 Good afternoon and welcome to Senator Sanders' discussion with the municipalities across Vermont. My name is Maya Sutton-Smith, events coordinator for Senator Bernie Sanders. We are so glad to have you with us today to talk about how your towns are responding to and recovering from the coronavirus pandemic. If you are joining us via Webex, you can ask a question by clicking the raise hand button. For folks on the phones, you can press star three to ask a question. With that out of the way, it is my pleasure to introduce your Senator Bernie Sanders. Thank you all very much for joining me. Let me just click this thing here. There's a lot to go over and I very much appreciate Ted Brady and Carol Dawes and Scott Tucker and Christine Lott and competitors for being with us today. We have gone through the most difficult year as a nation in our lifetimes. With a little bit of luck as we get vaccinated, we're going to become an adipate. The President and Congress are doing what we can to make sure that we not only respond to the health care crisis within the pandemic, but the economic crisis as well. And all of you know that at 5 o'clock in the morning, by a 51 to 50 vote, the American Rescue Plan was passed $1.9 trillion, it's $1.3 billion coming into the state of Vermont. It's $198 million going into local governments. That's a lot of money. And one of the challenges clearly that we face as we proceed from the pandemic is how we balance the resources at the state level, the money is coming directly into local communities. And then on top of all of that, as you are all aware, there is a major debate going on right now about another major program. President calls it Build Back Better. And that will be an infrastructure program of hundreds of billions of dollars coming into traditional infrastructure roads, bridges, water systems, wastewater plants. On top of that, if I have anything to say about it, there will be a lot of money coming in for climate change and all of the ramifications of that. They will become money coming in for health care, for education. So there's a lot for you guys to be juggling and looking at a lot of sources of revenue, looking at a lot of problems, you have to balance a whole lot of stuff. But I suppose it's better to be dealing with those issues of worrying where all this money is coming from and not having the resources at all. So it's maybe a good problem to deal with. I want to get to all of you and what the last year has been, where you want to go, what your priorities are, how you're going to balance state money, local money, new federal money. And with that, let me just give it over to Ted Brady. Ted, thanks for what you're doing. Thank you, Senator, for what you're doing, what you've done, and what you're going to do in the future. Really couldn't say enough about how meaningful this $198 million specifically coming to local governments is. So for those on the webinar joining us today, the league is the association of all of the towns, cities, and villages in our state and some other partners that looks after those local interests. This is the first time in 40 years that the federal government has given local towns this amount of unrestricted, or I should say lightly restricted funding to help them deal with the problems they're facing. The last year has been devastating to our municipalities. It's put the heroes in our town offices, on our road crews, on our select boards. The tip of the spear in trying to run this government through the crisis and to have Congress and the President recognize that with this $198 million is really meaningful. So folks know towns will likely be receiving this funding sometime in late May or June, based on a prorata share for, based on your population, and there are some tables out there. They're not perfectly accurate. We're waiting on Treasury to give this guidance. We anticipate these towns to use this funding or anything from covering public safety costs for the past year and the future couple of years to cover programming costs, to do economic development work, and to replace lost revenues in places that have local option taxes, where they've had these giant reductions because of the changes in consumer patterns in replacing enterprise funds. If your town runs a pool or something like that, or a rec program like Kim does, they have not only increased expenses, but they've also had decreased revenue because you can't have as many people at these places. And unlike businesses, we've had none of this assistance till now. So Senator, thank you. The other three things I want to quickly mention about what the league has really seen. Our municipal assistance center, which has a team of lawyers that answers questions for our members, has done a four times increase in municipal inquiries. Coming from what happens when I have only one snow plow driver, and he has COVID, and I can't plow my streets, to really complex things about what happens when I have somebody who was exposed to COVID, to perhaps the most complex of all, how do I have an election during the pandemic or a town meeting, and a kudos to the Secretary of State's office and to the Governor's office for helping us through that. Our advocacy group has been hard at work trying to make sure the funding that Senator Sanders has brought to the state in CRF money, the billions of dollars, the billion dollars in CRF money we've received gets to some municipalities. Our unemployment and workers' comp office has been overwhelmed with the claims that without the help of Senator Sanders and our congressional delegation, we wouldn't be able to pay all of these unemployment claims that our talents have brought to us. So we've seen our talents have to lay off and reduce their staffing in really significant numbers. They're giving an idea of more than $2 million of claims through the Vermont League of Cities and towns alone. So our towns have been impacted by this unemployment crisis just like the private sector has. And going forward, thanks to ARPA, and thanks to the legislature and the Governor for supporting some funding to the League and to our partners at the RPCs, we're going to have a full-time staff member on our staff that's able to help towns figure out how they can spend this money, this new money, this $198 million, how to track and how to report on that. So that's the brief report from the League. Thanks for including us today. OK, Ted, as Ted indicated, what we try to do in this is provide as much flexibility as we possibly could. And second of all, as Ted also indicated, make sure we get the money out to rural America, including small towns in the state of Vermont, who often are not beneficiaries. Burlington very well, but we've got a lot of small towns that need to help as well. I wanted to add and just to make you cognizant of this is there is a whole lot in the recovery plan, rescue plan that people are not aware of. Just give you a few examples that will impact you, above and beyond everything else. We tripled funding for after school and summer programs. All right, so if you guys are running after school or summer programs, there's going to be a lot more money available for you. And I don't have to tell anybody this has been a terrible year for the kids. It's been a very disruptive year in education. We want, we're working with the governor's office to make sure that we have outstanding summer programs this year, which will help kids maybe regain some of what they lost academically, do recreation, maybe have some jobs programs as well. So keep in mind that there will be money coming down the pike for after school, expanded after school and summer programs as well. Let's hear from Carol Dawes in Berry, Berry City Clerk. Thank you, Senator, and thank you for including me. I'm Carol Dawes. I'm the Berry City Clerk and Treasurer. I'm also the chair of the Legislative Committee for the Vermont Municipal Clerk and Treasurer's Association, and Ted has certainly touched on a lot of things that are that are sort of municipal wide, one of the big ones being lost of revenue. The city of Berry certainly experienced tremendous reductions in revenue for fiscal year 20 and then fiscal year 21, which we're in. Thankfully, we had enough advance notice that the council could adjust our budget before we set our tax rates to make sure that our tax rates we actually cut our budget to make up for the projected $500,000 worth of revenue shortfall. But that meant we were cutting services to the public, too. And I'm sure that Scott will go into more details about what the municipalities have gone through. I want to really focus on the clerks and the clerks throughout the state who have experienced similar circumstances across the state. Closed offices, furloughed employees, developing ways to continue to serve the public while putting protection measures in place here in Berry City. City Hall has been closed for more than a year now. And yet we still provide services to the public. We're still issuing marriage licenses and collecting property taxes and issuing dog licenses, and we have to continue to provide those services. This was especially true last year, of course, during the August primary and November general elections, as Ted mentioned. We had to really think outside the box. And Vermont Legislature was was great about putting legislation in place that allowed clerks to come up with all kinds of different ways to conduct elections. They did them as outdoor elections here in Berry City. We did the August primary as a drive through in our hockey field house, which provided great protection. Nobody had to get out of their car. It worked really beautifully. We're actually going to do a budget revoke next month the same way. Everybody was putting plans in place for social distancing, sanitizing surfaces and materials. And as Ted mentioned, the Secretary of State's office worked closely with the clerks to put procedures in place to expand options for voters. That was our number one priority to to maintain voter access and the safety for voters and election workers. And that included vote by mail for the November general election. And that's something that the Vermont Legislature is is actively pursuing, putting in place for a permanent change going forward. So what we're really thinking about, I actually polled members of the Clerk and Treasures Association and said to them, you know, what are your ideas for the ARP money? What are the things that that clerks need to to be prepared going forward? And it fell into three categories, one of them being building an office modifications, including installation of service windows, creating barriers. Many of us have jury rigged plexiglass shields and putting up something that that's more permanent door buzzer systems to to let people in outdoor public notice, posting areas, air quality systems. There's been a lot of talk about making sure that air quality in buildings is is the best it can be. So building an office modifications is number one. Number two is broadband and technology improvements to support virtual meetings to work from home more and more of us are working from home to provide online access to and storage of documents. Those are very important. And number three is expanding the digitization of land records and online access to land records. It became vitally important, particularly early in the pandemic when so many local property owners and businesses were able to access federal funding. They had to part of the legal process was they had to have lawyers doing research on their mortgages and their deeds. And yet our city halls and town halls were locked and records were in our vaults behind closed doors. And so we have made a real push over the last year to get more digitization and online access of land records. We did have two million dollars from the original covid relief money that allowed for expanded digitization. And I'm encouraging clerks all over the state to advocate to their select boards and city councils for additional funding out of the ARP money to continue that process. So those are our three main focuses. And Carol, let me just pick up on a point that Carol made. You know, we kind of take it for granted in Vermont. I don't have to tell anybody a bit of controversy regarding the election, just a bit. And yet maybe I missed something, but I have not heard that anybody in the state of Vermont thinks that the elections that we held here were not honest and that votes were accurately counted. You guys were responsible for that. So that's a big deal. So thank you for that. Let me go with Scott Tucker and Wilmington Scott. Thank you, Senator, and thank you for having me. I might be a little bit of an outlier with regard to what Ted Brady was saying. But let me just say this, we did cut our budget. We did not cut personnel. We're very fortunate in that way. Wilmington is sits at the southern part of the state between Bennington and Brattleboro. We are what I might consider a sort of a diamond in Vermont tourism mecca in terms of four seasons, but especially skiing with the hermitage and Mount Snow down here, Haystack Mountain. One of the questions was, did we lose revenue? And I think the simple answer would be not much. But our main revenue source is property taxes here. And we saw a one percent delinquency rate in FY 2020, followed by a five percent delinquency rate in 2021. Well, what does that mean? Well, we normally carry about four hundred thousand dollar delinquencies. And right now we're carrying over a million. But what the what the Select Board and Tax Collector did was that we did not do tax sales last year. Now, we must do tax sales this year because some of the people who regularly follow follow behind will be too far behind. And we do have some new taxpayers on our list, but we work very hard to create a payment plan for everybody. The overwhelming majority of taxpayers have paid their taxes and we made some last minute changes to our budget to cut about two hundred thousand dollars, which basically meant we did not have to borrow last year as we originally anticipated at the beginning of the pandemic. All right. Partnering, everything was based on partnering. Not that it isn't normally, but even more so. So we partner with up with our sister town on the economic front. And our economic. Development consultants, along with Dovers, along with the chamber, along with something called Wilmington Works, which focuses on our downtown. They all created this team called the Resiliency Outreach Team. And we contacted all the businesses early on, starting in March of last year. And about two hundred and fifteen businesses were contacted once initially and then a second time during this year. And the primary reason was to find out what businesses needed early on because as a tourist area where we're dependent on our retail on our ends on our restaurants down here. And of course, we feel the pain with our restaurants and our ends in particular. Retail seem to have bounced back, but we have some small shops that didn't do as well. The CARES Act helped us. The select board decided that it might be a good idea to extend money early on because we didn't know how quickly the money would come into the the town from the federal and the state sources through the CARES Act of 2020. So early on, we extended one hundred twenty thousand eight hundred dollars to businesses up to twenty thousand dollars each to sort of fill that gap. Zero percent interest. And we thought that that was helpful. But what was really helpful was the CARES Act allowed allowed us to convert those loans into grants, every single one of them, except for one. And then the select board waived a repayment of that particular loan for that particular business person. Now, as you know, there's there was a lot of help through the PPP. And for those businesses that didn't take advantage of it the first time, there is money left and we are through our economic development consultants going back and asking them to take advantage of it now. And many of them are and that I think has been very helpful. Also, we had a program down here in terms of feeding people in need called Everyone Eats. My understanding is Everyone Eats is really a Vermont grown program. And we were able to put two hundred thousand dollars back into the hands of the community, but in particular restaurants. They they were there was a core group of about a dozen restaurants and a dozen people supporting putting this program out there. So at any at any time, they're feeding up to eight hundred meals a week, a week, I believe. And that was that was helpful. So the restaurants were reimbursed at ten dollars per meal. But these were great meals. I had one restaurateur explain to me he was able to do things he might not ordinarily do, including checking cordon blue and things of that nature. So it was very healthy and the idea was to also buy local. We were grateful that originally the cap for us was about forty five thousand dollars based on the per capita population. And of course, our our regular population, our census population is about eighteen hundred, but we balloon to about five to six thousand because of second homes down here. And we did shift our operations, our highway and sewer departments early on separated into two into two units. But we were able to pay them a regular salary and I will stop there. OK, thanks a lot, Scott. I wanted to just make sure we have time for discussion whenever it's finished. Next panelist is Christine Lott, the mayor of the city of Lewinsky, Christine. Thank you, Senator. Speaking on behalf of Lewinsky, I think some of the things that the previous panelists have shared apply here locally. You know, lost revenue, shifting services, some of the clerk's office issues. The thing I want to highlight about our experience is how helpful we found partnering with local organizations and service providers and how that might change the way we operate into the future. So, you know, at the beginning of the pandemic, we stood up meetings with those partners and started to identify a lot of gaps uncovered. A lot of our residents experiencing barriers, accessing supports while they were maybe quarantining or unable to work. You know, we have a high poverty level here. A lot of folks in essential services. And so being able to make those connections between like our food shelf, the Association of Africans living in Vermont, the Vermont Department of Health, we're actually able to change and improve service delivery and messaging to reach more of our residents, which is something that we want to lean into as we come out of this. We also had those conversations about, you know, if three quarters of my public works department is out because of COVID and quarantine, how are we going to get things done? And recently we have had a Chittenden County municipal leaders discussion about trying to do more regionalization and more sharing of those services for resiliency, efficiency, cost savings. And that's something that we could be using some of these funds to do seed funding to actually stand up some of those programs. We had a very strong grassroots mutual aid effort pop up with some of our residents that's still going and has proven to be a really great low barrier way to get help before you can access those formal state and federal programs. We have a small business loan fund, which a lot of our businesses access to get help before they could get their PPP loans. We have a housing trust fund that we think we can expand with the Recovery Act funding as folks are, you know, the state's housing stability program is is coming to an end at some point, this could be a longer term solution for the affordable housing crisis that we've been experiencing for some time. Really pleased about the additional funding for after school programming and summer camps. That's a need we have certainly seen here, especially as we are trying to get folks back to work and reboot the economy. One of our biggest revenue losses was actually in parking, which has been a bit of a double whammy as we had plans to use some of our parking funds to support a development project, including a new parking garage and hotel in our downtown that would bring jobs, revenue, vibrancy into a new ski. And so being able to backfill that lost revenue will help us push that community development project along into the future. And when I think about that long term infrastructure and climate planning that you mentioned earlier, we have shovel ready projects that could use this funding. You know, we have really outdated streetscapes and the bridge, the main artery connecting us to Burlington. These aren't safe for biking and walking, and we want to make a lot of improvements there to reduce cars and carbon emission. We have deferred maintenance on recreation facilities and infrastructure. If we could have more folks staying close to home using our trails, our playgrounds and equipment, again, we're reducing that need to travel. So we're just really excited about this help and not just to recover from the pandemic, but to come out of it stronger and moving towards the community vision that we already have in place. So very thankful. Thank you, Mayor. And I was smiling when you talked about improved regional cooperation. We were talking about that when I was mayor of Burlington in the 1980s. So I hope you're making more progress than that. Kim Peters is in Rotland and is the superintendent of recreation and parks. Kim, thanks for being with us. Thank you so much, Senator. I'm going to start with the visual of, you know, as I'm scrapping together, what, you know, I'm representing recreation around Vermont. And I want to do a shout out to Ted Brady. A year ago in March, he brought directors together to say, how are we going to get through the summer and provide for the kids? You know, and it's brought us to where we are now. Last March, when schools had to close down, Rutland Recreation decided to open up essential care. We were one of the first ones to do it along with Winooski. We were on conversations. How do we how do we continue to provide child care as our essential workers had to work? Luckily, we had just started to lease the old College of St. Joseph gymnasium. So we had a nice 25,000 square facility that we opened up. We served over a hundred kids during that time for three months. What I believe Rutland really became known as is creating safety plan after safety plan to then help all the other recreation departments. I would say, you know, Rutland and Burlington, we have we're very fortunate. We have a staff of directors, but many of our smaller towns do not. And many of them during this time lost staff. They were furloughed. Directors were furloughed. You know, at some point, sometimes recreation is considered nonessential. And I think this this last year really show that we are essential. And it was proven over and over again. We during the summertime, many of the recreation departments, again, took over for the schools that were not able to provide their typical tapestry programs because they are located indoors. We took on that burden. We took on about four times the amount of kids. And what we were able to do is utilize all of our assets, all of our parks. So we we didn't really realize we were part of the response team until, you know, just recently going, OK, yes, we did this. I had great support from our mayor, David Lair, who I believe is on the call. We we took a risk and it paid off. We then were able to provide remote remote learning when schools shut down after the reopening in the fall. We partnered with our school district, which, again, is something that we had to do, not just with Rutland Public Schools, but with Mill River Greater Rutland Supervisor Union. I was working with five different school districts. As far as our recovery, you know, recreation is is in a weird situation because we're part of municipality and we're also working with the schools. So how the funding comes through is going to be really important that we're in both roles. So not only have I been on this panel, but also on the on this Department of Education saying, how do we continue to work together? Provide a great recovery for our families and our youth. One of the programs we are going to be offering, and I'll keep this short, is recreation on the move where we're going to provide free recreation with mentors. We partnered up with a couple of local organizations and we are really, really excited about doing these pop ups where we're reaching families that cannot get to our school district or our recreation. So I could go on forever, but I know there's there's going to be questions and thank you so much for this time. Well, Kim, thank you. And let me throw it back to you. So let me reiterate something that I think we all know to be true. Been a terrible year for the children for the first time in our lifetimes. Kids were not in school on a regular basis. We put a lot of money. We tripled funding for after school and summer programs. And the reason we did that is in general, after school programs have been underfunded. But second of all, we knew that especially now, this summer, it is terribly important to reach out to the kids who have lost so much schoolwork, who in many ways have really been isolated, stressed out and in some cases need employment to bring in revenue for their family. Kim, are you guys prepared to think big this summer? We have already filled up three of our camps. So we again, tripled our numbers. And yes, we are there. We are excited about the Tuesday announcement, but yes, we are ready. All right, Kim, what does that mean? Tell me a little bit about the camps. Does it cost me if I'm a working class parent in Rutland? Costs me money to go to the camp or not? So it costs less than $20 a day, but we do have many scholarships out there. So some of our families, it ends up costing nothing. We also set up a payment plan. $20, there's a lot of money, and I know you guys have your revenue needs, but for an ordinary family, are they going to be able to afford? Amen, a lot of money is coming in here. So what can you do to make it more affordable? So we don't turn anyone away. That's that's number one. And so I would say 75 percent of our population only pays 75 percent of that fee. So then it goes down. We that's why we're introducing the recreation on the move, where we are going to be going to our parks and offering completely free. Part of the challenge we do have, Senator, is that the money is not coming directly to recreation. So we do have to work with our school district and and to figure out how to compensate that. Because, yes, we do have to pay our staff. Right. All right. My hope is, you know, the goal of this thing is to involve as many kids as possible, especially families, most in need. And we don't want payment to be a disincentive of families to get into that program. Anyone else want to talk a little bit about recreation? We'll say on recreation that we'll get to the other things. Christine, did you have some thoughts on summer recreation after school programs? Yeah. So we are our staff is already talking to the school about expanding that program. They're really interested in bringing early bringing youth and family literacy programming into after school and summer. You know, we have we have a diverse population here. So not just working on literacy, but also we have folks that have limited English proficiency. And maybe there's an avenue to work on that. We were able to with the previous funding continue to provide after school over the months during the pandemic when we frankly couldn't have we had to find bigger space and couldn't have like financially made things work at the number of kids that we could have per adult. So we're looking forward to moving on from that. OK, anybody else want to jump in on recreation after school summer programming? OK, what else we got? Ted, do you want to throw it back to you? Working on my unmute skills. Sorry, Senator. Yeah, I think what we're really curious about to what how these municipalities are going to use this really flexible money that they're being given. And obviously, I said, we're going to have some resources to help them work through this process. The RPCs will have resources. But this is going to be a really interesting experience for these municipalities to say, hey, yes, there's this money coming in for after school and summer recreation programs from the federal government. I have this pot of money of several hundred thousand dollars. It's very discretionary. Should I should I potentially use that? If I'm a select board member, should I potentially use that to bolster something like what Christine has just said, you know, focusing it on this thing when this federal money is also coming? This is going to be something that we all need to work together on. And broadband boy, as Carol mentioned, broadband is at the heart of all this. Well, there's a lot of federal money coming in for broadband. But sadly, it's probably not going to be enough. And more importantly, what do you do with that broadband? Once you get people online, it's going to change the way we can deliver some municipal services, whether it be searching property records, registering your dog tags. You go down that list. Maybe that's someplace where these municipalities spend money. Let me jump in, Ted. Let me just jump in here and let's talk about broadband. How serious that we know how serious the problem is around the state, but who wants to jump in and talk about the need to improve broadband in your communities? And what does that mean? Carol, do you want to jump in? Yeah, I certainly know one of the challenges that clerks have around the state, of course, is, you know, there are polling places without without any kind of internet access. And we have a statewide voter checklist and people need to be able to check that on a regular basis in real time during elections and they can't. They don't have the access. And as we talked, as I mentioned before, access to land records, which is vital to maintaining property records in the state of Vermont. And that's just a couple of examples. OK, Scott, broadband. Sure, we we started Deerfield Valley, CUD down here a couple of years ago, started with a handful of towns. They're now up to over 23 towns. It gives you the idea of how broad this is going to be throughout the state. And they're now talking to the last house. So the money is important and it's also important. I think when we start talking about the rural condition, whether you're talking about broadband or housing or those kinds of things, because it will take money to do what we want to do. And it will help in the economic development sector as well. Is your other CUDs able to provide affordable broadband? Well, they they just starting to find, you know, try to find money. They're in they're in a position right now to build this to build this broadband infrastructure out. And then the next thing will be what will it cost? And I don't think anyone really knows. There's a couple of examples throughout the state, which I'm not terribly familiar with the cost on it. But there are some examples that have been successful. And of course, I think the more people you have in the the more affordable it's going to be. The problem with broadband is not only making it accessible, but making it affordable. I mean, it could be accessible and people can't afford it. And the quality of the speed is as I understand it as well. Exactly. Any more thoughts on broadband? All right, infrastructure in general, all right, we got. In Vermont, like the rest of the country, we've got enormous problems with roads and bridges, water systems, wastewater plants, very expensive propositions. Ted, what are we going to do about that? Yeah, well, I think this funding is going to help make a dent in the ARPA funding is going to help make a dent in some of that. As towns are going to be able to do economic development projects that focus, I think, heavily on water and wastewater. As the statute specifically says, we're looking to that infrastructure bill, the BBB that you mentioned to really get us in. We need a we need a once in a lifetime investment in our state's roads and our town roads and our town water and wastewater and our broadband and our bridges. It's it's there's a lot of deferred maintenance out there and this federal money is going to help start us. What we also need, though, is the towns to be willing to take on some of this on their own with financing. And that finance is going to be important to the municipal bond bank through programs like World Development, through programs like state bonding programs and TIF. We're going to need those tools because, sadly, all the federal money in the world won't solve this problem alone. It's going to need some state buying and local buying with local dollars, too. All right, do we have the labor resources available to do the work that has to be done? Are we going to run into a labor shortage here in terms of construction companies? Anyone have thoughts on that one? But maybe give us a longer time period to spend all of this money might be helpful, Senator. But in general, I do believe it's going to be helpful to a lot of these firms that are going to be able to bring on more employees. I mean, we have a certain number of very good construction firms down here when we start talking about road construction and things of that nature, because the short period of time to spend this money, my highway crew is not going to be able to handle all the reclamation kinds of projects that we might have. So we will have to use other other firms to help us. Well, and the issue is every other town in the state is going to get that money as well. So it's going to be a real competition for the workers that we need. But you guys, we should be thinking about that. Right. Right. Oh, I have discovered in recent years that water and clean drinking water is a more serious problem than I previously thought. Anyone want to talk about water? I was going to share that. That is something that we have been focusing on when we think about. Street maintenance is that can we wrap if we have to do a road repair? Can we also address the water mains, the stormwater treatment? Use green scapes to do that work. You know, Ted was talking about the other funding earlier. We are lucky that we do have. We should be within the coming months to be starting our means for revitalization project, which will address those concerns thanks to funding from rural development and being able to do that on more of our streets with some of this additional funding is going to really advance us instead of doing this piece meal over the course of several decades. I'm smiling again because I'm thinking you don't want to be one of those towns that paves your roads and then rips them up to put in water pipes, right? Yeah, we've seen that before. We don't want to do that. What's the price? Senator, one of the things that I think some of the new flexible money might allow us to do is we have municipalities that have led service lines and have really old infrastructure that go into private property. And so those service connections, those are things that some sometimes federal programs don't allow us to tackle. And some of this new flexible money might allow us to tackle some of those end problems all the way into the home, right? All the way to the faucets and to the fixtures. And water and wastewater are, I will recall, from when I was mayor. Those are very expensive propositions. And I suspect I haven't gotten less expensive over the years. Now, I don't know. You know, as all of you know, there's a huge debate now in Washington about what we call reconciliation to, which deals with basic infrastructure deals with climate. The president has proposed several hundred billion dollars for affordable housing. Which needless to say, I strongly support low income and affordable housing. Thoughts on housing. We need to build some housing in Vermont. And Senator, just to let you know, we do only have a couple of minutes last year. OK, thanks. Housing. Senator, I sit on the board at NeighborWorks of Western Vermont. I know you're familiar with it. And we have begun over the last year or so talking about the rural condition in terms of housing availability, quality housing. And how do we get people who want to stay in rural Vermont into houses that maybe they need a little bit of help with? They might need help with the taxes in some areas as well. But how do we rebuild some of these houses into singles or doubles so that people can afford to stay in the area they love? Wisconsin, we just I mean, I'm throwing a lot at you. You know, we're living at a crazy moment. It's been an unprecedented year. And there is a huge debate as you are all aware of in Congress's to how significantly we should respond. Different people have different points of view. I am one of those who believes that we should respond in a very, very strong way. But when Scott talks about housing, what I want you to know, and this is a lot of responsibility is going to come on to the shoulders of local officials. Let me give you an example. It's not just building low income and affordable housing. We want to make housing more energy efficient. So it's going to be another pot of money, which says to somebody, you know what? And we do some of this in Vermont, but we need to do a lot more. We can weatherize your home. We can cut your fuel bill in half. And by the way, we may be able to put some solar energy on your rooftop as well. And then we've got to figure out a financing mechanism for that. So it's not just building new housing. It is retrofitting housing. And that pot of money may come from the climate change. Pot of money. So we're throwing there's a lot of entities out there that you guys and Ted are going to have to keep a very sharp eye on. Housing, anybody else have thoughts on Carol? We here in Berry City, we we unfortunately have quite a few properties that have been abandoned, that are in the process of being foreclosed, had it have been foreclosed. And we would love to see programs that that allow people to come in and buy those homes and rehab them and make them their first home. And so that's certainly something that that we would love to see more support for. Let me ask you this just while we're on the subject of housing. Have you guys noticed people unable to pay their rent? Has that been an issue during the pandemic? Well, not so much. Christine, have you noticed that in the ski? Yeah, we've had a large uptake in households that are accessing the state housing stability fund. And I've heard from folks who wanted to but didn't feel that they could. So I know that there's still need. Right, there's a moratorium on evictions, but that moratorium is going to end. And you're going to have folks who can owe a lot of money in back rent. There'll be some money available to help those people. But this is a red light that you should be aware of. OK, what else we got? Ted, anything else on your mind that we haven't discussed? Oh, I think I'm really interesting for all of us to start engaging on is this billion dollars the legislature and the governor are going to work on to distribute to Vermonters. And you're going to help them figure out a way to spend that money, I guess. We sure hope so. And I think local governments as a whole need to weigh in on the proponent parts of the proposals that we like and we don't like. I mean, you talk about housing, the governor unveiled a proposal to build five thousand and address five thousand units of housing in the next three years with this federal funding. And it seems like a great goal with how that gets done and what mechanisms like Carol saying they have a specific need and bury. Wilmington might have a different need. We know that Chittenden County needs more units, period. So every region has a different need and towns really need to weigh in there. All right, let me conclude. And, you know, first of all, thank you. I think it's been a really useful discussion. A lot is going to come down into your desk, guys. And, you know, again, the fate of the new infrastructure or the build back better plan is up in the air. We don't know what's going to happen. We don't know how much money is going to be in it. It is conceivable if I have my way. And I think with Senator Lee, Congressman Welch have their way. We're talking about trillions of dollars, trillions of dollars, a lot of money coming in to the state of Vermont. And you're going to have to balance so many things and it could be easy. But I would I think we can all agree would rather be in that position of figuring out how we spend money than I have any money to spend. So we're going to give you that challenge, make your life difficult. But I think it's a good difficulty that you will appreciate having. So look, thank you all for the work you've done over this last terrible year. Let's hope things get better. And I think they will and let's go forward together. So thank you all very, very much. Talk to you all soon.