 Thank you. Becca is having a meeting with someone. So I don't know exactly when she'll be here. We have a couple of committee things I'd like to discuss. I'd like to get some feedback on where we're going on. UI. I'd like to talk about priorities. Nathan sent us. A list of bills. There's going to be a lot more coming. So we're not going to limit ourselves to those. So we're not going to limit ourselves to those bills, but. And just how the committee process is going pretty well. I will say one very simple thing. I really do like the 10 minute breaks every hour. I think. Going. An hour and a half in this environment is really. It's really hard. One of the things we need to do is take a committee consensus. We need to make sure that. We need to make sure that. We need to make sure that this. This. Has done to S nine. The workers comp. Presumption bill. It's up on. It's up for action today. I assume we'll concur. And I'm going to try to suspend the rules and send it to the governor today. What happened there was a drafting error. I guess. I don't want to accuse anything, but I think Damien takes ownership for this is that. Right. So that's just the. That's just. The. Was supposed to be effective retroactively. And the section was supposed to be just. Upon passage, which was just the intense section. And he made the intense section retroactive. I left out the last section. As being. Not retroactive. So essentially they just changed the numbers in the effective date to reflect the correct. So it was, Michael Marcotte called me, said we found a typo. I don't think it's something that's a Scribner's error that could be corrected by the secretary. So we have to, I have to get up and just say we concur with that change. Does anybody have a problem with that? No. No, it is- Do you want to see it? Is it just a date? You want to see it? We can pull it up. We don't have to do that. It says that the effective date now says section two, three, and four shall be effective retroactively to January 1st, where it used to say section one, two, and three shall be. Yeah, that's fine. They just paired the retroactivity to the wrong section. So- Do I need this on the record of action? No, no. I don't think so. I just, I will get up and represent that. Our committee looked at it and we were in support of the house changes. And then we will message it back to the house and to the governor. So they were really great. I had a conversation with Representative Marcotte even before the bill left the committee and he immediately took up the bill as soon as he got it and voted it out. So that was good. Last year, a call, it languished, the underlined bill languished for a while in the house, but now we're just doing an extension. So it went forward. So we also have on the floor today S9, no, S14. S14, I think. Yeah, if I mix that up. S14 is the deed restriction bill. And I was telling Allison before you folks got on that I finally found a way to give a very simple explanation. So my report will be very brief. If you want a preview, and I hope I don't screw it up, it's just that if you look at the bill, we don't have it in front of us. We are changing the words of any essentially accessible housing policy found in the bylaws to the specific ones that we enacted in the bill last year. And that was the problem by making it all land development for anything that might be viewed as accessible. It was far too broad and killed projects that might be less than the full extent of accessibility between private parties. And that's the, I'll do even better on the floor, but that's essentially all the bill does. And I'm not going to get into the history of how we got there and what the House did and what the Senate did, because it just confuses people and it's not worth anything to the end result here. That sounds good. Yeah. So let's talk about UI for a second, where I'm going to talk to Damien today and have him reach out to the department to get a draft or two of new language on the chargeability issue we've been dealing with. And you recall there were like four quadrants, I'd like to say, two covering the period of 2020 and two covering the period of 2021. One had to do with the charge, and each one of those had a chargeability quadrant and a return to work quadrant. I'm sort of leaning towards putting most of my effort into just one quadrant going forward on return to work. And even if some employers who might not otherwise get chargeable, get the benefit, I think that gives a lot of administrative ease to the department. And there's very few of them, because as we heard, we had like 80,000 claims around the pandemic and we're only doing like 6,000 normally. Or less. So there's probably only a few businesses out there that wouldn't have been charged anyhow, because as you remember, the major policy change we made in the spring was we're going to give everybody benefits who has a reason connected to COVID, and we're going to give every employer relief from chargeability for those layoffs or separations. So I think that's probably the easiest way to go. I'd like to see. I want some language in the bill that's tight. We may get to the point where we have to give. We may have to do it in a way because these things get technical and complicated and deal with the mainframe and yada, yada. We may have to give discretion to the department to do this by procedures, but certainly tell them what our intent is. We want to achieve to the fullest extent possible and have them come back to us before they enact the procedures just to run it by us to get some. We'll be in session and so we can have some input if we feel they're not going far enough. But this is a dance I think we've been doing since COVID all along where you need to do a fix quickly and you can't necessarily get too much into micro managing. That's my thought. I don't know if anybody has other thoughts. Yeah, I've sort of been thinking about it as universal that sort of even a simpler term of charge universal charge relief. And I think that's I support that. I would support your your direction on that. On both those pieces. You would not. I what? Oh, OK. I am. One thing I asked our chairman early on when when I was just learning about the committee is how much JFO support we get and how to, you know, I think it sounds like with Damian, I could better understand what factors diminish the reserve and what that what implications that has. So I can go do some private work, you know, early next week, maybe with Damian to better understand that. But that's where I just feel sort of inadequate to speak up yet in some ways is really understanding from a fiscal perspective what what that means because it just hasn't been part. It wasn't a ways and means thing. It wasn't sort of part of what I learned about financially in the house. And as I you and I talked a little bit about this, we really don't see much of JFO in this committee. And when it comes to you, I there, despite what you might have seen on the surface from Joyce yesterday, most of the number crunching gets done by the department in the form of Matt Barowitz. OK, and it's a good department of labor. It's a good question. I'm sorry. It's a good question. In the sense of what is the adverse impact in dollars by not being a purist here and saying if it really comes down to an employer who has laid somebody off and the job is now reopened and we passed a law that said you have to offer that job back and want to continue in that policy and say that those people should get to don't offer the job should get charged for that employee all the way back to March or whenever that person first started drawing benefits, then we're going to lose some money in the fund. I don't think it's going to be a lot. It's going to pale in comparison to the amount that we're losing by letting people get benefits from what they normally wouldn't. So but we should get some sort of feel, at least I agree, the goal in speaking with Senator Clarkson would be to try and vote this bill out by next Friday. And we're having them back, I think, on Tuesday. I hope with a proposal to start looking at some words on it. I also for the committee's benefit, I don't know how much. I know, Casey, you probably don't know this. I don't know if the other people do. I want to have Damien or the department come in and explain the simple factors that go into charge ability. They will bring they will bring what they will do is they will bring in a matrix that's actually in the green books that shows one column that has 20 rate classes. And the other column that has five codes, five sectors for essentially the health of the trust fund. So right now we're in because we're a year behind where I think in code one, which is the healthiest trust fund going and it's going to drop precipitously to code five. OK. And as you look at the matrix, the one to 20 is basically your experience rating like the construction industry is usually in rate 20. So they have the highest charge on the payroll that's charged against. Service employees, clerical, they may be up in rate one. So you look at the rate class and you look at the health of the trust fund thing and then you go to a box and you'll see this. And that tells you a percentage of the first fourteen thousand dollars of wages of an employee that the unemployed that the employer has to pay. That's how you calculate. OK, so if you had if you had like ten employees making twenty thousand dollars, the first fourteen thousand dollars each of those ten employees would have a percentage applied to them. OK, so so that would be one hundred and forty thousand dollars of salary or wages would be would be applied. And then it'd be multiplied by the percentage you fall in this matrix. So an example might be in class one, the percentage is one tenth of one percent. So if we had a very healthy trust fund and you were a low and you were a low turnover employer, point one ten percent of these ten employees at one hundred and forty thousand, I think is it's either one hundred and forty dollars or one or fourteen hundred dollars a year is what you pay. If we went to five, that one tenth of one percent goes to point nine percent. So then you apply the point nine percent to the hundred and forty thousand dollars. And that's how much you pay in taxes, but we'll have someone walk us through. And I think you get a much better feel as to why experience rating and the health of the trust fund dictate how much an employer. Plus, I wanted to show you that just you have some real numbers that you don't you don't think we're paying like 20 percent of a worker's employee wages in unemployment. The number is pretty small, but it can go up, I think, as high as six or eight percent. If you get into. Yeah, and we had just dropped it because our experience rating in a in a number of our construction industries has has improved. And so we as I recall a year and a half ago or two years ago, we were able to drop it fairly considerably, right? Well, the experience rating doesn't go by sector class. The experience rate, it goes by the individual employer. Right. People they laid off in the last few years. It was the overall workers comp rate dropped. I mean, there was unemployment and, yes, it dropped because the health the trust fund was so healthy. So the thing one through five is down to one for everybody. I thought it was a combination of particularly the forest products industry experience ratings generally improving. Anyway, I thought it was a combination. You're thinking of workers comp and that's true. This is unemployment insurance. Right, right, right. Sorry. I'm just sorry. I'm sorry. I'm totally just conflated them. And just what I have a clear question during what helped me in terms of the health of the trust fund now, people have been paying their, you know, you know, the employers have been playing the same rate during the course of the pandemic. They they what we're talking about is the prospective rate charge increase, the charge increase in the future. People have been what? Well, not, not, not, not, not exactly. This is why it gets so complicated. When you think about it, if you're only charged on the first fourteen thousand dollars of wages, the vast majority of the tax payments, the contributions from employers come on April 15th, which was 45 days after the end of the first quarter. That first quarter is where new charge rates come into place. And we have not we're not there yet. So I'm not sure how they're going to manipulate that table for the first quarter. Yesterday, we heard that. Much to my surprise, you know, nothing has been done yet and that everybody all employers experience rating now are being charged for every one of these layoffs and they want to figure out a way to relieve those people from the charges. And that's what we're talking about. But yeah, the the table changes annually. And it changes. I think it changes on July 1st. But by the first. All the base wages, which is only the first fourteen thousand dollars, are usually all done for most for ninety five percent of the employees in the state. So the what we're dealing with now is pre covid rates and they will change in January and July to reflect new numbers, new percentages for going forward, reflective of all the layoffs and all the tumult that is that is that like an actuarial calculation? I'm just trying to understand how the kind of the actuarial. We have an auditor here, so it's not that sophisticated, but it's there is a formula that determines the health of the trust fund, whether you're in one to five. And then there's a number of formula that determines your experience rating, which is essentially how many layoffs you've had compared to your your employee, your your staff, your staffing, right? Which is what they begin to calculate April 1st, which is why they need us to get this bill done, because to set the rate by July one, they need all of this by April 1st. I mean, they begin this work April 1st, I think, right? It's right. Yes, that's that's right. They are fairly certain all this table, this matrix, gets changed every July 1st and then need the information by April 1st to make those changes. You know, this whole thing that experience rating is pretty important in UI. That's why you have these small brothers that are really afraid. If they lay somebody off, it's going to affect all their all their wages up to the first fourteen thousand dollars, because, you know, that one layoff may be fairly significant when you only have a staff of 10 people. So anyhow, what time is it? Let's see. It is almost five of nine. Randy, did you have a thought on the UI? Because I have another thought on return to work, but Randy hasn't said anything yet. Actually, I do not have any major thought on it. I'm still listening and trying to understand that tomorrow there's going to be some additional material presented to us. Is that correct? Tuesday, Tuesday. I, yes, I'm going to try and have a couple of alternatives or one alternative that we could work off that's in writing and have Damien and Cameron explain it to us and we can start saying whether we like that proposal, we want to tweak it, head it towards a vote, maybe on Friday. OK, because we could spin our wheels on this forever. Well, I would I very much like to hear alternatives being proposed and what they are so that we have something concrete to think about rather than that they try to do this on the fly. Right. And that's the direction we're moving. Yeah, that's good concrete. So my thought on the return to work, which I. It is that we still have some sectors that are going to lag behind other sectors. We have still some fairly major sectors in this state that are not going to be moving back online as robustly as others. And I'm wondering as we look at return to work, if we can find tuna enough so that we could not necessarily exempt hospitality, education and health care, but maybe have a more modified return to work requirement in those in those more hammered sectors. You see what I mean? Well, I mean, OK, if you're talking about work search, yes, definitely in terms of this problem of whether an employer who is shut down. I'm talking about work search. OK, well, this bill really doesn't deal with work search. Deals with return to work offering a job to somebody in terms of ability. I thought that was all together. Isn't return to work also combined with work search? I think we're definitely going to want to look at the work search policy. And I made it pretty clear to the department that before they make any changes, we would talk to them about it. But this bill remembers just in the simplest form is just a continuation of the sunset of all the policies we made. And one of the policies, the foreign policy we're left with, is how much are we going to insist that an employer who shuts down and reopens rehires rehires or an employment? And I think in the ideal world, we want every employer for every employee to offer a job back. But we're facing apparently monumental, administrative, mainframe complications in how to do that. So they're going to we're going to try and find a way to make it as feasible as possible without having the system crash. Right. That's a lay way of saying it. One question I have is how do you feel about me working offline with Cameron and others about some language that would start to get at understanding more of the demographic experience of people? I have no problem with this, but it's not going to be in this bill. OK, I didn't know which bill is the fastest versus the not so fast moving one. We made a decision a while ago that we're going to try and keep this bill focused on if we could just changing the sunset date from last year's bill to 30 days after or a quarter after the executive order is lifted, then we'll move on. They have a bunch of work wage based, freeze categories, those one to five, they want to freeze that for a year. They have a lot of proposals. Other people have idea for benefit improvements. You heard David Mickenburg say, you know, the trust fund needs to be kept in balance. So as I joked yesterday to the pro tem, I said, we're going to start calling this committee the unemployment insurance committee. You just you. OK, that helps me know which bill is the bill to do that. You can you can start on that if you want. No problem. OK, so just briefly, any other feedback on how things are going or their priority issues out there? I'm not holding anybody to anything. You can approach me about these things individually or at any time you want. But you have something you want to suggest right now that you see coming down the pike that should be put on our radar thing. We have plenty to do. Keep you as opposed to some other committees, we have plenty to do that with covid related stuff. And I think because timing is so important in covid, that's my inclination to prioritize those things. But there are other things that will creep in and, you know, we're already starting to see crossover looming if there's going to be a crossover. It's hard to believe. But we got a lot with just UI and housing, certainly to keep us busy. Well, so any and there is I mean, in helping us recover, because what we're hoping to do is anything we can do to encourage the economy's recovery is also a helpful contribution in post covid in as we sludge towards the end of covid. As we see the light at the end of this tunnel, anything this committee can do to to reinforce that recovery, I think, is essential. So I think there are many things that we might be considering that would enable and further that goal. I would I have a student debt bill that I think would be really helpful for as an additional incentive for both, because we still have a retention problem in gov ops, Keisha and I heard of, you know, we're we're losing population. It's not huge, but we're still the only New England states losing population rather than gaining it. This is a challenge. We need to continue to address in covid, even under the umbrella land, you know, of covid. I also think one of the things we've learned in covid are the huge disparities with our BIPOC population. And so one of the areas I really want us to look at is addressing the gap between the asset gap between our white population and our BIPOC population. One and we might be able to accomplish that in our down payment assistance program and expanding that. And also, we are think we're going to see an explosion of debt with credit with some during covid. So many people have put so much on their credit cards. And I'm very concerned about those, what the implications of that are. The statute of limitations we might look at. Anyway, that that's an area of concern I have that is one that is one of those covid. You know, the trails covid. Senator Brock, did you have something? Yeah, I've got three things that are kind of on my agenda of concern. The first is the system issues, the IT issues with with respect to unemployment of getting our arms around that and determine whether or not there is anything that we want to do legislatively. You know, we talk about how bad the system is. We talk about its failure. We talk about its inability. We talk about what's happening with the relationship with other states that we're going to do something. And whatever the case is, we need to do something. And I think we need to to energize that. And I would suspect that if anything, it may start here as opposed to finance where theoretically we deal with technology issues. So that's that's the first issue. The second is affordable housing. And every year I bring this question up and every year I get answers that are unsatisfying to me, and that is why is affordable housing so unaffordable? This discussion that we had the other day and I haven't seen all the details from what we've been we've been putting into affordable housing. But I saw that project in Springfield in which if you calculate the amount, each apartment costs over four hundred thousand dollars to build. And that to me is not affordable. And I think we need to get at the real issue of why with the structure that we have, affordable housing costs so much. And I can't I'm right now. I don't know whether that's because we we demand the perfect rather than the good or because we have a system that encourages overspending. But when you compare that to the average cost of real houses that real people who are not in affordable housing projects by there's a tremendous disparity. I'm thinking of and I assume we're going to do an omnibus housing bill again this year, putting some provision in it to create a study group composed to a great extent of people in the private sector, including the home builders, people who are in construction industry, people who are attorneys who deal with with housing issues and economists and perhaps others to really look at that issue of how we can make affordable housing actually affordable and whether or not the structure we have of public housing needs to be supplemented with the creation of individual product development that may produce a project that's good, but not necessarily perfect, less expensive way. The third piece goes to something that we said or item goes to something that we talked about a little bit earlier just parenthetically. I think Allison, you brought it up and that is the disparate impact for people of color and others on home ownership and other things. And one of the things I see this kind of throughout is that often we take the high level statistic of disparate impact and treat that as a cause rather than a result. And I would like to get behind those numbers a little bit and ask the question, why, why is there a disparate impact? Is that disparate impact the result of discrimination or is the disparate impact result of not statistical error, but the way we calculate things that has that create a disparate impact or whether there are other factors that we ought to be taking into account? In other words, the whole issue of disparate impact, I would like to do more to get behind those numbers to really understand why there is a disparity. Is it discrimination or are there other factors that we're failed to take into account? Now, how we go about doing that? And this is broader than economic development. I mean, it's the whole it's what I see in corrections. It's what I see in law enforcement. It's what I see at how we we look at disparate impact generally. And statistically, I'm not entirely comfortable with the fact that causation and correlation are being treated equally. OK, so on the first issue on modernization of the UI system and mainframe, there's a perfect vehicle for discussion around that when we deal with our next UI bills and I'm a big fan of bringing back legislation that we worked on past unanimously out of this committee, may have passed unanimously out of the Senate. But for some reason, it died in the house. So two housing bills that I think one of them we may have already. The S two thirty seven, which we're doing a little cleanup on the floor today of there are a lot of provisions that fell by the wayside and the kerfuffle of of the end of the session. So as a starting point, I'm going to reintroduce that. And the goal, even though it may not be earth shattering, was to in in fact implement policies that reduce the cost of housing production, whether it be wastewater Act two fifty, bylaw changes and things like that. So we're going to pick that up. We have the advantage of having heard weeks of testimony and made a decision on those policies last year ourselves. And I think for the most part, they were strongly supported. And I'm also realizing that there there's still some objection. I want to look at the housing bond. Several of you signed on to that again. But as a way to at least get the conversation started, which will dovetail nicely with all these federal funds for housing is how to get some bricks and more of some capital construction into into producing more housing. So we have a number of bills that didn't make it all the way through, but had strong support in this committee. I think that we're pretty close to doing that, I think, on the student loan as well. I had just before we end this piece and move to Earhart. I had an interesting conversation with I hope you don't mind, Nathan, yesterday and we were talking about substance. And he said, boy, one thing I'm really interested and I would really like is that I have so many of my friends at UVM and stuff like that, that really wanted to stay in Vermont and have moved afar. I told him about our remote work and relocated worker bill and stuff like that. He was very supportive and I will be introducing the bill that made it, I think at the Senate Appropriations last year, that was codifies those programs subject to appropriations, which I understand, at least the signal I'm getting from the administration is that they are going to continue to support in the budget, at least the relocated worker portion of the bill, but I'd like to get those two programs codified. And when we do have money available to look to putting some money in there. So we have a full agenda, just picking up things that we've already worked on and adding to them. And we need to continue this committee conversation because before we haven't heard from Keisha or from Becca and not fully, I mean, so there's lots more to discuss. But the I heard exactly the same thing from my UVM intern about where kids are looking, where they're going to go next year. Same exact thing that this housing was the big barrier. So, hey, you know, it's but we have to hear from everybody before we can. We can schedule another 15, 30 minutes next week to hear from others and to follow up. But I think we should move on to homelessness, which is sort of the one piece of the housing puzzle that we dealt with last year that we haven't really got updated on and hi, Liz, and get a background of where we were, what we put in, what programs we established. We put a lot of money in. I know agency human services got 16 million dollars. But we heard some sad news last week that I think the way it was phrased was despite all those efforts and people sort of salivating that we were going to cure homelessness at this point were worse off than we were prior to the covid situation in terms of our numbers. Maybe that's not true, but that's what I think I heard Gus say. But so I am going to start off. I want to just use the chairman's prerogative and introducing Liz Reedy, who's with us this morning. I often hear cases say that she feels like she stands on the shoulders of my late wife, Sally Fox. Well, Sally Fox stood on the shoulders of people like Liz Reedy and Cheryl Rivers. And we're honored to have Liz here today as she works in Middlebury, which is another I'll take another minute to say another personal anecdote here is that when I first started working at legal aid in the mid seventies, John Dooley, who was a Supreme Court justice, was our boss. And he had this great idea of buying a Winnebago and riding circuit for legal aid. And we used to go down to Middlebury and park in front of the John Gramps Center and the advocate at the Winnebago that used to find the clients, bring them into the Winnebago to be interviewed by me as a as a lawyer, was Cheryl Rivers. And that's where I met Cheryl Rivers. And I always remember turning the corner going there with fear in my heart as to how many people she turned out for me to see in the course of an afternoon in Winnebago and a lot of them were tough cases, a lot of domestic violence cases and divorce cases, custody cases. And just as an aside for Becca's benefit is that back then, we didn't have things like relief from abuse orders. The cops would just say, if you have a domestic quarrel, go file a lawsuit in superior court, which is a nightmare to do. There was no quick indeed. And the person single handedly most responsible for getting that humongous change through was Carolyn Wesley's father, Jack Wesley. He came down and worked the legislature and made a monumental change in the domestic violence laws in the state of Vermont. So I'm done. Well, I will convey that to Carolyn Wesley when I talk to her later this morning. That's a lovely tribute to her her dad, who is a dear friend of mine as well. So happy to have Liz reading with us. It's very exciting. So you guys, I have to tell you last night I got the call from Earhart. You know, I just thought I'd check my email one last time and it was pretty late, you know, and it really reminded me when I was in the Senate and I used to drive back from Montpelier on some nights and, you know, you'd always have this was before we had cell phones and you'd always have some calls on. And sometimes I'd have a call from Michael, you know, and we'd be working on some poverty issues and some housing issues and then I have a long list of calls from constituents and, you know, wow, you know, I've been there all day and still you come home and you've got it. But Michael's was always the the call that I returned and it was always about something we had to do the next morning, you know, and again, having to do something the next morning. So this was very reminiscent of that. And it's nice to see all of the committee. I know Senator Brock actually who I'm actually I probably shouldn't say this in a public forum, but personally grateful to because, you know, I've really so enjoyed my work direct service at John Graham. And so if it wasn't for him, I probably wouldn't have come back to Addison County to do that. We celebrated 40 years at John Graham Housing and Services this year. Senator Rivers was the director of ACAG when the shelter building was bought. I just recently looked at the deed. And of course, it's really wonderful to see Senator Clarkson. Senator Rahm has been down to John Graham to our sleep out. And congratulations, Becca, on your new role. So so nice to see such a wonderful committee. OK, if we could, you know, Earhart and I spent a little time last night and we thought one thing we could do, I would love to kind of set the table a little bit and let you know what it's been like for Vermonters experiencing homelessness during the pandemic and who they are, where they are, what they've been doing, what we're trying to do to help them get into permanent housing, what the numbers are. And then I would just like to tell you a little bit about what John Graham's done, and then I would like to just make a few recommendations. So Liz, what we're going to do is it's your show. You and Earhart can divide the time as you want. We're going to go till 10 30, take a 10 minute break, and then you'll have probably about if you needed another 15 minutes, I am going to have to go to another committee, your committee, Senate natural resources, which Liz used to chair, and an active year you're going. And Allison will pick it up at 10 o'clock and I'll probably be back before 10 30. So go for it. Great. Well, so we thought Earhart and I will probably kind of team tag on the first part and we have the presentation by Sarah Phillips. Nathan, do you have that for the members? It is posted on the website. OK. So she did a really nice PowerPoint presentation, a homelessness update. You guys have it. Can you see it? We can pull it up. It's a little PowerPoint. Here it is. And so basically we'll run through this quickly. The main people that were counting here at this point today, there's about 2,500 people who are homeless in Vermont. And that's what is under the federal definition of literally homeless. And you can see what those categories are. And I think what what Michael was saying about what Gus stated, I think the issue is, is that, you know, the way we count homelessness and the point in time count, which probably is roughly, I don't know, a little bit more than half of this Earhart for last for the year prior to the pandemic. Would that be right? Yeah, actually, right now we've got over 2,500. Actually, this is the first week of January and good morning for the record. Earhart Mokka of Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition. One of the slides indicates how many folks are living in motels right now. It's over 2,500 individuals, including, I can't remember the number, almost 400 children that was in the first week of January. And the point in time count last year counted 1,110 individuals that were living in shelter, in motels, and an unsheltered in places not meant for human habitation. What we'd like to point out here is that many of us have always said that this way in which the federal point in time count is done does not show the true number of homeless people. So what actually you have is a lot of youth that are living in substandard and dangerous situations, you have elders that may be doubled up, you have people that are couch surfing, none of those people have been counted previously in the point in time count. But when everything hit in March, those people no longer had the ability to stay where they've been staying. People were afraid. Family members in some cases took people in and other cases didn't. And so what you saw was also people that had. Right now, out of those 2,500 people, you have families, you have people with mental health issues, you have people suffering from addictions and they're cooped up in a little motel room. Many people may or may not have ability to cook or to shop, and we have been at least in Addison County providing meals for people, delivering meals. So it's been it's been quite a it's been quite a ride. I just like to tell you what it's like for people there. So at John Graham, the shelter is still running. We have two shelter buildings. We can't run when the pandemic. Sorry, Liz, it's Allison. Could you just tell us where John Graham is? I don't know. I'm sorry. I just assume it's the center of the universe, Allison. Well, I would say that the Haven was my center of the universe. Right. And I don't even sadly, I'm embarrassed to say we haven't talked about it much in this committee. So I'm just curious where it is. OK, so John Graham Housing and Services has five buildings and our main shelter building is on Main Street, the corner, right in the historic downtown in the city of Regens. We have two other buildings there. We have a building in Middlebury and a building in Bristol. So we serve the whole county there with housing and services. But when and when you scroll down here, you'll see that all the different shelters, 30 shelters, 24 emergency apartments, motel overflow. So at John Graham, we have all of that. We have shelters, we have apartments, we have emergency apartments, and we have people in motels. So I'm sorry about that, Senator. It's OK, I feel I have to ask when I don't know. Of course. Yeah. So yeah, so so when pandemic hit, you know, we were pretty packed in our shelter spaces up two of which are in downtown Regens, but we realize, you know, sometimes you'll have you might have four or five people in a single room and you just couldn't do that in the pandemic. So it started that people that had pre-existing conditions or were at high risk were able to go to a motel to reduce the census. We continue to run throughout the pandemic. We can continue to run now and to serve people in all five of our buildings. But also there's about 70 to 120 people, depending on the census that are in motels in Addison County. And you can see the numbers in all of it from Sarah's presentation. You can see how many are in your own district there. So basically what we've been trying to do is to continue to run what we had and expand to help those people who who are in the motels, which includes delivering meals, providing services, helping people get housing, and also things like supplies, you know, personal items and also laundry, because people haven't really been able to do any of those things. So that's can you touch upon the comment about helping people find housing? Yeah, the experience has been in your neck of the woods. Yeah. So first of all, I want to say that I think the money that you guys invested has really been amazing that the state of Vermont and in a way, I'm kind of glad she couldn't come because I get to talk about her programs. Sarah Phillips and her team have done an outstanding job. They have really pivoted. They got the funds right out to the frontline workers to be there for people in motels. Immediately, we were able to start delivering meals, delivering personal items, and they even stood up a voucher and service program called the CARES program with some of the funds that you sent their way. And what that does, Senator, is it provides vouchers with those funds. The vouchers are administered by CVOEO and and it gives one on one support to the family. So we have a CARES provider at John Graham. We go into the motels. We through the coordinated entry process, we identify the people most in need. It's always families with children that are at the top of the list. And then, of course, people that have significant disabilities or would be really harmed by covid. And we get them to be eligible, ship those applications right up to CVOEO. Paul Dragon is there. He's done a fantastic job, turns them right around. The people then have the vouchers and the support. And then we conduct a housing search. Now, this whole program just started, you know, I mean, whenever the funds arrived and we have gotten several people, several households into housing just in Addison County. But as you know, in Addison County and probably in Chittenden County, in Addison County, we have a less than one percent vacancy rate for housing. So what that has meant is that we've had to create housing. So once again, with the funds that you appropriated to the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board in Addison County, we have been able to stand up. Well, our organization, John Graham, has put in place three new zero energy modular homes with the help of efficiency Vermont, and I'd love to address some of Senator Brock's issues with with cost and I'd like I can get into the details about the cost for those homes, and I think that they might be something exactly along the lines that he's thinking would be a good deal. Yes, with Jen, Jen sent showed us a photo of them. Oh, good, good, good. It gave us the gave us the price tag of, I think, one hundred and ten thousand each. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, good, good, good. I'm glad she did that. And then we also were in partnership with Addison County Community Trust for a refurbishment project that is involved with Housing Vermont. And there'll be a number of units there. Another VHCB funded project that was the Regents Commons project just took some of the families with the new vouchers. And and so those people have exited the motels and gone into those units. But I want to tell you, when the pandemic hit, we had two mothers. You know, I spent Christmas Day last year at John Graham. We had a big, you know, Christmas tree for these mothers that were about to give birth. They both gave birth in the middle of the pandemic from motel rooms. And they're both safely housed now in their own units, affordable units. So, you know, I'm not telling you that there's thousands of people being housed. It's one family at a time. OK, one family at a time either going into a new zero energy mod, either going into one of the VHCB units or going into some existing units. But it's happening and and it's happening with the investments that were made by this committee. So, yeah. So that's kind of is there, Michael, are there other things you want to know specifically about how people from motels into housing? No, I'm just wondering we need to understand better the challenges. We've heard that there are challenges in finding, like you say, the one percent vacancy rate. So it's more a capital problem than it is a rent relief problem. You say these these individuals that you found housing for, they're in housing that's affordable. I guess I would want to know is there a cross-pollinization between this program of finding housing for the homeless and the rent stabilization program when you put somebody into a unit, do they immediately go to the rent stabilization thing and say, pay the rent for this unit? OK, well, for example, with the with all the new units that we brought online with the funds that flow to VHCB, the three units, the three new units, actually, one of them is coming today. The three new units, they will all have vouchers from the Vermont State Housing Authority that and so will the ACCT units through Housing Vermont or I guess they're ever north is the new name, but all of those seven new units that that we're working to develop will all have vouchers. They would they will have project based vouchers. But for example, the folks that went into the Virgin's Commons, those folks went in with Sarah's vouchers, the CARES vouchers that you guys funded. So in many cases, people like one family, the one family that I told you that had the baby, that guy worked even during the pandemic. OK, this guy, he was just amazing and he continues with his job. So he's housed with his own income. But many other people have lost their employment. And so they're either going to have a project based voucher or they're going to have one of the CARES vouchers, which are temporary. But if they, you know, if they can go for 18 months on those, then they can be in line to be to receive a permanent voucher. So that's something really good. Those vouchers fully cover the cost of the rent or leave a share that the tenant is supposed to pay. Yeah, it's the same 80 20 as you always see. So people shouldn't be paying more than 80 percent of their income. So, for example, in one of our units, we had a person who is a National Guardsman and has a very started off in a pretty good job. He started with a voucher that paid his family's a lot of the rent. Little by little, he was paying the full rent. So it's it's based upon nobody pays more than 80 per cent. Is it 80 percent of your 30 30 percent was 30 percent. I'm sorry, I was not. It's not. Yeah, 30 percent of the income. Yes, this is this is an observation, not a question, but we're going to have to figure out with all this new federal rent money becoming available, how we use that perhaps versus the vouchers and somehow turn the voucher money to. You know, somehow move money around so we maximize the use of the new federal dollars, because as you know, people are pretty clear that two hundred million dollars for rent is going to be we're going to have to find ways to spend it. Otherwise, you're going to have to give it back to other states. So when I hear vouchers under cares or vouchers under federal other federal program, it's just at this point, it's just more rent money and we really don't need more rent money. We need more money that could be used to. What are the three legs of the stool? Housing, shelter and food. If I if I could jump in. Bricks and mortar services and a voucher. Right. OK, so basically we need all three and there's and basically what you did with that package was provide all three. So I'm telling you how we used all three, you know, for the case managers, the service coordinators to to to generate new units and also to work with the state housing authority. But I have a few ideas about that, which, you know, I would like to give. Before you get to that, Liz. You seem to perhaps maybe want to tweak or disagree with the fact that we may be worse off with the homeless population than we were before covid hit. Do you feel that's true or false in the in the case of Addison County and if so, how did we, despite all the money, how did we wind up losing ground? Well, the thing I guess the point that Earhart and I would make is that they were always there, they just weren't counted. And so now we see the full scope of the problem. The state has done a great job. You know, I was on a call with a friend of mine in Montreal. They got people dying on the street up there, you know. And and the state of Vermont has has allowed people to be safe. And and I can't say enough good about the Office of Economic Opportunity and the way the respect and, you know, and and also the frontline workers. You know, this has not been so easy for people. And by the way, that frontline hazard pay was amazing. And we're very grateful to the legislature for that. Basically, basically, you say, when the primary reason we find ourselves where we are is we sort of mis-projected last year. And we didn't know that there were more people out there than we thought. Is that what we're doing? We've always known that those folks were out there. It's, you know, the point in time count is something that HUD requires. And in order for the state to continue to receive certain funds for homelessness, it is really virtually impossible to get a handle on how many folks are doubling up, how many folks are couchsurfing and, you know, living with family, family and friends. That is a number that HUD doesn't require us to to try to get at. But I think anecdotally, folks working in the field know that at any given time, there's probably two, three or four times as many folks that are actually homeless or precariously housed on the verge of homelessness. Then what we count annually in the point in time count, point in time count is just one barometer. I would add that one of the things that the pandemic has done is basically it's shown us, it's revealed what was hidden all along. And, you know, we don't necessarily focus on what is hidden in terms of homelessness and in terms of the poverty that people are experiencing in Vermont. And the pandemic has shown us all of those systemic deficiencies that have been there all along, but we just don't focus on them because HUD makes us focus on one thing and we're missing, you know, the big picture in many ways. So the pandemic is revealed. What was there all along? As Elizabeth said, may I ask a question? Michael, I'm just curious, well, with a new administration, I would hope that the homeless advocates would be asking for an extension of that point in time count and what it's able to be drawn in. I also would love to ask, remind me, when the point in time count is done, is it January? Next Wednesday night, next Wednesday is our annual homelessness awareness day. And the point in time count is actually overnight. And so most of the data is collected the next day, so on the 28th, next Thursday. OK, so the 28th. And the question I have is of these 2,500 that have been identified this year, how many of them are repeat? How many of them are the are the same population that we looked at earlier, you know, in March? How many of them are the are the same and how many are new and how many are coming in because either we didn't we underestimated the scale or have come to us because their housing has fallen apart or they couldn't pay their rent. You know, how many have come because of other challenges in the system? So we don't have any or no, we don't have that answer. That's an answer that has would have to be generated by one of the folks who manages what's known as the HMIS system for the state of Vermont, the HMIS stands for Homeless Management Information Systems. So everyone who receives one or another of the federal sources of funding for folks who are experiencing homelessness get tracked and registered through the HMIS system. And, you know, there's obviously a lot of confidentiality issues in there. So none of us has direct access to that, except for the contractor that does that on behalf of the state of Vermont. Sarah Phillips ultimately would be the person to to ask or the folks who are we able to access that information and does it track by gender, by race, by what does it track by and what kind of data would it reveal? I think what you're getting at, Senator, is housing retention. And once people are in housing or if they are housing insecure, I think the issue there is what are we doing to ensure that people can retain their housing? And I can speak to that that at John Graham, we and I'll let Sarah know that you like those figures. But OEO does track the number. So, you know, we put everybody into this house as as Earhart described it. And we track housing retention. We at John Graham have 90, at least 90, probably 95 percent housing retention. So once a person goes into a unit, the service coordinator sticks with them. And those are the people that you helped OEO give us that service coordinator stays with the person. They stop and they visit them. They make sure that the paperwork is up today, that they're getting their health care. They might bring by a bag of food. And so that is key. And that's one of the big successes of the Vermont model. And that's one of the things I want to talk to you about keeping going is those services, those retention services, those outreach services are really key in their life and death for people. I mean, we had a guy in Addison County. He was living outside for eight years. He was from Redport. He was a former service member living on a tent by the banks of the Otter Creek. We went out and said, please come in. We have a unit for you. We had to go every day, every single day to the home, every single day for a while. And then little by little, his life changed and he was able to rent with our partner, ACCT, our service coordinators after three years still go there. The day his check comes, make sure his rents paid, make sure his doctor's appointments are kept. And so there are a certain percentage of people that are always going to need that level of service. And so that is one of the key things that we really and, you know, that all of the housing units that Gus has put in place, which is miraculous in many ways, what we're finding is a in that housing. So that's something that we want to talk with you about for sure. Are there other maybe just maybe we just have a discussion, Michael, is that good? So maybe I'm asking this in a different way, but I would like to have a this is directed to, I think, more to Earhart being in the building or on Zoom a lot last year. There was a point in time not to overuse that phrase, but there was a point in time last year where we were sort of giddy in taking credit for having solved the homeless problem by putting 16 million dollars into services, 30 million dollars into buying shelter or improving shelters, buying motels, all this stuff, not only protecting people during the pandemic in the spring, but also coming back better. If someone says to me, what happened? What's my response? Well, I think the response is that we were temporarily able to end homelessness and some of some of the disappointment that we felt soon after that initial diddiness of we have, you know, the state had one point two five billion dollars unprecedented of one time funds to to try and solve systemic problems that existed all along. The problem was the time frame that ultimately we learned and it took a while to learn how hard and fast that December 30th date was for the coronavirus relief funds. I think one of the issues all along here has been that the federal government, the money that the federal government is giving us is short term money that is that we're trying to use to serve long term problems. And I think that's that's that was the issue with the coronavirus relief funds. That is going to be the issue with the two hundred million dollars in rental and utility assistance funding that's coming at us. It's all short term money that's meant not as a stimulus. I would characterize it as relief money, short term relief money. And we we were I think because of the size of the funding and the flexibility that was allowed with the original CRF dollars. I think we had a hope for I think it lasted about a month that we could actually end homelessness with this with this funding if it could last longer and use that fund that money to build permanent permits, build in permanent solutions. But unfortunately, the interpretations from Treasury and the guidance were far more restrictive than what we originally originally helped. So that would be my my response. That said, we made huge, huge progress and have done I don't think we want to lose sight of the incredible amount of good that has been achieved as a result of that money, the hundreds of units that VHCB has stood up, the dozen, the well over a dozen shelters that have been made covid safe so that people can so they can serve folks again. Whereas before some shelters were completely empty and others had gone down to 50 percent of their their normal census because of the need for physical distancing. So there's an incredible amount as Elizabeth points out. It's it's really family by family, individual by individual. And so there are the there are many, many successes. So we don't want to we don't want to forget about that. But I think structurally, the issue is you're looking at short term dollars that are being used as much as possible to harness and achieve long term solutions. It's really people. I'll tell you the success. People are alive. Not that many people have gotten not that many people experiencing homelessness have gotten the virus. There's been a lot of suffering, tremendous personal suffering, including people, you know, that that have trauma, including people that suffer with addictions. There have been people that have died from overdose right here in our own county. There's tremendous suffering in those motels. But there's also a lot of care. People are alive. People are safe. People are getting help. People are getting their temperature taken. They're getting three meals a day. They're getting somebody that comes by and says, let's sit down and fill out a voucher application, get your name on the list. Let's see if you like this one of these new zero energy mods or would you like to go into a unit in Middlebury? So it's really one family at a time. And I do I just want to say a couple of other things that I think you might be able to do, do you know, with that rental money, would you be able to? I have a concern for people who are asylees and refugees and are not are not eligible for the HUD vouchers. So, for example, you know, we have, like I mentioned, these seven new units. Well, we have two families I'd love to put into one of these permanent units, but they aren't eligible to go in. And so I wonder if there would be a window there. The only way we can house people is number one in shelter or number two. We do have some GA apartments and the state has been so kind to us in allowing us to not have to have people be HUD eligible. But if some of that money could go for more of those apartments, then we could house asylee families and individuals and refugee families and individuals. We also in Addison County and I really thank the member from the house when I was testifying last last year, she asked me, what's going on with farm workers? Well, you know, we began really looking closely at that. And we've been we have a Spanish speaking service coordinator who's been delivering food there. So there's there's a lot of things that we can be doing if we have a chance to think creatively with these funds. And I would really encourage you to look at what can we do for asylees and refugees that might not be eligible for these vouchers under the HUD regulations? Well, we have a roundtable discussion scheduled for Wednesday, where we're bringing in all of the housing leaders in the state to precisely start thinking along those lines. And I hope for the rest of the time you're here today, perhaps you could give us some idea what you see so far from what you've read, Airheart, on the the the second COVID relief package and what Biden, President Biden is suggesting for a third and where there might be some opportunities there. And before we get to that, and it may be and I may sign off after this, but at one point we were talking about the I think it's the GA program being turned over discontinued at the state level and maybe being turned over in a block grant or something to the to the caps, if they're still called caps, I don't know, the and I think there was some hope that that program would discontinue, at least as it had been historically organized, what's going on in light of the pandemic continuing ongoing and you know, there's still plenty of people in motels and stuff. But that is a question for Sarah Phillips and Jeffrey Pippinger. My guess is that they're going to talk about that once the governor's FY 22 budget comes out. But the early word that we're hearing, and I've heard this both from Secretary Smith and the government's press conferences as well as in various forums, from various folks from AHS, that they still intend to ultimately move the Motel voucher program to community based providers. And they've already, as I think you heard last year, initiated some of that through a variety of pilot programs that are funding local alternatives, for instance, through the domestic violence network providers, there are already providers, especially in the southern part of the state that have their own pool of Motel voucher money. Some of it is being used to house people in safe houses that have master leases. Some of that money is being used to house folks safely in motels. And I think their intent is to build on that. That originally the original proposal was for that to begin as of this past July one. So for FY 21, of course, the pandemic came in between that and the house appropriations when they got into the FY when they were looking at the original FY 21 budget pre-pandemic, they had already said, well, we want to postpone that. At this point, my understanding is that they are going to want to start initiating that as of the beginning of the next fiscal year. So July one of this year for FY 22. And in preliminary discussions, we've had with some of the providers around the state, I think some would say that they'll probably be ready to operationalize that. Others will say we can't do that. And we're not only can't we do it, but we're not interested in doing that at the local level. So I think you're going to see a mix of different different responses from providers. But ultimately, I think this is a question for for Sarah and for Sean, Commissioner Brown, DCF as and Jeffrey Pippinger, his special special advisor. OK, so are you coming back? Yes. OK, because there's one thing I really wanted to say. So what we're going to do now, because I've overextended our break period, let's take a break to 10, 15, maybe I'll be back. And but I think what we can focus on for the remaining 20 minutes or so from 10, 15 on would be the future, the two new federal bills, what ideas they may have or whatever direction the witness and you would like to take it if I'm not back. OK. So I just like to point out it's only nine fifty. I would suggest we take a break only till ten o'clock. Is there a reason that we would go for? OK, right. So so I'm going to go do my jumping jacks and run around the house up and down the stairs and I will see you back here at ten o'clock. Nathan, thanks. Michael, good luck in in natural resources. OK, thank you. Keisha, how's it going for you? Can't help you with the quorum, Senator. I know I'm always ready. I'm always ready to go to that. I think that alumna, I think alumna of the Senate gets to count as a percent of presidents, you know, towards that quorum. Keisha, you want to know how it's going. And and I used to think the senators were just complaining when they said it was tough to have two committees, but I see now that it is really challenging just when you think you're getting into a subject, you have to switch gears. So yeah, no. So now we're getting we're going to go back to this subject and it's it's I'd like to pick up where we left off before the jumping jacks, getting a load of laundry and and doing the stairs. And Allison. Yeah, I'm here. Senator Ballin is here. Oh, right. I'm thrilled. Oh, that means I'm a good behavior. So I think what we'd like to do is really pick your brains about how we can creatively use the 200 million, which is coming at us in rental assistance. As you probably have heard Richard Williams thinks we can you know, use about 123 of that, but that we're going to have to be super creative and get waivers from the treasurer from the fed from the feds in order to use it fully. So we would love to pick your brains. I am not sure I thought we were going to solve homelessness. You can never solve prospectively the challenges people face in their lives. So I I just was hoping we'd be able to build more permanent housing. We built hundreds of units that was fabulous and in record time. But I, you know, I don't think any of us thought we were going to permanently solve this. And so going forward, how can we better help and more fully and creatively help people where they are? Let me maybe just clarify what I said before. I think one of the things that we learned is how much good we can do when we have a large amount of money and when we don't have when when we don't have high barriers to accessing that money, let me put it that way. You know, their Richard's program was not means tested. It was, you know, anyone who had an income loss and couldn't pay the rent as a result of the pandemic was able to receive assistance. It the the the barriers, the thresholds for eligibility were not set the way they usually are, which is pretty low because we always have limited resources and we're trying to deploy limited resources in the most efficient and effective way possible. So I think that that's what part of part of what I think informed that excitement that we had over over the early part of the summer when we first started contemplating how to creatively use a large portion of that 1.25 billion. So now going forward, where do we see and maybe, Erhard, you didn't get to present. And I we don't so you don't have your homeless or your housing stats for 2020 yet. Do you? So we what I what I had hoped to do, because I know you've taken some testimony on the two hundred million dollars, I provided you all and we don't need to go through it. You can look at it afterwards, but I wanted to give you the high points of my understanding of the two hundred million, because I've read the legislation, we have some great FAQs, some two pagers on what is and is not allowed under the two hundred million. And I know everyone wants to think creatively about that, but I want to put one cautionary note out there. You know, the preliminary word and you heard some from Richard about this. But I think the day he testified was the day that we saw the first FAQ from the first guidance from Treasury. And first of all, the money is not anywhere near as flexible as the CRF dollars. It is very restrictive. It is for what we know is it's for emergency, rental assistance and utility assistance going backwards and forwards. It's up to twelve months with a possibility of a three month extension if needed to to help prevent housing instability on a case by case basis. And we know that we have to obligate and we don't know exactly what the term obligate means yet, but we know that we have to obligate sixty five percent of that money by the end of September or else it starts getting recaptured. So I think your appropriations committee has already you have had on the floor yesterday, a quick CRF bill that already gives Richard ten million of this because we want to make sure that there's as little a gap as possible so that he can already start standing up that program. We can't exactly stand up that program because this money is going to be means tested and there are all these restrictions. So he cannot replicate the rental housing stabilization program as they've run it for the last six months and there are a lot of challenges. And Richard's head, I think, exploded when he saw that the treasury guidance and mine did too, because it's even worse than the restrictions in the actual language. So I think the one thing that I did want to make sure that you folks understood is as much as we can think creatively about this a certain amount of that money has to get out for what we know is eligible ASAP so that there's this little gap for the folks whose rent is now already accruing and they can't pay the rent because we don't Richard doesn't have any money to help. Right. And as you know, we've done that in two places in the same bill. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So you've you've given him to you're giving him two point eight million dollars for the Toronto Fund folks that applied in early December when they got overwhelmed by new applications and you're giving him ten million dollars of the new money. I think ten million. It could have been more than ten million, frankly. I think he asked for fifty. Maybe that was a little rich. Somewhere in the middle would have probably been, you know, but this is good. This is a good understanding as the money is already here. So yeah, I don't know the details of that. But I know that it's supposed to be here before the end of the month. So at least fifty, I think fifty five percent of it. So yeah, sorry. Erhard, Keisha has a question. Oh, I didn't know if your heart was running through a full list of ways to right, maximize the two hundred million. My additional question in that regard was what ways could we build wealth for people with that? Well, you know, to the extent that you can give people rental assistance for twelve months, possibly fifteen, you can help them with one of the most challenging aspects of their limited budgets that will probably help them catch up. I don't know if it's going to help anyone build wealth longer term. One of the things that, you know, in terms of creative ideas, you know, I think one of the things that we can do is we can give everyone on reach up pay for their rent for twelve months. And that would help get them ahead. It might help some families actually within that, you know, twelve months or soon after that may already be close to getting off off of reach up may actually be the thing that helps them, you know, brings them over, you know, over the edge and brings them to a place where they can get off off reach up. Similarly, we have a large number of folks who survive either exclusively or almost exclusively on SSI disability and none of them can afford to pay the rent if they don't already have a section eight voucher. So another thing we can do is look at who all is receiving SSI in the state of Vermont and provide them with rental assistance at least for twelve months. So those are some of the ideas that I would I would bring to you. I don't know if that's, you know, for so that just to clarify, I mean, what I hear you saying is as much as possible, parallel this money for rental assistance with with other programs that are means tested in exactly the same sort of very similar means testing for in reach up and an SS in an SSI. Yeah, we already know what their incomes are. We already know what those folks' incomes are. So exactly. Yeah. And we know that they're extremely low income and we know that they're they're unstable in their housing because they're paying if they don't have section eight or or Vermont rental subsidy or a Department of Mental Health rental subsidy, we know that they're paying way more than 30% of their income for their shelter costs and that they're at risk of losing their housing. Right. During the pandemic. Right. And are we seeing some of that population in our homeless in our homelessness? In our twenty five hundred. Yes. Yeah, I mean, I don't have the exact number, but the estimate is that approximately only twenty five to thirty percent of our reach up caseload actually has a voucher. Oh, really? Liz, did you want to add something? I wanted to say that this would be the with this money, this is the area where I think it would be really worth looking into whether we can designate some funds for G. What's now called GA apartments for asylees and refugees? Yes. And so because a lot of times they have zero income, there's no problem with the means testing or they have very low income because they're not allowed to work. And you see, there's been a bottleneck. They haven't been able to go through and get their green cards. And so people have just had their lives on hold. People are, you know, as capable as any of us, and they just haven't been able to go forward with their life. So I think somebody needs to do some research about. I did the research last night, Elizabeth, if I can just break in after we talked last night. I did the research. My understanding from, you know, many of the materials that we get from the National Income Housing Coalition and our National Association. First of all, is that CRF dollars are not that that immigration status is not a barrier to receiving benefits under CRF and the new 200 million is actually being put out through the original CRF legislation. And so the though we don't have specific guidance on this yet, what the National Income Housing Coalition is saying is that this new 200 million dollars immigration status should not present a barrier to receiving benefits under this new 200 million dollars. OK, and what I would do there is to because you see they can't they can't get onto a regular voucher. What I would do there is have a pool of it go to the Office of Economic Opportunity that could be granted to providers that were willing to designate apartments that people could get into that were that might not be eligible for other kinds of vouchers. And again, it's for 12 months. Yeah, but still, it's better than nothing. Like I said, and 12 months of rental assistance could be what allows folks that are extremely low income to make it for those 12 months, set some, you know, set some money aside for other, you know, necessities and ultimately get to a place where, you know, 12 months of housing payments are not nothing. That's a lot, you know, section eight vouchers. Sorry. And possibly 15. Keisha has a question, I think, for you. Well, one thing I was going to suggest as well as when when Michael said we might get all these housing advocates together, it might be really helpful to have our federal delegation staff on the call, because I feel like if we're confused and I keep getting confused what, you know, refugees and asylees are eligible for, it might help to have clarity, especially in this transition now that we know we might not face kind of undue litigation or some kind of request for money back from a new administration would just good for them to hear some of these things raised. I think so much of this is going to have to do with not for just refugees and asylees, but safer low income moms. And, you know, we've always heard for them, you know, one program tells them you have to be destitute and absolutely homeless to get help. And another program says if you if you're that way, we're going to take your kids away, you know, so how do we just make sure that these programs aren't at cross purposes and understand who's regulations are getting in the way so that this money could be deployed quickly to people who otherwise are afraid to take the help. Great. Great. That's a good idea. That's a great one other idea for you. So out of the two hundred million, there's a very significant set aside for services, and I know that Senator Clarkson's on the appropriations committee. I know I'm not. Oh, you're back. Becca is balance is so one thing is I think that I think the Office of Economic Opportunity has done a fantastic job in helping service providers continue to be there in the motels, in the shelters, in the apartments, you know, out on the street, doing the outreach. And I would highly recommend that money go to the Office of Economic Opportunity so that they can continue that, you know, just so that you know what they've done. You know, we got the CRF money, they got it out the door really quickly. Then we hit the cliff December 30th. All the money went away. What did they do? They stood up a FEMA program so that people in the motels could have access. You know, they would still have the services around them. And so if there's a way for them to for OEO to have access to these funds to provide services and that goes back to Senator Clarkson's question about retention, about outreach, about people in motels, about supporting people in their new units, the whole range of services. And they are the ones that are really great at doing it. All right. One of the things that they put on the I just want to get one more idea. And then I kind of hope Michael would be here for this is the survey back. The services are so important. And one of the things that VHCB has had is an ongoing. It actually we're meeting today of talk about how to provide services and housing ongoing. And as you know, other states are using Medicaid funds for that. And what which would require a Medicaid waiver, which used to be my part of the budget and on appropriations. So it's a chance to draw down ongoing federal Medicaid dollars to help make sure that a lot of these people with underlying conditions, mental illness, suffering with substance abuse, that housing is a health concern. It's you've got to be you've got to be housed in order to be healthy. And a Medicaid waiver that would allow us to get those services around people would be a game changer for. Yeah. So what to that point, one of the programs that the state is using Medicaid match for something called family supportive housing, which actually they boosted through some of the CARES Act, some both with general fund money in the current budget, as well as some of the CARES Act funding. It was only in seven counties. It's been grown incrementally over the last, I don't know, seven or eight years started off as a pilot program and they've been growing it in incrementally. It provides long term supportive services for homeless families with children to do that, not just three or six months worth of supportive services, but one, two and three and more years of supportive services to some of the families that are presenting with multiple challenges and multiple intersections with the agency of human services need that kind of long term that kind of long term support. And so one of the ways that we've been harnessing Medicaid dollars is for family supportive housing. And that's one of the places where I would urge you to talk to your appropriations colleagues to invest to invest more. And some of this service money, this 10 percent that Elizabeth just referenced, could go to boosting programs like family supportive housing for for the 12, possibly 15, 15 months. Senator Rahm has a question. Yeah, go for it. I feel like this is broadening a little bit from particularly homelessness. But I feel like you're good people to ask anyway. I've been really interested in a program out of New York City called Green City Workforce and they give jobs specifically to the young people who live in affordable housing and those jobs are to beautify and green up and weatherize the properties that they live in and the neighborhoods around them. And I just wonder, you know, I know it might not be eligible for this particular money, but I'm just really interested in picking up on good ideas that help people build workforce where they live, especially young people who live in affordable housing. You know, funny you mentioned that I was happened to be in D.C. last last year when Bernie and AOC unveiled their Green New Deal Bill for public housing, which had just that aspect in it was very exciting. A bunch of NYCHA, New York Housing Authority, young people like where they're rallying. It was really an inspiring moment at something that I think we should be looking at for Vermont, definitely. What's its name, Keisha? The Green City Workforce, I'll send the committee. That's a great, yeah, what a great idea. Well, you know, I'm on this call with VHCB today. One of the things that the houses, you know, we've got the homeless providers and the people who own and manage housing. And we've been meeting together for a number of months to see how we can really work on the retention issues and support people. And one of the things that we've been looking at is really project based support. You know, like there's two models that we're looking at. One has to do with the the SASH system, you know, where seniors have on site, you know, nurses or social workers, whether that's the right model to expand or whether there's another model that is a little bit more oriented toward people with very serious mental health and other kinds of situation or a combination thereof. So this would fit in really well. And when you see, if you see the folks, if you see the folks from VHCB, that might be a place where as we study how to go forward, that that could be kind of embedded, I think they would really love that. Right. Right. Folks might also want to hear from from pathways at one at some point. I know you've heard from them in the past. They received actually a substantial tronch of the CARES Act vouchers and were able to use that to expand into certain unserved counties. They were able to expand into the Northeast Kingdom, as well as into Bennington County as a result of the CARES Act vouchers and the associated supportive services, which I believe are Medicaid. At least some of that is Medicaid funded that. So you may you may want to hear from pathways as well. Can I add one other thing, which is so I think in terms of rental or rental assistance or housing assistance, one of the other groups of folks that I think we could help with that money is folks that are living in mobile home parks. And last year you all heard before the pandemic, you took some time to hear from Tri Park in Center Balanced District, largest mobile home park in the state with major infrastructure needs. And we're hoping to get some time again with you to talk about a broad array of mobile home park needs. We're hearing from mobile home park advocates that we have a very high need population, high risk population, a lot of elders, a lot of people with long term medical conditions living in mobile home parks that have been isolated. Many of them don't have broadband. They can't access telemedicine. One of the things we can do with this money, depending on how treasury defines housing costs and rent. But for HUD purposes, all of the costs, housing costs associated with mobile home ownership in a park, not just lot rent, but also your if you have a loan on your mobile home, if you're paying property taxes on your mobile home and your utilities, all of that HUD defines as a result of a four amendment that we provided Congressman Welch a few years ago and he got it implemented in a big Section 8 voucher reform bill. HUD redefined what is eligible housing costs in the Section 8 program in a mobile home park. And if Treasury defines that, what is eligible in a mobile home park the way HUD does, we could actually similarly to folks who are on reach up that are paying way too much for their shelter costs, too high a percentage of their income, we could help a large cohort of folks within mobile home parks, at least for 12, possibly 15 months with their housing costs that might enable them to possibly even have the money to replace a dilapidated mobile home, an energy and efficient mobile home. That's a great, great idea. Michael was supposed to join us. We're, I think, scheduled for another five minutes with you guys, five or six minutes. And anything else you want to make sure? Well, I would also add that as you I think heard from Gene Murray and also from Wendy Morgan at Vermont Legal Aid and Angela Zajkowski, part of what the CRF dollars did was help them all stand up a very effective eviction prevention mediation program. And I think we're hoping that the 10 percent of supportive services that's that can be a carve out from the 200 million that one of the things that you can fund is a continuation of that eviction prevention and mediation program. Yeah, that sounded like it was very successful and had more for whom it would have been even more successful had they had more time. Liz, Rita, you have a thought. I just wanted to quickly go to Senator Brock's issues with the cost of housing and the cost of developing housing as somebody that's done that for a while. There have been some challenges during the pandemic. One of them is supply side issues. You know, we're having a new home delivered today and a lot. There's just been issues. My son is runs a is a home builder. And, you know, everyone will tell you the cost of lumber's gone up. It's difficult to get, you know, to get stoves and refrigerators and washers and dryers. And we've had a lot of issues with windows for the homes. And so it's just been that's been tough and that's added some costs. But I think these zero energy mods, I don't know if you've seen them, Senator, but they're they're pretty nice. And the thing is they keep the costs down after the homes are installed. And for, you know, one hundred ten hundred, depending on, you know, what you add on, it's a good deal for people. They're beautiful. And the other thing at John Graham that we've done, we've worked with VHCB on five buildings and we've bought older units in downtowns where you can buy a nice old home for, you know, three hundred fifty thousand dollars and we have one in Middlebury. We I think we put in a couple hundred thousand dollars into it. And it's four units and we brought them online for very low costs, like probably around seventy five thousand dollars a unit. And they're really nice, nice downtown units walkable. So I think that a lot of it is really possible in the kind of price range that you're talking about and that you're thinking about. So. So is is Vermont in White River your supplier on the zero energy units? Well, Vermont, the price is very high for Vermont. It is. Yeah. I mean, it's not all they do, you know. So we've worked through Efficiency Vermont with KBS. But, you know, I mean, it's it's interesting. We've used a lot of local GCs for all the solar, all the, you know, porches and all of those things. So there's a lot of money going into the Vermont economy. And of course, all of our we renovated our shelters with VHCB funds. And that was all 100 percent local, you know, general contractors and subs. And the other thing is, you know, we have like we installed sprinklers. I mean, a lot of a lot of places don't have to do that. So there's certain costs in public housing. But I'm with you. I'm with Senator Brock on that. And I think it can be done. And we have a good track record at John Graham of having done that. So I think cost is an issue. Yeah. Oh, cost is a huge issue. I mean, Randy, Randy, what are your thoughts? This this is a concern that predates the pandemic. Because, you know, it's something that I've been going back to in this committee for what is it, the past three plus years, four years. I think the issue of rehabbing existing housing and we certainly have some success stories, but what I am intending to see is kind of a rule that the cost of what we find as affordable housing for apartments, single units and so on is substantially higher than what an average promoter who works every day and who has an income that is not subsidized could afford to buy. And it's that this act that as we look at these programs that cause you to scratch your head and ask the question I repeatedly asked, why is affordable housing unaffordable to anybody who goes out to buy it based on their income in an open marketplace? And we haven't gotten, you know, we've gotten anecdotal comments. We've gotten passing comments, but we haven't had a detailed look to break these things apart and to say, how can we do affordable housing in an affordable way? Because if as we've all said, there's a shortage of housing. If we reduce, because we typically have finite amounts of money available, if we can reduce the amount of money that we're spending, we can create more housing. Right. And and NeighborWorks has spoken to that. I mean, I think you have you have a couple of tough examples of that, but there are we also have had and we will I think we need to address this more fully and and here, Keisha, just before we end this, because we go to Josh Hanford in a minute and I just want to get Keisha's question in and Becca, did you have a question? No, no. OK. Well, I mean, just as I listened to all of this, I wonder if it's ever helpful after we hear from other housing advocates and think about this 200 million if we set just some principles for what we would like to do to make the money at value. We want to bring more housing units online. We want to, you know, give people a better life than they have. You know, at the beginning of getting the rental assistance, just like what are some broad parameters that we might say help us guide this 200 million to making Vermonter's lives? Yeah, build a robust in the end section, is whether or not we place any limits on how much we actually spend per unit. And that limit could be percentage based. It could be defined in some other way, because one of the things that you sometimes have to do is force people in the marketplace to think harder and better. As we look at things like automobile, automobile emission standards, for example, government restrictions on automobile emission standards have forced manufacturers to get best problem solved. And maybe that's one of the things that we might look at as we start studying the affordable housing market. Could I know this limited time? This is a complex issue in center. Brock, I appreciate, I think we all appreciate you bringing this up, you know, over really a number of years. And it's something that I think the affordable housing community struggles with. Can I just say that the number of boxes that affordable housing developers in our network check off and need to check off is substantially different from the boxes that are checked off by a market rate housing developer. And those boxes include historic preservation. They may include bringing back a downtown building that has suffered for years from this disinvestment and in a town that may have economic issues, economic vitality issues. We're talking about folks that are extremely low income, that can never afford a market rate apartment without a subsidy, and that may need the kinds of services that we've been discussing and what are to be able to successfully maintain that housing over over time. We're talking about highly energy efficient buildings because our nonprofits must steward these properties for permanently, not just for five, 10, 15 or 20 years. So they have to be built to last. They have to set aside enough money in a capital replacement reserve so that down the road they can replace the roof or replace all the heating systems. There are many, many different boxes. And we also learned, if I may, having been in this in this sector for over 30 years, we learned from some of the mistakes of the past and mistaken federal housing policy of the past, which may have given a private sector developer a 40 year, 1% loan and annual operating subsidies. It's very expensive to do. We're not able to do that anymore unless we can secure very rare project based subsidies for units. So we have to figure out how to do all of this up front with capital dollars only. We don't get all those operating subsidies that people used to get from HUD, where, for instance, a Northgate, which I've sat on the board for over for almost 30 years now, Northgate was a 336 unit development that was subsidized through the old HUD programs. Private sector developer built housing that was not necessarily built to last. After 20 years, we had to do comprehensive, comprehensive renovations. And we've had to do those comprehensive renovations over the last 30 years that we've stewarded it as a resident controlled nonprofit. These and that developer would have been able, after 20 years, to turn that housing into condominiums and displace all of those folks. So the other thing that we've embedded in our housing policy for last 30 years is permanent affordability. So we have to keep rebuying these properties and risking the displacement of low income people in center balanced district. We have Westgate housing, which has been a very successful model also of taking one of these older HUD projects that could have been flipped after 20 years and renovating it and making it permanently affordable and making it resident controlled. Liz, but one last thought and then we're going to take a five minute break before we start with Josh at 10 40. I just wanted to say that before the pandemic. It goes to Senator Brock's issue. The people that we were housing in our shelters and in our housing were working. You know, they they are people that are National Guardsmen. They're working at the airport. They're working at Middlebury College. We're not talking about people that are, you know, they there's a gap between their incomes and the cost of housing. And what we're trying to do with the housing is make it affordable to them. So so I can't tell you how we have people that ride bicycles through the snow to go to a McDonald's in Ferrisburg to work. So the people and a lot of them are front line workers, you know, their front line workers in restaurants, their their farms, their. So I just want to be really clear about who is who it is that's struggling with homelessness. It's our working people. It's the people who are serving our coffee in the morning. It's the people that are working in our stores and gas stations. So they're exactly the people that you're concerned about. I think, Senator Gray, that that. Thank you both. This is a terrific. We are scheduled to start with Josh in five minutes. It's so nice to meet you. Lovely to meet you. It's great to meet you. And to go to Keisha's question about with our housing discussion next week, who of the Fed employees here and might be who are the housing people we should be asking? Well, I would say you probably want to hear from Polly Major at in Senator Leahy's office in Bernie's office, at least for now. It's Haley Perrow and in Congressman Welch's office. It's Tafine Dean. And before we sign off, could I just? Sorry, Tiffany Bean. Tafine Dean, T-H-I-F-E-E-N. Dean, D-E-E-N. I have all of Tafine's contact information. Great. Quickly also, before saying goodbye for now, just point out, I think Nathan did provide some other resources on your on your web page. So including our annual priorities, hope to have some time to come back and we'll have time to airheart. We love you, Liz. Thank you so much. We're going to take a five minute break. Everybody at well, maybe we'll take a seven minute break. Sorry, Josh, and come back at quarter up. Is that OK with people? Great. OK. Thank you. OK, great. We're ready to. Hello, everybody. So just an update. I sent you just sent you an all email. The presentation in Senate Natural went fine. They're supportive. They're not going to ask any questions. However, I am not going to ask for a rule suspension after second reading, give people a chance to if they have any questions back home or anything, give them that chance. And also, I need to work on the house a little bit to make sure they understand fully what we're doing, and it'll only set us back one legislative day. We are going to ask for rule suspensions on the concurrence with the House technical correction amendment on S nine, the workers comp bill. Any questions on any of that? OK, so we have our housing gurus from the agency with us. I appreciate their patience. What I'd like to do, Sean, I assume I don't see you here, but I assume you and Josh are with us. Yeah, Sean, are you not able to see us because they're both here? I see all of you. I don't see them. Let me wait a second. They're there. There they are. OK, I see them now. So we are going to be having what I've been labelling as a housing round table discussion on Wednesday that I hope you guys can attend. We've been informed by other housing experts that you have these kinds of sort of communications ongoing every week or more often, but we want to sort of be involved in the fly on the wall. What's going on on the with the federal programs with the Biden proposal is projecting. We really want to start thinking outside the box. I think it's pretty widely assumed that even with the two hundred million dollars in the second COVID relief package, not to mention what might come down the Biden thing that we're going to have more money than we can actually spend on rental assistance only. So I know Senator Ballant and the speaker wrote or are going to send a letter. I hope I'm not out of school here to try and just to the congressional delegation to find a way to broaden the flexibility of those funds. But we want to start thinking about some ideas. I know there's a we've heard there's a big need for more capital to build housing for the successor to the program, how we can categorize some other payments we made as effectively rent. One idea I heard was taking the I'm going to show my age here, the A&FC reach up benefits and the portion of those that grant that's for housing, maybe have this money pay for that and free up some general fund. So all kinds of things like that. And we want to use this time this morning, the next half hour or so, to help us set the stage for that meeting. What you guys are thinking right now and just move us forward beyond the specifics of the program you talked to us about last week. I mean, I assume I mean, there's a lot of housing silos in this state, quite frankly. But I assume you folks being the administration have your fingers in the policies of all those programs. And I know it's a shared function, but I thought you would be the best people to give us that overview. Well, good morning. Thank you. Sean and I each have 12 fingers. So a couple of things just to maybe get started to let you know where we're on the same exact page with you and I'm pleased to hear that letter coming from the speaker and Senator Ballant. We've sent a letter as well to the congressional delegation and actually it's to the Treasury, we waited till the new administration was in place, but we followed it through the congressional delegation. So it comes from them that asks for increased flexibility on this 200 million, asks a whole bunch of questions, specific questions about definitions and eligibility that we hope that they can pressure Treasury to give responses that'll make the money work better here. And at a high level, there's some pretty fundamental challenges right now with the frequently asked questions that have come back. You know, one of the main things we want to see happen is move folks from these hotels to motels and use this rental assistance for that purpose. And it's unclear whether we're going to be able to do that right now as the frequently asked questions are written, you know, and that's estimated to be about 20 million dollars right there. And so we're trying to get clarity on that as well as a whole host of other sort of AHS housing related programs that we think could benefit from this money, everything from sort of there's a program they run of switching out fuel systems and replacement. You know, this funding does say utilities are eligible. So can we make this fuel switching eligible under that utility front? What about small code improvements? If we're going to move people into units and pay their rent going forward, we'd like to make sure the units are meet Vermont rental housing safety code. And if they don't, can we quickly bring those up to code with some small funds? And then just practical issues around verification and qualification and eligibility concerns for folks. If we have to spend months determining eligibility, this is going to get really hard and a lot of people are going to be left out. You know, if we need to wait till 2020 tax returns come in to verify eligibility, we're going to be stuck. So what you should know is that we have been meeting weekly with partners from AHS Department of Public Service around the utility side, as well as our other nonprofit housing partners to talk through these issues. You know, we developed this letter that had all these questions with everyone legal aid from our Apartment Owners Association to sort of make sure everyone's voice was heard in here and every flexibility that we could possibly think of, you know, think around mobile home parks and in that lot rent and those issues. It's all in there. Can we get a copy of that letter and do you have any problem with us posting it? No, I don't think that's a problem. I think we'd be happy to share that with you. Pretty widely out there already, I assume. So yeah, absolutely. But Michael, may I ask a question? Yes, please. Josh and Sean, one of the things that we chatted about with Earhart and Liz Reedy was aligning all the means tested programs within state government wherever they are housed that may have a population in that means tested umbrella that that and Michael mentioned one of them reach up. But there's SSI disability. There's there's a bunch that are means tested in exactly the same way. This eligibility requirement is currently articulated. Is there a way to to look at at at that, aligning all those programs and seeing how we might be able to creatively use this because many of them don't necessarily fall in, but are all spending money on rent and could be included. I'll let Sean dive into the details. But if I could be king for the day, one of the things I would do across all federal programs was set one standard for evaluating household income because every USDA rule of development, HUD, every program uses a different mess, tricks, a different eligibility. And it's such an inefficient duplication of effort across federal government. And then it funnels down into state government, whoever your main federal funder is, you use their formula and we're all looking at different things trying to help the same people. But I'll get off my soapbox. So there is one. OK. Yeah, I think that's that's accurate. Unfortunately, it would be a lovely world if if it were the case that they all lined up through one particular lens, but it's a little easier said than done. However, I can say we actually we have been as as Commissioner Hanford mentioned, we've been meeting with folks at agency human services, specifically the Office of Economic Opportunity and they're actually as we speak, working on quantifying along with Vermont State Housing Authority, some of those populations that we think are most likely, you know, as obviously we're still getting additional guidance from Treasury about exactly what these eligibility requirements will be and they likely will change given the new administration and some of the national outcry. But we were trying to get as much as we possibly can sort of lined up so that so that we can get money into the hands of Vermonters as as quickly as possible. So that exercise is is underway. Great. Thanks. If I would just add to a piece of advocacy here that may come in handy down the road, I caught the tail end of your last discussion with Erhard and you were asking who the federal housing folks you should have in, you know, one strategy we might want to work on here is with Senator Leahy in the position he's in with the new Corona relief package three, the Biden administration is proposing. If we can sneak in with Senator Leahy's help, you know, a couple of sentence line item that talks about extending, providing an extension and a flexibility for this second package that we're talking about as that works its way through Congress. It might be an easy fix for us that, you know, we won't be able to see the results for months down the road, but it might be a way to work on all these issues, considering Senator Leahy is going to be in the position to manage that at the end here over the next few months. Now, that's an excellent point. We've heard that before, but that's one avenue to give us more flexibility to change the parameters or the guidelines under the second package. And it we should work. We'll try and I'll try and work today, maybe to have some representative from Senator Leahy's office at this round table discussion. It might be good to hear him or her to hear, you know, the concerns that are already being raised. I assume that you're looking at every rental assistance program. Federal or state that we have right now, whether it be vouchers, reach up, anything that touches upon rent and see if we can swap some of this money into that program and free up money for that program, other programs to potentially be used for alternatives. You know, they may have very like a like a section eight voucher, for instance, that may be very restrictive, but it's worth looking at. Maybe some of that pot of money could be used for something other than rent. And we could put this money towards rent if we're stuck with that. Yeah, we've we've certainly we've certainly looked into that. Unfortunately, it's probably going to require a change in the program parameters for this money. One of the things that the Treasury was pretty explicit on is not being able to use this money to displace other preexisting programs. We're actually even trying to get kind or trying to get clarification on whether the tenant responsible portion of somebody who has a housing choice voucher section eight voucher can even be covered because they're technically receiving other federal's assistance through that housing choice voucher. So, yes, I share the exasperation side of it. Sorry. The recent frequently asked questions has everyone in this housing industry going a little crazy right now because it is just tightened what we thought we can do with this money and raised more questions than answers. Yeah, it will probably not come as terribly positive to hear, but in some ways, I think we can actually say we're a bit of the victims of our own success in that we set up a pretty successful rental assistance program with the first round and we're one of the few states to have such a comprehensive program. So this money is coming with a lot of strings attached really to address the lack of action that's happened in other places in the country, I think it's safe to say. Is the 200 million by virtue of a small state minimum or are we just basically as every state getting that kind of largesse? It's a small state set aside. It's fair to say if it was just done on a per capita basis, it'd be at least half of that. OK. And I think, you know, Sean hit the nail on the head. I've been, you know, some national groups and more Collins and so forth. You know, there's much larger states than us that many states that didn't even try to do a rental assistance or rental arrears program with the first year of money and then other states that did much larger than us, that didn't spend near as much as we did. They tied themselves in knots trying to only serve the most needy. And it ended up backfiring and the applicants weren't even able to apply with the pandemic raging and getting forms in and all of that. And so that outcry from the advocates across this country created this huge new 25 billion dollar rental assistance program because there was such a lack of action across the country. And our situation is just different that we did act and we did serve a lot of people. Well, perhaps they'd like to model the federal program on ours. That might be one of our suggestions. So one immediate issue, Josh, is that we have S 36 up for third reading today and we made a decision to put ten million dollars into, I guess, a successor program to the rental stabilization, I guess it's the first spending of this two hundred million and anything else that's in that package from late December. We heard from Richard Williams and he was saying. That's not enough. I mean, I think our initial response was there's going to be many more vehicles on this and we just before we just let this money out, we want to know what the structure might look for. Is that ten million dollars problematic? Wise, from your perspective, are you going to seek to try and change that in the house? Yeah, great, great question, Senator. I think there's a couple of things here. One, it's important for you to know that this money has shown up in our account. It's in the state's hands right now. I have talked to you talking about the two hundred. I hope it's well invested. I hope it's well invested and we're earning money on it. Well, the treasure informed, you know, finance and management that they've got it. So she does good work there. I tend to share some of Richard's concerns that ten million is too small. Let me just give you a small example. Why? You know, he's got a plan and set up a program to manage two hundred million. And if only ten million is allocated, the maximum administrative cap is based on that ten million. And the software system, the staff to hire won't even be covered with that cap. So it really puts him starting a program with one hand tied behind his back because he can't actually spend the money that he needs to to build this. I mean, the software estimates from these national groups that are saying, OK, if you're running a rental assistance program like this, this is what you need that alone, as you've seen from the sales force in all of our economic, those are expensive. That's a half a million dollars right off the bat to run a 15 months rental assistance program with the web interface, with all of this. He's not going to have enough administrative allowed enough allowed administrative cap with ten million dollars to plan for a two hundred million dollar program. The natural. Which is why he asked for 50. Yeah, I think a couple of things. One is I'm not sure we fully understood that most of the immediate need would be for administrative expenses. We were sort of projecting out what the rental payments might be over one or two months until we could put more money into the program. But are you sure that every time you spend a dollar, the most you can spend is ten percent or administration, or is it going to be a look back that says over the course of this program, you can spend 10 percent of your total spending. So if he spent ten million dollars and it turns now on administrative, it turns out we have a two hundred million dollars. He's well within that 10 percent being used for administrative dollars. It this gets really confusing because, you know, he's a federal he's a recipient of other federal funds and there's an indirect cost rate that he has with various federal agencies that needs to be taken into account that, in fact, minimized what they were able to draw down on admin with the first twenty five million quite substantially. So, you know, they were nowhere near that they were in like the three percent range of that of that other money. And so what we do know right now with this two hundred million is there's a 10 percent cap on admin, but it's also unclear if that 10 percent cap has to also account for your other services and supports that everyone talked about. That's another clarity we're trying to get. And usually when you disperse funds in a grant agreement with general, you know, kind of practices and so forth, you can't let in that disbursement, the cap go above what you're giving them, even though you plan to give them more. It's just not generally allowed because what happens if something stopped or failed, you switched a service provider. They've now spent more in admin than they would have been allowed if additional money doesn't isn't spent along the planned total outlay. It just we I've never seen an ability for a first chunk of grant to say, oh, well, you can use a hundred up to a hundred percent of this for admin cost because there's more coming because it just falls out of all of our standard practices and allowance in all of our state grant granting and contracting both in three point five and five point five and all those. I don't know how we would get around that. I see your your goal that let's give a little bit out to get things started because we know more is coming and can't we get around this admin cap? I just don't I just don't know that that's the case. Well, it's more than that. From my perspective, anyhow, I mean, you could obviously take it to the house and every day goes by, we learn more and whoever gets the bill last has more information to deal with, but it goes against every fiber of my being to give out ten million dollars and not know exactly what we're spending it on yet. It's a new program. We don't know what the administrative costs. We've heard no testimony and yet someone's asking for fifty million dollars. It's not the way the legislature generally works. So, you know, I think it's a down payment and there's a budget adjustment upcoming within weeks of this where we may know more and we may want to put more in, but just yeah, I was just in house appropriations talking about this and Chairman Stephens was invited and he's raising the same question like there's uncertainty about even the process to is this a one is accepting a federal grant and we're laying out the general expenses. And that's the model. You know, legislature always has the ability to weigh in on these sort of receipts of funds, but what is the right way to move this money? You know, and there was lots of comments in that that without Richard Williams being there without asking me this question of a sense of urgency that this we have to prove we can spend obligate this money by September or it goes back and that we don't have months to figure that out. So we are in a challenge and I in fact, I don't know the exact path for how this works. I do know the money is in that count. We've been asked to start that a one grant approval process. We're meeting with all the partners to try to understand the big picture elements that are required for that form, you know, such as admin costs and but this this money is liable to touch a lot of different players, not just the Vermont State Housing Authority. And we're all working with a little bit of unknown here. And if I could add and at risk of seeming as though I'm putting words in Richard's mouth, which I certainly don't want to do, but I know there's also some based on our weekly meetings, you know, some concerns among his team that if with each sort of re allocation or each additional allocation from these funds comes with changing program parameters, they're going to be bogged down in trying to retool this thing as as the money flows out. So I think there is also some interest in making sure that a certain amount of funds are locked into the agreed upon parameters that we have right now and limit the amount of sort of restructuring and retooling the program as as we're trying to administer the funds. And if I may, Mr. Chair, I hate to go back to the word we discussed, but trust, I mean, we're going to have to trust our partners in this to accomplish what we need to accomplish in a very short period of time. And that what what's frustrating is to hear that that because of this new program, the administration costs just setting it up are going to be so enormous. But that if we don't do that fairly soon and give then the additional money that will be the rental assistance and we will be expanding our understanding of how we're going to be able to use the money, but that we have to actually spend the money up front, getting it set up so it's able to move and go into action right away is what I hear you saying. I mean, we have to sort of spend the we have to make the administrative investment up front and some immediate rental money that will go to people, but that needs to be done ASAP to even roll out that money. Is that right? That that's that's my feeling. Yeah. And I think, you know, we. Yeah, we have to be anyway, I said what I'm saying. Mr. Chairman, can I ask a question? I was just wondering maybe the committee looked at this in past meetings when we were starting to deploy resources. But are you do you have any mapping? Do you have any tools to say this is a very economically distressed neighborhood that's about to, you know, go into further harm or disrepair? Do you have overlays of, you know, communities that are proportionally high, communities of people of color or new Americans or, you know, I remember we went through that whole process with the opportunity zones to understand which communities have a high proportion of low income households and a high distress. And I'm just wondering as these funds get deployed, what kind of tracking system would you be using to make sure they're reaching the most distressed neighborhoods by income? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think that that's part of the complexities of wanting to start this program with a good system that can do that. You know, frankly, the first CRF, you know, we deployed it. The bill was signed on July 2nd and the program launched in a week. And, you know, the Housing Authority, you know, we there's paper applications with that first round. We're transferring it all into data. They're working with other partners to collect and pull out that demographic data so we can analyze it because, you know, we didn't know this 200 million was coming, but there's great information in there to understand how effective this was, where we reached tons of stuff that helped educate future housing policy for, you know, years ahead. And so that works underway right now on the past money. But that's part of the reason of wanting a robust system to get that all from the start so we're not going backwards. And, you know, maybe Sean's got some more comments on this, but, you know, some of that data does exist and some of that analysis has happened for sure. Yeah, and I think, Senator Rahm, if you're not familiar with it, the closest, I think, most comprehensive data set we have is probably the community profiles pages run by Vermont Housing Finance Agency. They granted it does base much of the information off of HUD and census data in an American Community Survey, which especially that ladder, one can get a little dicey in terms of margins of error just because of the surveying nature and the size of our of our communities. But that's that's probably an interesting place to start. And VHFA, their their data experts are working with the state housing authority on setting up ways that this information can be can be included and actually have sort of more live interactive visualized data visualizations about the information that's being collected on who's who and where this money is being received. And Senator Rahm, you know, just want to add a little bit to that little context, you know, Sean and I for years back were struggling with the lack of of this sort of housing data that was specific to regions and communities and struggling with where you invest net new housing and where you want to rehab existing housing to not further decline those neighborhoods that had a lack of investment by building a shiny new facility that everyone moves to. And so we used CDBG funds and other dollars from our department to pay VHFA to develop this community profiles, have it as an ongoing web accessible resource for communities to easily understand their housing needs and their demographics that didn't exist before because I personally was struggling with some of our housing investments and not having that data available to know if we were putting the right investments in the right place. And so this is fairly new information. A lot of I don't think a lot of folks are aware of the resource that now exists with VHFA and this community profiles data set that hopefully will keep growing and adding more to it. We haven't had more actually to discuss the community profile in one. So I think that would be great. OK. Anything else you want to share with us this morning in anticipation of the meeting on Wednesday? I guess, you know, any any insight from you sort of what you'd want us to bring to the table in that meeting? Do you want to keep it around this particular topic, this new 200 million? Or do you want it to expand into other needs? Just just to be helpful in knowing how much to bring to the table? I think it will expand into other areas, but I think I want the focus to be the immediate future going forward and what the programs might look like. What ideas I mean, we could once we get your letter, that might be a good starting point in terms of questions and answers. And I mean, we're not we we can and we should, you know, maybe put on our website the frequently asked questions document. And I'm not saying we should necessarily be as expert as you folks are on all the ins and outs of the federal legislation. I know there are a lot of unknowns, but if we're going to be a partner or oversight to the development of this program. The sooner we get involved, the better. I mean, I think we had some oversight. I think we hit a pretty good sweet spot the last time around in terms of our suggestions and amounts of money we put into the other program. But, you know, we don't want to be in a situation where we just say, OK, you might like it, here's the money to spend it. You know, we want to have some involvement in how that goes. I mean, I'm learning as as we go, even today, some of your comments. I think I was more of a believer that some of the rent money should be means tested and I understand the compromise in terms of getting the money out the door and administrative simplicity. So you have to balance that. You know, I want to take another look at what we're asking of the landlord community in terms of rent stabilization and eviction protections in exchange for income guarantee. So those are the kinds of things I think we want to look at. And there may be. You know, the governor's budget address at the day before. And so there may be some new housing investments that naturally become topics to discuss at that roundtable as well. Absolutely. Absolutely. Senator Rob. So we were having this discussion a little bit earlier with Earhart and Liz, but I think I'm a data point of one, but I did see Randy and Alison's heads nodding when I said this, I think, obviously, we don't want to put any additional burdens or parameters on this kind of amount of money. But it would be really nice to talk about principles and ways that we could come out of this this better build back better and sort of know, are we helping people build wealth or access job opportunities? Are we specifically helping veterans or new Americans? Are we, you know, are there any goals or vision that you would have for how we spend this money that kind of unites the themes of the program and and has us come back better in some way? Well, excellent point. Two, three things jumped to mind as unfinished business of this committee that could be tied into this money. Money is always a good sweetener, but we had bills that have yet to make it all the way through on registries, housing inspectors and home repairs. There may be way to access some of these things to make those things less controversial or more affordable to the stakeholders. So that, in my mind, is definitely building back better. You know, you talk a lot about you mentioned a lot center around about metrics and data improvement. That could be put into some of these proposals. So yeah, that comment. OK, it's now 1122. So well, unless anybody has any other questions or comments going once. Just just on our fed people, we may want to invite to Wednesday. We'd heard Polly Major, Haley Perot and Cephine, Christine Dean, just question, Josh and Sean of those three. Any do we want all three or do we want? Is there one in particular who's the strongest federal voice? I mean, I think I think, you know, Polly being senator, you know, senior senator would be if you only had time for one, it would probably be Polly. But to get the House perspective, Tafine would also be important to make sure she's on the same page. Great. OK, thanks, because Michael and I need to. Yes, we'll work on that. Thank you. Polly may very well invite some of her DC colleagues. They often join the housing council meetings as well. OK. Oh, great. Terrific. Thank you. We'll see you on the floor. Good rest of the day. Thanks, Michael. Do you want to stay on for one second or not? Do you want to touch base later?