 All right, it's 1115 and we're going to move on to Michelle, I believe is with us this morning. Is that correct? Yes, I am, Senator. Thank you. All right, okay, here we go. So I am going to share my screen. I've got a presentation to give you an update on the status of our planning for more extensive engagement to bring additional equity to our planning and project selection processes and how we deliver those. So let me just get my presentation queued up here. Michelle, this is related to the four page report that we just received that gives us an approach and then the status update. Yes, that is correct, Senator. All right, I shouldn't have bothered to read it if you're going to present it to us, sorry. Well, it's only four pages. You don't listen to us, you want to read everything, you know, you like to read. We never know who's going to read those reports, that's for sure. So you'll recall last session that there was a requirement in the T-bill that we move forward with an equity framework and provide a report to you, which initially we were thinking would be the actual product of this process, but it turns out this is much more involved than we had anticipated in the timeline is now different than we originally expected. So in addition, simultaneously, at the federal level last January, the Biden administration issued what's called the Justice 40 executive order. And this is, we'll have requirements that states invest 40% of their federal investments and that those investments floated disadvantaged communities. And the guidance on that is still under development. We're not exactly sure what that will mean for Vermont. I think in Vermont, the characterization of disadvantaged communities would likely include the lower income communities throughout the state, might be sort of income-based, as well as other specific census block communities of folks who are historically disadvantaged in their participation or their receipt of benefits from federal programs. So this is something we're still monitoring and we'll be incorporating into our process. When we think about equity and transportation, I like to use this block, which really talks about the different kinds of equity. So we have basic inequality where we have unequal access to opportunities, which is shown up the top with a person who has a terrible road and can't sort of get from here to there versus somebody who's provided a nice highway. And then are we making sure that when we do provide equitable access that we are providing that across the geographies and across the different user communities? And then social equity to sort of identify and address these inequalities. So being able to understand the sort of foundation of why there is inequity. And then ultimately we arrive at a sort of a point of justice, it may be called to assure that we are using appropriate tools and approaches so that we are able to distribute the resources that we're charged with in an equitable manner. So we have moved forward and selected a consultant after a pretty lengthy process to develop requests for proposals, which included consultation with both sort of agency and regional planning commission partners as well as the state equity director and also our federal highway administration director. And I think I might have a slide on that later, but it is a multi-layered team. The consultant that was selected is Resource Systems Group, which brought together both a good internal team as well as bringing forth the Rights and Democracy Institute, Kaia Morris, who many of you may have heard of. She worked on the climate planning process and has assembled a team who is working now also with the Agency of Natural Resources on some of their equity advancement. So I think that she'll bring some good insights into this process. The way we are setting this up is that we'll do the initial project initiation and research, examine existing programs and prepare an assessment of where we stand. And then we will have a very lengthy stakeholder and public involvement process, which will be led by the Rights and Democracy Institute. And there will be very focused research and outreach to specific types of marginalized communities to help us form the basis for how we would engage with these communities across the state going forward. So the Bennington BIPOC community, Winiski Burlington Second Generation New Americans urbanized residents within Barrie and Newport and Rutland area persons experiencing low income. And there will be a whole range of engagement strategies that the Rights and Democracy Institute have utilized successfully. We do have some pretty good information available to us on this topic now. This is an index prepared by UVM, School of Natural Resources, Rubenstein School. And it basically looks at environmental disparity. And there's a variety of tools, not only here in Vermont, but that are evolving nationally. Here's another equity index created by the Oregon Department of Transportation's Office of Social Equity. And so we will be looking at utilizing and then enhancing or developing similar tools for our efforts. And you'll have this slide in your packet. I'm not gonna dwell on it, but it's basically, yes. Michelle, I think you think the slides are advancing, but all I'm seeing is the same slide, Inequity, Equality, Social Equity, and Justice. Oh dear. Am I unique in that or? Yeah, that's all I'm seeing, yeah. Okay, let me go, I don't know what's happening here. Let me go to another framework here. If you have two screens, you might just be looking at the screen with your PowerPoint. Oh, I see that, yeah, somehow I'm having, I'm gonna stop sharing and get this straightened out. What are you seeing, Senator Chittenden? No, yep, there's better. Oh, now we're seeing each other. All right, let me try this again and see if I can't get this up. Thank you for letting me know about that, Senator Chittenden. Yeah, I really had some great slides for you to see, but okay, let's start sharing again. Okay, are the slides advancing now? Yes. Okay, so those are all the slides that I showed you before that you didn't see, they'll be on your website, but they're just depictions of the resources that are available. And then we will be working on a vision statement and guiding principles that will help inform how we advance this and how we apply it to our work. And then the final report will basically be a compilation of all of the research and will result in best practices, recommendations and methods for implementing the plan. And this planning process will apply to everything from our public outreach to identify projects that may be needed in a region or a community, all the way to scoping processes where we engage the public in the design concepts for projects, the 502 hearing where we're bringing out information related to the sort of near-final designs and the right-of-way implications. And then our on-the-ground implementation of projects so that we have a good way to approach this. Very good, Joe. Yeah, I'm just wondering, Michelle, the metrics that are gonna have to be developed to comply with the federal requirement that 40% of investments flow to disadvantaged. Just take Burlington. You've got within the city of Burlington, you have many neighborhoods, some are very affluent and some are much lower income. And so within your planning, are you gonna have to identify and set standards or definitions around, I would think you'd have to, around what is a disadvantaged community and it's a community gonna be a subdivision of a town and city. It's just, when you think about what it takes to implement and report and for compliance, I know that certainly you think about historically what we've done. When we put interstates through, what do we do? Put it through the poorest neighborhoods, split them up. We did that with the Boston North End or whatever and or the people who live along a railroad line to historically have had maybe lower income. So I'm just wondering what is the thinking or will the federal government provide those metrics? So I'm anticipating that the federal government will provide some guidance relative to the metrics. They've done that with other types of investment requirements that they have placed upon us in terms of maintaining our bridges or roadways, et cetera. And I expect a similar approach to this. In terms of breaking it down, I suspect it's going to be really looking sort of the investment side will perhaps be a little different than the outreach side. And I can't really speak to the investment side on the Justice 40 piece until we have more guidance. Yeah, because it's only certain federal investments. So obviously there must be identified package of investments that this requirement would apply. And I don't know what those certain are. Well, it seems pretty broad from the executive order when I reviewed that. So I'm just, I'm sort of curiously and anxiously awaiting more details on that. I mean, I think if you, I think compared to other parts of the US where you consider our rural context and other factors related to income, I would imagine that when we sort of look at our transportation system investments, whether it's transit or roadway or bridge, we're making a lot of investments in communities where there are economic disparities. And then I would expect, you know, we're going to have some acknowledgement of that when the final guidance comes out. In terms of the specific outreach we do relative to our planning and our projects, that would really be more at the sort of neighborhood level, so to speak, depending on which communities we're delivering services or projects to and how we may need to approach the engagement for those processes. All right, so just to give you an idea where we're going with this, January, we're going to kick off this process and start the setting up the advisory group. And then May through September will be that intensive community outreach that we had talked about with basically later this fall working on the recommendations of the implementation plan and then having this ready around February of a year from now. So that's the timeline and that's the status of this. And I believe that is my last slide. So I'm going to stop sharing and see if there are any other questions. Questions, anyone? Boy, no questions. So when you're reviewing a project, then this would just be part of that criteria that you would be looking at in that decision making or that would translate down into probably the RPCs and the TAGS as well. Yeah, the RPCs will be an integral partner in this whole process. And I think a lot of the outcomes in terms of where we will need to place more emphasis on engagement and even to the point of helping certain communities understand and be ready to participate in our processes. In other words, it's not just knowing that there's a public meeting coming up. It's, okay, there's a public meeting coming up and what do these things that the Transportation Agency are going to be talking about? What do they even mean? How do they impact me? What concerns should I have? So it's a pretty broad sort of effort. And then for some communities, is there a need to assist by creating a liaison who is from that community who can help us in understanding the needs of a particular community? Say if it's a new American community where they might be impacted by a major roadway project and what are the considerations we're going to have to create to address to make sure that they are not impacted in a way we would not intend to impact them if we had not been deliberate about this. Yes, Senator Perkley. Thank you, Michelle. Do you see this impacting the work that's happening today or is it something that the agency is trying to get in place so that for future projects? So today we already have a process within our public outreach plan to make sure that we are identifying potentially impacted communities when we are doing projects. And a good example of that was the recent engagement through the NEPA process for the Champlain Parkway for communities in the sort of north end of that project. So we do actively and intentionally use tools now, but we are anticipating that there will be other approaches and perhaps better screening data and better screening processes so that project managers are trained to understand what are all the steps they need to be taking to assure that they're addressing these objectives of the agency. Well, I understood that. I was thinking about the Champlain Parkway project. If you saw this work affecting projects like that, I think you would go back and redo some of the engagement or this is really more going forward. Right, like in that example, the engagement was already redone as part of the NEPA requirement that the record of decision be reexamined. And so that occurred in the Champlain Parkway process. I would say that projects that are underway are not going to sort of be placed on pause to conduct additional engagement because we would assume in particular those that require some sort of NEPA evaluation that we are catching sort of those areas where we need to be doing adequate engagement to address the concerns that would arise from impacted communities. So I don't think we're in a position to say, oh, we're not gonna let things go forward until we make sure we've done this, but where we can and where we're early in the processes, we are going to be applying the tools, at least the tools we have. Thanks. When did the federal rules become effective? So that Justice 40 executive order became effective last January, but it's been a very slow rule out on the guidance. I've attended a couple of webinars put on by the federal agencies overseeing this and at the USDOT and they've been pretty high level. So we're still waiting for more details. Questions, comments? Anything else, Michelle? That's it for me today. Okay. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Okay. Anything else the committee has on the agenda? You'll probably get to have lunch today. I've got a meeting for lunch. Okay. All right, unless there's anything else, we will see you all tomorrow morning at nine o'clock or I'll see you this afternoon.