smaller communities are unequal footing when there are large projects in their towns. I'll give an example, in Main Street, in Johnson Village, Maple Fields had an application to redevelop the main block of that village. Their initial application was very typical, suburban strip type layout that was not consistent with the community's vision for that area. To their credit, Maple Fields worked with the community to revise that site plan to one that fit with the streetscape that did account for pedestrian access and also accounted for the river on the other side. But you know the fact that there was an Act 250 process that that community would have standing in probably contributed to that decision. Next door in Hyde Park, when the McMahon Chevrolet dealer was looking at expanding Act 250 and the local zoning led that business to redevelop a former industrial site rather than locating in a green field. The result of that was that wetlands that were impacted by the prior development which occurred before we really understood that the benefits and impacts to that development wasn't anything malicious that was done by the prior owner, but it was an impact. We're repaired and the modern stormwater system actually reduced the amount of stormwater and phosphorus entering our watershed and entering the Lake Champlain watershed. You all know that's important for many reasons. And there are of course counter examples of applicants who run into challenges or conflicts with other state permits. Can we have a question? Yes. That's the LaMoyle River watershed. The LaMoyle River watershed, yeah, yeah, thank you. So my first piece that I'd like to just talk about is how do we get to those good outcomes in a more predictable process, especially for the small applicants. Now do I control the screen? Okay, yeah. Okay. You can zoom in if you want to. Okay. Bigger also. Okay. If you're talking about a particular parent. Yeah. If you want us to read it, we also have it on our iPads. You too, okay. I might just refer to you to that because I'm very bad at being a millennial and this stuff kind of freaks me out. It's better now. So you can just slide it where you are if you want. Okay, great. So one of the reasons that, one of the changes that's happened since Act 250 was adopted is that when Act 250 came to be, most communities did not have robust local planning or zoning. That has been a big change over the last 45 or so years and has been beneficial in shaping development. But as that local planning and zoning has become more robust, so have the chances for conflict. One of the right ways several years ago that, that the legislature has attempted to address that is by creating this concept, not a concept, but a definition of an existing settlement. And on the last page, there's a table that I is a generalized partial list or overly simplified of various criteria where whether you're in an area for development or outside an area for development, how different criteria are applied may differ. One of the challenges is that that's not necessarily consistent across agencies. And in some cases, the distinctions may lead to interagency. They don't want to use the word conflict, but it's not a better word for it. So we'll use the word conflict. And it's really better to deal with those issues through the planning process, rather the regulatory process. That way, when you have a small applicant appearing before the district commission or the local board or for a state permit, you kind of know what's expected before going into it. And that can save a lot of time and a lot of resources for a small applicant. And just when I talk about small applicants, bear in mind that in Act 250, if you're doing a commercial or industrial development, the jurisdictional trigger varies whether you're in a community with zoning or without zoning, but it's based on law size. So the result is that in rural communities where lots are generally larger, Act 250 may cast a wider net and capture things like small independent contractor years. It's not a negative necessarily, but it is important to recognize who in these communities may be going through Act 250 so that we make a process that is easy for them to follow. Yeah, we have no questions. Yes. Just a point of clarification, I think the question is what you meant between a planning process versus a regulatory process, that local government process is the planning process as opposed to a local regulation using their bylaws compared to what you're generally using the term regulatory meaning Act 250. Can you just clarify? Sure, sure. So one of the, I guess it's stepped back to the state planning statute which envisions a coordinated planning process at state, local and regional level that encourages citizen engagement. One of the things that the Act 250 reform build attempts to do or interpret their attempts to do through things such as the capability and development plan. The increased review of local and regional plans is to begin coordinating our various planning processes. So I think yes to all of the above that the local planning process, especially on the issue of where the most appropriate areas for development should be is sort of the beginning place. And I think that's really important for structuring Act 250 for smaller communities because it is very possible for some of our smaller smaller settlements to be missed when you're looking at them from a statewide level. There are also important considerations at the statewide level but the local process which has checks and balances through review at the regional level of other neighboring municipalities can be the guide. What we have now though is a disconnect between that process and perhaps the agency comments and review where to use an actual example you might have a situation where there's an area that's been defined for greater intensity of development and there might be conflicts between the agency of transportation review related to requirements of something like a turning lane and the agency of natural resources, 9L review of wanting pedestrian connectivity and then the agency of agriculture review of agricultural soils. And what happens and I've seen happen that is every agency wants their own meeting with the applicant and they're not doing anything wrong. That's how the process is currently structured. They're doing their jobs. So it's not an agency staff problem. If the process was structured where there was the that question happened first of are we in or are we out? All of the agencies are on the same page. The district commission is on the same page and the local review boards are on the same page and the chances for an applicant getting sort of stuck in a jurisdictional dispute between different arms or levels of government are really reduced. And those are the kinds of things that for those small applicants are really frustrated. Hold on, there was a tie. Okay. It'll go to representative Odey and then Nicola. Age before duty. So with the, so if the way it works now if you see each of those agencies and each one says a different thing and what happens and then what you're saying is what could be instead is that all the agencies would meet with the applicant or they would all meet together and figure out what they thought were the best. So that's a really good question. What happens now depends, you know, somewhat from application to application. The larger applicants like the resorts in our region tend to have staff who are fixed costs work for them who coordinate all of that. For the smaller applicants, especially who may be not familiar with the process, may respond to agency questions as they come in. And that can lead to things like multiple site visits with their engineers or attorneys. For them, those are not fixed costs. They're not, they don't have an attorney or an engineer on staff. And so that's one of the things that drives, can drive up the cost. If the capability and development plan that's proposed in the legislation is structured and I think we've been in a way that is functional, that need for every agency to make their own determination is lessened. And there's the potential for more predictability. No, I think how that plan is structured becomes really important. And I do have some concerns that the current structure is more top down than it should be. And provided in my comments, so it's intentionally a provocative alternative and I recognize it's a somewhat provocative alternative, but that was to sort of do the bookends for the committee to start a dialogue about how local governments and regional planning commissions might be more engaged in that. And that's specifically on this question of the existing settlements, because that's really where these interagency issues can get really, really messy for a small advocate. Don't actually go if I answered your question, just confuse the things. So I follow what you're saying, but I still don't see how what some best practices might be. And I still don't see how you avoid, how any applicant avoids agencies making different determinations. They just sit together and just decide So it would be great if you have one time earlier in the life of Act 250, there was a greater tool for policy coordination between the agencies. That would be a great thing to move back to. And there's always going to be some agency review. I don't want to leave you with the impression that we can totally cut that out. It's more, I'll use the Johnson-Naklefields example because it's really illustrative of that. If that was located in the Village Center, the main intersection in Johnson's Village Center, what that means is that for B-Trans, B-Trans would be looking at different standards for when a turning lane is required because they're also taking into account speed, the built environment, all of those things. That Agency of Natural Resources is looking at a different standard for their setbacks from stream buffers. If they all know that they're gonna be looking at those different standards going in, then the discussion is, how do you meet that different standard as opposed to what standard do we need to meet? And so that cuts off a thing, that for a small applicant creates more predictability because they know it also reduces the potential for the dueling engineer problem that happens, should this be a road we're planning as a true road and therefore we need a turn lane as opposed to is this a road we should be preparing or planning for pedestrians. If that is predictable, if that's defined in the planning process, the opportunity for another engineer representing perhaps a competitor to say, we disagree with B-Trans, on this basic level finding is reduced. So what I'm getting is the Act 250 is the agencies which have different things that they're applying and they should be looking at the thing as opposed to their agency. So then maybe the question, you said something like, it's a standard that they apply and then different two questions they would ask, well, wouldn't the question they would ask be, how can we get this project happening? Not what standard they apply because they have three different standards. One's looking at where the turn lane should be looking at the crossing of deers. Right, no, no, no. The agency of Act can provide exceptions if it is something that makes sense. And when you think about farms, think about how many years ago farms were built in many instances and think about where the rules and laws are today as far as restriction. So that's why there's this little flexibility that the agency of Act has to make meaningful and thoughtful decisions on its own. So I'll talk about that and that's in the article. So we talk about management and we talk about structures. We talk about farms and how the agency of Act regulates. So essentially, I'll go through the management stuff first and then I'll go into the structure. So first thing, these rules apply to everybody. So keep that in mind. Who they do not apply to is if you lived in, just make an example of, if you lived in the city of Burlington and your neighbor had a pig in their backyard, we do not deal with your pig, right? However, if your pig is in the Manuski River causing a problem, we could deal with your pig. So we work with the town to decide if it's a water quality issue, we can take the lead. If it is not, and it's just a property parcel in Burlington and it butts all other parcels, no water nearby, and they just don't like the pig. We are not going to intervene. That's a local decision on managing nuisance and other factors that might come with that situation. So when we recently wrote the RAPs, what term you use, backyard farming, is often, some people can relate to that in some way, is not what you need to say that greatly. It's we regulate farming as defined. So anyone who is farming can apply too. And in the backyards, the town can come up with what they need to. Because by definition, the backyard farm doesn't fall under the RAP, so therefore they can regulate it. So anyway, so when you look at these, stacking manure, you cannot stack manure in a place where water's going to end in deep. And whatever term you want to say, there's a floodway, which is where when the river's high and it's moving fast, it's going to move in this area, the floodway. And when it's spreading out and it's going slower into the flood plain, that area as well. So in any of those areas, you cannot stack manure. You also can't stack compost. You can't stack through processing residuals material that is a waste you can't put there. And then as far as nutrient management, so all of these farms need to have a nutrient management plan, which is the phosphorus, nitrogen, and potassium allocations for the crops. They need to meet the crop uptake. They cannot apply an exceedance where therefore it's no longer useful. So when you think about flood plains, you've got to take soil tests, you've got to figure out what crop you're going to need, you've got to figure out what it needs, and you need that requirement. In addition, that's on all your land, but in your flood plains, you also have more restrictions on when you can apply manure. So the goal that we looked at in the science is a lot of the flooding does occur in the shoulder seasons, right? Not always during the main cropping season. A lot of the spring flooding or even currently, we're probably going to have, we're in flood season in some areas, but there's a lot of ice in the river and it's going to back up. During these times of year, you cannot spread manure on fields or any other waste on fields, unless you get an exemption for us for an emergency situation, which may be instances, and of course we wouldn't choose the flood plain as your first place, right? We would find another place that's more suitable on your farm or a neighboring farm. First, we try and find another storage for where you could put that so you don't put it on the land at all. So, no one should be out there, basically, unless there's a real bind, which I've never seen a situation where we've had to go to the flood plain as a solution. So, beyond that is, we can also then require additional requirements so that the spreading band for the winter applies to everybody. And in flood plain, it's a wider band. So, it starts in October and it goes all the way into mid-April. So, understanding that if you have a farm and you have some flood plain, you need to make sure you address that so that you have capacity to be able to do the other lands later. You cannot wait until the very end of the shoulder seasons to spread manure in the flood plains. It's restricted, right? To give them more protection, to make sure that there's more growth with the crop that's there and incorporation. If you do, in the regular season where you are allowed to put manure, for instance, on a flood plain, you have to incorporate it or inject it pretty immediately so that it is not on the surface sitting there. And that's been in place for a very long time, that restriction. We, in the last RAPs, put a lot of additional restrictions in what I like to call them, sort of, you should have known better, actions. If it's really saturated or if it's full of snow and anyone looking at it goes, if you actually spread anything on that, it will run off. There's no question, right? That is where, and we've had instances, which prompted some of this, where we needed to take enforcement and have a clear rule that said you should have known better. So those are as well in the rule. So if somebody is actively operating on a flood plain and they knew that there was a high level of risk and it was well known, that could be something that we could enforce on if there was an instance of water quality. Any questions on the newer application and storing of waste? Courtney, what do you mean by frequently flooded land? So that is a term that we came, so a statewide, all soils are mapped. Then they have this classification of frequently flooded, occasionally flooded. You know, there's a designation based on the soil type and where it generally falls in the landscape. And that is the designation that we use as frequently flooded based on those NRCS soil maps. So if you look at your farm, you can turn on that layer and then you can turn on the frequently flooded layer. And that's the layer that we use for that regulatory standard. So in typically what my experience is, it's a hundred year flood plain. So, okay, so buffers and setbacks. The agency of ag requires on any river, a 25 pound. Actually, I'm going back a little for a second. So can you explain nutrient management plans? Like they're not actually designed to reduce, they're not designed to improve water quality. They're designed to maximize output while minimizing cost of inputs. No, they were originally born many, many moons ago for crop production. That part's true. I mean, the fallacy is that since then, there have been more tools that have been piled into what you have to do to build a plan and those are all water quality tools. So like an example would be the phosphorus index. It's all about water quality, that entire tool. So it's about how far away is the water? What type of management are you doing such that the proximity and likeliness that nutrients could get to water would happen? So that whole tool is looking at soluble phosphorus and particulate phosphorus and how it transports and whether the risk of transport is higher or low given all the activities that you were doing. So, well, yes, the idea of applying nutrients and thinking about crops is core, part of it. The water quality and risk assessment tools that are inside of it, the erosion tools, the phosphorus nutrient tools, those are all very specific to water. So that has definitely been something that I've heard people argue and I just want to be really clear, they are really much at this point with the technology and innovation and research water quality focused. I guess I also have a couple more questions. You're talking about manure, can you use chemical fertilizers in these annually flooded places? I mean, it said the term is actually manure or other ag waste, which can include all of those items. So it's really, it's a pretty broad spectrum of things that you cannot be spreading in these areas. So it really doesn't need a fertilizer in any type? It could mean, it could be waste feed, right? It's a very broad term to say you really shouldn't be putting anything in these areas. So it includes chemical fertilizers. And then this is just because I know we've been promoting no-till in these kind of areas, does glyphosate have phosphorus in it? It's a very miniscule amount such that it isn't something, as far as like the operations on the dairy farm should be considered as far as a major risk factor. But it has it in it. Glyphosate. Representative Morgan. Some farms are very large and they're not easily seen from the road. Who monitors, how is it monitored to see that these rules are being followed? Sure, that's our job. We have 11 inspectors that go out on these farms. Traditionally what we're talking about here is mostly dairy farms or large-scale vegetable production farms. All of them either fall under a certification or a permit by us and we have requirements in statute that tell us how often we at minimum have to get there. So you have the right to just stop it and say you're gonna walk your backfields along the river and see if you have fences, buffers, et cetera. Which might be a little more respectful than that. But you can do that. Yes, yes. We give people a call and let them know. We want them to join us so that they can see what we see, so that they can correct what we see if we see something wrong. Representative Dola. Just another question about nutrient management planning. Does nutrient management planning is it tied to the phosphorus in the soils so that if you reach a certain threshold in nutrients within the soils, it may affect your application of manure even during the post-winter spreading where farmers trying to manage their manure after storage for so many months. Would that nutrient management plan limit the application of it in areas that have high amounts of phosphorus? Or does it say that you can re-estimate the amount of uptake that phosphorus can handle? Can you help us a little bit? Yeah, these are very detailed nuances that I'll give you a big picture. So that we can have some confidence in the nutrient management planning process to help manage the nutrients. So essentially the phosphorus index, if we get back to that tool, you put in all your different management. And the output might be because your soil levels are so high in phosphorus that you cannot apply more phosphorus because you have what you need to grow the crop that you said you were going to grow and therefore it'll give you a big red square at the top and say no, which means you cannot apply any nutrients. So you can try and look and see, well, okay, well, what if I did something different? Can I get it out of that no box? And then you actually have to implement that. And that's what we check. We look at your plan, we look at what you're doing in a farm, we look at your records and see are you following that plan. But there certainly are several farms in the state of Vermont due to historic management in the past where one farm has bought the farm next door and they know that they can't apply manure at all to that one farm. That's not the case by previous land owners. So that is a real thing. It cuts you off and says no. In the RAPs, we also put that if your soil test level starts to get above 20 parts per million, you have to have a drawdown strategy. There is some science, but there is no guarantee that just because your soil is high, it actually means you're polluting. It could very well stay in place, but we still want to think about the risk reduction. So while you may not get a red block saying stop, you can't add any more in that instance, we still want you to do something. So we've added an additional state layer to say you need to think about a reduction strategy, which may be cutting your manure applications back, trying different methods of setbacks, for instance. So there's a whole lot of tools that people can use. They put it all in here and it spits out what the outcome would be. But it is a real thing and it does happen that these farms, it's not widespread, but it is real that it will shut you down. We'll just keep you from adding more phosphorus so you could still grow. Absolutely. You could till in an annually flooded land. You can, I mean most, what I've seen with some folks is they're more mindful of that you can till in those lands and they may till to plant, but they won't till in the fall because they don't want it loose. So they'll have more gully erosion or scour, which it doesn't help them at all and they recognize that. The one thing I've noticed about people who manage flood plains, they're a lot more cognizant of their management actions. They think about it. They engage with us a lot more in conversations about it. Because it is, I mean when you live near a river, you know it and you watch it. And you've now had the experience with it. Representative McCullough. So I appreciate your comment that that there's very small amount of phosphorus and glycophate and I'm not doubting that, but what I don't understand is what that amount is or the best way to compare it is would it be by pounds of the total product? But I'd like to know what I'd like to have that statement quantified. Additionally, I need to better understand the role of the phosphorus in glycophate. Does it have a short half-life as well because it facilitates the active ingredient getting into the plant, so that it pretty much within a matter of hours is not in the soil anymore and it's in the plant. And I think that'll help us better understand if the glycophate actually, even though it may be a small amount of phosphorus, may be some kind of small things make a big difference and I'd like to know how that would overlay on a farm nutrient management plan with a red block up in the corner. No more phosphorus, please. So if you guys just kind of poke carry and you may have that information of your own. We do, we have some information we've already developed and I will get to that, but right now I don't want to. No, not now, no, no, no. I mean, this question has come up multiple times throughout the years and we've answered it. It could be just a little catalyst that's insignificant, but we need to thank you. That's okay, education's good. So I'll go back. So buffers, which in the regulations just have to be at least grass. You can also do trees. There is something in statute that says if we require a farm to plant trees, we have to buy an easement. So there's a distinction there that these rules say you have to plant grass at the very least. We have programs that if people voluntarily want to plant trees, we obviously help them and facilitate that and that's called the CREP program or Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program. So 10 foot on a ditch, 25 foot on a surface water and if we feel like those are insufficient, the agency of Ag, we have a whole tool that we built that'll run through the matrix, take all the data, the management field in and consider should it be wider. So if we have a concern that we think it might be wider or it needs to be wider, we can run that tool and we have the ability to tell the farm it needs to be wider. Of course, they have appeal rates and we'd go through that whole process as well. That is built in. And then as far as managing stream banks themselves, the RAP, so we spent a lot of time when we were revising the RAPs two times ago, three times ago, geez, which is actually fairly recent. I know we've changed them every year for the last couple of years. I want to say this is probably in 2014, maybe, if memory serves me right. We worked and spent a lot of time with DEC River Management Program. So you'll meet Mike Klein this afternoon from that program to make sure that what we were doing for agriculture was consistent. So in a town, National Flood Insurance Program, for instance, is a really important program for towns, especially Vermont, given our conditions of flooding and being built on top of a lot of river systems. Agriculture, because that zoning piece is with, not always with the town, we do our best to make sure that farms first comply with the town, but if there's an instance where they can't, the agency of AG and our decisions to issue a variance cannot put a town out of NFIP standards, right? So we worked together with rivers to make sure that if we're going to approve something, it can be done based on all the river science. So for instance, if somebody needed to, they had a barn that had burned down and they were trying to rebuild a portion of it, but historically had been built in this area, but they wanted to, when they built it, they wanted to change the design at the end so that the back end of the barn was a little bit different. Technically, they're going to have to do an entire study of the river to make sure that they don't rise the river during that process of changing that floor plan of that barn. And so any foundational infrastructure that might be within the floodplain, you need to prove that you're not going to basically mess up the floodplain, right? And so that is an expensive process. We've only had two instances that I've seen it come up as a question. One was a barn fire up in the Northeast Kingdom and the other was some work down in the river Delta with green houses at the time, but we worked through that. So you have to do a really, it's a pretty intense study to understand whether you would rise the river at that cross section of the stream based on the work that you're doing in the footprint. So it tends to be costly, the farmers are responsible to do that work. So you just don't see that much activity in that realm, but that is the standard that is there, is that if you want to try and, if it makes sense and we approve it because it is the most sensible thing to do and there is no other alternative that then it bears to the farmer to make sure that they do that work to prove that it can be done and if it cannot be done, then it cannot be approved. If they want to work on stabilizing a stream bank itself, so if the river's cutting in, there are sort of two types of projects that I see come in this realm. One is coming at property infrastructure, right? Which our natural reaction as citizens is to protect whatever infrastructure there is, right? Whether it's the city of Montpelier or a barn. And so in order to protect that stream bank from coming farther at it, you have to go through and make sure that you meet all the technical standards and work with your DEC, ADCA bag, and USDA in many instances to ensure that it is done appropriately. Because the last thing you want is one for it to fail, but you also have to make sure that you don't mess up the rest of the river system. If it's just cropland, they couldn't do that process. It's less likely that they would receive any financial support in those instances. But the alternative that I've seen in the past, because it is a property, it is property interest in their land, it is their crop production. It is something that is worthy of protection from that standpoint of view. But we try to work with the farms to explain we have other programs that look at a more holistic approach, which is that river is moving because something else is pushed on it, right? And maybe it's the city infrastructure that then redirected the stream towards the stream bank. If the landowner is okay with it, the idea of letting that river carve a little bit more or giving it more flood plain access and basically buying an easement on some of that land to give the river that access is a program that we work with DEC to create. So it's a river corridor easement program. And typically what we'll do is we'll overlay that crack tree planting program with that easement program and try and create more of a natural habitat and let the river find its balance rather than trying to protect the river and then move the problem further downstream. Representative Lefebvre. Thank you. Whatever you want to call it. Different to Rental Rains we've been having the last couple of years. I'm wondering if the 100 year watermark is still a reliable benchmark in terms of how high you know the water ought to come given whatever season. It seems to me in flux, it seems to me in change. I guess basically it's related to how the climate is changing. I'm wondering how you adjust it or how you kind of still use it. So my recommendation would be you should talk to the USGS. They manage a lot of this data. All the monitoring stations are USGS stations and a lot of that work and data into the flood areas is also done by them in conjunction with FEMA. We then rely on what they do. And so I can't speak to say that but the tools that we've started to look at and I was explaining this the other day, the whole system is dynamic by nature. It's a river system and it's moving because it's where water is going. To have a fixed map to say this is where that line is will never be static because it does move. In rivers like the Connecticut sometimes and some portions of it it's a little more static because it's dam controlled and has been that way for quite a while. But there are no magic layers. Even the FEMA layer, the property I previously owned, they said we were in a flood plain and we were 20 feet high above the highest mark. The math is just wrong and you do a letter of math amendment and you do this whole process to get out of any intensive concerns. So there's the back way to re-correct everything that every example has. There is no magical and so we do our best to use these maps as the regulatory lines but then we all, no matter what you're doing and even if you were thinking about it in Act 250, there will never be a bright line where you could say this is where this falls because it will be dynamic and change. There's LIDAR which is a way that you can take imagery of the ground and it will bounce back and reflect so it'll give you some topography so that you can see it. It can help you sort of understand where the river might go based on elevation but even that as you start, we were trying to do this when we were trying to build these RIPs to try and figure out how can we find a good math layer or create a good math layer to be clear because farmers wanted to know. Like do not tell me that you'll come, let me know after the fact where that line should have been. They wanna know upfront that you're building water behind something and getting the flood plain getting bigger and wider and you think about going from hardwick to the lamoil outlet. There's a lot going on in that system that you just can't predict it especially in these flood plain areas. And all it takes is one break away and everything changes from that point down. So with increased rain and with increased activity, I think that has certainly played out a bit more in some instances, especially as some of the policies have changed over time to not excavate in the river as much as once was 50 years ago. Those activities, many, many different management activities have led us to a different space between climate change and management and now it's everything is, you know, the goal of the state DEC is, and Amy's supporting this through this RAP processes, try to be as natural as we can to find a new balance rather than to continue to put band-aids and shift the dynamics. Is that included acquiring land or sort of in a river that does flow in banks? It's kind of, it's not going to, you know, basically have an economic, well, that's what we tried to create programs. So you'll learn what a river corridor easement is, which is essentially a river is going to move in some fashion, right? And the best predict, the tool that they use is just to say free belt widths, which is how wide is the stream, take three of those on the side and three of those on that side and draw a line. You know, there's a lot of science behind getting there and you've got to somehow simplify things, you know, to really quite amount, all cannot be hydrogeologists in trying to figure where the line exactly should be to develop the program, but you can figure out that generally the river in the next hundred years is probably likely to be in here at some level. And so with farmers, what we will coordinate with DC and our CREP program is they'll essentially buy the ability for channel management rates. So it's essentially that whole flood plain says you can't, if they voluntarily choose it, you cannot put rip rap anywhere along. You know, let the river go and as the river goes, the river takes your land and you've been compensated for your channel management rights. So that's the kind of program that we've been working to implement. We've done a number of projects. We do it also with the River Conservancy and BLT because they hold the easements to make sure that this stuff is steward and future. But we've done quite a few of those projects, especially in some of these much more dynamic spaces where again, farmers are aware of the conflict and will actually bring projects to us naturally, but we also have significant. I have a representative Bates and then representative Lillian, that's the question. So I have a question I visit, I frequent a stream that cuts a cattle pasture right in half and cows are out there and everything. So how does the state manage that? Cause it flows right into the Wulumzak. So I'm just kind of curious about all this manure spreading and phosphorus and everything. So how do you keep that from going to the Wulumzak? Sure. So the standard and trying to write a rule for every situation is always a challenge. But the standard is that if those cows are creating such an impact that the stream banks are eroding and they're not just crossing and crossing and it's causing a real mess, that we can enforce on. One of our challenges, and if you've gone up into the hills and think about, I always think about Orange County, so I just hiked a lot there doing lifestyle exclusion work as we call it. Putting fences, trying to design fences in some of those areas there or in Addison County is a bear. You can't draw a straight line through the woods, right? And but the pasture itself may actually include a ton of that. So trying to be thoughtful and saying, you don't have to fence every square inch that a cow might have access, but may not actually be able to physically get there because there's so much vegetation or other things that are in the way. It's flat. But if it's flat and it's open, we have programs that we can help people get into these spaces if it becomes such that they are truly causing a problem and it's chewing it up and especially overgrazing can often cause that where they're coming in and out and the density of animals is really a challenge. But if you've got 10 acres and one animal, that's a small animal, you're not gonna cause a big issue for the cost benefit of if you had 100 animals in a very small size. That's what we're talking. Yeah, so we should probably talk so that we can find out more about that site. It's a good fishing stream by certain parts of it where they don't cross. They cross all over the place, so. Yeah, they've got to have defined crossings and they've got to manage the vegetation and the erosion on the stream bank. If those things cannot happen, we can stop them. Okay, thanks. So we tried to build it that way so that there was some flexibility for sites that it just didn't make sense because actually some sites can be painful and it's remarkable with a few animals having still access. But when you get your density up, it gets to be a problem. All right, thank you. I've done the fuller. So I understand some years ago we prohibited birming to protect agricultural fields from flooding, not just the rivers, but the branches that feed the river and we did that because that practice had been done. Is there a program that helps take those berms away for the obvious purpose of allowing inundation flooding to occur to reduce damage damage? So I strongly encourage you to ask Mike Klein more about this because at this point, birming, there may be instances where they allow it. It's their program, right? Okay. We do not regulate that. If someone said to us, we would like to burn, we would say, you need to go talk to Keith. Okay, good. We'll be talking with him. So, yeah, certainly, but there might be instances where protecting downstream or something. There may be some other situation about the site that it may make sense. And I do know that there was a site after Irene that the berm blew out in Irene and they were able to put it back. So it just all depends on the situation, I think. But as far as removing the berms, again, talk to Mike Klein, but we've worked with agricultural property owners. There's some old railbeds that are out there that obviously would impact the flood plain, not having full access to the site. And they've definitely done projects where they'll remove or lower the railbed to be able to create more connection to the flood plain. So, you know, those are the type of activities that obviously are really good for water quality. One of the big things in the TMDL is a stream bank balance and trying to get there. And so some of those clean water fund dollars have been used to these projects when they've been identified. And just, we're done on it, but I just want to say I understand that those berms were done with really, it's not any kind of a, in a, yes. There's an evolution. Yeah, that's fine. It's all gone through. Thank you. So, you're not quite finished. Yeah, so basically, if you want to do anything on a stream bank, you know, you need to make sure you follow standards. If you want to do any kind of stream crossing, like a bridge or a Goldberg replacement, you need to communicate with DDC. There's levels where if the watershed is very small, you don't need to report, but if the watershed starts to get bigger, you do need to report. But no matter what, you need to meet basic minimum good practices as you do it. So that is all stuff. You should definitely engage with DDC, but that's where we wrote our RAPs to say you've got to follow the DDC requirements and work in relation with that. And then, so the last one here is the zoning piece. And I've talked a little bit about that, but you know, essentially, we can't put infrastructure in these sensitive areas unless you can show that you're not going to impact that flood stage, right? So they call it a no rise study, is it a general term? And then where you may not be in, you know, this broad floodplain area, but you're near like a small stream that might come through. Because one of the things in Vermont that we'll see is that even small streams coming out of the hillside can do a lot of damage, even though they may not actually flood, right? Which is that so much topography slope, they can still erode and carve which of these colluvial roads in the hazard areas. Staying away from any stream bank is a priority of ours for any infrastructure because we don't then want you to protect it after the fact. So if we can be preventative up front for new infrastructure, we do that. For add-ons to additional structures, we really try and look at it and think is that necessary. So that's the process. We have a team of the agency that'll go through and review the applications. We connect intentionally with the town because we're going through this process. Because no matter what a farmer does, even though the agency of ag can issue them an exemption, they have to tell the town what to do. And the purpose of that is so the town is the one, again, they're responsible for their flood insurance. And they can tell them this is potentially in a floodplain. You need to be aware of that, right? They can have that first level of communication. We've had instances where, you know, people do it, it's not a judgment of a farmer or not a farmer, but started to develop something and did some excavation in the floodplain. And we were notified that they didn't go to the town first. You know, we went through our enforcement process to address this, because that is the requirement, is you have to communicate with your town on step one. They had to stop all construction. They had to cease everything, because you cannot get into that situation when you're compromised for insurance. And there was an alternative and it wasn't done. They didn't do the study, you know, so like those things are where we're able to step in and say, it's not okay. So, there's a lot of restrictions in here as far as how to manage floodplains. And you know, obviously for us, it's an important space because it's really good production, typically. So there's an interest and that's where our fertile land is, is these older floodplains and the newer ones as well. But it's obviously a dynamic space and to be sensitive to water quality, to be sensitive to erosion and other downstream impacts, we tried to build these rules so that we could accommodate all of those things and work it easy to do it a lot of way. Representative Taranzino. Yeah, Laura, how many dairy farms are left in Vermont? The Count, pardon me, Diane, Bob, Phil and Ron, Aging State of Agriculture, as of February earlier this week, 697 commercial dairies, cow dairies, down from 700 in January, so three, between January and February. Awesome, three. So I'm struggling to understand how we're managing the production of annual crops in flooded areas that are on impaired waters. And so I'm sort of looking at this. I guess, can you give me a sense of how much land is in that situation where they're actually doing an annual crop on an impaired water that's in a location that's annually flooded frequently? So let me say one thing before I answer that. I also forgot to mention that in these flood plains, they have to cover crop, if they're growing an annual crop. So that's a new requirement. Or at least if they're growing some crop that can't be cover crop, there's a timing of it, they have to leave a 30% residue over the winter so that it is protected. Of the annual crop. Yeah, so if you're growing some other type of crop that doesn't get harvested, so like some corn can get harvested for grain. So leave a lot of the debris, they'll take the crop, but leave a lot of debris. So that way it's protected. So that was the requirement that we changed in the last one. So trying to keep year-round protection on these sites so that you have some for all time that's connected into the soil and building soil health. But as far as the identification of the number of acres, we could try and review that exercise. I don't have that data and I don't think we've touched it because the popping changes on a regular basis. So we have looked at studies looking at basically, the farm has so much that it needs based on the feed that it's come up with and the balance that it has, but it may flip completely between corn and hay. So to be able to one day snapshot in time, all that data is provided to the USDA. And I've tried, I had to go to Fort Collins to get that data at that mass level, which isn't easy, it's a long process. So we sort of just didn't, we didn't worry about that. We said focus on everywhere just do a better management job rather than dealing with trying to figure out the specifics because it is so dynamic. As soon as you know the answer, it's going to be changed. I don't know if that's helpful to you, but you know, overlaying impaired streams, obviously some say impaired for a bit longer, but those, I mean, like are my like, you know, Champlain, I guess I'm trying to get a sense of it. I mean, it seems like we're trying to get phosphorus out, but we're putting it in at the same time when we do this. And then we heard testimony two couple of Fridays ago about farmers sort of realizing that it wasn't as productive an area as they thought it would be, or they changed and sort of voluntarily moving out of those areas, but you know, we're trying to clean up the waters. And I just, in our time with having lands that obviously if they're annually flooded, they're going to be polluting that water. And if it's impaired, how do we address that? Well, so there's another backstop that does exist. So with USDA, you know, if you have insurance on your crop, if you were in a flood plain and it actively is flooding and causing damages, emergency conservation programs, what they used to call it, I don't know, I'm starting to state myself that I'm losing track of the program names, but you get three strikes. So if you come to say, I need assistance in this field because the river has done something to scour majorly, you know, it's bad enough that, you know, we've got an issue. By the third time you ask for it, they do not help you. For crop insurance. The amount of payment that they would give you in the assistance it's tied to your crop production and the insurance that you've gotten. So they've got a model there that they've built that says basically three strikes in your out. And so a lot of the programs, and so for instance, think about the wetland protections that have happened to a lot of these lands that have had low productivity, major flooding problems, can no longer get any support to help protect that site because it isn't worth it essentially as, you know, what USDA has sort of said in that instance, they come into these other programs where they're, you know, we've got thousands of acres protected in wetland reserve program right along the rivers down in the Addison-Rutland border because of those types of situations where the flooding is so intense and the productivity and the yields were so low, but it didn't make sense and the farmers acknowledged that. So there is a level of protection that exists amongst the programs themselves to make sure that, you know, we aren't just continually throwing resources in something that isn't functional. And farming, of course, you know, the work it takes to do that, it isn't as well functional to them. So I don't know that I would say either, you know, just we're just loading phosphorus in these areas, annual flood plains is one term, you know, and I think you have to be careful with what are you talking about because there are 100 year flood plains and they're annual year flood plains and they are very far apart in terms of the timing of which they might, and a flood act might happen. And so to work on managing within those lands, I think it's really important to make sure that you're clear because the impact of potential nutrient loading is very different based on the flooding information. And then I just, I'm wondering, we often get questions from constituents on slug spread and can you just remind us what the notification requirements are for that? So I encourage you to talk to DEC, but my understanding is there's very few sites. I want to say somewhere between three and five, there's very few that actually do that in the state of Vermont on agricultural lands. And they regulate that from the nutrient management plan to the activity, to the timing, to the monitoring. They do all of that. Where we have farms that are taking crops throughout the land, the farms need to report the import of that information in their N and P, but it is a separate management of the sludge versus the farm. That's something. Oh, I just, I'm pleased with the discussion you're asking some really good questions and most of them have good answers. And this one, you know, it's from the sludge. That isn't an agency of ag program. That's a program that DEC runs. And, but what Laura was just saying was that even though there is some phosphorus and nutrients going on to that property through the sludge, it has to be accounted for in a nutrient management plan. So. To DEC side, they make sure they do monitoring and testing and reports that. Yeah, but you also do, because all nutrient management plans are under your program, right? Sure, but a lot of times what the situation will be is that the farm might be only responsible to plant corn and harvest corn, but they don't do any nutrient applications. So therefore it would just solely be a DEC situation. Because a lot of times you're not adding manure and sludge, right? I don't think I've ever seen that. And I don't, honestly, I don't know the DEC rules well enough to know that whether that is even allowed to have an additional nutrient source added to where they're already doing sludge management. Maybe you're restricted to just sludge management, which maybe why I've never seen that. Sadly a question for DEC. Do you have one more question? Yep, I do. And actually not much question for you or Diane, but a comment just to build on the paradigm of annual crops in our alluvial soils. You've heard me talk about that at the joint hearing several weeks ago. And we aren't gonna regulate our way out of that, but paradigm changes I believe need to happen. And yes, I totally understand. You go to Fort Collins, the results you're gonna get are gonna be four years old and they were a snapshot in time then. And some of my favorite farmers have rotated their crops twice since then. And I get it. But I think we just need to make incentives. For different crops in there, total adjustable nutrients of legumes are actually higher than they are from corn. I understand why we do corn, just the same. But by volume, we need to switch that practice and I'm just whatever into the future. These practices need to change and we hope there wouldn't be a regulatory thing for the future. Yeah, I definitely encourage. Talk to some farmers that manage some flood plain land. I think they'll get some really interesting testimony on what choices they make and why they make them. They're very thoughtful about that. Of course they are. Of course they are. And I've got several personal friends that are doing that and they're doing a great job under the paradigm today. But if you drive from the West Coast to Montpelier or along any waterway, of course we're raising our annual crops in the most arable, level, fertile grounds that we've got. And those by definition are what we're doing. Thank you very much. I know. And that would include grow crop vegetables. But yeah, it absolutely does. Absolutely does. As well. Absolutely. We talk a lot about dairy today, the majority, and if you were starting to regulate produce because of the Food Safety Modernization Act and those produce growers that are over 500,000 and for sales have to be fully regulated. And we find they're all in those lands. Oil lands. Oil lands. That's the most for all. Anything of size and scale are in those lands. And I think the challenge is the only map layer you have is a hundred year flood plan on there. Really. Everything else is an estimate. There is no annual flood plan later. It doesn't exist. So trying to figure out especially what's in between there, there's certainly soil layers. But soil layers are the three acre scale when you come to mapping them. They're not accurate. The fluvial version hazard and the belt width concept, like I said, Mike Klein can talk a lot more about that for you. There's a lot of science behind it. But again, it's dynamic and it's moving and all it takes is an Irene to shift some of that stuff in some instances. So there is no wonderful magic tool to be in this space for regulatory purposes. There are good guidance practices, good management recommendations that people can work with. But to have a bright line where you say that's not allowed because of this, it is more difficult to find that space. Thank you. OK. Quick question. And we have to move on to this. Maybe if you want to get back to me on this. But I'm curious to know if we are building to a standard given that we're vulnerable to climate. And we want to make sure that agricultural production is as resilient as it can be to future flooding. I've learned that some states have adopted, have avoided what they call technical paper, TP40, which is the 1950s document for determining whether your engineering standards are built to a 25-year flood. But relying on TP40 is 1950 data. And so it's already may not be the best most current information for helping when you're building structures, farming structures, whether it's a manure pit or silage-leashate control, whether you're building it towards a manner that helps to ensure resilience. Yeah, so what are we doing in the state of Vermont? So it's somewhat different than floodplain management, because again, you most likely aren't able to build these structures in the floodplain. But as far as climate change and thinking ahead about when we design infrastructure, NRCS is who we, which is the federal partner of the Agency of Ag, who we rely on to make the standards. All of those standards are right now being revised to include new rainfall, which means that storages are going to get bigger, farmers are going to have more water and management there of it. So that's the reality is that those numbers have gone up and they're adjusting it. So the technical engineering standards are all being revised. And what's your time frame? You'd have to ask. Rob Achilles, I don't know. But it's either currently developed and about to be rolled out or still in that development process. And we should wait for that in your mind, because some states have adopted their own time sheet. In our rules, it says you must meet the current NRCS standards. So it'll naturally just when it rolls out, it rolls out. Thank you. It'll be the regular standard. Thank you very much. And thank you for providing this, the English summary. The English summary is great, right? It's funny to read it from the US, how bureaucratic we are. Very helpful. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Great. Next up is Mr. Koster. Sorry. Good morning. Good morning. I'm Billy Koster. I'm the director of planning for the Vermont Agency and Natural Resources. Thank you very much for coming in here to speak to the critical resource area of provisions of your committee bill on Act 250. I'm going to spend most of my time talking about that piece of the bill. But I'll give you just a real brief overview of the Agency and Natural Resources and our work in Act 250. And our statutory party to Act 250, that means that by law, any Act 250 application that implicates the natural resources criteria, we have the ability to participate as a party. So we review all Act 250 applications that are filed with district commissions around the state and assess whether there are significant natural resource impacts proposed. If so, we put comments into Act 250 district commissions suggesting how to minimize and mitigate those impacts. We also are required by statute to provide technical assistance to the Natural Resources Board and its district commissions. That's codified in the Natural Resources Board, Rule 21. So we will occasionally get specific requests from district commissions to address questions that they have for some of the applications that are before them. So that's a separate role that we play beyond being a party. As you likely know, the agency consists of three departments, the Department of Environmental Conservation, which is the primary regulatory body, the Fish and Wildlife Department that does a number of things from regulatory outreach and addressing our game species, and the Department of Forest Parks and Recreation, that is our largest land manager of state forest parks and focuses on the forestry sector and increasingly on outdoor recreation. Staff from all three of those departments participate in a review of Act 250 applications. Each of those departments have regulatory review staff that play their own unique role in looking at activity projects. And that review is all coordinated through my office, the Office of Planning. And we push applications materials out to the agency. We consolidate their review comments. We make sure they are consistent across the agency. And then we work directly with applicants and district commissions in the review of those projects. As you know, the agency also has our own regulatory jurisdiction primarily through DEC. The issue permits addressing impacts to things like surface water, wetlands, stormwater, rivers, a whole range of media. And you've already heard from staff from the Fish and Wildlife Department testifying on this bill. We'll hear from folks from the river's program, lair chair tomorrow, and likely others from our agency. But this is just a reminder that we all are under the umbrella of A&R and work together in review of Act 250. And we play a similar role in reviewing section 248 petitions before the Public Utility Commission. So we're probably the most active city agency in Act 250. And we take great pride in that. It's a really important part of the state's regulatory landscape. It is a gap filler in some ways. And we really rely on it, especially to protect fish and wildlife resources. And I apologize. I'm just getting to the point of my life where I'm having these reading glasses. So I'm trying to figure out how to do that and talk to people at the same time. So your committee bill does a number of things, as you're likely aware. It proposes changes to jurisdiction of Act 250, which controls when Act 250 review is triggered, changes to the criteria, which is kind of what things you're looking at, where the substantive considerations that are being made when Act 250 is reviewing a project that proposes changes to the board structure, appeals, a whole host of things. And the critical resource areas is primarily, in my view, a jurisdictional piece. It impacts when Act 250 jurisdiction would come into play, when district commissions would review different sorts of development. And I also want to say right off the bat that I know that this committee in the bill is very interested in forest integrity and addressing issues of forest fragmentation. That's a significant priority for our agency, as well as has been for many years. And I know you'll hear from Commissioner Snyder from the Department of Forest Parks and Recreation probably next week to talk in more detail on that issue. But that is a big priority for us. We acknowledge that Act 250 currently lacks criteria sufficient to address impacts to forest blocks and connecting habitat. If anything comes out of this process, we would like to see criteria allowing Act 250 to review those impacts, because we believe that that's very important. But it's our position that regulatory protections is only one strategy to address forest fragmentation. It's certainly an important one. Other strategies include planning. And we've made good advances in this state around planning for forest integrity. The legislature enacted Act 171 a year or two ago that required regional planning commissions to address forest fragmentation in the regional plans and authorized municipalities to do so. We've seen lots of progress in that regard. And then probably the most significant strategy to address forest fragmentation is the maintenance of a viable forest products industry. If a landowner can own a large block of unfragmented forest and they can harvest that land sustainably and make a revenue off that land, then it's in their financial interest to keep it undeveloped. If the highest investment use of that property maintains sustainable forest management, it's not going to be fragmented for houses. It's not going to be subdivided into other lots. It's going to stay in forest. And we've been very fortunate that we have many landowners in Vermont who have kept their land in that state while the amount of forest has declined slightly in recent years. We still have a significant amount of forested acres. And that is largely the result of these decisions of private landowners to manage their properties for forest products. And we're seeing a real threat to the viability of that sector these days from global influences, but also the loss of a lot of in-state capacity to process those wood products and to value added products. We're seeing a number of sawmills and other processing facilities go out. Seth Jensen testified earlier this morning to you all that in his county several mills have closed recently. So we would really hope, as he suggested, that you look at the impact of actually 50 on those facilities and do what you can to support the forest processing industry, because that's a real key strategy in fighting forest fragmentation. So now I'm going to turn to the definition of critical resource area, which is in your bill. I'm looking at draft 5.2, which I believe is the latest. And that definition is on page 12. And it's short, so I'll just read it. Critical resource area means a river corridor, a significant wetland, as defined under section 902 of this title, land at or above 2,000 feet, and land characterized by slopes greater than 15% and shallow depth of the bedrock. That is a new definition that the bill adds to Act 250. And that definition is used in different ways to trigger jurisdiction. I'm just going to hit on those different applications of the concept and then talk about our view of that and then take your questions. So the first use of that term comes on page 6 of the bill, line 18. And in that provision, the bill effectively establishes automatic and universal jurisdiction for the construction of any improvement for commercial, industrial, or residential use in a critical resource area, including areas above 2,000 feet. So that basically says, if you're doing any sort of construction of an improvement in these areas, Act 250 is automatically triggered. It doesn't look at the scope or scale of the project, the area's impacted. It just says, if those activities are occurring in these areas, Act 250 is automatically triggered. As you've heard from the Natural Resources Board, Act 250 typically is triggered by the size of the parcel, the number of lots, the scope of development. Except for areas above 2,500 feet, then Act 250 is automatically triggered. This critical resource area concept brings that automatic universal trigger to these areas as well. Going on to page 7, critical resource areas are referenced again starting on page 6, excuse me, line 6. And this effectively, this section repeals the exemption for farming, logging, and forestry in critical resource areas and in areas above 2,000 feet. So currently, farming, forestry, and logging are exempt from Act 250 unless they occur above 2,500 feet. This provision would lower that elevation threshold to 2,000 feet and repeal the exemption in the other areas that are included in the definition. And we've done a chair shelving that's asked us to do some mapping to share information with you all about what those elevational breaks look like and how much land is included, say, above 1,500 feet, above 2,000. We're going to get you that information next week. I do have some preliminary numbers. And changing that threshold from 2,500 feet to 2,000 feet adds another 513,000 acres to Act 250 jurisdiction. 513,000 acres. Under the current law, that automatic jurisdiction is triggered at the 2,500 foot level. In all of Vermont, there's only about 190,000 acres above 2,500 feet. So if you drop that threshold to 2,000, you're going to pull in an additional 500,000. That's almost a quadrupling of the area that would be subject to automatic universal jurisdictions. Let's see. And then the last section I'll point out is on page 10 of the Bill, line 1. And this speaks to subdivisions. So the first two jurisdictional triggers are focused on activities, the construction of improvements or logging or farming. This section talks about triggering Act 250 for subdivision. And what this section does would say that Act 250 jurisdiction would be triggered for any subdivision, including dividing one parcel into two. Currently in Act 250, subdivisions trigger review if you're creating more than 10 lots or more in towns that have permanent zoning and subdivision bylaws or six lots or more in towns that do not have those local divisions. So in towns that have planning and zoning, you have to get above nine lots of Trader 250. In towns that don't, you have to get above five lots. This change would trigger Act 250 for just one subdivision if it's in these critical resource areas, including lands above 2,000 feet. And then there's a couple other references throughout the Bill to critical resource areas that require they be considered in an updated capabilities and development map and that regional planning commissions include them in their regional plans. I'm not going to speak to those. Those are suggestions related to the planning provisions of the Bill. So now I just want to kind of go back to the definition itself and talk about some of the components. The first critical resource area in mentions are river corridors. And there was some discussion of river corridors earlier today with the Ag Agency. You'll hear from our rivers program later who can speak in great detail about river corridors. But I guess my point is that as currently drafted, this provision raises some questions because river corridors occupy a portion of land. So if you own, say, a 10 acre parcel that abuts a river and that river corridor extends 50 feet, 100 feet from the river onto your property, is your whole parcel going to be subject to Act 250 jurisdiction if you propose to build on it? Currently, 250 is usually triggered for the parcel, not by portions of. So it's just unclear to us whether, if you have a river corridor on your property, whether you fall into this critical resource area, an Act 250 would be triggered. Or if the intent is that if you're only planning to build on the river corridor, then it's triggered. So that seems like something that warrants some clarification. And I guess another question we have is whether all of Act 250's 10 criteria would apply in those instances. If your main concern here is addressing impacts to river corridors, inundation and full-deal hazards, and that is going to be triggered for something as small as a single-family home or for forestry or for farming in these areas, does that level of development really warrant the full Act 250 review? Or is the intent just to focus on impacts to river corridors? If the intent is just to focus on river corridors, there may be better ways to do that. There exists a state flood hazard and river corridor rule and permit that is required for some forms of development. It's not currently required for development that goes through Act 250, but that's an existing regulatory program, just like our stormwater or our wetlands programs, stream alteration, that could easily be expanded to address these sorts of impacts without having to pull these small areas of development into Act 250. So that's an alternate approach that certainly exists. The second element of the critical resource area definition is significant wetlands. And these are class 1 and 2 wetlands. The state has broken the wetlands into three classes, 1, 2, and 3. Class 1 being really outstanding, significant resources. There's only a handful of those that have been decimated in the state. Class 2 are state significant due to their size or their functions and values. Class 3 are typically smaller, more scattered, and while valuable, they're not regulated by the state. So this focuses on those two more significant classes of wetlands. The same question applies. If you have a significant wetland on your property, does that automatically pull the whole parcel into Act 250 jurisdiction under this approach? Or is it only if you're going to impact the wetland? That's not clear to us. Another issue is that wetlands are dynamic in nature, and they're not accurately mapped currently across the state. So this approach would suggest needing a wetland delineation before you do any form of development to determine whether a class 2 wetland is a significant well is present on your property so that you know whether jurisdiction is triggered. Wetland delineations, well assessments are typically done for larger developments, but not everyone knows they need to do that, especially if you're bringing the threshold down to a single family house. It's not a bad idea to vet properties for wetlands. We certainly support that, but it could create just additional complexity at the very beginning stages of the Act 250 process just to determine if jurisdiction applies. So that's another consideration for you. And then, similarly, we have state statutory protections for significant wetlands. And there's rules that have been promulgated. And we have a robust wetland permitting program that is already reviewing impact savings resources. So it's not entirely clear what the intent of triggering the full, robust Act 250 review if you're really just focused on protecting wetlands, because we have a wetlands program that's intended to do that. And if that program has gaps, we'd certainly be happy to talk to you about how to make it more robust. But it just raises the question of whether the full suite of 250 process and criteria would be necessary if you're really focused on just wetland wetlands. The next piece I'll touch on is areas above 2,000 feet. As I explained, Act 250 currently has automatic universal jurisdiction for areas above 2,500 feet. That would lower that threshold of 500 feet in elevation. And as I said earlier, that equates to about $500,000 and a little more than 500,000 acres. We're doing some additional analysis to determine what of that half a million acres is actually developable or operable for forestry. And we'll try to have that information for you next week. But it's still a significant land area. And this gets me back to the forest fragmentation conversation. Because currently, landowners are able to harvest timber up to 2,500 feet without getting an Act 250 application. And we see very few applications to harvest above that threshold. We get a few every few years. But there's not a lot of timber management that occurs above 2,500 feet. It certainly happens, but it's not a regular activity. So I think most forest owners and managers are not familiar with the Act 250 process. It would be a big change if they had to get an Act 250 permit to manage some portion of that half a million acres. And it could, frankly, be a deterrent for them to do so. And that seems the exact opposite effect that you would like to have in promoting people to keep large blocks of unfragmented forest and active sustainable management. I think requiring people to get Act 250 permits in that half a million acres for forestry could really work in the opposite direction and encourage people to seek a different use of that property. If they're going to have to get an Act 250 permit, you might as well get it for a couple houses while you're at it to do it for your timber operation. So that's just a concern. You might want to talk to forest landowners and the folks that advise them to get a better sense of how much of a hurdle that could be. But we have real concerns that lowering that threshold to 2,000 feet could have the unintended consequence of deterring forest management, which is our best strategy in preventing forest fragmentation. And I think as others testified, elevation is not always the best proxy for sensitivity. I think it's a pretty coarse one. There may be better ways to determine what areas are more vulnerable from a natural resources perspective. And then the last piece that the definition includes is slopes greater than 15% on shallow bedrock. That sounds reasonable. I know that building on steep slopes is can be problematic. Again, I think there are a number of regulatory protections out there through our state storm water program that does address that issue. And I don't really have a strong opinion on that one. But I think, again, it will be a granular analysis that will be necessary at the beginning of the development process to determine if those features exist on the site and whether they would then trigger activity. So in summary, the agency does not support this approach to jurisdiction, largely due to the reasons that I just summarized. We think that there's some confusion about how the river corridor and well pieces would be applied in practice. If the intent is to apply them just narrowly to those resource areas, it would appear other restrictions and provisions of state law already exist that could do that work easily. Dropping the elevation trigger may have significant impacts on the forestry operations in the state, which is a concern of ours. So that is basically the bulk of my testimony today. I think that we're certainly open to discussing alternate approaches to jurisdiction. But as far as the critical resource areas as proposed, it's not something that we think is the way to go. Representative Forgates and Gold. Yeah, I think the fact that you say you're not supporting these changes kind of answers my question. Well, two questions. One is big because, OK, if one thing is possibly one possible change is too large, how would you answer that to make it not too large? And maybe that is the answer of my second question, which is, well, what do you call this? Sure, so if the committee is interested in expanding Act 250 jurisdiction to address sensitive natural resource areas, the proposal we made to the Act 47 Commission, which was the legislative process that went off in the past year or so that Chair Sheldon and Representative were on our recommendation to that commission, was to establish what's effectively a petition process, where through rulemaking, entities of a town, a citizen, a nonprofit, a conservation group, a regional planning commission could propose to the Secretary of Natural Resources that a discrete defined area had unique natural resource values that weren't higher jurisdiction, so that you would not create a blanket increase across the state, but you would go in on a case by case basis and say, this 100 acres is a regionally acknowledged quarter for wildlife. Even a single home developed in this area could have detrimental impacts on those functions and values. We really feel that automatic and universal Act 250 review in this area is warranted. And here's the scientific and planning argument for why that is. There would be some criteria developed that would inform when those areas would be designated or not. I would be referred to a public process where folks could provide comments and then an issue, a decision would be rendered. There's similar models that exist in the state for outstanding resource waters and class 1 wetlands. These are other ways to identify premier natural resources through a petition and designation process that then enjoy higher protection. So that's our current proposal. We're absolutely open to talk with you all and other stakeholders about different ways to get there, but that's our current thing. What would you ever consider, instead of having people, the kind of anyone, has been anyone for monitors only or anyone? That's one question, but instead of having all this pump up going on, wouldn't you have kind of why not make a proposal for which lands in line and get it done once? Because it's not a simple proposition. I think this concept of increasing jurisdiction for active 50 has been discussed as long as I've been at the agency, which is over seven years now, and no one's come up with that silver bullet. And I think we're absolutely willing to continue to talk with people. I know VNRC has been working hard on this issue for many, many years and I think it was scheduled to propose something to you all yesterday. They're going to come in tomorrow to do so. I'm eager to see what they have to say, and that may be a course that we're able to support. But if the goal is to address forest fragmentation and connectivity, we don't currently have the tools to say right now, here are those places in the landscape that are so critical they need enhanced protections. It's not to say that we can't get there eventually, but we don't have that figured out right this second. So our thought is that this petition process lets the areas, creates a process to identify and protect those areas as they are determined to exist on the landscape. Representative Dolan. Good morning. My question was, earlier in your presentation when you talked about the forest products industry, and you had mentioned that you brought up the case where we heard earlier about in the oil that several mills closed. And so you saw that the threat of how to provide for the processing for forest products industry. And you had some ideas on that. I'd be very interested in hearing from you about how Vermont could go about attracting those types of businesses and scale for Vermont that can help support that industry. I don't know if you have ideas now or at some point, but I just wanted to flag that as a follow-up. I can share one idea right now. And I would suggest you wait, hold off until Commissioner Snyder testifies, because I think you will be able to speak to that in a much more complete and eloquent way. But certainly one piece that we have acknowledged could be addressed through Act 250 is restrictions on the time of operation for forest processing facilities. It's increasingly harder with climate change for loggers, truckers to bring forest products out of the woods safely under dry or frozen conditions. And deliver them to mills and processed. Used to be that you could bank on having a nice long winter when you could freeze up your forest roads and move wood nine to five during normal business days. Now with the weather, we've been having this week as a great example. Sometimes you have short windows of safe conditions, and you have to go all night for days to get that wood out and then get your windows. Similarly, during the winter, during the summer, we have lots of rain. Sometimes you may only have a brief dry spell to move wood. And we've seen some mills have restrictions on when they can receive shipments of forest products in their Act 250 permits. And we'd ask you to look at whether there can be some accommodations made for mills to have some reasonable flexibility to work with the weather and not be constrained by hours of operation when they really need to do the work. So that's one simple one, but I'm sure Mike can give you a lot more ideas. Representative McCullough? I'm not wanting to shoot the messenger bill. Appreciate your coming here and giving us a preview, perhaps, of the administration's approach to modifying Act 250. Frankly, that disturbs me. For our natural resource, this planning division to be not supporting critical resource areas, definitions, and exploration of this is quite troubling. I understand you're willing to keep talking, except that happened over the times today. But with that, I'd like you to just take the word back to the sixth floor that the rest of the agencies need to come out of the woodwork and tell us upfront, yes, we're supporting this section, or no, we're not supporting that, or you know what, this has been a great exercise, but thank you, but no, thank you. This committee needs to know. And we need to know in detail. So you've given us some detail. And I appreciate that. I'd like your planning agency to rethink your position that perhaps planning is not as, as I read what you said today, planning is not as good as each little part, deciding do we need to increase our regulations, or we need to look at this a little bit differently. We're talking about a planning document here specifically for the entire state. So that's my pitch. You don't even need to respond. Thank you very much for listening. I just want to respond briefly and say that planning is critical. And I didn't focus a lot on the planning provisions of your committee bill today, but I think certainly doing more to identify where natural resources are in the landscape and inform people in their development decisions and is critical. And I think Act 171 has been very successful in that. It authorized towns and regions to plan for force blocks and connecting habitat. We've developed a whole curriculum and model bylaws for communities to do that work with. And that's happening all across the state. And these issues are being regulated at a local level. And I think that's a great outcome. And I certainly support planning at the statewide level. So I hope I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. I think just the specific language of the critical resource areas that's currently drafted raises some problems for us. This representative would actually be adding some other critical resource areas. Definition scores all the way to the far end is a vernal pool. Is this 250 square foot thing worth protecting? And of course, we have regulations around that at any rate. Thank you. So I guess I'm following up on that. I'm wondering, is it the position of the agency that there are not statewide significant resources that we should be protecting? No, there certainly are. There is statewide significant in African communities. There's also statewide significant wetlands. There's a whole litany of resources that are statewide significant. I think my only comment is that this definition as a jurisdictional trigger has potential issues, unintended consequences. It's not clear how it will be applied to either just that specific location of the entire parcel. What would those resources be? And how would you identify them? I'd have to get back to that because there are a number of resources that through statute and rule have already been designated as state significant. We have a whole ranking system for natural communities that I can get back to you on that one and this class one and two are already considered state significant. So I don't know the answer off the top of my head. I mean, I guess I would just also say that that concept of having things come from the bottom up has been pretty slow on class one wetlands. We have a corridor of protections. It's not something that's proving out to be working that well. And again, absolutely open to talking with folks we're actively engaged with BNRC around this issue right now. How do we come up? Is there a path to increase jurisdiction outside of centers that is workable for all stakeholders? And we're still working on it. My questioning is along that same theme. I was intrigued by your suggestion or identification of alternative models to try to accomplish the same objective. And you mentioned this petition and designation process. Sorry, I appreciate that. Gives us something to think about. I would be interested and maybe you could follow up with us with getting us some of this information. The petition and process that we have in place, if you could provide us some data in terms of how effective it has been in both the wetland class one designation and you mentioned outstanding resource water. How many do we have? The reason why we're kind of concerned is that earlier in this whole process, we heard about climate impacts and how, and we are Vermont and it's various mountain ranges and river systems. How important it is to be thinking about that connectivity issue, about forest blocks and connected habitat and how I think we as a collective in the state are trying to wrestle with that level of live necessary as we think about Act 250 in that next iteration and what that looks like. And the maps I think we're very telling in that much of our landscape as you know is in private land ownership and how important it is to engage the public in embracing that vision of our future being robust and vibrant both ecologically and economically. And so we're struggling with trying to figure out those tools that are going to help us really acknowledge and realize how to bring us forward into aligned in that vision that can protect these forest blocks and connected habitat. So that example is helpful if you have other examples in which we can help acknowledge. And when we get to that whole 2,000 to 2,500, we're fortunate that we have some areas with higher mountain range, maybe not Rocky Mountain version, but certainly our Green Hills are something to embrace. But we recognize in other places in the state we have smaller mountain ranges that may not necessarily even reach that 2,500, but elevation does matter, especially when we're thinking about forest blocks and connectivity. Then I've driven through, I think we all have through the Vermont landscape where we've seen beautiful hills and mountains that with no zoning where they have developed now on the top of the mountain ranges there. And maybe if you think Act 250 is just slowing the inevitable development, that's unfortunate. We want to really be deliberative and those planning processes are critical for us in enabling us to see how again, thinking of forest block and connected habitat throughout Vermont, how important it is for us to be kind of having the tools in place to help us address those challenges. So I'm very much welcome. Your other ideas on how to accomplish those objectives, given the level of that. We'll share those in just briefly. We absolutely support modernizing the criteria to address forest blocks, connecting habitat. We've suggested ways to modernize the floodways criteria to be protective of river corridors and the connectivity that those riparian areas provide. So we share those goals, absolutely. I think this narrow subject we discussed today is a jurisdictional one and I think it just raises some questions for us. And elevation absolutely does matter. What I meant to imply is that 2000 feet is not a magic number. In some communities, you might not ever hit that height but there's ridges and mounds that are significant. Other places 2000 feet is a flat, it's your whole community. It's like Marshfield almost, so that's 500 feet. So it's just picking the number is not always the best way to get there. And our biggest concern with this proposal is the rescinding the forestry exemption in that area between 2000 and 2500 feet. That's what gives us the great cause because that may discourage landowners from doing good forest management in those areas that are appropriate for forestry and may need to conversion to other uses, which is absolutely what we're trying to avoid. Representative Fave. Thank you, Billy. I was very encouraged to hear what you had to say about the forest industry. There's a key role in preventing fragmentation. I certainly see that industry as keeping these small towns and my neck of the woods is viable and I would hate to see any more obstacles put in their way and I would rather have a sense that the two can work hand in hand as far as preventing fragmentation and also having a very healthy forest industry. And I'm hoping that such concepts as location jurisdiction enhance designation, if you will, in these areas will play a role in determining what kind of flexibility we can give in terms of how we relate to the working land. So I was very happy to hear your testimony. Thank you. Pardon? Yeah, I just wanted to make a comment. I'm not sure what the protocol is for witnesses to come in and speak, but I appreciate your candor. I appreciate the issues that you brought up. I appreciate what you're thinking about, the impact of this changes on the working lands. And I think I'm still struggling with the critical resource areas that are out there and understanding what the impact that's gonna have on agriculture and forestry. And so I appreciate the fact that you came and brought that to our attention. Representative Flurgen. Yeah, I just would like to follow up on what Representative Smith said. I see it that we have witnesses in here to give us their opinions on this bill. And this bill, well, this committee bill isn't anything a second stone. It's anything that this committee that I'm aware of has decided this is the way the wording's gonna be. And again, I appreciate the fact that you're receiving your opinions whether we end up agreeing with them or not. That's your opinion. I wonder if you, as a planner, have you put any thought into how we address the sort of cumulative effects of incremental development if we aren't gonna change jurisdictional curves? I have thought about that. I haven't come to any great conclusions. This is a real challenge. How do you create a regulatory structure that can account for that incremental growth that doesn't just kind of swoop in at some point in time? And it's kind of like, there used to be this concept as last person in Act 250 under the transportation criteria where you could build out on a part of a road and the next development that necessitated extracurricular traffic light, they had to pay for all those improvements where it was really the cumulative impact of cars from all that development and the dots of that play that contributed to it. But it was whoever that last developer was who hit that threshold, it was all on them. V-Trans changed that model by charging a small amount from every person along the roadway, anticipating meaning to make future investments and spreading that cost around. But that's harder when you're trying to make land use decisions. So I don't have a good answer to that. It's something that I continue to think about and struggle with. I think it would be great to have some professional planners who have done this working for a long time to discuss this. I know you've heard from them on the F-47 commission process. I think that jurisdiction is a tool to get there. I think our proposal to increase jurisdiction in areas that have demonstrated values and demonstrated risk is one way to do that. The example I like to give is the Shutesville Hill Wildlife Corridor in Waterbury. It's a, you look it on the map, it's a very obvious place, a very obvious linkage. It has discrete barrier or sideboards. It's this place on the landscape that you can point to and say, that's important. And even a small amount of development in an area could be detrimental. And I think that's the exact sort of place we envision for this petition process where someone will come forward and say, this area on the landscape has outsized values. It has high vulnerability and risk from even small amounts of development. Let's have, actually could be applied here, broadly. So that's one way to get a cumulative development. But you're focusing on the areas that have the highest values and the most risk instead of just broadly across the landscape. But again, I think there's a lot of smart people, smarter than I, working on this, and I'm hoping that others will bring ideas forward as, you know, in the course of this debate that we can talk about. Any more questions for Mr. Bouser? Related to that example, what triggered the Act 250 process in the first place in order to give you the opportunity to recognize that this particular example was critical in both what we're trying, you know, as a resource of high values? So, we know that it's important because of a number of studies that have occurred in the area, both by which my life, part of which concerns the others, but currently that area doesn't have any special regulatory protections. Act 250 would only trigger if the current jurisdictional thresholds were met. And I use that as an example for a petition process that I discussed earlier where someone could come forward and say, this area is important. I'm gonna petition for Act 250 to apply university here. So that was just an example of a place where the model I'm suggesting could work well. In this case, it was a cell tower. So that triggered the 248 process. So let's say it was going to be a, this is Waterbury. So it would, they have adopted standard. So they have zoning. And so let's say it would be 10, no, six blocks, six blocks. So what if it was a housing development, high elevation for four houses in that? It wouldn't trigger. It wouldn't trigger. And even if it did, and this is, you know, the biggest issue from higher agency's perspective, there aren't criteria related to forest blocks and connecting habitat. So even if a development area triggered Act 250 review, we wouldn't have the tools to address those considerations. We may be able to get to it through necessary wildlife habitat or some other of the environmental criteria, but there's no lens currently to review these landscape scale values such as habitat blocks that connect. So let's say again, coming to this example, that it was a four lot subdivision. And we had adopted a connected forest block connectivity type standard. And yet it was four lots. So I presume it would still lie under our threshold if we hadn't done anything with jurisdictions. So, and I always think a good working forest, a good working farm is what we strive for. It does less impact from a well-managed forest, to withstand to a well-managed farm. So I think we can all agree that sub-objective land conversion into new housing, you can never undo. And yet here we have, in this situation, the type of development triggered review that gave the state the opportunity to flag it as a absolutely critical juncture. So that's what we're trying to get at is those situations, because nine times out of 10, it's a housing development. How do we, a petition process may help, but you have to be really foresight in determining strategically how to plan on a statewide basis. So that's a huge challenge. So how, welcome your recommendations of jurisdiction that can help us ensure that those areas of absolute critical importance aren't going to be lost. We'll continue working on that, and as ideas come out that we think are good ones, I'm happy to put them back to you and to talk more. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you all very much. Thank you, thank you. All right, welcome. We are ready to get started. You're on your record. Good afternoon, Chairman, Chairwoman, Sheldon and committee. Thanks for having me here at the Belfast River Four Doors and I have cultural practices in those areas. My name is Rob Evans. I am the River Four Doors and Floodplain Protection Program Manager at the Agency of Natural Resources. Our program supports multiple jurisdictions that regulate development in flood hazard areas in the River Four Doors, including municipal permitting, Act 250 in the State Flood Hazard Area and River Four Doors rule. My prepared testimony will, one, give you a brief overview of the areas regulated and also discuss current authority for regulating agricultural practices in the River Four Doors. So to start, the area is regulated. Direct attention to the screen up there because I have some visuals to test and we will talk about flood hazard areas first. The flood hazard area is a regulatory zone mapped by the Federal Emergency Management Agency with the basis of the National Flood Insurance Program. The flood hazard area depicts the areas that would be inundated by the, quote, 100-gear flood or more accurately, the 1% annual insurance flow. Development and map flood hazard areas is regulated by 90% of Vermont's communities that are enrolled in the National Flood Insurance typically through zoning operations. In addition, the flood hazard area is regulated through Act 250 under criterion 1D floodways as well as the State Flood Hazard Area and River Four Doors rule. Municipalities and the State are required to regulate flood hazard areas in order to maintain access to Federal Flood Insurance and hazard mitigation grounds. Shortcoming of the flood hazard areas that does not account for the fact that rivers are dynamic and that they change location in their river valleys over time. Specifically, flood hazard areas do not account for flood-related erosion, which is Vermont's primary mode of flood damage. Moreover, 80% of Vermont's rivers and streams do not have a map flood hazard area. River Four Doors are mapped by the Agency of Natural Resources, my program in particular, and depict the space a river needs over time to accommodate erosion and depositional processes. River Four Doors are an important planning and regulatory tool to avoid putting new investments in hazardous places and to avoid the need to further channelize our rivers to protect those investments. Here's an image that shows both flood hazard area and river corridor combined. As you can see, they don't exactly line up on the landscape. That's because the methodology that goes into creating those is distinctly different. It's based on calculations to determine what's gonna be underwater during the 100-year flood. That's the red area that you see up there, the reddish pink, the yellow corridor, superimposed the river corridor, defining that lateral space the river needs over time. From Meander migration down the valley, river's Meander in low-field valley settings. That's just plain physics. This image depicts a situation that is common in Vermont, a narrowly mapped flood hazard that under-represents flood risk. In this image, the flood hazard area does not extend beyond the banks of the river. This is due to the river being disconnected from its flood plain. Flood plain disconnection results from channelization practices, typically some combination of dredging, burming, armoring, and straitening. Channelization sets in motion process referred to as incision, where the channel cuts down vertically. And larger and larger flood flows are contained within the channel, setting up extremely the road sub-situation. Floods should start spilling out onto the flood plain during the one-to-two-year flood. Allowing water to spread out, slow down, drop sediment, debris, sometimes ice, like this time of year. This is what we refer to as natural and beneficial flood plain functions. This image shows all of the hundred-year flood being shunted downstream, putting public infrastructure and private investment secretary at risk. The river corridor depicts the space the river needs to re-establish a stable slope. That's that Meander geometry I referred to. And flood plain reconnection. The river corridor is an essential tool to ensure that investments are not placed in conflict with natural river processes. The river will restore itself if we provide the space. 43 communities have voluntarily adopted river corridor regulations. In addition, the state of Vermont regulates river corridors through Act 250 and the flood hazard area river corridor rule. Before I move on to agricultural practices in the river corridors and flood hazard areas, are there any questions about the difference or distinction between these two map areas? One map's inundation risk, one is a tool to manage for erosion risk. Harvey? Yeah, could you explain that a little bit more about the differences between the main and the A&R? Sure, in terms of just on this particular slide. Yeah, in how it works and how it's integrated. Yes, it is interrelated. If the situation we're seeing here where the FEMA flood plain, the red area is very narrowly mapped, it's essentially depicting the 100 year flood contained within the channel of the river. If the river was not disconnected from its flood plain, we expect to see a place showing red as least as big as the river corridor, perhaps even larger. If it was accessing its flood plain, dissipating its energy, causing it to settle. And again, what typically creates that incision process where the river starts to get road downward and then it starts to the road laterally as well as channelization practices. It can also be a combination of upland changes to watershed hydrology as well. The river corridor on the other hand isn't looking at a one flood, it's saying based on the science of morphology, how much space does that river be over time through a whole range of floods to discharge its floodwater, sediment, and be vertically stable. Vertically stable isn't mean it's not gonna move laterally over time, but vertically stable and at least erosive. What we think of that as the minimum valley space that the river needs over time. Does that answer your question? I think so. You said 80% are not mapped of the flood hazard areas in the state. Don't we have all those NFIP maps that are historic and so that when you say not mapped, can you sort of explain what that means? Because the maps are done differently, right? Like they're all mapped, but some were surveyed, some weren't. Actually not that they're actually not all mapped. FEMA, due to just the cost of mapping, doing detailed studies and creating maps for rivers really focuses on our larger main steps and those rivers and sardines that are adjacent to populated areas or are experiencing development pressure. So 80% of our stream miles do not have a female map. Now those are by and large by the number of smaller rivers and streams. You know our big rivers and streams, the Lodder, the Lamoyle, the Winouski and a number of the major tributaries like the Dog River or the Mad River, those are mapped by FEMA. The tributaries to those rivers are not mapped. And flood risk does exist on those, yes. And then we're not working on that on any level, it's mapped by FEMA. FEMA's back in the state after being on hiatus to update maps in the state, but it's still going to be a dark percentage stream. Okay, I'll move on to discuss regulation of agricultural practices in Riverport. The Flood Hazard area in Riverport or Boole went into effect in March of 2015. The rule regulates activities that are exempt from municipal regulation. Those activities, the towns cannot regulate and that are regulated by the rule include state owned and operated institutions and facilities and state buildings. It includes a transportation infrastructure, roads and bridges, culverts that are in these areas. And it also includes the regulation of required agricultural and forestry practices and power generation and transmission facilities that are subject to the public utility commission process. Also known as section 248. The Flood Hazard area in Riverport or General Perm that allows farming as a non-reporting activity. And such activities do not involve the placement of structures or other above ground improvements or birth work that permanently alters ground elevations or fulfill retaining walls, berms or terraces. Required agricultural practices in flood hazard areas need to meet a no adverse impact standard to ensure development does not increase flood elevations, velocities or decrease flood storage volume. In addition, development needs to meet flood plain management standards such as elevation, flood proofing requirements, anchoring, use of flood resistant materials, other base requirements of the National Flood Transport that the state is on the hook for just like today. Required agricultural practices in Riverport always need to meet a no adverse impact standard as well as specifically, development cannot increase fluvial erosion hazards by creating a need to channelize or further channelize the river. River channelization typically in the form of stream bank armoring may increase your water stability which exacerbates erosion hazards and sediment lobing to receive waters. Similar to densely developed designated centers, the rule contains provisions that allow for infill and redevelopment within the farm production area. So long as it's not getting closer to the river than pre-existing development. And lastly, the definitions and regulatory standards in the Flood Hazard Variant River corridor will align with standards in our agency procedure for making determinations and recommendations to Act 250, Criterion 1D. Unfortunately, the Act 250, Criterion 1D definitions and standards and statute are antiquated and do not align with current practice which makes it very confusing for the regulated community and leads to inefficiency in the overall primitive process. I would direct you for further reading to an addendum that we filed with our testimony entitled Rational and Policy Support for Revisions to Act 250, Criterion 1D. It walks through the last 15 years of Supreme Court decisions, legislative acts, et cetera in terms of how we view and use river corridors in light of 1D determinations and Act 250 process. So in closing, the committee bill is currently drafted, modernizes terms and standards and brings them into alignment with current practice. Take questions. Representative Smith. Just working on that, the slide you have up there where you have the farm production area. And so that looks like it's in the Flood Zone. Yes, sir, it would be in the Flood Zone as well. So if that farm wanted to make some improvements or changes over the process period, they would apply for a permit from my program and then they would have to again meet standards. So we'll start with the flood plain area. They would have to ensure that the project does not decrease in flood storage volume as well as no adverse impact standards. So if they wanted to elevate the ground and place fill, that might ultimately be permissible but they'd have to offset that by excavating basically what we call compensatory storage requires that they maintain space for flood water storage and conveyance. So that's the first big test. If you can get over the no adverse impact hurdle, then it falls back to standards that are really tight, but what it is you're doing are you building a barn? If you're building a barn, that has to be flood plain management criteria for elevation of the barn. Wet flood proofing it requires things like having flood vents to allow water to equalize so you don't have collapse of walls due to uneven water pressure. It requires that you have utilities either elevated above the flood elevation or flood proof so they're dry and flood waters have anchoring requirements. Things that are floatable, things that can be moved downstream during floods need to be either enclosed or otherwise anchored to ensure that they don't become part of the debris field that pulses downstream and then we all pay for what the tax dollars to pick up somewhere else. So that's, so before I move on to river corridors, that's the kind of stuff you look at. It just kind of depends on what you're constructing. Oh, there, but you know, they're disparate buildings as well. I mean a lot of them didn't have for a long period of time. So I was wondering if that was destroyed by fire or flood whether it would be allowed to build back or they'd have to find another location. They would be allowed to build back and you know, it's an interesting point to bring up regarding historic designation, historic designation. Typically let me just back up. It's a building and we're talking about the flood insurance program, the standards we need to administer. So it's really focused on insurable buildings. When an insurable building is substantially damaged, 50% of the cost essentially replacing it or more is the cost that we build back. If you treat that as a substantial damage threshold, normally that requires that you meet current standards. So if you have to elevate it, you can rebuild it but you have to elevate it and flood proof it and keeping it on the requirements. Historic buildings have a specific pass on that. They're exempt from substantial damage on the requirements. So if it truly was on either a state register or a national register of historic places and it was substantially damaged, there would be some additional relief for instance for building that. So what would happen if they were expanded to meet some of the new water quality and practice standards and all put in the most historic area there? Let's, yeah, there is a large fairly new concrete manure up there that replaced an earthen manure that NRCS funded it just a few years ago. And so it's a matter of installing implements to make sure that during floods that they're not gonna have floodwater backing up and further compromising that system and that backflow preventer and things like that. The top of the manure pit needs to be above flood elevation and the design flood elevation with our rule is two feet above the 100 year flood elevation. So again, flood proof, you don't want to have your, the overarching without getting into the very specifics of the new standards is you don't want floodwaters to compromise your investment and you don't want your investment to pollute or contaminate or compromise floodwaters that's a kind of exchangeable point. It's important because we've been really focused on this slide and what's required when we're talking about inundation hazards and inundation standards, but there's also the lens of the river corridor. So the river corridor, you know, infilling within those existing buildings or placing modifying those existing buildings not a problem even behind and further away from the river will be called shadowing would be allowed kind of closer to the road there. But the big test here is we don't want to see a new investment closer because that might engender the need to start channelizing the river sooner or more to protect that investment. So where I'm sitting, it looks like if they have to put in a new facility or add on that so they have to go to the lab. Correct. But it would be allowed. Yes. Representative Morgan. Did you say that FEMA determines the outer boundaries of the boundaries of the flood plain? Yes, the flood hazard area, the inundation flood plain, they do the mapping of the studies. How do they determine what that is? It's basically a combination of hydrologic analysis coming up with an estimation of how large it is the 100 year flood coming through here. So that can be done a number of ways. Typically it's using screen gauging records to come up with a flood frequency as a statistical analysis to analyze stream flow records. In the absence of stream flow records, US Geological Survey has come up with what they call regression equations where they use large data set from all of our gauges in Vermont and Hampshire and even part of New York to come up with predictive equations to estimate flood flows in the absence of stream flow data. Then you can also do, if it doesn't typically do this because it's very expensive, it's rainfall runoff in a lot of ways where you look at precipitation inputs, land cover, land use with perviousness and then you can generate a runoff discharge flow, a flood flow from that. That's the first step. Then once you have a flood flow, then you have to put that into what's called a hydraulic model. Essentially what you do is you survey, or in this case, with high resolution topography like the other state, LIDAR basically shows that high resolution elevation landscape is. So you essentially take cross sections perpendicular to flow of the channel and flood plain so you define the geometry at regular intervals down and upstream. Then you simulate flood flow through that geometry and then you can determine how high or low the flood water gets. You take into consideration, same thing, land cover, land use, is it heavily forested? Is it paved? Is it mowed? All those things have an effect on flood water. Are the boundaries deemed to be pretty accurate? When they do these days with the advent of that LIDAR, that high resolution topography, they're quite accurate. I think where there's the variability as people agreeing on is the flow estimation. With a real 100-year flood, please step forward, please kind of concept, because there's a lot of variability around them. But in terms of mapping of particular flood elevation, it can be done very precisely or it couldn't be done near as well in the past. The reason I asked is a few years back, I live on the shores of the Loma River and I got a letter from FEMA stating that my house was on flood land and that I had to, and I don't have a mortgage on my home, I had a home equity line of credit and I was using it for something. And they told me that my home was on a flood land, flood insurance, and it cost me a lot of money to have my property surveyed, filled out a ton of paperwork. I had to prove to FEMA that I was innocent, I was being guilty by then. And anyway, we wanted to pay off the home equity line of credit at a quarter of a million bucks. I paid it off so I didn't have to buy insurance. So I really doubt that they're very accurate in their process. I, it really depends on the age of the published data. The Lamoille has variable data, a lot of basically right now eight of our counties have variable data, meaning FEMA did a study based on inferior topographic information 30 years ago. If I help you pay, you'll be happy to know that they're coming back to study. I still might bring money back. I can't help you there. But the FEMA is starting to work this spring to restudy Lamoille River. So perhaps folks that were in your situation will have better data to rely on in this situation. But it's a highly variable quality of the information and on a very important reality. So I'm gonna start moving on to the next one. It won't need to. Representative Dolan. Captain. We had heard Dr. Dr. Stoner and I mean that agricultural industry come on. Experienced $25 million, they kept a minimum of damage. So I see the crop loss, disruption, property loss. Are we batter off today? Are our farms more resilient today in preparation for future flooding? Or are we still facing flood risk at farms and a level that should encourage us to work with our farm community, try to improve resilience in the farms? And that's the case of what we do. That's a good question. And I don't know for certain exactly what we stand with our farms, just speculating here. But I would say by and large, the level of flood risk is very much the same. Again, at the time, there was not a state floodplain or a little bit required permits to do anything, which implements flood resilience measures. Generally speaking, came into effect in 2015, as I said, and I think gradually over time, just with our current authorities, in terms of our regulatory authority, there could be some gradual improvement as farms invest in new infrastructure and build a key, et cetera, et cetera. But yeah, I don't think we're necessarily better off in any measure way. It's not that any way done. You know, and so that's a million dollar question. You know, what should we do? What can we do? And the question is, do we do it through regulation? Do we do it through some form of incentives and grant programs? You know, as I understand it, I'm being an expert on a hag, but a lot of these farms are having a hard time being financially solved. And so I think they would need a lot of assistance if they're really to boost in a significant way in a short period of time. They would need resources to empower them to do that. Representative Lefebvre and then McCulloch. My apologies for coming in here testing when you wait and good afternoon. I just would like you to tell us how with the bill we have in front of us in fact, your job? It's hard to know. I mean, right now it has currently written. I mean, as I said, our rule already covers ag and forestry, which the draft proposal proposes to exempt from that 250 unless it's in a critical resource area. But it's really hard to know right now. I mean, just as written, there's potential for it to have a significant impact on our staff resources through Act 250. If it were to remain as is. There are other opportunities, other regulatory tools that exist, such as the floodplain. Flood has very river coral rule. It's an existing regulatory framework that could address these areas. It really depends on really what the jurisdiction, ultimately what's the jurisdiction. I mean, if every river corridor has triggers Act 250 or regulation, in respect to our program, it could be very significant. It's just hard to know right now without getting it more into what the real jurisdictional triggers are. It seems as written right now that it's substantial increase in Act 250 jurisdiction. It was raised this morning, testimony, that the question that, if you had, say, 50 acres and some of that acreage was on a river corridor, in this building, into effect, would that mean the entire 50 acres would now be under Act 250 jurisdiction? I have not enough of an expert on Act 250 jurisdiction. I'm still surprised sometimes, again, that anyone wants to exist with what triggers Act 250 jurisdiction. It really depends. I mean, that would be significant if it's just a parcel being in triggers it. Also, I think a key question is, does it bring in the full suite of Act 250 criteria for review or are we just triggering certain criteria because it's in a river corridor or are we gonna even look at it through the lens of river corridors and flood hazard areas? It's hard to know what the overarching intent is at this point. One last overarching question. Are there shortcomings now in the work you do that you see this act feeling? Absolutely, and I've tried to close without my testimony, which is the clarification in terms, standards, definitions, and statute. Really, the language and statute that refers to floodway and floodway fringe is very narrow and it confuses the regulatory community when oftentimes they'll come in with a permit application and they'll say, hey, we did everything right by the FEMA floodway, we're all set. We'll say, oh, wait, we determine the Act 250 differently. We look at the entire flood hazard area and river corridor, it's a larger area and we have higher standards than just base federal minimums. And so I think that can cause a lot of inefficiency and back and forth working with our Office of Planning and ANR and the District Commissions and consultants for the applicants that can be very iterative and drawn out in time consuming. So I think just the modernizing of definitions, terms, and standards, and statute to align with the way we do business now would be very helpful. And we are a river corridor and flood lane protection program, so I think that it is a very important discussion that's taking place and needs to continue regarding what the options are. I think the most sense from the hands protection of these areas up and downstream of our built environment. So this is what I add definition into what poverty is happening? Absolutely. Representative McCullough. So from the thing you're gonna get there next based on something you said, but you said a bunch of other things that I think we need to pass. The common denominator is infill. And we have at least one other state agency encouraging infill in river corridors and one or two planners. And we spent a fair amount of time this morning talking about the crystal balling that needs to happen, what's gonna happen in the future. And I'm not thinking you were even talking about that at the years from now. And so, if I'm even close to that, then deductive reasoning would say then, why would we want to infill in our river corridors, even if done carefully to the standards we have now considering the vast rate on home land. That's a fantastic question in my best answer. We talk about infilling and we really tried to accommodate infilling in densely developed areas through a number of mechanisms. So to be clear, our procedure that dictates Act 250, our rule, our model regulations we recommend for municipality all have these provisions. So the thinking within infilling really has to do with the river corridor and providing that space. And if you think of a place, a context or setting like Montpelier, we have tremendous amount of investment built right up to the edge of the river. While the river might want to wiggle over time, we're not gonna let it, right? We have a huge vested collective interest in managing the river to protect our existing investments. So with respect to river corridor regulation, which is all about providing space for the river, it's really acknowledging that in our built environment, we've really lost that opportunity for the river to wiggle over time. And in a lot of cases, the river's actually become stable. It's not a depositional range where you have sediment accumulation that's transporting us down the street. Big ditches. Big ditches. So on one hand, we relax with river corridors, the standards, so provide for infilling in these areas since we're already managing the river in these spots. But when it comes to the flood hazard area, standards are very high. We want to build in a flood smart way. So for example, elevation or flood proofing of buildings, the federal minimum standard is to elevate or flood proof to that quote, 100 year flood elevation. Our standards and rule and Act 250 procedure require two feet above that. So that's what we're trying to do is think about, okay, well, here's the regulatory design, elevation of the feds one, but we realize there's a changing climate. Tomorrow's 100 year flood might be larger than yesterday's 100 year flood. Back to your question about how this stuff is estimated, the flood flows are based on historical information, not looking at future conditions, hydrology, and run-offs. So, you know, and I think what the other, so I think we can, in places like Montpelier, Waterbury Village, Wilmington, we can infill and redevelop in a way that is flood resilient and in consideration of climate change. There's no guarantee. When you're in the river bottom, there's always risk. We're just trying to buy down that risk. We know them by having higher standards. So what I think I understand with your further explanation really is we have areas that are already armored to the hill and we're not gonna tell Waterbury, they gotta move, we're gonna protect downtown Waterbury, downtown Montpelier the best we can, and infill in those areas would be appropriate. I'm a little hazy on how appropriate it gets when you're up on the North Branch, for instance, or up farther on the main river, we'll just talk about Winooski, when, even though according to our best guess, our best guess is that maybe two extra feet would be enough. I would say, why wouldn't you go there? And I think you've probably done your best to answer that, but yeah, no, I can't. Can I just, before I, are you planning to testify? So we have, we started a little bit late, so I wanna just let the next meeting with our legislative council after this. So I would say 320, because we started about 20 minutes. We can take this back to the hall. We were gonna give these guys an hour, so that's what you planned on, we'll give it to you. I'll just quickly address your question and hand it over to Mike, if that sounds good. Yeah. So again, infilling is thinking of those built out areas. When we're looking upstream, where we have an undeveloped Reacher River, the river corridor is essentially a no-bill zone. The idea is if you're outside the river corridor in the flood hazard area, we've given the river that room its space, we're giving it that space to minimize erosion hazards. If you're outside the river corridor, then that's where you'd be developing, to higher standards in terms of inundation, elevation, flood proofing, et cetera. We tried to structure our regulatory frameworks and authorities such that we're really protecting those areas up and down the street for floodwater storage and sediment attenuation. That's our macro-scale green infrastructure that can protect places like Montpelier and Waterbury. If we maintain or enhance those areas. I think, I have a quick question though. How many permits do you, does your program issue in a year and how many get denied? I want to, we don't issue a whole lot of permits because again, a lot of by-large land uses are still regulated at the municipal level. So it's just that subset of things that towns can't regulate. I'd say over the last four years, we've issued about a hundred permits. But we've given a tremendous amount of technical assistance, well, over and above that. A lot of times it's trying to work with folks to site stuff outside of these areas so they don't need a permit for us. So we spend a lot of time on it, but our permit numbers don't necessarily reflect that. Track of how often, you know, how many people you've opened here? Yes, we have, we've tracked general technical assistance. So we've had those numbers and bad end permit numbers as well. Can I ask a clear-cut question? Sure. What do you mean permits? What permits are they? State, yeah, that's a good, I'm glad you asked. Talking about Act 250 permits, we don't issue those, we just advise. This is our state flood hazard area and river coral permits. Permits can't act soft against those things that towns can't regulate. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Well, again, my name is Mike Klein. State Rivers Program means you have natural resources. And I wanted to touch on another set of activities that we work with the other cultural community on. And that is the in-stream activities. Rob was talking about activities on land and our program through our stream alteration pool and our partnerships with the agency of Aging and RCS. We also look at, and regulate to some extent, agricultural activities in-stream. One of the, so I was just going to go down through a short list of what some of those activities are and describe how we do or don't regulate those activities. In Act 138, which was in 2012, gave the agency authority over the construction of berms. Berms are regulated and largely prohibited activity unless there's a public safety issue. Waters are damaging on your habitable structure. We would commit berms otherwise. They wouldn't be permitted. Many agricultural producers do take a certain amount of gravel out of our rivers. By annual basis, our chapter 41 stream alteration rule allows upwards to 50 cubic yards per year when a landowner's land for use on their land. They just need to contact us and provide technical assistance on how to do that in a way that minimizes impact in the river. We're basically staying out of the water to do that work. Stream bank stabilization, as you may have heard this morning, that is one of the required agricultural practices. So we do not actually issue permits for stream bank stabilization on farms. The RIPs require that bank stabilization be conducted in accordance with a plan by either NRCS or the Agency of Agriculture consistent with our policy for avoiding erosion hazards. We do work with the Agency of Agriculture and NRCS technically advising stream bank stabilization on farms however we don't, right? One of the main governing factors to that activity is the cost. Bank armoring isn't expensive. Proposition these days and in many cases, where farmers have been struggling with the energy streams and the expense of dealing with that, we work with the Agency of Agriculture and NRCS and other partners to offer alternative tools like our river corridor to ease many farmers over 100 landowners to take advantage of that program to sell an easter to that river corridor land instead of channelization practices. We also allow for affording of our streams again with proper erosion control practices in place. Both our rule and our general permit contemplate that our rule covers perennial streams and a certain threshold of perennial stream in our roots looked at at about a half a square mile drainage. Many of these small perennials can be committed and we define that as the threshold of which a farmer could maintain their ditches in their field as long as a certain erosion control and best practices are used in maintaining those ditches. Again, we advise a number of farmers and work with our partners in NRCS to review those projects. Streams larger than that would have to conform with our under-performance standards. And then finally, bridges and culprits on farms do fall under our jurisdiction and do have to meet our state standards or bridge and culprits in place. So that's really a rundown of the typical ways that we interact with the industry, I've answered any questions there or other questions that you mentioned as well. Representative Dola. How's that non-reporting general permit? A non-reporting general permit essentially lays out a set of conditions. If you practice them, if you are implementing a practice and you follow those conditions, you don't need to report to the agency that you're doing that to them. If it's found that you implemented that activity and did not follow practices laid out in the general permit, that would be an enforcement. So how does that landowner know about what standards they need to maintain if they're not necessarily working with you directly before the project commences? Well, it's like any other activity out there, a landowner that has never worked with the environmental agency may start an activity without doing the thing that they need to permit. Certainly, we have worked with many of the agricultural producers and growth and town growth foremen know our river management engineers and are well aware of the activities they need to permit for. I think we work in partnership again with the agency by the way and NRCS, their field reps inform landowners as to what types of entities would be required. But there are unfortunate situations where people start an on-screen landowner and they need to get it squarely. So in your opinion, there's always, you know, the lack of information might result in someone not knowing that. Do you find it a successful tool? All in all, you know, generally speaking. The general permit? The non-reporting permit in terms of achieving. So what are the benefits of the cost of it? Yeah, the benefits are, we're going to go on that. We, you know, we look at probably 1,000 stream alterations a year. Each engineer might look at two or three of their projects in the fields. So we try to identify those activities that are fairly, that set of practices that are fairly easy to implement and reach the criteria in Chapter 41, which is public safety, significant damage to fish and wildlife and significant damage to other riparian owners. We're working in some of these small, very very small streams on activities that are relatively routine, which would stand much less of a chance of pushing us into those sort of red zones of significant damage. So it's the potential threat to resource and the use of our resource, the program resources to maximize our effectiveness on the ground of spending time, where the impacts are likely to be much greater if we don't do it correctly. Back to ground wood movement. This is us here, but you can move on to the cubic yard. Yeah, I have to get 72 hours notice if I take 10 cubic yards. If I decide to take my cubic yards, I don't need to tell you. That's right. Now if I come back 30 days later, I'm going to take my cubic yards and I think it's stated, I had to go check back on this thing. It's stated that it's per year, 50 cubic yard threshold. I understand that. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. That's a good question. I don't know that I've ever dealt with that. Usually landowners don't like to mobilize but twice to get a job done. And we have a pretty good work. It's not really an activity that we could hit it. So mostly landowners, they need 30 cubic yards. They work with us to identify a good location. But we haven't spelled out to be honest. We haven't spelled out directly in our general firm that you can't do what you just described. I don't think that exactly rings in there. I would make an attempt to write that down. Now what part of you had a two mile stretch of river and you had 10 farms on it? And they each decided they wanted to take out 50 cubic yards. That's a significant amount. Now how do you monitor that and what do you do about that? Well, by the way, I'm not sure I could prohibit that because it is an individual landowner. It's by individual landowner. So if you have 10 different farm families, back to back, they can each take the 50 cubic yards as long as they stay out of the water, et cetera. It is an imperfect piece of law that it's actually right in Chapter 41 in the sense that even 10 cubic yards on a very small stream can have the value for its effect. And so it's not scaled to a resource very well or really thought to move from a two-military impact standpoint. Will you say stay out of the water? What does that mean? That means at the time of you're taking the gravel, keep your machine out of the river itself. So usually you're working on the gravel bars and you're just basically not digging the river itself at the time that you're getting the resource to. So yeah, you wouldn't go out there during higher water and take through an animal. So for an excavator, it can actually go into the water as long as it's taking material from a bar or a dry spot or you keep the machinery out of the water entirely, which by the people who see out of the water and create accidents when you don't allow any excavation on the banks, just. More questions for Mike? You know, if comments or thoughts on the Act 250 revisions or the, like, how it might play out from your perspective if we designated river corridors as critical resources? Not a whole lot over the above, but I can confirm it means you already accepted to say that as Rob would say, you know, our primary concern is being able to do the job that we do in Act 250. And it is a lot of direct staff time on projects. Act 250 is from a strict perspective of hazard avoidance is much less efficient than our actual regulatory current program, where that's what we're dealing with is looking at those hazards and how to mitigate them. So from my perspective, from the program's perspective, we have been charged with protecting river corridors, we've been charged with promoting their protection throughout the state with our municipal partners. We're very much interested in seeing river corridor protection that can claim that as collateral and with our support. Do you have the ability, do you have the ability to do what you're doing? Are you for people maxed out or what's the situation? You know, again, Rob mentioned, you know, our permanent program, I think I testified in front of the committee a couple weeks ago on a river corridor that we provide about 1,000 municipal assistance but hazards per year that keeps our floodplain managers pretty busy. If we were doing a direct regulatory work ourselves, there would be efficiency in that process. But right now, the way we operate is mainly in the systems role, we're pretty maxed out. Just a point of clarification. So you, your shop provides municipalities assistance in compliance with the National Flood Insurance Program and that's about 1,000 visits, technical assistance a year. But you also said you provide another 1,000 visits per year related to stream alteration permits. And then you review some 200 projects. And mentioned on that, I think it's about 200 projects for reviewers. Well, we might, we might, we might, if I can, I don't have those numbers right in front of me, but the issue about 850 permits a year, we will review close to 20, or over 2,000 projects per year on the stream on the side. And I think it is fairly similar on the river for the floodplain side. Again, I can get you those exact numbers so we keep track of all of them. Is it in your submission from January 15th? No, this would be our full results-based accountability. And we have that broken down in quite a bit of detail on exactly what we do there. My last question is trying to get at how much of your workflow is related to Act 250 versus your standard work. What you just described was your standard work. The standard work. Right. And I don't know whether Rob has an idea of how many Act 250 projects that we review on an annual basis. For the record, Rob Evans, yeah, it's a hard number to pin down because we put a lot of effort into Act 250. I'd say our regional floodplain managers, we have five that support the three regulatory jurisdictions, local permitting Act 250 and state floodplain rule. With respect to Act 250, it can be variable from year to year, depending on the individual, but they can spend easily half their time on Act 250. The amount of projects may not be high, but because of a large-scale project coupled with the inefficiency of the process, I'll use an example. The hotel that's proposed right here in downtown Montpelier, I've had a floodplain manager, and my time has spent significantly over the last 12 months. We're still not done. So we put a lot of time and effort into it, but the numbers of permits that Act 250 issues isn't really reflective of that effort because it's such a drawn-out process from a time standpoint. We have a little greedy up next, Act 320, which is just about now. The hope is that we will review the changes to Act 63, which we're moving in on. When do you want to work on those? Act 63. So you might want to pull it up and see what those changes are. Laura, I'm wondering if changing the wording or the lettering on our door is on somebody's radar to make it... It is. I've asked them about it. Okay. Three restorations. Nice. It's her problem line here. Yeah, problem line. All right. We're ready to get started here. Welcome. Hello. I'm hoping to look at Act 63. Maybe go on. So I have some paper copies. I'm going to do a light one for the red ship. That's where everyone I have is now done. I just realized they're not ready. Do you need more? No. Should I walk through it? Yes, please. The first thing I want to walk through is a change that didn't make. Page one on line eight and nine in the title of section 1530, I forgot to strike the positive transaction account by the production fund. That should be removed. Do you really want to keep that fund? Is there like a... There is no fund. I know. She's out. On page one, line 13, what is being struck is the requirement that the deposit initiator goes to a separate interest-bearing account. When you strike that requirement, you can strike subsection C, which is the requirement for the deposit initiator to initiate putting the deposits collected into that account. There's no account. There's no need for that. I'm going to put it into the account. And that leads you to page two, line five, that now becomes subsection C. And so the requirement for the deposit initiator to remit to report and then remit the unpaid deposits remains. It goes into effect January 1st, 2020. Any reference to the deposit initiator account is struck. So on page two, line seven and eight, they are not reporting, reporting the transaction account. On page two, line 11 and 12, the report does no longer include the balance of the transaction account. There is no longer a report of the refund of payments from that account on lines 17 and 18, and there's similarly no report about the income earned on the account. There is no account. And then on page three, lines one and two, there's no report on any other activity on the account. So what is being reported? This is the deposit initiator reports the number of containers sold on the proceeding quarter and the number of containers returned, the amount of deposits received, and the reference to the deposit transaction account. This is struck, the amount of refund payments made, and that's it. On page three, lines nine through 13, the formula of calculations of the amount of the abandoned beverage container deposits is struck and instead there's the narrative of the deposit initiator. The amount of the abandoned beverage container is the amount equal to the amount of deposits that the deposit initiator collected, and the quarter less the amount of the total refund value paid out by the deposit initiator. And on page three, lines 19 and 20, the deposit initiator can apply to the commissioner of taxes if they have what they've refunded exceeds the amount of deposits collected in the quarter. The commissioner can authorize that on page four. Under those criteria, the change there being if the commissioner determines that the deposits collected by the initiator are insufficient. And on page four, lines 16, do you want that confidential business information, the information report by the deposit initiator is confidential business information exam from public inspection. That's it. Any questions? Representative Odie? So now we're not doing the election, we're doing it quarterly. But somehow, what about interest on the deposit that you're handling in the quarter? You're never keeping interest under the existing law that the deposit initiator was allowed to keep the interest. So under the existing law, what you are amending the account, the separate account would bear interest in order to calculate the amount effectively to do an audit of the account each month. With the deposit initiator we need to report what they collected, what they refunded and the amount of interest on it. That would allow department taxes or ANR to determine what was actually unclean and what should be remitted. You don't have that separate account department if you're doing it based on point of sale software that retailers maintain. There is no interest. There is no I don't know if they'll have an account. I don't know if they'll put it into an account. They'll just be liable for the payment or that you can keep interest on what the amounts are when you look back for it. One of the things you want to think about is is that in a sheet? The whole concept of the sheet is when you're returning to the state is properly abandoned. Is interest on those unclean deposits over a quarter abandoned? Or is it going to be argued to be taking? That's the argument for either. Well, since you are not separating this money out and the deposit initiator can be commingling these monies with other monies and thereby raising interest on all of their monies requiring remittance of interest will be difficult to distinguish from interest on funds that are not to be remitted and so there's an argument that whatever would be required to be remitted as interest would be taken. The argument that it's not a taking is that its own property that is abandoned and the state should have a right to grow interest on the property that is abandoned but it hasn't been abandoned for a few months. We reacted to a tiny brewery came and said something that's only a few but there are levels so there are very few office that they're dealing with $1.4 million to hold so could we possibly say we have more than a certain amount of interest bearing account of when you're running into a common benefit situation similar to the Equal Protection Clause under the US Constitution except it's common benefits and common burden so you need to have a legitimate state interest for distinguishing two classes allocating a burden or treating a burden legitimate state interest is not in this case I'm not sure I'm not the one that asserts the legitimate state interest you have to assert the legitimate state interest Representative Turner Michael I just wanted to ask this bill here will it further hurt the bottling and beverage so having answered that will it decrease their profits I can't say will it cost will they be losing a potential revenue stream that they use to run the beverage container deposit system yes Madam Chairman are we voting today I thought we were I'm hoping to Representative Dolan I think we have a couple of options then one is to either have a monthly deposit to be a monthly process versus quarterly or a quarter of a process do you have a preference in terms of what you think would be the most ease of use because I guess a monthly would reduce the concern of that responsibility I don't think either way it obviates the difficulty the difficulty is kind of to be able to figure out what the interest should be returned no I'm just saying just having any agreement on a monthly basis right I mean that reduces the amount of interest especially over that nickel that's collected on the first day of each quarter since you don't have a separate account how do you audit the interest that is generated right well I'm less interested about that the more I'm thinking about in terms of getting the money into the state the state with the funding source well that's there's two different aspects of that administrative burden of collection I don't know what department of taxes is here but they would probably like to do that four times a year instead of twelve times a year so the cost if you look at both costs and benefits it's probably a more efficient system and minimize costs regardless of the interest issue if you manage on a quarterly basis the second aspect of that is having the money in the fund to move the money but you can spend money in anticipation of receipts and after the first year you'll have a pretty good idea of what your anticipated receipts are doing I'll record in the four gates and then McCulloch because this question of interest came out of our last discussion I worked on it a little bit last night and I made some assumptions and the assumption you ask me to do that and drink the assumption, the first assumption I made was we were talking about $1.4 million at the end of the year as an estimate of what was going to be turned over to the state so I said $1.5 million and dividing $1.5 million by 12 to get what could be an average monthly would be $125,000 the interest that would be earned on $125,000 would be $104 for every 1% of interest that was earned and I've got no way of knowing what the state earns for interest and I assume they have sweep account and sweep everything into interest bearing so I said what would be an average interest rate and I used 3% I don't know really what they would get, they probably get more than that I would think with the amount of dollars they would have invested but using 3% it would then be $312.50 a month on 125,000 so if you assume that each of those 3 months and a quarter they would be adding $125,000 and so at the end of 3 months the earnings on $375,000 I had 3% would be $1,875 so that's whether you consider that a lot of money or not a lot of money to me $1,875 would be quite a bit of money to the state when you're talking millions of dollars it's not that big I'm interesting that on $1,500,000 at 5 cents about 30 million containers at the end of the year that don't get turned in and that's what we're talking about on this issue I think that interest calculation is high well I try to be on the safe side because you're talking about the interest being remitted from the deposit in this year they may not get 3% well no, I was talking about if it was turned over to the state how much the state would be losing by not having turned over every the way this thing was written and I'm not doing that to say I'm not doing that to justify doing it that way I'm doing it that way just to have a figure to talk about that's my speech on that representing McCullough their significant amount of culpability for getting this interest discussion going maybe two weeks ago where I thought council had really answered questions about whose money it was what might even be basically possible to do with it having said that there have been some interesting comments and some of them have already reported and it's all very interesting but I've led the record show that I'm standing here for the beverages industry saying there's lots of money to do and for us to somehow and I would say convolutedly reach under their pocketbook some interest out of this would be unjust and having said that and we've gone through a pretty good discussion around this bill as presented by today my Michael with the changes I feel confident in moving the bill with the script or changes that Michael discovered a motion has been made to improve the draft represented for Gates I just need to make a quick comment but we don't need a second okay I forgot what it was what I was going to say is the interest is the interest that the distributors might or might not be getting is a small amount when we've already taken 1.4 million dollars out of their pocket because they have up to this point have been able to keep this money themselves until we pass the law last year so we would be further taking out of their pocket any possible interest might be there and you have to take into consideration the other thing that the distributor has to do is pay the retailer three and a half cents in addition to the five cents three and a half cents for handling the handling of that every bottle or can any other further discussion the screeners are corrected can you keep saying that sure yes two point one then yes yes yes yes I what did you say I didn't understand representative morgan no representative woody representative smith yes representative squirrel yes representative tarantini yes motion now we need somebody who is interested in reporting the bill on the floor but I don't want to take I don't want to take that perfectly we got it out of here thank you thank you thank you thank you what was it what's above who comes back will take our bill George is ready did he say he could come in yes he did you guys can get him are we on the record are we on the record yes but you are under George still members are looking for George's bill. It's under his name for H171-4. Laura's got copies. Thank you. We're just looking from a high level of kind of why you introduced it and what your goals are. Thank you for the record. I'm representing George Schofer-Jericho, chair of the committee to make sure you're hearing from H171. So H171 is a long-term funding for clean water. And the idea in the bill is to want to follow the concept at all. Everybody's in. And number two, to find things which had a nexus with our water problems. So this bill includes information about five types of revenue sources. We also, of course, have the sheets, which are the bottles, the non-return bottles, which raises two million dollars. But you don't mention that in this bill. Do you know the interest on that, too? No, we just wanted some changes to that. We have no discussion about interest. Sorry. No, we're all set there. We're not bringing it up anymore. So, you all talked about up here the most, anybody going to the water issues that we have. You know, obviously the reading I've done, impervious services has a big contrast. The Treasury report, you know, there's the debate about a parcel fee versus an impervious service fee. And some of the parcels are with us, which I should reduce our pollution issues and I would increase them. It seems dramatically unfair to charge parcel fee to those folks. So, you know, I settled on impervious service fee because of the clear access. And the way we did the impervious service fee is in the four buckets, depending on how much impervious service you got in your property. The UVM has mapped the impervious services of the state down to half a year. It's really pretty amazing work to see how they mapped all those maps or completed undergoing a final lookover that should be available. So, no one used to have this. You can go for either parcels or that. There's a little bit of consternation about it. So, what we do is throw it into the four buckets. How many square feet of impervious service do you have? So, we're about to have a walk through with... Yeah, so we throw that in. It's just graduated from the impervious service here. The higher the fee. You know, that raises about $7 million the way it is set up. I also believe that tourists, they benefit from clean waters and they contribute to the pollution. And so, we put an occupancy fee on hotels, motels, therapy, and the bed and breakfasts of $1 a night. The money for coming to the bed. That raises about $3.4 million in impervious services. 37% of the impervious services are roads. And we're not going to live in the impervious service fee or the municipality or some of the state itself or government and stuff. But with 37% of the impervious service actually being roads, for a way to get some... a science sell of the financial burden there. And for that, I put in a tax on asphalt. So when asphalt is sold by the time, regardless of who is sold to in the state, whether that's the municipality, the state, the private person, going their driveway or parking lot, it's an adult fee on that. Sometimes I look at, it looks like, you know, kind of asphalt generally costs about 70 bucks or so. So this adds a dollar to that and raises who can't be absolutely sure about around a million dollars a year. Farm communities, obviously the farms and the combination. We fertilize our fee first. And fertilize our fee turns out to not be very helpful if, you know, because to raise a small amount of money in the millions range, we'd have to bump that fertilizer fee up to 70. Harvey? What I said along was the milk hand person making some money. And we produce about 2.6 billion pounds of milk a year per month. About 1.6 billion stays in state. The other is to go to the state for processing. So this applies to the 1.6 billion pounds that stays in state. And the processing fee, the fee on the processors is 0.1 cents. And that raises about 1.6 million dollars. And the last thing is the property transfer tax where we have a surcharge already. With that is just repeal the sunset of the property transfers. This tax surcharge. We just repeal the sunset of that. And that property transfer tax looks like it's going to raise about 5 million dollars. So with these sheets, all together that's 24 million in clean water condition there. And almost all goes into the clean water fund. Michael can tell you about the way why the process has to go into the general fund first. It does. The idea that 90% of the waters that we're working are compromised to some extent that really everybody needs to do something. Nobody should be able to have to do it all. And so this tries to spread it around with sustainable long-term sources which we've got to come up with by July. Thanks. Any questions for representing Till before we do a walkthrough? Thank you so much. Thank you. Each 171 is an accurate water quality funding chapter to the title 32, which is the taxation chapter. And it would establish a impervious surface fee first let's look at the definition of what is impervious surface. H2, lines 9 through 11. Man-made surfaces including paved and unpaved roads, parking areas, loose driveways, and walkways for which precipitation runs off rather than infiltrates. The thing that people don't intuitively understand when they think about impervious surfaces is that it includes unpaved roads and includes gravel roads because it doesn't have asphalt on it, doesn't mean that it's not impervious. Then there's the definition of parcel for fee is going to be assessed on parcels. This is the definition for parcel that is used in the grant list, so the municipal tax. Lingo is the same except there's one key difference. So it's all contiguous land and the same ownership together with all improvements that are in. The key difference is it shall include a parcel exempt from taxation under section 3802 of this title unless specific to the example. So that means that the parcels that are exempt from the property tax are subject to this impervious surface assessment. So it encourages universities, charitable organizations. And that's on the basis of the all-in principle. Page 2, buying 16. The impervious surface fee is going to tinge on the key off of the impervious surface maps that are developed by the 4th of the Mount Center for Geographic Information Services. So on the 4th of January, 2020, BC GIS provides to the department and that's the department of taxes and each municipality a map of the percentage of impervious surface on each parcel within the municipality. So then you will see that on page 3, BC GIS is required to update the map upon notification from the municipality of newly constructed or expanded impervious surface and the need for a correction to a map due to a municipal review of the parcel. Checking it down. Then on page 3, line 8, this is the establishment of the assessment, the liability for it and how it is collected. So page 3, line 9, beginning July 2020, each municipality in the state shall assess an impervious surface fee on every parcel in the municipality. So the key thing there is the municipality is assessing. So the municipality is the one that assesses and collects under this model. There are exemptions. The following parcels are exempt, that's referenced by representative, till the federal government, those under control by the state, those under control by municipality and a parcel within the limits of the railroad can track right away. Part of the basis of that, those exemptions is especially on the state. You're just moving money from one hand to the other. It really shouldn't need to do that, allocate resources and allocate resources. Page 3, line 20, then you get to the amount of an impervious surface fee. Again, the municipality collects from the owner of a parcel an impervious surface fee in the following amounts. And this is based on the bin system I'm not sure if Charlotte talked to you about the bins. We haven't heard from you yet, right? Okay. So the concept is that the impervious surface maps that are overlaid on parcels are pretty accurate, but not fancy. And so instead of basing the fee on square footage or acreage, which has some error because as you'll hear probably from the relevant witnesses, there's things to throw off the square footage like shading from a tree. They can either mimic pervious surface or mask pervious surface. But generally, you will have a good calculation of the percentage. So what was proposed is that instead of doing it based on your square footage, you do it on bins or categories that people are putting in these different bins and assess the fee based on the bin that they're in. So on page four, you'll see that the fee is $10 per parcel per year if you're on a parcel with less than 2,000 square feet. It's $20 a year per parcel if you're between your 2,000 or more but less than 4,000, it's 30 per year. If you're 4,000 or more but less than 10,000 and then it's $100 per year for a parcel with more than 10,000 square feet of impervious surface. Then on page four, line nine, you get to collection. It's collection collected by the municipality as part of the tax bill. Assess under subsection five, four, two, three. That is the property tax bill. And specifically the education property tax. It is directed to be listed separately from the tax collected. On page four, line 14, the treasure of each municipality shall remit the impervious surface in two payments two on December 1st and the other on June 1st. The owner of the parcel may seek abatement from the municipality under the normal abatement authority. You're sick. You die. You no longer own the property. You moved to out state. Those are the general abatement authority. Page four, you'll see that there's administration provisions unless otherwise provided the commissioner of taxes shall administer and enforce the collection of the impervious surface fee in the same manner as it administers and enforces the collection of the tax in chapter 133. That's its collection of the property tax. The commissioner may under its enforcement authority offset any delinquent impervious surface assessment against a refund. So if you're not paying your fee but you're getting a state income tax refund, they can take that out of your refund. And then on page 5, line 7, the commissioner of taxes deposits all impervious surface fees into the clean water fund for the purposes of that fund. Do members have questions on this section? Representative Odie? We looked at how we can get this if we didn't do the property tax bill which is going to be $200 million a year to do and how would you go after the unpaid $10 bill? So how do you, is there any figuring of what this costs to administer? Well, this is being collected by the municipalities on the existing tax bills. So the concept is that there will be some costs initially to retrofit those bills but going into the future the cost should be relatively lower than what it would cost the state to do it because this is already in place. There's two other costs. One is that under the education property tax system municipalities are obligated to cover the cost due from then each payment period. So if somebody doesn't pay the municipality has to cover that cost. In the past there's been language that said for this assessment municipalities don't need to cover the cost of the unpaid fee. That language is not in here so what's in here is that they collect according to their authority for education property tax that means that they have to cover the cost of the unpaid fee. Municipalities don't like that. It is a cost to them because if they want to go and recoup that cost they have to initiate enforcement of their own to recoup that cost. So that is a cost to them. The second cost to them was this is going to cover all the parcels that are currently exempt under that all end principle. They currently don't send a bill to those parcels. They're going to have to determine what parcels are there that are exempt and then they're going to have to bill those parcels the relative amount depending on which bid they follow. So that's an additional cost. And George gave us an estimated revenue for each of these to reflect the costs. Do you have any idea how deep those are? I don't know if Dan has done that analysis work yet. I know he was producing the revenue generated. I don't know if he was doing the cost. The four buckets created linked to anything else. I haven't calculated the acreages of the square feet but they calculated the other things other ways we talk about in previous sections is currently like half acre, one acre, three acre. They're just how are they picked? Four buckets. They were picked looking at some of the data on the amount of parcels in the different categories. Looking at size like how many are in that first bid how many in the second bid, how many in the third bid. Trying to find some not total quality but trying to find some equal numbers and it's not even because the number of bins and the number of parcels in that last bid is small compared to the first bid. Any other questions on this representative? To clarify about that fourth bin the number of people following in the fourth bin may be small but the square footage that they're representing on that house is where we are greater. I would say that's equal to significant. Is that there? It's true. I mean if you have really long driveway or really long unpaved roads on your driveway then you may be... Or a certain very large manufacturing facility in a junction for instance. Right. To an extent any kind of bin system or flat B without a modifier is going to be regressive. And so figuring out how to address that and eliminate the regressive nature of some of these it's difficult. It's not difficult. It looks difficult. Like the equivalent residential unit formula where you figure out what the normal residential unit half acre what they're responsible for how much impervious surface is on their land and you assess them a basic fee and then you use that fee as the modifier for the square footage on commercial or industrial or large residential properties. That's how you eliminate that regressive nature because you go back to a common factor the ERU but then it's based off of your actual square footage or size or acreage or whatever you want to make that parcel and parcel type. And so that sounds difficult and it really looks convoluted in a narrative on a page but when you write it out as a math formula it's not that that's pretty correct. We'll have to do a struggle with that. Representative Dolan. Just on page three lines four and five was there any consideration to just quarterly update or annually update or every five years update their environment if they trickle in across the state if that's where you want to batch. Right and that's you know it's a good point and there's arguments on both sides one of the arguments is that you should do it at a more attenuated timeline because the state has proven not very good at updating maps when they've been directed to update maps whether it's the soil quality maps, conservation maps the wetlands maps, land use maps never really did it well and so give them enough time to do it well the response to that is they've always had a good amount of time to do the maps in the past and that thing never did. The other response is like hey they didn't have supercomputers twenty years ago that could do the stuff they didn't have GIS they didn't have satellites that were doing this so maybe you give them time maybe but the response to that is hey this is something that people are paying and do you give somebody a five year pass because they put in their big huge patio three weeks after this they're signing into effect you know there's a lot of you know policy things you can do I kind of want to keep going so we're going to do sort of a high level are we interested in getting deeper into each of these five things that George has brought to us I just had one quick question it's absolutely terrible I was thinking when I read that of April 1st like the time I'm sure I'm sure AC GIS is going to have an opinion about should I move on yes on page 5 line 10 as representative Phil noted this is repealing to the sunset repealing the repeal of the clean water surcharge so in act 64 you put a clean water surcharge on the property transfer tax it was supposed to sunset two years later instead of sunsetting what you did is you extended the sunset from 2018 to technically 2039 but in 2027 the amount of the surcharge is reduced from 0.2% of the value of the property transfer tax to 0.04% and that's because the first million dollars of the property transfer tax surcharge is used to pay the debt service on the bond that was issued for affordable housing that's administered by the government on housing and conservation so that bond is a 30 year bond and that's why you have 1.5 million dollars of 0.04% in 2039 in 2027 which is about the time of the tier one of the clean water initiative that would sunset at that point but what representative Tilly would say you get rid of the sunset of the 2027 2039 it's just going to be in effect and the money is going to go into the clean water fund well it goes into the clean water fund and the affordable housing debt service until 2039 and then add to that to all the clean water so if you're here in 2039 you can allocate that money and that is what section two, three and four are about and then you come to page six line nine, section five this is the whole water quality occupancy surcharge does everyone know what the rooms and meals tax is it's 9% this is not changing the 9% this is just an additional dollar per night of occupancy in a room subject to the rooms and meals tax this is an idea you floated maybe eight or nine years ago so that's what you'll see on page six in addition to the tax on the rent of each occupancy an operator should collect the water quality occupancy surcharge of one dollar each one at a time occupancy is defined as pretty much everything that you could think of hotels hotels bed and breakfast Airbnb you did the Airbnb and it was in the last year except like just doesn't matter how many people in the room just for the room how many people in it does it apply to other EVO or the other type of services that allow for a short term rental as opposed to just Airbnb right, it's yes the real term is short term rent it doesn't apply if after 30, if you rent per term of 30 days or you rent for two week periods for more than two weeks two weeks for like over three months a year there's some provisions for when it doesn't apply but for most most occupancies it's going to so on page six line 14 the money generated is deposited in the clean water fund and then the enforcement and collection is just the enforcement and collection for the meals and rooms tax under the authority to quite that under 32 BSA 1941 and then on page 7 line 1 section 6 we initiate collection January 1, 2020 shall we move on page 7 line 6 section 7 people are going to tell you that this section is unconstitutional people are going to say that you can't put a premium or an assessment on the sale of milk without burdening commerce and discriminating against state interest and there have been cases where that has been the opinion of the US Supreme Court but the US Supreme Court also said in one of those opinions that states have the ability to tax provided that they tax in a nondiscriminatory way and provided that the revenue generated from that tax isn't dedicated to an account that benefits for Vermont farmers or in-state farmers versus out-of-state farmers so for an example the case one of the cases where they held a premium unconstitutional Massachusetts which doesn't have a lot of dairy farmers put a premium on all package milk sold into the state and most of the package milk sold into the state was produced in Vermont and New York and the premium that they put on that package milk is dedicated to an account that was used to give grants to Massachusetts farmers for their production Supreme Court said yes Massachusetts you have the ability to tax but this tax is discriminatory because 85% of the tax was raised on out-of-state producers and you then use that 85% used from out-of-state to benefit in-state to give them the ability to have a lower price in commerce and then have a competitive advantage against out-of-state milk that's just discriminatory on commerce that's not what this does it just puts a fee on milk that milk handlers licensed in this state purchase so if you're purchasing milk to produce dairy products in the state which is what a technically a milk handler is you pay the .001 cent on each pound that you sell and that money is then put in the general fund not a dedicated account for the benefit of farmers into the general fund and it's appropriated as any general fund money so it does not discriminate against out-of-state commerce it's not on out-of-state commerce it's on in-state those milk handlers operating in-state not dedicated to a fund solely benefits from our farmers in relation to out-of-state farmers and by the way there's already a fee on milk handlers in the state and on milk handlers that's based on volume as well what does the current fee go to? it's a permit fee that is used for administration of the program so if we raise I know that agency agriculture has a number of programs that they manage for the general fund money on being their annual projects their field based practices and others their staff I think another is sort of maybe some other programs but that would not be benefitting farming or farmers in relation to that is just use of general fund monies for the traditional general fund uses in the general fund but this is this is not something that is solely dedicated to farming or something that gives farmers a benefit in relation to out-of-state farmers I'm thinking this this not is not a bad for farmers so is a hauler a milk handler or is it really it looks like this is primarily processors a milk handler is a person from an incorporated association or corporation engaged in the business of buying selling, assembling, packaging or processing milk products for sale within or without the steam it shall not be a milk producer a milk producer is the partnership person, an incorporated association who owns or controls one or more cows go cheap water buffalo and sells or offers for sale for all of the milk produced by animals that's what farmer representative Odie in between the milk tank and Agamart and Massachusetts is a person who hauls the milk down there I'm thinking that person doesn't buy the milk and resell it Agamart and therefore don't fall into this that would be something that they're going to have to work out on their own or that they're using marketing service or not some of the intricacies and delicacies of the milk producer typically farmers all the milk that's been delivered all the delivery would be whether it's all the statements so do we discover yeah, do we discover but collecting this along with the fee they have to pay or yes in addition to the requirements in section 2721 or any other tax that they have to pay they pay to the secretary of agriculture a handling fee of .001 per pound and then you'll see that there's a provision that they shall not assess that fee back to the farmer unlike they have done the following costs and some other costs and they would be penalized $5,000 for each separate up to $5,000 no, it's actually just a $5,000 one on each separate instance the secretary determines the order of both of the following occurred the milk handler conducted the assessing the handling fee from a payment to a milk producer and then the milk handler otherwise charged or assessed a milk producer for the cost so so I see that it's almost $4,000 I would like to keep going through this with you are you able to stay with us sure and Laura you need to go Jim can turn off the record for us that's great I'm just going to send you an email now I'll just keep going you might have made it to the property but if a farmer owns a milk let's deliver because that would even if it's a co-operative a co-operative a co-operative they're milk handler so you'll see the chair asks it's remitted and collected in the same way as the current fee and you'll see that page 8 going on the page 9 at the time that they apply for their hand or license and on their renewal when they pay their application fee they also pay the note handling fee should I move on so page 10 line 5 section 9 this is as represented till noted that there is an assessment on the asphalt and the assessment is on the manufacturer so does everybody know what asphalt is I don't have to read the definition so the manufacturer is pretty much every version of manufacturer you can think of those who actually manufacture for sale in the state those who distribute it for sale when it's manufactured by another person those who import it into the United States when the person that manufacturer doesn't have a US presence so that's pretty much you are actually manufacturing you're distributing for somebody that manufactured it out of state or you're importing it into the state by somebody that doesn't have a US presence you'll see on page 11 line 1 the manufacturer who sells asphalt in the state to a state agency municipality your private entity shall pay an assessment of $1 per ton to the department now one of the things that's going to be difficult about this program is you have to stand it up first because nobody's actually reporting this right now to the department and the department can't can't collect and audit something that they don't have records on so you'll see that there's a payment requirement each manufacturer submits to the department a monthly report showing the total tonnage of asphalt sold in or sold in to the state by the manufacturer in the prior month so there you go the department gets its data and the manufacturer shall pay the assessment of the tonnage of asphalt sold in or sold into the state each month at the same time the report is issued the money is the money is deposited in the clean water fund and used for the purposes of that fund the records each manufacturer shall keep a record of the tonnage of asphalt sold in or into the state and shall retain those records for at least 5 years records of the tonnage of asphalt sold in the state shall be available at all times for inspection by the commissioner then there's enforcement the requirements of this shall be enforced using the enforcement and collection for this and set forth in chapter 103 of title 32 that sails in these facts that's that