 My name is David Mears. I am the director of the environmental law programs here at Vermont Law School. Welcome. Welcome on this beautiful day. The fact that this many people would choose to spend one of those rare, precious, beautiful, sunny, green days in Vermont inside speaks to your commitment and dedication to the issue that we're going to tackle today. So let me just share some logistics and some thanks and just a mix of things so we can jump quickly into the program. I just want to note at the outside, the main group of people I want to thank is you. As I look around this room, what an incredible gathering. Just an unbelievable mix of perspectives, background, experiences. There's centuries of experience and knowledge in environmental, land use, housing, transportation, government, development, advocacy. Just what an incredible gathering of folks. I think one of our grandest hopes, whereas Kate, Kate's probably out there chatting so, you know, one of our grandest hopes as for the folks in Peg, Peg Elmer, the folks that kind of conceived of this was that by bringing this group together we would be able to catalyze the energy, the ideas and begin to move forward collectively as a state in the conversation that's being led by our legislature. Thanks to Amy Sheldon from Middlebury who's the chair of the General Assembly Committee that's been charged with kind of getting public input and figuring out where is Act 250 going to go. But gosh, there's too many people for me to even begin to think. Diane Snelling, the chair of the Natural Resources Board, Julie Moore from Natural Resources. Just what an amazing gathering of folks. So thank you for coming. Some more specific things. I want to thank Kate McCarthy and Peg Elmer in particular for their tremendous work to pull all of this together to organize the panels, the speakers, the invitations. Thanks to B.T. Digger and to Theresa Murray Klossin who have helped promote and advertise and who will be providing coverage and information about this out to the public as this goes forward. Thanks to the Vermont Planners Association. Thanks to Vermont Natural Resources Council. To the Hymetto's Fund, to Two Rivers out of Quichy and to the Vermont Association of Planning and Development that I backed. I never had to say it out loud. So Vermont Association of Planners and Developers, Development Agencies, there we go. I knew. Not developers. Sorry. We've never confused original planning commissions with developers. So thank you to all of you who pulled together to pull this off. I also wanted to know a couple of logistics. One, the bathroom situation here is a little odd and I don't mean the composting toilets thing. I mean just that for a group this large at breaks, giving coffee and tea and all of that, there would be more of you than could fit in the little bathrooms just up the hallway. So there are also bathrooms on the second and third floor of that, the Debo Boys building. There's also bathrooms around the corner. You go across through this door out into our little cafe and around the corner. There's some bathrooms there. There's some bathrooms in the library and there's some bathrooms all the way down the hall into the Oaks classroom building. So I suspect just giving the massive people, you may have to use all of those options. Another logistical thing, we now operate year round as a law school. We have an entering group of law students, about 25 or so, who are on campus today and will be participating in a whole series of orientation meetings. That will be in meeting rooms scattered about and there's some breakout sessions this afternoon. And if you find yourself in a room where you're being informed about how to prepare for a case or learning about the Socratic method of instruction, you're probably not in the right room. So just a heads up around that. Oh, and then continuing legal education credits for those of you who are impaired by a Juris Doctor degree and are looking for continued legal education credits. There's a sign up sheet out in the foyer here and make sure that you fill out the evaluation form and you can get a certificate of participation. So with that, let me turn things over to Amy Sheldon who will kick things off and kind of get us oriented and I'll follow on with a little more discussion about the challenges we're facing. But again, thank you. Welcome and thank you so much. Thank you, David. Wow. Thank you all for being here. I gotta say last week when we thought the session was over and we thought we were gonna get into our active 50 work. There was a moment when I felt really alone. And that's just you've disabused me of that completely. It's great to see you all here. It's my absolute pleasure to be with you. What I'm gonna just briefly cover is the legislative process that we're in. And then I get to talk first and step back and listen and learn from all of you today. So thanks again for taking the time to participate. It does mean a lot to us. Just a little bit about me and my interest in land use planning. I am a natural resource planner professionally. But my first job was at the middle grade land trust and Art Gibb was actually on our board. So he was the chair of the first Act 250 Commission and certainly piqued my interest in serving in the legislature. And I thought one day I'll do that. I didn't know that the stars would align for me to actually get to follow in his footsteps. And I know we all love where we live in Vermont. But I would make the case that Addison County can be a really good sampler of all of the issues facing Vermont. So I'm proud to share it and put my time and effort into it. Act 47 is the law that we're operating under and it created a commission on Act 250 the next 50 years. We have six legislators who are the commission but we also have a crackerjack crew of advisors 14 people, five of whom are from the administration or their appointees from the agencies who work most closely with Act 250. And then the remainder is from sort of all over the spectrum of interested parties from the development community to the planning agencies and everybody in between. So our process began in September and it's about a year and a half process. We started by hearing from our advisors in public hearings in the state house one a month September, October, November, December. And then of course we started the session. And during the session we had began we did some subcommittee work. One of the great things is that in some ways we don't have enough time to get our hands around all the issues but there are so many people excited and interested. The biggest challenge is going to be how to get the public input and the input from professionals who use Act 250 from all the various ways and angles we do it and not just Act 250 but land use planning in general and compile that into a meaningful report. So the three phases of our process, the background information that's over that ended in December. We're just beginning the public output phase and that starts on June 27th. We'll have our first public hearing. There'll be six public meetings around the state. But in addition to that we're going to have online surveys and hard copy surveys available. And most importantly to many of you is that we're going to ask you to take we're going to have a meeting in a box and have you facilitate additional meetings so that we can get to as many Vermonters as possible. And the purpose of those public meetings really is to get high level input from Vermonters themselves on the issues that they see confronting us. We will frame those questions for them and get their input but see if there's anything that we've missed. First of all, educate people on what is land use planning, what is Act 250 and what isn't Act 250. There's a lot of people who get confused. And more importantly though kind of touch in with the public and see what is the appetite for more environmental protection and how do they see their communities growing and evolving and staying vibrant in the future. And is there a role for the land use planning and regulation in that? And what is their appetite for that? So we'll have many ways, many avenues for the public to engage. And then we will move into in September, we move into our report writing phase. And then we will the legislation is a little bit open-ended. It allows us to recommend changes or not recommend changes. Actually, one thing, one little point that you are probably all at least individually aware, but you may not know the cumulative factoid around this, which I find interesting is that Act 250 is actually the most amended second of statute. At least that's the sort of buzz around the state house building. It's been amended just about every biennium since it's inception. And if I skipped over this too quickly, it turns 50 in 2018 or 2020, excuse me. And so, you know, it's a really great time to look at what was a landmark environmental legislation. It was only ever partially implemented. And so the conversations around how do we do we or do we not engage in a more broad scale statewide planning? And what are the things we need to talk about? The subject areas in our statute are very similar to the breakout sessions that will be happening today. Looking at fragmentation and settlement patterns, climate change, and can we integrate more consideration for impacts of climate change into our land use regulation and planning, water quality, appeals and structure just sort of we're not sure how much that will take to the public, but I very much appreciate the fact that professional organizations are taking a lead in this kind of conversation. The hope for the public meetings is that they remain very high level and visionary and that we provide avenues for people to give us the feedback on specific changes that need to happen. But that the public meetings really focus on on the higher level conversation of where do we see the state going and what is the role of Act 250 in the future. And then the final sections that we dive into more deeply are jurisdiction and exemptions. And I do believe they do parallel the breakouts this afternoon. So it's the intention of the sponsors of this conference today as well as my own commission to take your input, we're going to get a report summarizing what happens today. And I promise you that we'll read it and integrate it into our work into the future. So thank you again for coming out spending the time and for all of your care and concern for the remote landscape. Thank you, Amy. Well, I've been given the task of trying to identify some of the challenges facing us as we embark in this effort, which I think in many ways Amy, Representative Sheldon has just summarized pretty effectively. But I'd like to give a little kind of more colorful perspective on it. And I'll note that I am not an expert on Act 250. I don't consider myself. I have certainly practiced law in the area and I've certainly interacted with the statute over the years, but I feel far from an expert and I'm trying to in fact, through my remarks, reflect back some of the commentary I've heard over a period of years, frankly. And I'll also note that Vermont Law School has had a tradition of being engaged in this work that goes back quite a ways all the way to Dick Brooks, Professor Emeritus here at Vermont Law School. And if you haven't had the chance to glance through his paper, we've made available a link to his paper online. It's still it's a work in progress, so it's not quite fully polished. Thanks to some of you for offering you know, some editorial remarks to help clean it up. But nonetheless, the content of it reflects some really long term deep thinking that Professor Brooks has provided after really a career of looking at Act 250. And so it's worth looking at his perspectives on on where the law has been and where he thinks it ought to go. There were also I'll know you know, there's one of the long term challenges from the very inception of Act 250. But all the way through its life has been the idea of state planning. It was initially a law that had a very substantial component of state planning that was stripped out early in the early days, and then attempted to be added back. Doug Costell, a former dean at the Law School, participating in the Act 200 Commission that were you know, presented a whole set of ways to begin to get communities in the state of Vermont to be part of a state planning effort. And that too has been as a result of the multitude of amendments largely been removed from the statute. So it remains largely a permitting statute. And so I think that I'll just lead with that as a theme. I think that's a fundamental challenge for us as we look at the statute is the degree to which it has simply become a permit by permit ad hoc decision making tool. It's not that it's completely divorced from municipal planning or regional planning, but the linkages are not strong. And it's also we have a plethora of other plants in the state. We have just within the ADC of natural resources. There's a variety of plants, river planning, you know, watershed planning. There's all sorts of things. And of course, transportation has plans as does. We have plans around housing and other attributes of that all touch on how we develop on the landscape at the state level. It's not true that we don't have state planning. It is true that those plans aren't effectively coordinated. It's also true that those plans don't necessarily link up and align with the regional plans. And it also is true that the municipal planning to the extent that it happens lines up with the regional plan. So there's a degree to which planning and the intersection with Act 250 remains a fundamental challenge that goes back to the very beginning days. And you'll hear from some other speakers today who will kind of share experiences from other states on how they've begun to try to deal with that challenge in their own states. This is not unique to Vermont. One speaker last night who you hear from suggests that maybe we should just not call it planning. Maybe the problem is we need a different word. But I'll let I'll let her expand on that idea. But it was I see that as a central challenge is thinking about how do we if we're going to modify and amend Act 250 to the future. How do we tackle this issue. It's been highly controversial. It's been elusive yet it remains central to answering the question of what is this landscape going to look like. But in some ways maybe I've leaped over maybe the biggest challenge that we should start with which I know is the legislative commission is going to be trying to understand and get perspective on from the public. Which is do we have a shared vision of what the landscape in Vermont should look like. And then second is Act 250 the vehicle that we want to use to try to protect and preserve whatever that shared vision is. So I think there's a very high level discussions that we need to have. My sense is based on substantial work over the years it's been done including work by the Vermont Council on Rural Development that there's a fairly strong alignment across ideological perspectives. And what we want the landscape to look like. Where it breaks down is the role of Act 250 in protecting that. And then the balancing between protecting private interests and the broader public interests that we always need to figure out how to balance in these conversations. So with that with those very large kind of high level challenges that we face some of the more specific and in our face challenges are just simply the fact that the world has changed since 1970 when the act was first enacted. Substantial changes and it continues to change and we can see on the horizon some even even larger changes. One there's been a very pragmatic level here at the law school. We spent a lot of time talking about all the variety of environmental laws that have passed. Many of which passed in the 70s and 80s and have continued in through they stopped at the federal level but they've continued at least in Vermont. We continue to add and adapt environmental laws over the period of time since the law was first enacted. So Act 250 is no longer a central law in terms of the variety of air pollution, water pollution, waste management that it was may have been intended to address in this early days. And so there's a significant challenge the thing about how do we and how do we intersect those two permitting regimes. That's complicated, wickedly complicated work to do and the act and the current systems I don't think are sufficiently interactive. We are not, we have very inefficient and confusing processes for applicants, for advocates and for the broader public to try to figure out how these permitting systems and regulatory programs fit together. Another major challenge has been technology. Technology has changed dramatically in lots of different ways and we see bigger changes on the horizon. Whether we're talking about energy systems, solar, wind, other renewables. The wind battles alone, you know, have changed the landscape and the way and the relationships among all of us who are engaged in thinking about the Vermont landscape. Solar energy having similar impacts and the relationship between the work of the Public Utility Commission and their work in improving energy projects and what happens on land use. Also not really baked. We don't really have a good comfortable streamlined system for managing the very important choices that we're making about what the landscape looks like in light of the changes in energy technology. So if we are committed as a state to, you know, what is it, 90% by 2050 of renewable energy as part of our energy portfolio, what does that mean for our landscape and is there a role for Act 250? Should there be a role for Act 250 in that? Or is it just we're going to ignore that, pretend that there is no man behind the curtain? Transportation. Transportation technology. What's, you know, what's happening there in terms of an electrified transportation fleet? What does it mean if in fact we begin over the next coming decade to have cars that are self, you know, guiding? What's happening with transportation? That also relates to a set of changes that are happening that are not entirely technology-based but also a cultural element. What's, as the generations of Vermonters are growing up and wanting to live in small downtowns and cities and, you know, more, you know, not out in the suburban sprawl. If that pressure changes, what does that mean? Because we also know we have a strong, a major problem in terms of affordable housing in our communities. So the intersection between energy transportation, other infrastructure like communications infrastructure and housing, and the landscape, right? These are all substantial changes that have been happening and will continue to happen. Is Act 250 in its current frame, you know, up to the task of adapting to that? Similarly, we have, you know, one of the central pieces of our economy, our agricultural economy, our forest economy, our working lands economy. Major changes happening there. The dairy industry is under a major pressure right now and has been, for a period of years, the consolidation of dairies, the water quality challenges, just the existential challenges facing the dairy sector and a proliferation and hopefully, you know, growth in the diversity and different kinds of farming as it evolves in the state. These are major changes, pressures. What role for Act 250? You know, for value-added processing of our food products and forest products. How does that, how do we fit that into protecting the landscape as whatever vision we have for that? Similarly, for the forest economy, major disruptions have happened over the past decade with substantial changes and the way in which land ownership and the demographic changes in the state, the way in which land is being held in increasingly smaller and smaller blocks. The things that we have assumed would be the case are no longer going to be the case going into the future and we can either wait until it gets to a crisis moment or perhaps we can use this moment in time to think about what would we like, how would we like to deal with those challenges and is Act 250 a vehicle that we could use to do that? And then finally, I'll just mention one of my own personal interests in a pet area that I think is substantial but important. Even though it's just one of many issues but is the issue of a polluted stormwater runoff in the state, an area that I've worked on extensively when I was with the Department of Environmental Conservation and the work that continues on. That's not just a pollution issue, that's about how do we live on the landscape issue. As we begin to look at what are the challenges facing our lakes and ponds and streams and rivers, it turns out not to be just finding a few polluters, it's all of us, it's all the activities on the landscape and it's the way in which we manage and live in accordance or in association with our river systems. So in a time as we head into what is probably the biggest and most substantial change that we face of all, which are the impacts of climate change and the dramatic increase in the frequency intensity of extreme weather events, what does that mean for our landscape? What does it mean for our rivers? What does it mean for our forests? What does it mean for our wetlands and flood plains? And I say all of those things because it's not all negative and it's all not all bad news. We have in Vermont a landscape that has the attributes of a state that could be resilient and can also play a major role in moving to a carbon, at least a carbon neutral kind of future. We have all the attributes that we can figure out how to use our forests, use our healthy soils, figure out how this concept of working in community centers, towns and village centers with a working landscape around that's how that in its own way is a major contribution to living in a carbon-free kind of future. We have all the tools and attributes that we need before us. Can we step up and use this moment and look at Act 250 as a focal point? It may be putting too much on Act 250 to say it's going to solve all of those multitude of problems. But at its best, Act 250 has been a place that brings community groups together with state officials to figure out how we want the landscape to work. So that's the I'll conclude there by just saying I think that's my greatest and highest hope is that this process will fully engage the broader Vermont public and that we will come out of this conversation enriched with a recommitment to a shared set of values. So with that, I will turn it over to the next person. Next two people, yes. Thank you. Please, folks, need no introduction. But yeah. I think you all know there are natural resources board chair Diane Snelling, longtime supporter of Act 250 and a major player in the state. So thank you. Thank you. And Rob will maintain of tell me your firm's name. Who is going to have his remarks? I was asked to talk about the history and heroics of Act 250. And so I've taken sort of a personal view towards that. So bear with me. I know there are people in the audience who can correct me if I've stated the wrong names or the wrong years. But good morning and welcome. I thank you to the Vermont Planners Association, especially Peg and the Steering Committee, the Vermont Law School, VNRC, VT Digger and Representative Amy Sheldon Chair of the Act 47 Legislative Commission on Act 250 the next 50 years. I don't know if there are any other members of the Commission but I welcome them. Perhaps Representative Dean was here. No. Okay. I've enjoyed the research in preparation for these remarks and strongly recommend the interested people will read some of the published histories of Act 250 including Professor Richard Brooks Treatise and his recent essays. Paul Gillis for many articles but especially Act 250 from birth to middle age. Greening Vermont by Elizabeth Courtney and Eric Zensey and the story of Vermont by Christopher Cliza and Steven Trombulac. We recently the Natural Resources Board recently moved our offices from the Dewey Building at the National Life Campus to number 10 Baldwin Street and and we had been in that building for quite a while so of course we found some really interesting artifacts along the way. One of the best examples is a very large binder labeled Art Gibbs Historical Novel about Vermont's Environment. Act 250 history from 1966 to present day which although not truly a novel does contain the best kind of information that is familiar to most legislators drafts, reports, correspondence except there are very few notes and I intend to keep researching to see what I can find. The binder also had the passage of Act 250 1960 to 1970 written in 1992 by Christopher Bailey for the history honors program at Dartmouth College and I found that very helpful. It was a very it's a very step-by-step kind of description of the legislative process. I also watched the wonderful Vermont public television series The Governors with Chris Graf interviewing Dean Davis. To start at the beginning I'm not a native Vermonter but I am very local and I've been around for a long time. I'm actually old enough to remember the passage of Act 250 and I know there are a few other old coots in the audience so bear with us as we talk about the past. In 1970 I was 18 a senior at CVU high school and full of fire about equality and honoring the earth. Before that however I remember the building of Interstate 89. It was a very exciting time and it seemed that there was massive earth moving everywhere. We went on frequent family excursions to view the progress from the first bulldozers to placing the signs. The building at the interstate provided something new and exciting every day. It literally reshaped Vermont. When I see the aerial photos of the half finished cloverleaf in South Burlington or the original cupola hotel it's difficult not to time travel a bit. I recently became aware of the UVM landscape change program and their amazing collection of digital images of Vermont. I've spent hours visiting the past and I would recommend it's well worth looking up. You can just go to the UVM landscape change program and easily search and find hundreds of really wonderful photos of Vermont history. And that's the majority of what you're seeing here. One of the first images I found was the bulldozers breaking ground in a field in South Burlington. It produced an instant memory of the intense curiosity I felt watching it happen. It's well known that the interstate brought big changes to Vermont and many more people could visit and stay in this beautiful state. New types of commerce emerged and outside perspectives met up with rural ways. I think I was and is an incredible feat of design and engineering. I tried but failed to find the names of the designers. But even with today's traffic it's still a wonderful road to drive on. It's a pleasure. When we imagine transportation for the next 50 years I hope it will be as beautiful as 89. Even without the changes of the interstate 1960 to 1970 was a dramatic decade. In 1962 Phil Hoff was elected in Vermont as the first Democratic governor in over 100 years and President Kennedy was assassinated. In 1964 the Civil Rights Act passed and the Beatles played at Chase Stadium. There were riots in Selma in 1965 and in Detroit in 1967. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in March of 1968 and then Robert Kennedy in June. It was a time of great change and turbulence and a growing awareness of the need to engage to be part of making the world a better place. Human impacts on the environment were part of the discussion. Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring had been published in 1962 and continued to gain momentum. In Vermont there was a lot of optimism because of Hoff's election. He was a bold thinker and understood the times. He was re-elected in 1964 and in 1966. In 1965 the average median income in Vermont was $6,900 and the population was about 390,000 people. When I read that it was a very shocking way to remember how much has changed in terms of the economy also. A piece of personal history in 1966 my father ran against Governor Hoff in his campaign for a third term. Of course my father lost. He knew he wouldn't win but he ran anyway to give the people a choice. Sincerely it was hard at the time but it also led to I hope great personal growth. The knowledge that it was possible for a candidate of good qualifications and ideas could run and still lose is an excellent preparation for the realities of politics. Dean Davis ran for governor and was elected in November of 1968 defeating Jack Daley the Lieutenant Governor and a former mayor of Rutland. In the same election George Aiken was re-elected to the U.S. Senate. Davis had been considered the underdog. He had never run for election and wasn't well known although he had served as president in the national life company for many years. On the Vermont public television governors program Governor Davis responds to Chris Graff's question what made the difference in this election? By saying he and his wife went to every town in Vermont twice and some places much more often. He also talked about visiting quote centers of influence which he further describes as important people that could persuade other people. Governor Davis was well known for being practical. The interstate had brought rapid second home development in southern Vermont and because there wasn't any regulation the houses were built on steep slopes with inadequate septic. Bill Schmidt of the Wyndham County Regional Planning Commission invited the governor to come and see what was happening and he did. The scene is described was awful with sewage running down the hill. Bill continued to be an activist and an agitator on behalf of finding a solution and protecting the environment. In June of 1969 Governor Davis issued an executive order creating a commission of environmental control to review the situation and deliver a report back to the legislature in January of 1970. Art give their representative from waybridge was appointed chair of the commission which is of course why it's referred to as the give commission. Art give was a retired investment banker who moved to Vermont in 1951 to farm. He was first elected to the house in 1962 and served on ways and means and when the chair of house natural resources became vacant he asked to be appointed and was. In 1971 give was elected as a senator from Madison County and served until 1987. Even after Hoff's election the legislature maintained a Republican majority. In 1969 the speaker of the house was Richard Mallory who later became congressman. In 1978 John Burgess became speaker. He later became lieutenant governor. The senate pro tem was George Cook in 1969 however he was appointed by President Nixon to the US attorney position and Ed Janeway became pro tem. The members of the commission constituted a diverse range of expertise. I think we have a list yes. Unfortunately there were no women on the commission so I'm particularly glad that Amy is chair of this commission. The task must have seemed overwhelming. We wanted strong controls Mr. Gibbs said in an interview the question was how to do it and I would say we're still trying to figure that out. There was also an advisory committee to the commission which was a very broad again another very broad group of people with lots of expertise who participated very closely with the commission and there were three women on this advisory committee. The two women are listed as essentially Mrs. Mrs. Harvey Smith which to me was another throwback to 1969 saying really? Like what are their names? I mean that's not their name and one woman because she was not married was listed as Miss. So I mean I just it just was another part of sort of saying what was the culture of that time? The commission began working during the summer and fall of 1969 and the chair established special committees to report on the issues of water quality high altitudes pesticides open space and health. As the facts on the special issues are evolved the commission wrestled with the structure of the necessary controls. Walter Blusher who was a member of the commission with real planning experience he drafted an outline which despite many revisions remained essentially the same in the final version. In January of 1970 the governor relieved the commission of drafting the report and transferred that responsibility to the attorney general Jim Jeffords. Jeffords eventually enlisted his assistant John Hansen to direct the drafting of the report. He was assisted by multiple legislators and citizens including Jonathan Brownell. The commission report became the basis for age 417 and its process through the legislature and counted many stops and starts. Apparently there was strong support in the House especially from many of the legislators who had worked on the passage of the anti billboard law in 1966. The House Natural Resources Committee and its chair Mr. Royal Cutts of Townsend provided strong studies support. There were also many people who were opposed the state taking such actions including Representative Salmon who later became governor in 1975. Also opposed was Senator Arthur Jones from Essex Orleans who was chair of the Senate Natural Resources Committee. Jones had worked on the anti billboard law but thought that state control of development was a government intrusion. After the usual back and forth 417 passed both chambers and was signed by Governor Davis on April 9th 1970. Act 250 is an elegant in the same spring of 1970 the first Earth Day and the first Greenup Day were celebrated. Governor Davis was re-elected in November 1970 again after being considered as an underdog because he had instituted the sales tax and passed Act 250. The politics that then aren't that different from now each of the legislators commission members advisors and citizens who participated in creating Act 250 are heroes. Like all significant legislation the best policy happens when it's possible to collaborate. The legislators of 1969 and 1970 are the same type of individuals who serve today. They care deeply about Vermont and want to find agreements that create solutions. Our world is full of people who seek fame and celebrity and when I speak of heroes I'm referring to the kind of people who don't think of themselves that way. It's their passion for an issue that makes them heroes. The entire creation of Act 250 was heroic. It remains a vivid example of people thoughtfully doing what they believe was right. Act 250 is an elegant law and it deserves to be implemented with the same grace as it was written. Its goals remain relevant although it does need to adapt to new knowledge and science. As you consider the questions posed by Act 47 remember this is an opportunity to create the next phase of a legacy for Vermont. Please try not to be distracted by the current flaws in the program and have the vision to imagine an ideal situation. We must think first about what we hope will be the Vermont in the future we want and then we can decide by determining what we want we can design the right regulation to deliver those outcomes. In your discussions please also try to keep separate the law from the administration. I know there are many examples of delays and confusion and from the beginning of my time as chair I have been committed to developing a high functioning permit process. The NRV continues to make improvements to our administrative protocols and although these changes may not yet be apparent to applicants progress is happening in December we are on schedule to launch a completely online application. It's my hope that soon applicants will have the predictability and consistency that they deserve from the permit process. It's also my hope and intention that planning and regulation must start working together to find the alignment that Vermont needs. As planners you have the unique role in these discussions because it remains critical that the work of municipalities and regional planning organizations be respected and recognized as an essential part of statewide thinking. I'd like to end with a quote from my father from 1983 when he was governor. The statement is from a publication titled Managing Rural Growth the Vermont Development Review Process. It was produced by the Environmental Board in the state of Vermont. Our challenge is to preserve those things about Vermont for which we love her while building economic opportunity so that it is not necessary to be already wealthy to enjoy this unusual place. To meet that challenge we must begin with a determination to protect our environment. If we fail there there will be little point to success in economic scene because we would have lost that which we wish to be able to afford. If the prize is gone the struggle loses meaning. The Vermont environment is that prize. Thank you. Good morning. David in his opening remarks talked about what really is the evergreen issue for discussing Act 250 which is what is the role of planning in regulatory review and I'm going to talk a little bit about how that issue played itself out in a series of highly contested regulatory battles in 1980s. Involving the Killington ski area and I'm also going to talk a little bit about what they encode the culture of those times. In the early 80s Killington was expanding aggressively the ski infrastructure and residential real estate development and each condominium phase and each expansion of a ski level was being treated by Killington as the applicant as a free standing project unrelated to anything else they were doing. In the real estate development there were often different entities developing it but they were all part of the same resort. They were all sharing common infrastructure and highways and sewage and the cumulative impacts of these developments were just not being looked at at all. The issue really was I think framed well by Monty Fisher who was the the executive officer director of the Monty Natural Resources at that time and on the page one storing the New York Times in November of 1985 he said quote the law doesn't deal with the cumulative impact of a place like Killington. Killington is on a scale we've never seen before and it's stretching the human and natural resources to their limits. So VNRC decided to jump into that fight. They hired Beth Humstone as their expert planner and they started petitioning for party status in virtually every Killington related project and Killington at that time was represented by the same law firm that defended tort suits against the resort and that firm brought up very highly litigious style to act to 50% before a local commission that really tried the patience and the capacity of the volunteers who served in that commission. My colleague Harvey Carter and I represented VNRC in these actions as well as in some cases the Connecticut River Watershed Council was involved the town of Shrewsbury other attorneys involved were Mark the Stefano, Jim Dumont, Mark Sinclair, and Bill Roper. This battle over controlling the growth of Killington was largely but not entirely played out in Act 250 and the key precedent at the time these these litigation started was a board decision in 1984 called In Ray Bruce Levinsky and that had been an application for construction of the second phase of a private sewer line that was intended to serve a subdivision. But the application only described the pipe and what the excavation was going to be like. It didn't talk at all about the potential impacts that would be made possible by creating that infrastructure. And the central from our regional planning commission and two state agencies took the position that that application was incomplete without any assessment of the impacts of the development that would be made possible by the construction of the sewage capacity and the environmental board agreed and held that the sewer line and the proposed subdivision were a single project and the application was described details of the entire project not just the mere construction of the sewer line. And so at Killington that was the precedent that the challenges to the resort wanted to apply to a ski area that was developing in many different ways. And there was sustained and further opposition from the resort and this produced highly contested hearings for the district commission and spilled over in the statewide politics with the ski area attacking the state of Vermont its agencies and its then new governor Madeleine Kuhn. And finally the focus of a number of there were a number of cases but the one that really became the one that got most public attention and the focus of the most I think highly debated hearings involved a proposal by Killington to construct a pond for snow making in an underdeveloped portion of the town of Mendon called Parker's Gory and Killington took the position that this was an application to build a pond but let's get going and then we'll talk all about considering the scope of the development that would be made possible by this new snow making infrastructure. And there was seemingly an endless procedural wrangling about whether this was a simple pond in the woods or the first step in a big development but it soon became clear that there was actually an overriding issue related to this project which was wildlife habitat the reliance of black bears on wetland that was at the site of the proposed pond site and as with as the lawyers in the room know and mostly the planners know in these cases you end up with expert witnesses and Killington hired a bear expert from Montana and the state of Vermont was actively involved Department of Fish and Wildlife had some of its good biologists there and also hired outside experts from Maine and Tennessee and these experts on one side and the other could not agree on anything the state and the outside experts said this was an exception which bear habitat is very very important construction of the pond would destroy the habitat the bears would be in peril and the guy from Montana said no no no no no not true no bears no no problem and so you can see the frustration that this was before the environmental board of getting this testimony that just didn't mesh at all so on the third day of the hearing as I remember it Killington issued a challenge they said let's go out and look at the area and the rest of us couldn't believe it's not such a good idea that we never thought it would have come from then but the problem the problem was that they had all these environmental board members dressed up for a hearing ready to hear testimony and the issue was would they be willing to go for a hike in the woods and it pretty quickly became clear that they needed to get everybody along and that was going to depend on our gift Diane mentioned who was probably about 80 at that point and so everybody looked at our and I said I've got boots in my car let's go and he went out to his car and got his boots and we went tramping off into the woods and we got to the site and the bear experts were about to start talking and pointing things out to the commission when art said I think I found some evidence and we all looked at him and he was looking down at his boots and sure enough he had stepped in some very persuasive and clear evidence that bears were using that were using that habitat and it went downhill for killing him the rest of the day because there was evidence everywhere of this and luckily Yvonne Daly from the Brooklyn Power was there and she wrote a story about it the next day at the page one of the Brooklyn Power and said pretty soon the whole state knew about it and that really solved the factual issues and once those were solved it was pretty clear I thought where the case was going to go but it took two years in a Supreme Court decision to get it there and ultimately Parker's tour is now a conservative area the promise never built Killington was able to get the snow making infrastructure he wanted by going to Woodard Reservoir Plymouth working with the dam owner there who I ended up representing and we worked out with the help of the state an arrangement where they have a source of work that doesn't involve constructing in Parker's court a number of these cases ended up at the e-board and it did apply the Levinsky principle the board held in one case that I'm going to read this where there exists a growth facility clear evidence of a plan for growth beyond what was presented in the application and a direct relationship between growth and the proposed construction an application may be deemed incomplete until additional information about the overall master development plan is submitted for commission review and the commission can then convene the hearing in the merits to decide the scope of the project and the commission may obtain more information in order to adequately evaluate the project so you can talk later today about whether master planning is being effectively applied and there's still arguments about what the scope of the project is and particularly what information is relevant and I was at Killington with some people here in this room three years ago and we had a long, long proceeding for a week about what the scope of the traffic study should be in connection with the new phase so these issues always get played out in the facts of the case but Killington is doing a much better job of looking at the big picture and it certainly helps the developers to get decisions on compliance with some of the criteria in advance so they know that more than one phase will meet the standards Act 250 was not the only arena where these issues played out the Water Resources Board now gone decided the major case involving septic disposal and the impact of water in these high altitude developments it was a case called involved the sunrise development which was also at Killington they built a large treatment plant that got permit from the agency and we were my partner Harvey Carter I put an appeal to the Water Resources Board and the question was whether water that came through a spray field and then discharged into the surface were even if it was chemically and biologically clean require an MPDS discharge permit and could it get one and there's a case that was decided by an evidentiary objection we objected to expert talking about the quality of the work as we said it wasn't relevant it was waste and in need of the permit they sustained the objection and all of a sudden a fully developed treatment plant was it going to be usable and that that got the attention of a lot of people from the front page of the New York Times I went back and found the article it was interesting it says the ruling effectively halts expansion at most of her month's other ski areas and brought to a climax along the street over whether the resort's growth of recent years benefits the state's economy or threatens its main attraction the Green Mountains and the result of that was the legislature came dealt with it effectively and swiftly by enacting rules for indirect discharge permits and bringing clarity to what to how in ground large septic systems should be developed but particularly high mountain areas and they got eventually got to use their septic system but the development community and people concerned about growth had clear rules but they only came out in this case as in so many others because of litigation that forced issues to be heard the New York Times is not the only the only publication covering all this ski magazine got involved and they declared that Vermont was quote in a state of civil war between Governor Cunin and the resort owners and I'm going to read a short quote from the ski article I'm talking about and please feel free to hiss after I read it said quote Governor Cunin a Democrat immigrant female Jewish was elected to 1984 the state historically overwhelmingly fond of none of the above if you can believe that but you get the flavor it was thank you for hissing it was it was there were some really ugly dimensions to this and the district commission district commission number one at the heroies hearings was really in a tough position they were in a highly charged political atmosphere that was getting statewide and broader attention and they were just trying to figure out what after 50 men had applied so finally I just for at least for some of the lawyers I just want to go over talk about some of the other sort of collateral ways that these types of disputes played out in the press and the public arena Killington sued VNRC to subpoena its membership lists and governance information in an attempt to to deny party status results subpoena clashed didn't go forward Killington filed a petition in superior court for an extraordinary rip to seek the force the district commission to proceed on an application in a narrow form filed by Killington rather than asking broader questions result rip denied a side show in this whole thing was Killington's proposal to make snow from treated effluent this did not play well in the realm in the realm of public relations the Times Artists published the cartoons showing two Killington skiers carrying toilet plungers and the caption read uh oh looks like those snow making machines are clogged again killings did not think this was funny they sued the Times Argus for defamation I don't recall the outcome I wasn't involved in that but I don't think they collected and then someone created a bumper sticker they read quote Killington where the affluent meet the effluent and um surely if that was available a carpenter and one of the condos at Killington slapped it on his truck showed up for work and his boss saw the sticker and fired him like that so you're out of here his name was Cowboy Snodgrass he went to the ACLU of Vermont and he saw you Vermont called a cooperating attorney who was my partner Steve Saltinstall some of you may remember Steve and Steve brought an action and that ended up in the New York Times also and Steve ever quotable said quote it seems to me as if an employee cannot speak his mind of political issues then they become like serfs in the middle ages unquote the result of that was Cowboy collected so that's a quick glance back at a time when act 250 took center stage in a highly politicized public debate about growth and the issues that were debated then seem somewhat familiar with different contexts today thank you so uh so we now have time for a 10-minute break and then we'll reconvene knowing that this group is such a misbehavours maybe I'll say you've got a five-minute break and then five minutes to transition back to your seats so run and find the toilets and then come back thank you everyone well we're going to move into the next phase of this conversation I'm delighted to be able to introduce Ann Galloway who will lead and moderate this discussion and thanks to her both both for the support of BT Digger for this event but also for her amazing efforts you know she has poured her life and heart into making BT Digger a success at a time when as we all know journalism and media is under under major strains from so many different ways and Ann's steadfast commitment to having good strong valuable journalism with integrity in the state has been an amazing contribution to our democracy here in Vermont I also deeply appreciate her willingness to moderate this coming panel and to take time away from her busy schedule to be with us so with that Ann Galloway thank you well thank you all so much this panel has some amazing folks who know an awful lot about Act 250 and how it affects their businesses and how they operate in the world our format today opens with each panelist offering 90 second remarks following the 90 seconds yeah we're going to keep to that right Teresa following the opening remarks each panelist will take the lead on one question from me ending with a lightning round where each panelist will quickly list their top issues regarding Act 250 following the discussion there will be 15 minutes and we really do mean we'll get to those 15 minutes of Q and A okay so here we go I'm going to introduce the panelists we're going to start with Cathy Byer on the end who is the Vice President of Development for Housing Vermont she's worked in the real estate and community development industry for over 25 years and she holds a masters in public administration from the Hartford Kennedy School Bob Duncan who is closer to me here on the on the right remembers Dean Davis campaigning for Governor 1968 as a proponent of statewide land use regulation a graduate of Pennsylvania State University and a founding principal of Duncan Wisniewski architecture in Burlington established in 1985 his first exposure to the Act 250 process was in 1984 his firm has experienced the entire gamut of the process including lengthy appeals Mark Delaney in the center is the chief mountain and corporate matters officer at Smuggler's Notch Resort he's been employed at Smuggler's since 1978 and is responsible for planning permitting environmental compliance construction management and mountain operations among other duties he has led the resorts Act 250 works since 1987 he served on the Town of Cambridge Planning Commission the Conservation Commission and was a long time member of the Lemoyo County Planning Commission Board of Directors Jeannie Morrissey to Cathy's right is the president of J.A. Morrissey incorporated a general contracting and construction management company headquartered in Williston, Vermont Ms. Morrissey has managed a variety of project types sizes and contracts over 37 years as both a contractor and in her early career as a public works engineer Jeannie is a graduate of the University of Vermont and a licensed civil engineer in Vermont and California all right so we are going to start with Jeannie Jeannie, would you trade more stringent protections for the public sorry oh sorry darn now you guys get to talk again okay 90 seconds Cathy opening remarks sorry about that guys thanks Ann so as you heard I'm a real estate developer I'm a non-profit real estate developer and I believe that the question each community in Vermont needs to ask simultaneously is where should we conserve our land and our natural areas and where should Vermonters live and work too often the first question is answered let's face it it's the easy one we all feel warm and fuzzy when we drive past and see the sign this land is conserved forever I think at its core Act 250 does try to answer both questions but on a project by project basis and criteria by criteria it's the best that we have but it does not allow for a broader vision of a project of a project in the context of the community so I think a lot of what today is about and you've already heard some of that is is a reflection on on the planning and regulatory tools that are in place now in place now as compared to 1970 and in that context a very robust community plan and a much changed state permitting process out of the agency and natural resources what is the appropriate role for Act 50 today to help us answer both questions Thank you very much Mark is next Hi I've been working with the Act 250 and since 1987 I was mentored by Ed Stannock who guided me very well over the years aren't you Ed but I have to say maybe it's a function of my advancing age but I missed the simple days when an application was only a couple pages long you could write your own criteria narrative you didn't have the 25 page schedule B one size fits all form to deal with and the fees were a lot less I think Act 250 should be the first stop on a project's path through the regulatory process not the last I think the applicant should be able to present conceptual plans of enough evidence to support positive findings on select or all criteria I think the party should be gotten out of the record I think the big picture issues should get settled and then issue a permit conditional upon the receipt of the ANR technical permits this way the applicant can make changes if needed before they are fully vested in the the cost of engineering required for the technical permits and can have some surety that the project will move forward all the ANR technical permits these days include some opportunity for public comment or interaction and give the parties an opportunity to participate Act 250 has had many positive benefits projects I've been involved with over the years and a lot of that occurred and life was simpler thank you very much Jean so essentially my experience with Act 250 is working for a lot of owners that have experienced a lot of impacts that is in the healthcare sector the manufacturing sector the business service sector the affordable housing sector and as a Vermonter not as a contractor but as a Vermonter I have to say that the complexities of any law and I think it's the price of democracy is that laws are complicated is that the more time that passes between when a law is enacted and the current time you're in the greater the distance from the original intention of that law and my hope of what comes out of today is that the collaboration of the folks in this room some of the follow-up and the work with the legislature and with the board that results in one or two or three or four small but bold but courageous but simple outcomes that assist that something happens something small good perhaps a shift in the paradigm and I also want to give a shout out not just to the lawmakers but to the staff I would like to see every public employee who has to serve in the issuance of permits and in the reviews who's being asked to go faster to be supported because as a former public employee I said you know these are the folks on the front lines that actually this group might want to be talking to about how do we make things better how do we make things more efficient are the people on the front lines and the last thing I just wanted to point out is that on the cover of this pamphlet I did notice it says act 250 protecting Vermont's environment promoting economic prosperity I do think if that linkage is to be real then we should really be talking about how to link it up because I would like to see an economy that as Diane mentioned we can all that everybody can enjoy can enjoy this state and I wonder what it would read like promoting Vermont's environment promoting economic prosperity thank you Jeannie thank you Anne when I was asked to serve on this panel and to think about what act 250 meant and its importance to the landscape and the development of this beautiful state I was immediately reminded of the opening paragraph of Charles Stakins The Tale of Two Cities which probably most of you or maybe familiar with I was surprised to learn that it's the second most popular book in the world and I'll just read you that first paragraph because I think for me to epitomize is a lot about what act 250 has become and what it is it was the best of times it was the worst of times it was the age of wisdom it was the age of foolishness it was the epoch of belief it was the epoch of incredulity it was the season of light it was the season of darkness it was the spring of hope it was the winter of despair we had everything before us we had nothing before us we were all going direct to heaven we were all going direct the other way and so in my mind act 250 represents a paradox which is what that paragraph of course is all about and it's necessary to frame the parameters by which we plan language development in Vermont it is unnecessarily complex and in some ways redundant and overlapping of local and regional planning part of what Kathy was alluding to so in Dickensian terms what I would say is the good thing about act 250 is it slows down development and the bad thing about act 250 is it slows down development and so I think the starting point of discussion for the future of act 250 is how do we reconcile the good and the bad into a unified whole that does more than slowly process of development but rather improves the process of development and support the vision we have for our future and I brought a show and tell but let me just sort of exemplify that so this is the total application for the Plainfield Health Center in 1977 and that sounds like it is in 2007 we built an addition to the Plainfield Health Center and this is the application and I know a lot of things changed over time there wasn't any stormwater regulation in this application certainly wasn't this application but for me that's a good visual it shows that things have changed to a point that's harder it's much much harder to go through the process and prepare for the process thank you thank you very much all right now we'll get to the questions Jamie would you trade more stretch and protections for the public values captured in the act 250 criteria in return for more certainty for a more efficient process so the entire question of reduction of protecting the environment I think is a little bit misplaced I think that you know again listening to some of the horror stories in this box is the good that has come thank God for act 250 and many of the blessings to our environment and what would we have done without it doesn't necessarily mean that we we can't begin to revisit what is it what does it mean to to meet the to look to look at a more in a more broad sense that we don't have to sacrifice the environment for a more certain process we don't have to sacrifice the environment for a more efficient process I think I think what we do need to do is look at how do we have a more efficient process how do we have a more certain process and we talk the four of us have talked amongst ourselves about a variety of different ways to begin to look at that but in part I wanted to offer an example of an experience I had last week where I met an owner who has a has a business that is is about to explode in Vermont and it is a sustainable business it's an awesome Vermont based business who wanted to to purchase a piece of property in a downtown didn't want so the employees could walk to work and 11th hour and I I wasn't involved in initial details I'm just getting involved in this now but the time but it was subject to act 250 because of a previous subdivision subdivision of the property and looked at the time frame and now an alternative site is being pursued because it won't be subject to act 250 and so I was looking at this and I was saying to myself well is that a less stringent protection of the environment or is that an aspect of an that is not captured in the process because we can calculate the impacts we can regulate certain things we can promote certain things we can measure energy consumption there's a whole lot of things we can do but there are there are also other things and that can be calculated that are good for the environment and so for me I would like to see that the mindset that no we don't need to sacrifice anything for a more efficient process or more certain process but we may have to change things and I know that the board is working on that now whether it is the process, the timing, the flow chart but for a private sector owner to make a decision about buying a piece of property with the uncertainty for them to make an investment it is extremely difficult and so anything that can be done to look at creating exemptions where you may have an act 250 be an act 250 circumstance where it would apply but maybe we look at the parameters and say we are getting so many of the things that we wanted this is an anomalous situation maybe there's a quick turnaround hearing board maybe there's a way to shift things and I'm not expecting this overnight but I'm thinking anything to accelerate things without giving something up should be enacted first okay next question is for Kathy what changes to act 250 would make it easier to invest in town centers and villages? so as a residential developer and as a developer who spends a lot of time in downtowns I can tell you that the exemption for priority housing in designated downtowns and neighborhood development areas is working and my company benefits from it often and I know for some people they think an exemption from act 250 why does this keep happening it's not a good thing but actually I believe these exemptions are exactly tied to what we want is where we have extensive community planning around the designated downtown around neighborhood development areas and because of that we have this exemption from act 250 I actually think it could be expanded beyond priority housing projects because of the amount of planning that goes around those designated areas that for me is the biggest incentive for developing in downtowns and I will tell you developing in a downtown is one of the most expensive and risky things that we do in a downtown it's not unusual to find out there's a misunderstanding around where the property lines are about a parcel that has been in use for over 100 years there's challenges around construction as Jeannie can attest to when you're trying to develop on this tight site there's no room for staging there's truck traffic you have to close down the public sidewalk it's a really challenging thing to do to develop in a downtown and sometimes there's aging municipal infrastructure where the town actually wasn't quite sure where that storm water line was or where that water and sewer line was that complicating so it's a challenge and there are a long list of incentives I actually went online and there's a spreadsheet with a list of incentives so I think it's an area that both the state has done a good job on encouraging this and I would just say keep at it because it is challenging but it is where our Vermonters should be living and working Mark would you be willing to consider increasing Act 250 jurisdiction in areas where there's a strong public interest in conserving the land and return for reduced jurisdiction and billage centers and downtowns? Well I conserved in the least poor reduction of Act 250 jurisdiction especially in billage centers and downtowns as part of a comprehensive package of incentives that are offered to encourage development and renovation in those areas and prevent sprawl providing the community has appropriate planning and regulatory processes in place I think we should evaluate which criteria are better handled at the municipal level and delegate that review to them however coming from a ski area my initial reaction is to I think is to increasing jurisdiction is negative I tell most of my staff as I mentioned today and earlier that if we want to sneeze at a ski resort we need an Act 250 permit for that however I think Act 250 is proving itself to be a thorough and comprehensive process good project planning and development should be rewarded not impeded and we can't expect every project to belong in an existing downtown or village center that being said I think the jurisdictional trigger should be examined a lot of the inappropriate development that takes place out there I think is happening beneath the 1 in 10 acre thresholds and in particular their cumulative effects of those projects not being covered by Act 250 is not being taken into account I recently had an opportunity to read some comments put together by David Mears who advanced the concept of critical areas and I think that's on the right track I think we also need to be mindful of the economic impacts the Act 250 process as Bob Lutz too has been becoming more and more expensive and time consuming it's difficult for individual landowners and entrepreneurs to navigate on their own and I believe that ultimately works against Vermonters that favors corporate entities with deep enough pockets to hire their required consultants and attorneys I believe that a strong economy which is possible with some growth in development is a cornerstone of environmental protection I think also the matter of redundancy in our state and local land use regulatory processes has to be addressed it's inordinately time consuming not just for applicants but for the interested parties for the regulators it's costly and it's allowing multiple points at the same level and by the way I do think the ski resort should be eligible to receive growth center or below center designation Bob has Act 250 had a positive impact on your projects have there been some negative impacts and worst examples besides the Plainfield outside? yeah and that actually wasn't a negative impact except for time and in effort to boost the application in my practice as an architect probably the minority of our projects are subject to Act 250 so my experience in terms of impact on them is limited every project we approach we do the best we can balance budgets balance clients needs zoning regulations activity regulations and so on so when we get to the process we've never actually had an application changed under Act 250 or any project changed for either the better or the worse as far as the application process is concerned because I think we strive to do everything that all of the rules and regulations require of us but having said that I'm familiar with some some Act 250 applications that I think have been impacted positively and when it comes to mine for me and many of you may remember especially if you're from Northwestern Vermont is a period in law application in Williston in late 80s and I'm grateful that didn't happen I think that's largely a result of Act 250 at the same time I'm not really sure the development succeeded it is dramatically better but that's a different conversation but the negative impacts of Act 250 I think have to do with the application process itself as I showed in my show until earlier an application process 25 or 30 years ago was equivalent of a 15 or 20 page term paper that probably everyone in this room has had to do multiple times and now can easily be 10 or 15 or 20 times that and it's not unusual have 200, 300, 400 page applications Act 250 so it has become a complicated process and that has caused that has time in terms of the application process itself having to serve us to multiple municipalities and building boards and DRBs and planning groups and so on all as a burden that I think and I hope we can come up with a way to simplify in addition the law itself is relatively complex I think maybe there's some ways to simplify that because there is a lot of overlap with local zoning applications and there are municipalities in the state that have very little in the way of zoning there are municipalities in the state that have pretty good zoning ordinances that actually cover almost all of Act 250 covers Burlington is an example of that with its with its criteria for a zoning application much of the Act 250 application if you had to do one in Burlington most times now you don't have to there's a lot of redundancy there and therefore it seems like it's just a waste of time but the biggest negative impact for Act 250 and I think we need to figure out a way to address this I don't want to diminish anybody's opportunity to appeal but the appeal process can be just downright homeroous it's expensive it takes a lot of legal time it takes a lot of time we've had one project that went years because the environmental court does not have any time limits or any constraints the the judge rules when the judge rules and so one project that we had that was actually through housing demand and was thought it was years and years in the appeals process and I don't know that in Burlington about 15 years ago it didn't go that long in the appeals process but the negative impact it ultimately had was on the quality of the buildings that got built so we had to exchange essentially legal fees for building materials so whereas we would have had more durable building materials the length of time that it took the cost of legal fees basically come out of the project budget so if a project has a budget to pick a number of five million dollars and if the appeals process costs 200,000 dollars to get through legal fees in time and inflationary costs then that 200,000 dollars comes from that five million so the project even though it will still comply with Act 250 there are things that happen that make the the building may be unesturable maybe not as long lasting and I think that's a really serious implication to think about for our environment itself well you guys are great I mean we're now at 1026 we're ahead of schedule so I think we ran plenty of time for Q&A and I think we've got an eager audience here so let's go on to the lightning round we've got 60 seconds or less so once your topic is pertaining to Act 250 we're going to start with Mark okay I think the criteria need to be looked at because I think technical permits from A&R have superseded some of the criteria we could eliminate some of them perhaps or change them and streamline that I'd like to see a little more consistency between districts both administratively and in terms of commission behavior I think we need to strengthen commission training and I think we need to support better staffing levels I think we could look at ways of developing better ways to integrate A&R, B-Trains, Department of Ag historic preservation into the Act 250 process I think we need to be able to speed up review times set some timeframes and force them to create some better predictability um did I use up 60 seconds yet? I don't know, that's just about it how about on appeals I think we should be placing the burden of proof on the appellant whether that be the applicant or the opponent lastly I think we've got to look at criteria 10 local and regional plans I think those documents tend to be too vague and aspirational at times I think they need to be implementable perhaps rolled into municipal regulations in order to be meaningful within the Act 250 context thank you Jane? essentially I would I think that the most important thing is to look for the most immediate change for simplicity what what can come first so that this doesn't become an ongoing conversation but is there a way to have quicker turnarounds on administrative work whether that be a staffing increase how how much can we do quickly I also I'm not sure I know the how but I I do believe that you know inside of some of Bob and what Mark have said that and some of what Kathy said about the incentives that that you we do have a lot of very good players in Vermont we have a lot of very good owners a lot of very good architects people who are willing and ready and desirous of meeting the spirit of the law on their own and and just to be revisiting Act 250 from the sense of how protectionist it is and how fearful the bad guy it is and look at is there actually such a way as looking at not just protecting against the bad guy but also looking how to reward the good guy whether that is increased exemptions or an accelerated process for somebody who has a complete application or shifting around the burden of liability of proving but mostly mostly I think that we need to begin to view ourselves as a whole because at the end of the day the environment is very important the economy is incredibly important for for every dollar spent here it has to be seen as a holistic dollar thank you very much Bob so for me I think the main point is simplicity and I don't know exactly how we get to that but I think there are ways to do that one of the examples that that is in Act 250 criterion nine death which is energy conservation so if it's an Act 250 application has to actually be 10% better than energy codes that have been implemented in Vermont and I really struggle with that because I think the energy codes that we have are at least adequate we always try to do much better than the energy code in any project that we do and I don't think Act 250 should be any different than any other projects in Vermont we think as Vermonters that we should have a code that is stricter than what's been adopted for Act 250 and we should uphold all projects of that standard so I don't think we need to make something a bigger threshold for Act 250 which leads me to my point my next point which is I don't think Act 250 should be seen as a burden right now I think of many and as it's seen as a burden it's seen as something I have to get through it's a long process and so on Act 250 should be something that we hold dear and because it is important to our land use planning and to what the state that we want to be and I think we need to come up with a way to perceive Act 250 as part of a process that really benefits us all instead of as a hassle for some thank you very busy okay Kathy so I'm going to suggest something that's kind of takes on the holy grail from the original language of the 1970 law that a jurisdictional threshold for housing is 10 units or more and I would suggest that in 2018 is that the appropriate threshold for housing particularly if we look at communities with extensive planning and in particular in comparison to the commercial threshold which seems to be there doesn't there doesn't seem to be equity there the impact of 10 units of housing versus what it would how you trigger Act 250 on the commercial side so I actually think that is a place that we could have a discussion um and this the second area is what I mentioned is is just how do we continue to emphasize this link between planning and um the Act 250 process and I know we'd all like to go back to or lament the fact that the state land use development plan was not passed and that um if only that it happens things would be so much better I'm not sure about that but let's celebrate what we have today and see if we can continue to uh strengthen those links between our planning on the community level and the Act 250 from the process thank you very much let's open it up for questions and that's Smith from Ottersford Clean Environment a number of you have talked about community level planning and I want to share with you an observation from my town of Dandy and what's happened in the last decade and I come to appreciate more of a regional and stable review process as a result of it the town has a village center designation it is a historic village where Pearl Bump decided to settle in her retirement years and after she died someone bought all the houses that she had bought and fixed them all up looked like a movie set there used to be and I call it what used to be now two operating inks three antique stores a general store and a couple other stores at the same time over the last decade as these businesses were in operation we had a grandfathered gravel pit that then started blasting and then added crushing and turned into quarry and an asphalt plant and so homes have been damaged there's asphalt fumes in the middle of the night and I've heard stories of people having to leave the antique store and because of the blasting it's now under active 50 and if you go to google earth and look you can see the huge impact on the land right next to our village center now we have no operating inks no operating businesses the general store closed it's a very good case study what happened now what can happen even when there's active 50 involved on the municipal level when we were doing our town plan in 2015 the applicant for the quarry was seeking an amendment and he came every meeting and said to the neighbors I was reprimanded in a letter from the chair of the planning commission for using the word encroach I said that the quarry was encroaching from the village and that was a bad thing to do so what I've seen is that when you get down to the municipal level you can have people who are friends and they're going to support their friends and yes this quarry is providing some jobs nobody really knows how many but how do we get at this some people call it the good old boy network that it's still very prevalent in so many towns and not necessarily achieving the goals that we are talking about here well I think one thing I would say is that I think that's where active 50 is an important role and that it's a regional approach as opposed to a local approach I did a lot of outreach since my permitting in active 50 experiences pretty narrowly focused over the years and I'm smaller specifically I reached out to a lot of people preparing for today and a lot of what I heard was the redundancy issue which I alluded to previously but I also heard a lot of people saying that they thought that the level of expertise and the level of bias at the local or municipal level tended to be greater I'm sure that can vary widely from town to town but perhaps that's where active 50 can play a stronger role and we can perhaps roll back some of the local and municipal regulatory processes so in your case was the the expansion of the gravel pit which is essentially I think extraction of earth resources was that not were you not an active 50 level hearing for that where you were experiencing that active 50 was complicated and to me it's it's not about who's administering active 50 it's the overall structure this is a good case study of how it hasn't worked but this this is something that did ultimately come under active 50 however that original operation is grandfathered it has no limit on its tournament they can blast and extract forever right next to our village center but an aquari owner is now I think the owner of one of the historic inns his mother owns the store that just shut so it's an increasing sort of creep of the lack of the the vision of village centers and healthy economy so yes it has been through active 50 with permanent amendments but it has only enabled the expansion of the operation with some conditions did the original operation precede active 50 the original operation was a grandfather gravel pit so that's the governing it's the road so this is another issue that I think we all need to look at is what things have been carved out the slate quarries are not under active 50 extraction obviously has a big impact on communities and we have a lot of it in relevant county and I think our district commission is very good at dealing with these impacts but this is a very odd situation and one that I'm just watching you know also on route seven this is another I think larger issue for the state is that our rural communities are dying we still have all kinds of businesses along route seven right they mean they have the amount of table virtually all of them gone now so the sorts of things that people tourists would come to Vermont for to see this is Vermont the gift shops that all these things that they don't exist anymore in these rural areas and it's happening all over the state it's probably an example of we've been talking about the areas where active 50 might be able to do less and there's obviously places where it can still do more is that that part of the conversation is both ends of the spectrum and every specific story brought into the conversation I think helps illuminate what should be thought of we have a question from Amy in the center here thanks a lot I'm so grateful for your input I listen to your top issues and a lot of more focused on how we can ease restrictions on development and I think the real question for me is what are the environmental resources of statewide significance that you think could use more protection I think there's been some conversation around sub-jurisdictional impacts that's one of the big things we're struggling with it's how to address those so I would really appreciate hearing from you all what are those environmental resources of statewide significance where you would be willing to see more environmental protections in place so from my perspective what I would like to see is preservation of open space and focus development in our downtowns in our villages the strip development that we see happening in all of the state and it happens in pretty much every community and more and more of this happening at interstate exchanges I think those are unfortunate patterns of development and some of that is subject to act 250 and some of it isn't and when I talk about simplicity in act 250 it's not necessarily to make development easier it's I think it's to make development better but also to make it less costly to improve a process so that it's more predictable I think that I actually had some of an act 250 little talk to me about how 96 or something percent of act 250 applications get approved and that's probably true I think there are a lot of applications that never get made because they may not make it through or a person doesn't perceive the ability to actually have the funds to get to act 250 process so I think that what that means to me is that if most applications get approved and they get approved more or less as they were submitted then I wonder what the process is really doing for us because for me I don't see I don't see design improvements through act 250 in terms of the buildings I don't really think the buildings are necessarily better designed or as they're approved they're better signed or impacted positively so I just wonder what act 250 is really ultimately doing for us if 98 percent of the projects get approved and many of them without much of any substantial changes so does that just mean that it costs money and it takes time and if you have money in time you can get a project approved that's a question I have so I don't really I wonder what positive impact in many cases act 250 has on the application of them to slow it down and I think that one of the things about act 250 that it does do and I alluded to that earlier is that the good thing is that it slows down development and the bad thing is that it slows down development and I think that helps in the economic swings that we experience other states in boom times are doing project after project and things are happening and then all of a sudden there's 50,000 square feet of commercial space is vacant act 250 does have a modulating impact on development in the state that I think prevents a lot of that from happening and I think that's a fortunate part of act 250 is that it does help them modulate development but I don't want to mis- have my comments misconstrued to saying that I want to see this change so that development can happen more development can happen or it cannot happen faster I just would like it to be more predictable and more efficient and cost less for clients and ultimately for all reminders Amy, your questions around where how act 250 can help preserve state areas of statewide significance natural areas of statewide significance it's interesting I'm not sure that's a role act 250 can take on all by itself you know I think I'm sure everyone of us in this room can think of that natural area in your community or the place that you go to that's important and the protection of those resources I think can't just be a regulatory protection it's a conversation we have to have in a broader level which I think Vermont maybe I'm naive but I think Vermont does a pretty good job of it through either our land conservation efforts through our in part through some of the jurisdictional thresholds around act 250 and developing above 2500 the evaluation so I guess I would just say I think that's a bigger question than act 250 alone can protect and I just wanted to be clear with the exception of the notation about the stretch code where it does make sense to me also that we have one energy code in Vermont not a more stringent energy code for act 250 other than that I don't see and I hope I didn't speak a need for less stringent requirements just more promotion of the efficiencies and the risk-taking and the decision-making moments in the process again not to have a project be less but to be less expensive and I guess I agree somewhat with Kathy that I see the promotion of the improvement of the natural landscape because in every facet on the municipal level you know in all the local community land trusts and through public-private partnership and through everything that's happening with the farms I think it's a we just have an ongoing conversation about the environment the economy the community the Vermont that we live in I mean I feel like inside of our work everybody is stretched to the max just trying to just trying to make what's happened happen I think the consciousness of everybody involved that's probably the greatest impact of act 250 I would say as a collective people Vermonters are much more aware for all the reasons that that Bob indicated one specific area that I think could be addressed in some of the ANR folks here may be able to comment on this because it may already be but that's in terms of a landscape scale impact I think well-travel corridors are one that we could and should be looking at looks like we've got two questions here Hi, my name is Lottie Raven and there's two things where I see act 250 going towards and I'd like to get your comments on that and I think those two things are going against the idea of simplification and shortening the process without sacrificing quality and one of them is the electronic submission that act 250 is going towards what I've seen that means is that an application can be thousands of pages long and you can submit it electronically it's not a problem and I've seen that happen and I'm wondering how can staff even review those thousands of pages you know, Jeannie we're talking about you know, more staff and if the applications are thousands of pages long there's no way that anybody can meaningfully review that so like what's the point the second thing is if I'm mistaken please let me know but what something I heard is that act 250 is going towards not accepting an application until all the stormwater and ANR permits have been approved that would lengthen the process instead of three five months long processes going on concurrently that would make each one go seriously and that would really lengthen the process if I'm mistaken in that please let me know but that's what I heard so I wanted to know what A is that true would be what you think about that thank you I believe it to be true and I am that's why I say I really think that the ANR technical permits should be made conditional that you should be able to get your act 250 permit conditional upon receiving the ANR technical permits I think the applicant should be able to run concurrent applications or at least get some surety from act 250 before they invest the money required to get those technical permits and I do want to reiterate I believe most if not all of the ANR technical permits nowadays require a public notice process and can invoke a public hearing I hadn't thought about the electronic submission as being a limitless flow of paperwork but it did occur to me when the electronic submission was mentioned that that would sure cut down upon intended on the number of trees that have to be cut down to file an act 250 application so I saw that as probably a positive benefit but I didn't think of it in terms of whether a human being could actually process that application my understanding of the ANR stormwater receipt before the act 250 application was that there was a guarantee of time from the for the issuance of the act 250 permit once you had all those in place and maybe I'm mistaken about that but I thought there was a mention of a 45 day turnaround time for the permit once you had your ANR stormwater permits in place I may be mistaken when I heard that that was not a recent conversation but I think someone here might be able to answer that better than I could in terms of the timing of it I thought that was the trade off but I completely agree with Mark in terms of making the permit process understandable and easier to get to a certain point with conditions for those detailed permits later it's true that a lot of people involved in administration of act 250 understand the cost implications of what it takes to file an act 250 application and especially all the engineering that's required as a little backdrop story the act 250 application till recently had something called a risk check or a comp check analysis for energy conservation and the comp check program I did quite a bit of research on this because I couldn't make it work whether I lied to it whether I told the truth it could never prove that we were 10% better than the code and yet I knew our project was 25% better and so we worked and we worked and we worked I thought well maybe I'm just an old guy I don't really know how to run this program and so I gave it to the millennials in the office and said you do this and they did it it came up with the same bad result so I contacted the people that wrote the program in Oregon and they wouldn't tell me how much the state of Vermont paid they just said the state of Vermont paid a lot of money to customize this program for its own particular use and I had the person who actually wrote the program on the phone with me and I'm going through this and I'm pointing out to her how I'm putting in the data but it's not coming out with the information that you would expect at the end so it's really odd it should work for you but I can see I'm doing it here it doesn't work so a little many conversations later I'm speaking to people that didn't want failure and explaining to them that this doesn't work and they said well other people seem to do it so I called the act 250 and said well send you a copy of one well I get this handwritten copy from this person all these boxes were checked handwritten but there was no program there was nothing spit out of the computer saying they comply and the coordinator said well I got this piece of paper and they checked the boxes and so my box is checked because I got this piece of paper that said they comply so there's an example of somebody complying with an ordinance or a portion of the law that they actually weren't complying with the coordinator accepted it because they signed a box saying we comply and I spent hours and hours and hours trying to get a building to comply who eventually went to officially Vermont they ran it through a fully separate program demonstrated it was 25% better than code the coordinator accepted that as proof that it was 10% better than code so an example of maybe something that could be definitely we've had that same experience about me Brian did you have a question yeah Brian should have my natural resources counsel several panelists have mentioned the frustration with the appeals process and that frustration isn't just limited to applicants I'd say and I'm wondering if each of the panelists could contrast the current appeals process with the process under the environmental board and maybe identify what we consider the strength and weaknesses of each of those I'll start housing remote has been through several appeals of our affordable housing projects including the one Bob referred to and Woodstock which took nine years to resolve including going to the state Supreme Court I I think the I was not I was not a supporter of changing to the environmental court from the environmental board I believe it has brought the appeals process to be much more it's and quite frankly if I was a citizen I think it'd be a lot harder to participate in the environmental court process it gets wired up real fast I I I would be a supporter of returning to something like a three member professional service board who would hear now remember the environment of court here's active 50 appeals state and our permit appeals and local zoning permit appeals it's a wide range and I think it's something that could be handled better by by a more not full nine member citizen board but maybe a three member citizen board and I think it could serve both the applicant and the appellant in in a better fashion my experience has been with the environmental court and that's where my frustration has been so I I think if there's a way to as Kathy alluded to do some other means the environmental court to me is not the best way to do it because it is to be very time-consuming and it doesn't seem to have any any time limit at all it's it's a pleasure of the judge who is reviewing the case I'm going to have to take a pass on that Brian because woohoo I've had very low experience with appeals my question has to do with the alleged redundancy of the active 50 program which was done by A&R and with the town's zoom but by little of the fact to it I worked for the program I think Ethan Allen was the chair of the your own movement and in the 1990s we did an effort to drill down into finding out how much development and subdivision of Vermont is actually subject to active 50 in 1990 our best estimate was only 40% of well-developed subdivision of Vermont goes through active 50 my guess is it's a lot less now my guess would be maybe 25-30% of all development subdivision goes through active 50 so the question is are we really looking at the right forward here to evaluate improvements for the future but here's my question about redundancy people may be aware that active 50 has always had a role in being a fail-step safe mechanism to see if the A&R technical permits were prominently issued and I look back and say and the very very rare instances where the commission rebutted the presumption it was for public benefit I think of Polk Mountain I think of Trap Family Lodge Incorporated with a unit discharged into the word-brain reservoir from a wastewater treatment plant I think of the District 2 commission which rebutted the stormwater permits down in Straton Mountain and there are other examples not a lot but there are some so first of two questions is anyone aware of any analysis that has been done whether or not that was for the public benefit to the extent that now throwing that out and simply relying on A&R permits would be a loss for the public interest and the second question is the quality of local reviews Title 24 Chapter 117 enables municipalities to do planning and adopt and implement zoning and subdivision bylaws to my knowledge that there have been a quality check there's been study after study of how is active 50 doing but I'm not aware of any objective analysis by and the legislature or anybody else as to the quality of the review of all those towns under that enabling legislation so here if we're about to say let's reduce active 50 jurisdiction let's eliminate some of the criteria the serious concern is throwing the BBM with a bulk bathwater because we really don't know what we're going to lose from that fail-safe mechanism looking at A&R permits and secondly what really is the quality review of local review so my question is are you aware of any reviews that have established the quality of local review processes and secondly what do you think about the loss of that rebuttable presumption by active 50 commissions I think the loss of the rebuttable presumptions that is a function of changes of the times they have changed in the days when we saw active 50 commissions challenging A&R permits those A&R permits were a lot less robust I think in terms of the engineering that went ahead to go into them in some cases there was fewer of them also and there was not the public process attached to them that there is nowadays so I think that the A&R technical permits are now probably more sophisticated in terms of the engineering that goes into them both from the applicant side and from the A&R review kind of things and I think there is also an associated public process that is somewhat duplicative so that's why I think that A&R technical permits could be considered to be something that does not need to be rebuttable within the active 50 contracts and then in terms of local review processes I am have not had a lot of experience with that in my own permitting life because I live in a town or operate in a town that does not have something we only have some division regulations but from what I've seen on the in my experience on regional planning commission I think that you are correct I think that there is some concern that local processes may not be as sophisticated and capable as the active 50 process can be but I don't think but I think that is not universal for example and perhaps David you might want to chime in on this in the city of Burlington where you have a robust planning effort professional staff sophisticated regulatory process then the overlap with active 50 may be a true redundancy so I think it's kind of a case by case thank you my favorite we're going to have to end it right there thank you to our panelists and thank you all for listening to the panel when we still we've got we're going to move right right into our next job next panel we're not yet taking a break get into our next panel very lucky to have had a group of folks who have come from other parts of the country to join us and I hand up if you can see me holding my hand up you're supposed to hold your hand up and everyone get the message that word we're starting good well that was great almost at the second grade level so we're very lucky to have a group of outside perspectives folks who have been willing to come from other parts of the country we'll actually have a fair amount of knowledge about Vermont and active 50 but also have deep knowledge of their own jurisdictions and their own states so to lead this discussion is the executive director of the Vermont Natural Resources Council we're very lucky to have Brian Schuch and BNRC as sponsors of this event as long-time participants and supporters in the development of active 50 so with that I'll turn it over to Brian to lead this conversation thank you thanks Dave and I'll just stay seated I'll be very brief my introductory comments because most of them have already made several of them several times we've already established that active 50 was a very visionary groundbreaking law that was appropriately technical it was democratic it was incomplete in some respects with the absence of a land use plan as Diane Smelling mentioned it has been amended several times over the years arguably I would argue that many of those amendments have not been improved with active 50 and we also have established that things have changed significantly the role of state government in regulating environmental resources has expanded tremendously the sophistication of municipal planning and land use regulation has grown in some communities some parts of the state and the whole fields of growth management land use regulation and environmental regulation have evolved quite a bit so this is an appropriate time to take a hard look at active 50 to see where what this role should be moving forward in the future and we are very fortunate to have some folks here from outside of Vermont who can maybe give us some advice and point us in the right direction in a couple of areas so I'm not going to read their bios they're very impressive they're included in your your meeting packet but I'll just give a little bit of a brief introduction to my immediate left is Drew Schmidt Perkins who has a long history with the thousand friends of Maryland and is the Vice Chair of Smart Growth America and is really one of the country's leading experts in smart growth in land use planning and the relationship between land use and transportation and environmental protection we also have to Perle Rob Sanford who was a district coordinator for nine years in Vermont in district three and then went on to become the chair of the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of Southern Maine where he teaches a variety of environmental policy and planning classes and issues and then to his left is Josh Brower who early in his career was hired by Peg Elmer as an intern at the Agency of Natural Resources and then actually helped staff the Costal Commission that came up with Act 200 in the late 1980s Josh went on to move out to Washington State where he got a law degree and practiced land use and environmental law and chair of the Seattle Planning Commission for several years so I'm really glad that they have this both inside and outside perspective that they can bring to bear I'm going to ask them he's the same question to maybe help us get his perspective from what other jurisdictions in the country are doing the first one we've talked a lot about planning today relationship of planning to Act 250 the relationship of local planning regional planning to state planning and how that should fit into our our environmental protection laws and our community development laws so in Vermont as most folks in this room know Act 250 from its inception created a strong role for municipalities and regional planning commissions to exercise a lot of influence over how development should occur in their in the municipality in the region we have criteria 10 we have criteria 6 we have criteria 7 we have the sub criterion several of the sub criteria under 9 all relate to some variation of growth management land use planning and community development and local decision making and regional decision making so I'm going to ask our panelists in their states and in places where they have experience what is that relationship between local, regional and state level land use planning and development regulation whether the tension exists in their jurisdictions between the desire for local control and the responsibility of the state government to manage statewide resources or to address development projects that might have impact beyond municipal jurisdictions and I think I'm going to start with Rob a big mistake sorry, I'm with the professor I'm a 10 year old professor with a low budget and no ambition so I might just answer this just how I want but first of all I apologize if you have any 1B waste disposal issues because I wrote some of the permits for the Vermont Law School and perhaps we should have retained your distinction I'd like to tell you a couple of trends that we have ongoing in Maine first of all we started out great guns we had a smart growth institute in the year 2000 we had Governor Glendening from Maryland come up and we started outgoing and then we sort of lost our way so we dismantled our state planning office if you realize state planning offices do two functions one is they do research and the second function they have is advocacy and many governors don't realize that they can just direct that state planning office to do research for them and some states do a combination of them so we kind of outsource that among different state agencies and drop some of that the trends that we're having it not all towns have planning and zoning the state planning office would offer incentives to develop comprehensive plans now they offer it as advice but before the incentive could be financial so that if you had comprehensive plans there could be money implied similar to where you have in Act 250 if you've got planning and zoning you've got a higher level for that so our regional commissions act more advisory and because I work in education I often find that many of our students who are here to study planning and policy don't know that we have regional planning commissions or what they do so we make them go out and intern in them we have Maine has it's one of the grayest states in the nation to which I am contributing although I'm shifting to white from gray and we also have one of the lowest growth rates although I just became a grandpa on Friday so which is interesting because the outside perspective I started here my first job and grad school was working here and so we kind of set that we are wrestling with other similar things the high cost of housing in coastal areas we have low unemployment but we also have significantly low wages my daughter took a job in Virginia that paid $25,000 more than any comparable job in Maine Northern Maine we have it's more conservative so we have the two mains like you have the two Vermont's 60% of the economy in the state of Maine is in Cumberland County in the greater Portland area so there's that perception that those folks are driving and dominating and yet most of the folks are elsewhere we have high high school graduation but we have low college part of that is we have Ivy League so we figure let the folks from Boston come up and get their fancy education and we'll go out and make money in the forest and agriculture industry but those industries have dried up and the dominant industry in Maine is tourism and like Maine I mean like Vermont we are recognizing that the green environment is part of the tourism and the concept of the working landscape so that's kind of the Vermont and Maine parallels that we have but for all of you out there with your smartphones and taking notes now I want you to shift that from checking your email to taking notes I want you to write down three perceptions of Vermont that you think Maine has and you'll get I've been authorized to give you three continuing legal education it's for everyone to get correct okay so begin because I'm going to read off mine soon and we'll see how quick you match okay just one or two word perceptions of Vermont that we have in Maine one way shift you don't get that citizen involvement back very easily okay number three and these aren't any particular order but historic we in Maine think no we think we're historic too but we think you also are historic number four small scale there aren't many states where you can have a statewide conversation and it's geographically difficult because it can take eight hours to go across Maine okay number five no offense but we think you're kind of liberal okay so and my sixth one this Vermont is your reward our reward for driving through New Hampshire you know Vermont abandoned and it's uh office estate planning about 10 years before Maine did it so through it that's why I left Drew good morning it's really fun to be here and the only way I can connect to Vermont is I got cousins who live here so does that count but I never worked here so I asked the same question a number of people when you think of Vermont what are you saying sorry guys maple syrup was number one two was beautiful three was cute little towns and I can't remember what the last one was now but I think that that does go to how successful you all have been with your citizen involvement with your act 250 and I'll come back to that name and the hard work that you've been doing here so Maryland is a little different from Vermont we have over six hundred six million people and in the last year I've got 24,000 more the town I live in Baltimore city has as many citizens as Vermont our population is struggling there too we have 23 counties and 157 municipalities we have one city who has no county so it's a city county that's Baltimore and the power of our land use planning is very much at the county level and where the cities have planning most of them do there too and Maryland Association of Counties runs the state we call it it's called Mako it's also known as make no they say no to everything any attempt to do everything is one size doesn't fit all so no statewide planning no statewide standards and no we're not going to do that now we've had some success working with them but they also fuel the flame of the two Maryland Maryland's like you all have and it got converted by they're conservative by the Republican angry anti everything community as a war on rural Maryland anything that we were trying to do to protect the environment to strengthen workplace laws to do anything was a war of rural Maryland and it really hurt the kind of conversation that we needed to have in Maryland and to be constantly accused when you're trying to actually work on things that would strengthen the economic engines of rural Maryland to be accused of trying to fight them has been hard the word we can never use in Maryland is regionalism that's been banned virtually don't ever use it because of this strong local jurisdiction local counties the counties fit to say if they're not playing well with the neighboring counties so be it so we have counties that have plans their land preservation areas just beautifully done the hard work and right next door right over the line this imaginary leave a line is this the worst sloppily poorly planned high polluting expensive to maintain development which of course all those people drive through the world preserved lands and the hard work that's been done other places so we are working on that if you're trying to figure out how do we unify we have very strong local planning laws our comprehensive plan laws are very strong a lot of requirements they have to now update them every 10 years they used to be six nobody did them at six years there was no accountability to actually do them so we said okay 10 years and this time we mean it they have to be updated regularly those comprehensive plan laws do have to be linked and followed it is actually you're required our comprehensive plans are laws and this comes to this name when we call something a plan people think it doesn't it's just a plan you know I had a plan to work out this morning a plan includes action steps so when we we said the names mean something right and so you know this is one of my sort of things is to say well why are we planning plans we need to have something that sounds a little bit more formal but they are required then to have zoning and all the regular authorities meet those planned goals because all our comprehensive plans say we want everything to be beautiful and functional lovely and and then we zone for to a load of development and all sorts of other problems but Maryland is supposed to be aligned we also are required to have a state plan for 40 years it's involved a stapler we've taken the 23 local plans under a valley that changed Governor O'Malley Governor Blondettian is of course a great smart growth governor you all have heard of him and I you know to the name bit he said what are we calling it growth management let's call it smart growth because automatically our opponents have been for what done growth so the names matter I mean I you know hearing you all talk about acts 200 act to 15 you need nicknames right despite your number nine means up until you all however you know to involve more people please nicknames we've talked about a mascot on it okay um that'd be the permit thrive Blondettian he elevated our planning agency to a state department and gave it relatives governor O'Malley maintained that and made them provide incredible information and run rough shot over other agencies to do the right thing then comes governor Hogan who is dismantling that agency by firing everybody good putting in anti-planning people and not I haven't found anything they've done actually at all so we are struggling now with you know a number of years of really aggressive work to improve our planning and now have a governor who does not want that so so much we're hoping that the sort of the stuff we have in the works and diving to the local level we can protect more of this work but if we have a second term of governor Hogan it's going to be much harder to do that I think I'll leave it with that that I agree that we need to make sure that we have have a process that's very citizen friendly that has excellent enforcement easier appeal process that is very citizen involved we can't give that part up in this process Maryland has a very very poor citizen appeal process and that's hurting us so I would be very interested to see how Vermont moves forward to simplify that make that better and stronger thanks through Dr good morning and thank you for inviting me home I grew up in Plainfields Vermont went to Twinfield and then went to U32 for high school I know I'm a Vermonter because as the old adage goes I plan on being buried here I will tell you that I moved to Washington state about 28 years ago planning to live there for one year and then come back here go to law school on this coast and then come back to a lot of work I fell in love when I went to Washington both of the state and my wife and it's a great place to live I can two things happen when I tell people I'm from Vermont either they tell me that it's the most beautiful place they've ever been and they wonder how it's remained so beautiful or they say what is Vermont I literally had somebody say to me is that a town in New York state now it's actually a state I'm a land use planner by training and I did in turn with the agency natural resources I was assistant to the state's land use attorney so I actually helped process and write and our permits on a weekly basis and also fended the states and our decisions in front of the then growth board here in the woods I was also asked to be a staff member on Governor Cunan's growth management commission working with Doug Costel which was a true honor and really an eye-opening experience one of the things I was asked to do when I was working with the growth management commission was to study Vermont and Oregon's land use policies and provide that information to the commission as a model roadmap of what would be a good system for how to do land use regulation thing in the state and on a state-wide basis and I did that I actually wrote my honors thesis in college on that analysis what I can tell you that's going on in Washington state is the worst possible combination that I could ever imagine as a land use planner and as a land use lawyer Washington adopted its version of SEPA which is a baby NEPA state environmental policy act about the same time that Vermont adopted Act 250 SEPA is about 46 years old and SEPA like Act 250 requires that you fill out a checklist and you improve up some points used to be an easy form to fill out now it can stretch for hundreds if not thousands of pages with technical reports that you have to prepare and submit along with it and SEPA has done both at the local level at the county level and at the state level Washington state is pretty unique it's a huge state by comparison to Vermont since I moved there over two million people have moved to Washington state Seattle has more people than the entire state of Vermont has in it and as you probably all heard we have a little company called Amazon.com that has developed an office campus in downtown Seattle over the last four years Amazon has brought 40,000 new jobs to downtown Seattle so that's like taking a Burlington and putting another Burlington downtown Burlington so you can imagine not the land use issues the growth issues the housing cost issues that have come along with it what Washington state does is it has a state government and the state has agencies like the agency natural resources always is called the department of ecology but it also has very strong county governments unlike Vermont and so every county has very robust fully staffed county government then you have municipalities and every municipality has its own municipal code so you've got three layers at a minimum of regulatory action and jurisdiction in the state of Washington most of the action happens at this local level at the city level or the town level in my work as a land use lawyer it's pretty rare that I ever get a county permit because the county jurisdiction is only under covers unincorporated areas of the state so if you're within a municipal area that's incorporated you're going from the local town body first and it's also pretty rare that I have to get a statewide permit the state doesn't do a lot of land use permitting they handle a lot of the environmental work shorelines stormwater things of that nature we also in 1990 passed a growth management act which was this idea that life in what is happening in this conversation now you have this kind of Act 250 as a piece of legislation that was chosen long for about 20 something years it was kind of doing its job there was a perception that most projects get through there was a perception that maybe only certain percentage like Ed said are even covered by CEPA and you have rapid sprawl going on in Washington because right outside the municipal areas you have all this beautiful land that's forest or old farms resource lands so there was this huge pressure to start developing outside of Seattle when I moved to Seattle there was a little town called Issaquah it was sleepy it looked maybe like Barry maybe smaller than Barry now it's a couple hundred thousand people about there and they've got these huge sprawling mega developments that have their own little quasi town centers strip malls and so what you see in Washington is we put this big pressure on planning with this idea that we're going to have statewide planning goals that will get transmitted down to the county as planning goals so the state goals your county goals county plans have to be written that are consistent with the state goals and then below that you have municipal plans that have to be done that have to be consistent with the county goals and the state goals so we spent a ton of time writing comprehensive plans when I was on the planning commission Seattle worked on the update to Seattle's plan and in Washington they're supposed to be updated every five years but the state will kick that can down the road because the state has to fund a lot of local governments to do their planning so if the state didn't have any money they said we'll give you a little bit more time in Seattle the comprehensive plan is a pretty huge document and within it in Seattle there's 38 neighborhoods and in the 90s when they were first doing planning the neighborhoods got together and so well we want to write our own neighborhood plans and but only 28 of the 38 neighborhoods did it and each neighborhood depending on the sophistication and how much money they had could they do they have some architects or some landscape architects or some engineers or where's who live there who might volunteer so some neighborhood plans were a robust others were very thin the city then took those 28 neighborhood plans stapled them into the comprehensive plan for the city and then here's the best thing we do with it we take all this amazing work and we put it on a shelf and we forget about it and we walk away from it even though the state law says that development regulations have to be consistent with your local plan whether that's your city plan your county plan your state plan once those development regulations are updated if your plan has changed when somebody walks in for a permit and says well the plan says I can do this here and it's consistent with the zoning the state says great where's your SEPA permit starts back at active 50 essentially and then says well did you get this other permit you might need a statewide permit for this you might need a local permit for that you might need a county permit for that and so the entire permitting process starts again in Seattle to get a permit to build a multi-story 10 or 12-story mixed-use building that's going to have a commercial on the ground floor and maybe housing above it can take two to three years to get that permit in Oregon where Oregon puts all of its emphasis on planning Oregon spends a ton of time they put all their brain power in the planning and then their planning has teeth and then they say okay we're going to take a plan and if you want to do something you have to look at the plan and prove that you're consistent with it and you're doing it in the right place if you walk in in Portland to get a permit to build that same 10 or 12-story building in all of Portland except for one neighborhood which is getting redeveloped in this hot neighborhood it takes three months to get the permit but in Seattle it takes three years in the Pearl District in Portland it takes six months because there's a secondary level of review so when I think about Vermont the struggle to make clear corollary is that you don't have county governments here and you've got town governments that are staffed by larger by volunteers my dad still lives in Middlesex or my stepmom and so you also have a plan and that was really kind of the root part of Act 250 was it was supposed to be married to a very strong planning for the whole state and so for me without good planning it's hard to have a good and efficient and predictable permitting process because I largely see and I see this in Washington all the time we as a society kick the can down the road of hard land use decisions instead of doing hard planning to say this is what we want where and this is what we don't want over there because we want to preserve this area we say well we'll just let the people fight it out through the permitting process which then brings everybody into it in Seattle we have a phrase it's called the Seattle process we love process in Seattle I think the city literally has 130 something volunteer commissions on everything the planning commission is one of those I had to apply to get on the planning commission there were 50 people who applied for the spot that I applied for and I was appointed by the mayor the mayor made me come in and interview with him for half an hour and I was thinking to myself don't you have something better to do than have this something but it was great so we love our process but the process does it allows it adds time and cost to projects I've been working on a piece of land use location that I started working on the project when my daughter was three and I just took her to go look at Bates college in there where she'll be matriculating in suppression in September so I've been working on this one project for 15 years and I'm the lead lawyer we filed the lawsuit on the project in 2008 I've been to trial four times I've been to the appellate court three times and we're slated to go back to court I just got the email yesterday on November 9th for our fourth appeal there's no end in sight and so this is and it's just a little project in Seattle and you know we've argued it's inconsistent with the Congress plan and the city goes well you're only here they got the permit we think we can get a permit for it so when I think about Vermont I think about you know it's hard it's very rural state with not a ton of resources but to me planning is where the rubber meets the road so as a follow-up to that I guess who's doing it right what examples do you guys have of either in your states of some really creative or innovative solutions to some of the challenges that you've heard about today I'll go back perhaps to you to start with that well let's define getting it right this administration or the previous one this administration or the previous one fine we're a full-scale defense so the things that I think that we are doing moving things forward Maryland is cut in half by the Chesapeake Bay so 21% of our state is actually water just like was on Wikipedia you're 4% just for contrast that is one a land use challenge because how many bridges do we want to build across the bay so that people can get to the beach on the Atlantic side but it's also an incredible environmental issue and Maryland recognized years ago and decades ago that land use has an effect on the Chesapeake Bay and has focused a lot of our land use policy around saving the bay so some of the things that I think that we're doing well is you know first we said okay let's start preserving land though so we said every time you sell a piece of property one half or one percent of that price of that property has to go into a fund to preserve land program open space it of course got to to burn it to everything other than saving the program land but then we passed a lot not once but twice get a theme in Maryland that says no no no really really this is a dedicated fund for this purpose and now we're actually getting some of the stolen funds back so one we set up that for land use too we said well okay let's protect the ribbon of land around the Chesapeake Bay from development and said you know within the South and Peter the shore very limited development except except except and then recognize that that's not actually doing much of everything else is being paid over and so we're from those critical areas as that was called to identifying more land use changes I think that one of the most innovative solutions that we have come up with involves septic systems and I have ended up being this weird specialist in septics and I relish the fight Maryland said low cost sprawling development is happening because it is low cost and we've got to recognize that and all our land use laws do not enough compete with cheaper development out there so we have to start looking at what's driving it one of the things that's driving it it's cheaper to hook up to a septic system $10,000 put in the ground than $30,000 to hook it up house up to a watering sewer so let's make it harder to do septics and we passed the infamous tier map which says to every county tell us where your water and sewer is where it's going next so tier one is where it is two is where it's going next tier three is low density schlocky poorly planned development on septics and tier four is the areas you have designated for rural and in the rural areas you're no longer allowed to do major subdivisions on septics and so they changed the definition locally of what a major subdivision is which had been four units or more and they went to seven units or more we caught them in the act and squashed from them but that has begun to do a couple things one it has actually had real impact on world development and two it began to link the impact of the individual house on the environment and when you couple that with our stormwater utility fee past the same year that says the more pervious surface you have the more you pay in a fee to pay for program story to stormwater we've begun to sort of look at development issues and the environment of course our current governor ran and won on fighting the rain attacks as he dealt our stormwater fee so these two things I think have been exciting and I do have to just put it in another context because we have the Chesapeake Bay we are also under federal pollution limits and we have total maximum daily load limits of pollution for the bay Bay is in trouble and so a lot of these things we're able to do against meeting those goals but we of course any minute expect those goals to disappear because of Washington so you know that's an additional challenge we have in Maryland but it's a challenge that we're trying to really work on and maximize in ways that help with both land use and directly with water quality thanks Drew and just an aside when a group of us met with Vermont senate president pro 10 to talk about cleaning mechanisms for our water cleanup for Lake Champlain he played us a rain tax commercial that your governor ran and on his phone we have a video art commercial we have a really good one Rob so when you teach environmental policy what are the really good examples that you point to the communities or states certifications that are doing it well well first I want to say that rain tax that's a good example of naming that you were talking about I mean it also sounds like an art garfunkel song but here's a couple things that Maine has done right very early on we made our counties watershed based if you think about that that's phenomenal because you can regulate based upon an actual environmental logic of watershed the second thing we did was early on we started looking at the question of sprawl and we recognize the triangle of comprehensive plan zoning and subdivision putting those three things into sync together and that's through our state planning office and through look and through using the regional planning commissions which I say are largely advisory the the third thing we are doing is conversation about drivers you need to be talking about drivers for example climate now we environmental scientists don't even talk about climate change because it's we consider it a natural aspect of climate so that mentioning it is just mentioning one particular thing the first response to climate change and I'm speaking as an environmental scientist is insects and the second response is disease brought by insects because low order species can move fast reproduce fast so you're going to see bullia, dalgid and all these other things coming so that second response of disease malaria will start working its way up and the third response is going to be habitat ecological change as a result of that that cascading effect and the fourth response is going to be institutional response and institutional response is largely going to be too late and after the fact so we are already seeing change opossum kills are increasing in Maine now the opossum aside from pogo is not a political animal so but they're just appearing more they're a southern animal but and so that's an example of one driver the second one is the shift to the service economy which may have like I say parallels to Vermont continued recognition of the role of environment in environmental settings in the state economy decrease in regional authority due to decrease in regional resources but the need for local planning for example how many of you realize that and when Katrina had the army court had filed a set of responses well developed plans and that were sitting there and an engineer had written them but but the the parishes elected to spend that planning money and building bridges to floating casinos and so there's an example plans are not just abstract things that are about taking action and some of the other drivers are the increased need for federal, state and local coordination so Maine is working on that we have an EPA environmental finance center grant for that we have an institute for climate studies that I don't know that's doing that so there are a few things that Maine is doing that we can look forward to and one of the things I'd like to encourage all of you here is to think about this as having some kind of smart growth institute or some kind of thing where you gather together periodically to do this and so that we don't just talk about ideas but we set for some plans Josh you cited work and a couple of times as being a a good example is what is it about that that that what aspects of their planning program for their landings to develop a regulation system do you you find good I think the proofs in the pudding and I think it also is reflected in Washington state as well when you go to Oregon most of their sprawl is contained the communities are pretty compact and they've done a good job of preserving their natural resource areas whether it's ag land or forestry or mineral resources as we were flying out yesterday it was a beautiful day in Seattle and you could see for forever the mountains were out and what really struck me was you could almost physically see the urban growth boundary on the ground as you take off and you head east out of Seattle because you move from a very dense populated area in Seattle to slightly less dense areas you move east and then when you get out to Issaquah and the flails of the Cascade Mountains pretty much all the urban sprawl stops right there and what you see are a couple holdover communities that were these large-scale subdivisions that kind of slipped through and said you know we'll go on to municipal sewer we'll go on to municipal water and we'll do these big contained communities that were outside the growth boundaries we haven't seen one of those come through in the last 15 or so years in Washington State and so what I think is working well is the work that was done in planning and one of the main things that both Oregon and Washington do is they draw up urban growth boundaries and they say within this area we're going to have density and this is where the municipal services are this is where sewer water is and outside those boundaries we're going to have rural development I will tell you that in Washington State they think rural is a five-acre horse lot where I grew up it means a compact town center with beautiful open space surrounding it so I think it's a little bit backwards in Washington but at least that's their idea is that you have to have at least a five-acre lot you can't have one-acre lots because that's just kind of the spaghetti lots that were created under Act 250 long ago so I think that's what's working well is good planning that has good boundaries and you don't push those boundaries and you don't move them all the time so we've got about another 10 or 15 minutes I do want to let the audience have an opportunity to answer questions I guess so I just ask one more you've listened to this morning's talks you have some experience with Act 250 in Vermont and planning you have a good perspective from your work outside of the state kind of in a nutshell as briefly as possible what advice do you have for Amy and the Act 250 commission and everybody here moving forward as we re-envision Act 250 for the next 50 years and I'll start with you Josh I think it's a hard choice that Vermont has to ask itself to me it goes back to the genesis of Act 250 and the fact that only half of it really got enacted that the land use plan for the state was pushed aside because it's hard to make those decisions of where you draw the lines because you're either inside that line or outside that line and there are real economic benefits to being on either side of them perceived or real depending on it so without good planning I think Vermont's going to just keep kicking the can down the road of making land use decisions through litigation I'm reminded about something Doug Costel said and it took me a while to figure it out because I was 22 years old and it didn't make much sense to me but it did as I got older Doug Costel said there's powerful logic in the status quo and I think Vermont right here and right now you guys are struggling like do we make some tweaks to Act 250 and you know go a little bit forward go a little bit backwards but it'll essentially keep the status quo of just doing land use policy through incremental permitting and litigation or does the state really make a hard decision to plan with teeth to it Rob Okay so the one thing I want to leave you with is this notion of creative tension and there's a certain thing when you get too much stimuli like what I call the Walmart effect you go in there and you can't find anything there's too much and you just want to get out of there and on the other hand if there's not enough stimulus you fall asleep so you need something in between so tension a certain amount of tension is a good thing and so in fact there's a whole theory called creative tension and that's where you use adversarial things to tease out the answer not everything things that are collaborative often come out from people from different positions so the number one thing is to have a conversation recognize that there are these tensions like the two mains the two Vermonts plans versus actions planning versus zoning ideal versus permittable local versus state visionary versus practical strategic versus tactical historical versus future you get the idea but think about those as tools that you can put together and use to solve problems as soon as you stop having the conversation you stop solving the problem and that's why the citizen involvement is so powerful thanks Drew I'm going to pick up on the citizen involvement we often we see this is feared it can be short changed in Maryland there's a big fear of lawsuits willy nilly if we give people standing the right to sue citizen standing in Maryland virtually doesn't exist and what happens instead when people are not fully engaged and have the opportunity all the way through and understand the process and know that people have no back and that it's fair then people step away people stop working on the hard projects and that never wins so continue to build this robust citizen involvement straight through the process while at the same time and here's the challenge keeping it simple and fast everybody deserves to have things resolved in a reasonable amount of time it's not okay to raise an entire child and maybe even fund their education on a single project funding is okay yeah I mean these things are simply not okay and I plus the example earlier I have a project had to do had to be short change because of legal fees I mean those are real real aspects so make it the process clear make the citizen involvement robust and real have real authority have people have the ability to challenge have these timelines be be tight and think about the language what you all are doing here is stunning amazing the results are incredible having driven up yesterday from Maryland through New Jersey New York I got up here and I was laughing last night and I said so what's the problem really I mean and it's hidden you guys got a lot of trees but this is a stunning place and you've done amazing things but you I think you need to work on the communication this is a little bit hard for people to to get into and understand what some of these things are so nicknames are good when you use them for the good and finally I think it is look for the weird solution when I started working on land use issues I never really thought that I find the solution through septic system policy but we were forced to sort of go to a different direction and look for what was the driver what was the unusual thing how could we come at stuff from another point of view and another strange reason to to get the outcome that we wanted so look for those opportunities thanks I want to make sure we have a chance for anybody to ask questions so Josh I have a question about Orogram about 10 years ago the NRC brought in it a whole day program on Orogram a couple years ago I went online and I looked on Google Earth at the forest in Orogram it looked like it was almost like strip farming and so my question is is has this successful effort to concentrate growth and make permitting more efficient in the growth center area actually resulted in better environmental protection or is it just now a resource extraction it's a really good question and and what I've come to learn in living in the west is that your view of environmental protection is very parochial actually had somebody say to me that washington's hydroelectric dams are not breeding power because they're big dams they're not running river dams like we have in Vermont and because these big dams have stopped salmon migration they're actually bad for the environment whereas I would argue that when you make power from water that's actually green so the reason that timber harvesting looks like strip mining is that the west was carved up into sections of land which is a full section which was the survey grid and one section was given to the railroad company and one section was allowed to be homestead through state claims by settlers moving out there and the federal government did that it's a checkerboard in the west and they did that to encourage the building of the transcontinental railroads while the railroads then sold that land to timber companies and so they can they literally survey a straight line and they'll come in and they will cut down every tree on the left of the line and on the right of the line there'll be trees so it looks like they're being strip mined in the west they call that environmental management and resource management because they'll look then come in and replant them and somewhere between 10 and 20 years later all those trees will be grown back up I'm an avid skier still and I'm now looking at I think the second or third clear-cutting of this same parcel that I've been watching for 20 something years since I tried by it it was literally strip mined and then grew back up and then was cut against me I would argue that those protections are working because what they've done is they've said here's where we're going to do that stuff and here's where we're not going to do that stuff I would also argue that one of the reasons that the timber industry left the west is largely it's spotted out the cost the environmental permitting and then the shift in the economy so you know some of it's the permitting some of it's just evolution of our economy the other question so with none I as far as launch I'll make a couple of announcements I should have said earlier well first I want to thank the panelists for coming here and for sharing so this afternoon we're going to be breaking into breakout groups there's a number of panels in the back of the room those of their self-explanatory those are the issues they describe the issues that we're going to be discussing in the afternoon and they provide an opportunity for all of you to provide some input on what your kind of feedback on those issues and thoughts that you might have that will be shared with the commission going forward we are going to summarize today's proceedings including these afternoon breakout groups so we are going to have lunch there's going to be two buffet lines lining up there which we can make our way to I think right now smells like the foods there so on either side of the either side of the coffee there will be a buffet line and then in about 20-25 minutes or so after we get settled while we're still eating we're going to introduce our keynote speaker John at so is that right Ted? we're going to do the tables table by table we're going to we're going to be sending them on okay we're going to do we're going to do table by table not everybody in Russia so why don't we why don't we start with the back of the room maybe the back four tables to come on up which again and help yourself to lunch thanks everyone I want to call our dean Tom McHenry to the microphone if I can tear him away from John Kessler two people who have a visiting problem when I was in second grade I told someone this story a moment ago I had Mrs. 50 from my teacher and my mother showed up one day to class and found me sitting in the corner separated from all of the other students in the class and my mother said why is David sitting in the corner and Mrs. 50 said he has a visiting problem though I've introduced Tom McHenry who has a visiting problem but we are we're very blessed to have Tom McHenry who is someone who has many decades of experience as an environmental lawyer out in California but who also has deep connections to this state and to this region and he has brought his skill set and his experience to here at Ramallah school and Tom will share some short remarks and then we'll introduce our next speaker thank you David thank you very much the best news of all is my remarks will be really short but thank you David just an amazing group of people here I've only had a chance to meet a few of you but I think you'll probably be able to complete the revisions to Act 250 before you finish your dessert it's just an extraordinary group and an extraordinary amount of expertise I first want to see how many people in the room are graduates of Ramallah law school so if you are please raise your hand including David Mears up here okay for faculty of Ramallah law school I see one of them checking his iPhone while I'm speaking Professor Shevree can you raise your hand Professor Shevree is not hearing me can you raise your hand John who anybody else from faculty of Ramallah law school with us and anybody who has employed as an extern or as an employee a student from Ramallah law school ah there we go okay we want you to please continue to do that we have an extraordinary group of young people and older people at the school very interested in environmental issues very interested in land use issues and particularly as the subject of climate change has forced us all to think about the ways that land use and energy tie to environmental quality our students are very interested in working with you so look for that opportunity at dinner last night Eli from our career services office when we went around and introduced ourselves said that he was here and he was looking for a job he wasn't planning to leave us but he was looking for a job for the students from our school so we'd really like to encourage that I had the opportunity in California number of years ago I was an environmental lawyer to look at a unified environmental statute and we got together and spent an entire year figuring out how we rewrite California's environmental laws which are about almost the same size as the entire set of federal environmental laws and I will let you know it was a complete and total failure so I admired the effort to look at Act 250 if there was any lesson I learned from that process it was that it takes a lot of time and effort and an immense amount of flexibility from a lot of entrenched interests and I think one of the things we're exploring here from our law school is the opportunity to reimagine how we make our environmental laws work more effectively and make them better so I thank you for spending your time thinking about this I also told story last night about the fact that Professor Chevria and I taught a land use course here at Vermont Law School several years ago I taught the California portion of it it was sort of modern recent developments in land use and we've been looking at some very interesting infill and land use related measures as part of our efforts to achieve minimal carbon emissions in California and John taught the portion of the class in Vermont we had an opportunity to take our students up to the state house and meet with some Vermont state agencies and then we went down to Logan and got on an airplane and flew over to France because the third part of the class was French land use law we met with a land use professor at the Sorbonne we met with the equivalent of a Supreme Court Justice in Paris and then we took the speedy train down to Provence and met with the local land use planning agencies it was fascinating to see that in France they were facing the same kinds of issues that we face in Vermont and we face in California issues associated with affordable housing or workforce housing issues associated with sprawl issues associated with figuring out how you take the traditional local land use model and expand it over time to take into account regional and statewide concerns but we were very thrilled to be able to feature Vermont because it's really one of the two states along with Oregon that's really looked in any serious way at a form of land use planning that's more statewide although I know from talking to many of you that's not been successful someone amusingly the administration of Vermont Law School referred to our course by a semi-French name they called it Le Boonduggle so that's all I want to add today I just don't want to welcome you here at Vermont Law School I've greatly enjoyed being the dean I'm about nine months in so I'll only be able to call myself a new dean for another month or two I had a wonderful moment this morning because I was able to use for the first time a speech that I had with Caitlyn smiling in the back one of my former students who was on the boondoggle by the way Caitlyn Hayes which is we welcomed this morning 22 accelerated JD students to the school last summer we had 10 accelerated JD students by the way last summer I met with them at the end of the summer and asked them how their accelerated program went because they're going to do law school in two years they're going to work through the summers and one of them said that it seemed a bit rushed they were getting the message just great but we have if we entered 161 students in Vermont Law School this past fall we are thrilled we have 180 deposits already this year for our incoming class for the class that will start in the fall of 2018 and we usually get about 100 new applications over the course of the summer because you can now take the LSAT in the summer in June and then apply to law school and start as early as the end of August we also have a very robust master's program and an LLN program and our online enrollment is currently about 100 students and we're seeing that climb as well so we're very very pleased about the robust interest in the law school and the programs we have but we do depend upon all of you in Vermont who work in nonprofit organizations work at state agencies work in private law firms work with businesses to help us train our students only 10% of our students come from Vermont but 20% of our students end up living in Vermont and our students took the bar in 32 different states last summer so they also go all over the place so welcome we're thrilled to have you here please think of how Vermont Law School can help you as you go through the process and I'll turn the podium back to David thank you very much All right thank you I'll now turn the podium over to Mark Kane who all of you who are planners know well who's decades of experience in the planning arena and is the president of the Vermont Planners Association thank you Mark Thank you, my job today is to actually thank other people so there's a lot of passing the thanks as you guys know or many of you know the process of putting together a conference like this is very challenging and BPA was really excited about the prospect of working with the commission Act 250 to understand how changes to Act 250 might resonate with the vocal planning community and take into consideration some of the many things that Vermont planners are actually understanding and dealing with on a day-to-day basis so when the kernel of this idea for a conference came out and the BPA discussions it really resonated strongly with the executive committee so we are really excited actually about the both the ability to put this on and to actually help facilitate this conversation and we'll talk a little bit about later about what we're hoping to do this afternoon but probably more importantly we're excited about bringing a really diverse group of people into this room and I'm really surprised I got a lot of planning conferences and this is probably one of the most diverse groups I've seen ever at a BPA event so thank you very much for coming I also want to make sure we don't forget to thank some of the people that really worked hard to put this on and on behalf of BPA I'd like to thank specifically, thank Peg Elmer for all the hard work that she's done it's an amazing job her and Kate McCarthy Kate McCarthy also was an integral part of putting this on they've done both of them a fantastic job in addition from the BPA side of things Steve Lott's speech who is our treasurer he makes sure that this all works out from the economic perspective and Sharon Murray who is actually on the BPA working group for Act 250 which is a group that BPA has established to gather our membership information and communicate that back to the commission and I'd also like to note that Sharon and David actually are two of our new FAICP members from the state of Vermont so we're very proud of that too and we also should thank partners for putting this on we're Diane Snelling thank you very much Diane for helping to go and get this organized Donna Casey for putting this on and obviously the folks here at the Vermont Law School Rebecca Martina and Eli Gleason also thank you very much for helping put this on appreciate it without further ado I'm actually going to now introduce John Adams and John Adams is the director of the Vermont Center for Geographic Information and if you vet John or know John you know he's a big fan of data and facts and I think in this day and age that's actually a really good thing to have as a basis for discussion of policy so John is going to provide us with some relevant facts and information about the state of Vermont that hopefully as we get into this afternoon sessions we can consider in terms of some of these strategies and approaches it might take to changing activity or modifying so thank you John thanks Mark thank you for inviting me to to speak today I asked Kate McCarthy at BNRC if she could send me a list of people who would be here so I could understand how nerdy I could get here and as far as I could tell it's a this is a pretty nerdy audience so if your idea of a good time is not a barrage of overly complicated maps and graphs as you finish eating I apologize so going back close to a hundred years ago one of our first planning reports in the state the Rover Mono program for the future we had two outcomes from this that I think or I know were less than desirable the first being eugenics which we will not get into the second being this recommendation and this big push to build highways really without much consideration about associated impacts with those nearly 40 years later 1968 in Vision and Choice the document or report that would lead to active 50 we identified some of those negative externalities that came from the recommendations or those actions of the previous years and we had this we had this map that was made and it has some beautiful maps in this report if you haven't seen it this is a projection of our urban areas in Vermont in 1990 if trends were to continue and it's a cartographic technique we call scaring people with maps but a big part of the report would set really what our land use goals are up until today and that's really looking at our traditional our working landscapes surrounded by compact settlements in this report again really set the way for active 50 and trying to preserve Vermont's landscape this is our urban areas today I tried to mimic some of the colors of this 1968 map thankfully we did not see the urban expansion or urban growth as was projected I don't think it was ever possible for that to happen but I think in we have to acknowledge that things would likely be a lot worse if it wasn't for active 50 and I'm going to talk about some of our development patterns maybe why some of them are happening some of the opportunities challenges we have here in Vermont before I do that I'll just touch upon a few or ask the question you know should our land use policy promote this traditional rural scene and concentrated settlements that we highlighted in 1968 and I'll try to talk about maybe elements of that that we weren't thinking of then or emphasizing and still don't today starting with this bar graph which I realize is not doesn't look like the most exciting bar graph it is a bar graph I tried to make the bars look like roads as if that would make it more interesting to you like you're a bunch of five-year-olds or something but it is an important an important point here and you can't read the bottom but what this shows is median household annual vehicle miles traveled by different areas in Vermont and to the left to the far left we have the excerpts of Chittenden County next to that we have the state median so about 22,000 vehicle miles traveled per household and then to the right of that we have a half mile from our downtowns our designated downtowns and our neighborhood development areas which we're seeing households traveling with vehicle miles traveled of up to two-thirds one-third to two-thirds less than the median in Vermont and this is really significant and we're able to measure this thanks to the Embassy of Transportation and the Transportation Research Center at Vermont working with the household travel survey to oversample for Vermont so we could really get location specific data and not just census data that's out there what are some of the benefits of that when you think about affordability annual cost to operate a vehicle in the United States is close to $9,000 in Vermont households as we know spend a really large percentage of their income on transportation and vehicle ownership and we often look at the medians but when you think about giving someone the opportunity to live in a place without a vehicle or without owning a vehicle it's really empowering this is really key I think to building inclusive communities and having more people come to Vermont so walkability I think a great indicator of what types of communities we want to build you look at energy this is from VEC over half of a household's energy costs are associated with transportation so living in our walkable neighborhood or within a half mile of downtowns you see a 31 to 16 to 31 reduction energy costs for Vermont households health can anyone tell me who this individual is Surgeon General Vivek Murthy under President Obama does anyone know what he's talking about maybe before before he started talking about how we have the first generation of children in this country that are expected to live shorter lives than their parents and that's because of things like diabetes cardiovascular disease another disease is really related to inactivity and he started a big campaign calling on planners on transportation engineers on community leaders to really focus on building walkable neighborhoods because we know there's a far less prevalence of these issues in neighborhoods that are walkable and this statistic is showing that over the past 25 years we have seen a 50 percent increase in obesity in high school students in Vermont water quality so a lot of talk about impervious surface in water quality in Vermont when we look at the amount of impervious surface inside of our centers versus outside in population and jobs one acre of impervious surface inside some of our centers has about 12 people and 10.6 jobs compared to five people and 2.2 jobs outside of centers so you need about two and a half times as much impervious for the same amount of people in outside of our centers and close to five times as many as much for jobs so that's I mean that's just a sampling of I think some of the benefits of a settlement pattern like this looking at issues ranging from health affordability energy water quality now shift over to ask you know where is development happening in Vermont and this is an update to some numbers for a talk I gave a couple of years ago at a BPA event so looking at E911 points when we look at new residential structures from 2008 to 2018 or to the end of 2017 this is showing the areas in dark green those are both outside of centers and in black inside centers we see not a tremendous amount of variation from year to year and where development is happening however and most of it is happening on the outside however this because of the way E911 has been keeping their data for multifamily units they're only registering as one structure so we're not actually getting a whole lot of information here so when we drill down and look at some county differences there are some significant significant differences and to the far left you see Chittenden County where you have a much higher percentage of residential development happening inside centers and we'll revisit why that might be happening later when you look at new multifamily structures the difference is fairly dramatic here almost all multifamily development is happening within Chittenden County and luckily CCRPC has been keeping data on units per structure as well as year built so we can go back with this chart of showing us going back to 1890 all the way to today and the areas in green are development outside of centers so actual units including multifamily so you can see as we start to build out the highway the expansion out of centers you see that dip in the late 70s and then when you look at between 1990 to 2006 you see about only 40 percent of our residential buildings were inside centers and then post crash in 2007 there's been a big drop there or a big increase in development in centers where we see 60 percent happening on the inside you look at commercial structures and it's worth noting that the number on the far left again that's Chittenden County that is only showing a little over 200 over 10 years so we haven't seen a whole lot of new commercial construction over the past decade at least compared to residential buildings as measured by this metric here but a lot of more of it is happening in centers than outside compared to our residential construction and looking at Act 250 decisions I thought it'd be interesting to try to compare them but because of for a number of different reasons one of how the data is kept and managed and two I just didn't have very much time to dig into it there really wasn't a way to make any sort of apples to apples comparison and I'm actually not sure there's a whole lot of useful information to be gleaned here what this showing is a minor major application so it excludes administrative amendments by jurisdictional type so you can see a lot more in terms of commercial applications being reviewed by Act 250 as compared to residential act applications and this is showing from 1970 to present day so I think many of you have seen these maps before they're dot density maps with population looking at 1850 to 1930 and I think the story here is that we're moving from an agricultural society to an industrial one you could see this is approximately or similar size population and you can see on the map to the right a concentration of our population right you see it gets a little lighter shade on the outside so as our transportation infrastructure and we get rail improves and we industrialize you could see people coming in from our hill farms and coming into our centers so I tried to recreate that density map of what what Vermont looks like today you can see a little more dispersion a lot of growth in some of these centers and an expansion into the suburbs of Burlington but this is this is using some of our residential data of where people live when you look at daytime populations I think it's a very different story and in 1850 to 1930 our daytime and nighttime populations were pretty similar whereas now it's very different and you can see a much bigger concentration of our jobs in our centers throughout Vermont and if you extrude those jobs into sort of a more modern 3D map as opposed to 1930s that density map you can see here the extent of it how it is concentrating in those downtowns across Vermont and this is a sheep density map and it shouldn't be in here so what is driving these development trends and maybe we'll start by backing up and looking maybe country wide or at a even globally what's been happening so here's economic activity in the United States split in half you can see that despite these transportation costs decreasing dramatically and the invention of the internet that we've had an increase in concentration of economic activity and productivity in our big cities in urban areas and it hasn't been equal in all urban areas there's been a lot of work done by Ed Glaser at Harvard University as well as Benjamin Chinnitz before him Carnegie Mellon showing that it's a combination of population centers as well as educated people and entrepreneurial people as measured by a percentage of people in small businesses so if you compare Detroit versus New York for example where you had a lot of small business owners in the textile industry as opposed to large companies vertically integrated companies like the auto manufacturers the small business folks were able to adapt to a changing economy and those are the areas where we've seen the largest amount of growth and it's telling when you think about the company that's basically made they've almost made place irrelevant in terms of the technology that they've enabled people to communicate with instead of buying you think that maybe you'd buy that some less some cheap land somewhere if you've got a great internet access Google went and bought some of the most expensive real estate in the country right in New York City spending a decade ago close to two billion dollars for the Port Authority building and then just a couple months ago buying another building for 2.4 billion dollars so what does that what does that mean or what does that look like in terms of settlement patterns across the country and in Vermont well and across the world really we've seen an urbanization happening right so people coming into these centers and depending on housing supply housing prices transportation costs people will move out further and further into the countryside and commute into into their jobs and into the cities and this is work done by Alistair Ray and Garrett Dash Nelson at Dartmouth who looked at our origin and destination of commuting patterns across the country here transportation costs I think driving a big portion of it here in Vermont we've done a lot to make transportation really as inexpensive as possible more than 47 in other states our share of state and local spending covered by user fees in terms of driving is covered by drivers so 75% of that is coming from a different revenue source so there's no link between how much you drive and really what you're paying for that infrastructure so thankfully Garrett Dash Nelson has shared the data he used for for this study and I pulled out the Vermont commuting patterns and you can see here the origin and destinations of where people are working and he they ran various algorithms to determine sort of what is the economic geography in terms of the connectedness of these communities and he found sort of four separate different operational sort of economic zones happening in Vermont you can kind of see illustrated here so this really corresponds sort of to a lot of other data that we see in terms of loss and population loss in rural counties where you can see the areas outside of that that Burlington metro area our commuter shed starting to lose population here you can see for the first time in the past few years a number of different counties in Vermont are experiencing a natural decrease in population so deaths are we're seeing more deaths than we're seeing births which isn't shouldn't come as a terrible surprise that we've we've known about our aging population for a while here's our projected population pyramid for 2030 in Vermont and here's how this here's how this looks in terms of a thematic map and I don't I'm not trying to scare people with maps here either I should point out this isn't a dramatic drop in population nor is it a dramatic increase in population these colors sometimes can make it seem like it's a greater difference than it is but I do think I'll draw our attention to maybe some of those centers like you even have like Montpelier or Berry Virgins St. Albans Newport Rutland Bennington all those areas and the darker red shade of the spectrum which I think is something that we should we should focus on and see if it's something that we can can change so looking at opportunities what are some of the opportunities in Vermont well Vermont has some pretty smart people by almost I think any metric this map I think is showing us you know percentage of population with university degrees and we have an opportunity to use a lot of data and make some changes in what we have control over and I have a few slides that I've adopted from Joe Monacozi for Vermont how many people here know who Joe Monacozi is or have seen him speak he spoke at the downtown conference awesome so a good number of people if you haven't I highly recommend checking out some of his work I think if you Google Joe and either downtown conference or he spoke at the let's talk progress event last year in Burlington you can see this talk in its entirety but so Joe is a big advocate of using data and information in terms of of municipal governance and governments in general particularly as it relates to their understanding their their tax base and where some of their revenues and expenditures are coming from and he draws this example with farmers who increasingly are using some very sophisticated data and information using drones to understand what is the yield the crop yield for what amount of input that they are putting into their field so a farmer will grow so the most profitable crop based on what it takes for them to put into their their field and if we think of our our cities like this and we decide you know what kind of crops do we want to grow in our cities it helps us I think think a little bit differently about some of the decisions we make so if we compare a mixed use this is a mixed use building in Montpelier it's on a closer 10th of an acre 16 apartments with my house on closer 10th of an acre and a big box store you can see big differences in tax value here and this is maybe traditionally how we look at revenue from some of these buildings but we aren't breaking it down by area right we have a finite amount of space we can't just create we can't annex you know part of New Hampshire if we we want more space or we could try but I think it wouldn't go over very well we might have better luck with Quebec when we break it down by acre it tells how much different story so that mixed use building is now we're yielding $150,000 per acre as opposed to $4,300 per acre for a big box store and you look at the amount of infrastructure that uses we're using far less for that mixed use development so we're seeing a much bigger yield of far less expenditure in terms of public infrastructure for that development when you extrude that in terms of three dimensions using 3D mapping you can sort of see that picture very clearly and we posted Jenny Bauer in our office actually posted this at midnight last night if you go to our Twitter account at VCGI I posted a link to an interactive map and we just uploaded about 50 tans in Vermont where you can explore the property value per acre in three dimensions this is St. Albans you can see the downtown core very clearly there and I want to be clear these aren't like big tall buildings this is this is value per acre of our downtown our traditional downtown streets those treasured assets those those nicest buildings that we have in our downtowns are yielding the highest value per acre this is the Walmart in St. Albans that I've circled in blue there and I want to be clear I'm not picking anyone to pick on Walmart and I'm not saying like that they're a bad company organization I think and the way Joe talks about it is they're doing exactly what we've asked them to do and what we set them up to do right he tells a story of how one of the vice presidents at Walmart went and talked to the North American sort of assessing conference and explained to them everything that went into their buildings and how they both purchased contractors and really how cheap it was to build these buildings and that they had a life span of 15 years and that they were basically worthless to anybody else right just sort of bragging about how how terrible these buildings are which is a really smart thing to do right if you can lower your property tax bill across you know 1500 municipalities or however many they have stores in and this is the system that that we built this is what we're saying like the worst the worst your building is the less we'll charge you despite regardless of how much infrastructure you're using meanwhile if you're you want to invest in some of our dam tans the nicer building you build you know think the bigger your tax bill is going to be so it's not that when you think about it you know we're getting exactly what we've designed for a combination of terms of our economics and our regulatory structure a few other tans in Vermont I don't know if we want to play like the guessing guessing game here anyone know know where this is nope southern part of the state Bennington Waterbury smaller place come on right next to Waterbury it's Richmond I can't believe you didn't get there um this one should be easy virgins this one this one is too hard you're not going to get it it reads burrow so you can see that this applies at different scales right these traditional centers are really providing the highest amount of yield per acre for through what they are now there are a number of things aside from the economics I think that we we should consider here and when we looked at Montpelier and looking at the assessed property value per acre compared to percentage of non-conforming properties there was a very clear relationship right the higher value a property was the more likely it was to be non-conforming so most of our damn town if it were to burn down could not be rebuilt according to our zoning code or at least our old zoning code and hopeful that our new one can support that kind of development property values sort of before and after zoning per road mile you could see here after we enacted zoning we were building at a value of one third of what we were before zoning so you can imagine you know with our requiring greater setbacks road frontage et cetera we're using a lot more infrastructure taking up more space than we used to for our our traditional development patterns and a lot of people want to live in these areas so there's a high demand this is a this was a survey down by RSG and 91 respondents in Vermont said they would walk to school shopping or other activities if they lived close enough and people want to live in small towns right so luckily we're not we're not all sort of profit seeking robots who would just move to to big cities like New York City right we are willing to forego the maximum economic productivity to live in a place that that we like and a lot of people want to live in small towns and then and then we have a lot of just basic things I think going for us in Vermont you know a lot of people talk about millennials in particular as you know wanting needing to live in cities et cetera but they're not any different than anybody in the sort of history of who we've been asking as long as we have what what is the number one priority for where you want to live will people want to be safe people want good schools people want job opportunities and we have those here in Vermont and we also have really good beer so we have a lot of the ingredients I think of what people want and I see these all as as big opportunities of things that we have some control over into who it's going to how we want our communities to look like what are some game changers that are just going to maybe blow up everything that we know about the world one was mentioned earlier self-driving cars and shared mobility I think we'll see a lot of development of these things outside of Vermont before they come here but they're it's hard to tell exactly how this would play out is it just going to be less expensive to live further out and you can just get in your car and start doing your work and for your two hour commute to wherever or is it going to be such that we have a huge opportunity in in shared mobility and people not needing to own cars and freeing up a lot of these urban reserves that we have in our downtowns in our villages so this is more payload areas and black is over 100 acres of parking right we don't need that parking space if you don't have vehicle that needs to sit idle for 95 percent of the time that opens up a lot of opportunity in our downtowns and villages then we have the hyper loop not on everyone's radar but definitely on the radar of miglumaniac billionaires who are competing to see who will build the first hyper loop this is I think is Richard Branson's company you can go on their website and punch in you know two cities and they'll tell you how long it'll take for this pneumatic tube frictionless pneumatic tube to fire you over to the other city this is Boston to New York and that's 26 minutes so if we think about we think about what the highway did in Vermont and how that led to IQ 50 and a lot of population growth and what this might do this is like with some traffic like a four hour trip down to 26 minutes that could really radically change our landscape and where people live if you can commute hundreds of miles within a half hour and that gives it just changes our world and then of course climate change you know the biggest issue we're facing right now this is this is just showing you know by 2100 our the Montpelier temperature for summers will be 88 degrees which is the equivalent of summers in in North Miami and there's a lot for us to think about in terms of we heard a little bit about insects and in terms of extreme weather events and what does that mean for our tourism industry etc but really the big big issue for me or that I keep thinking about is is sea level rise and I don't know how many people took this quiz in New York Times a few weeks ago so it's asking you and what what state is this given x amount of sea level rise and I can't remember what the the amount was and it's just sort of mind blowing to think about and and I'm going to end sort of on this this slide here and not because I want it to be you know depressing or anything but for me when I look at it it helps put what I'm trying to tackle into perspective it it seems a lot easier to deal with things like oh we can you know fix what's wrong with that 250 when you think about trying to relocate you know millions of people or sea level rise and my final thoughts I mean I think I just want to echo the reoccurring theme that we've had today and that David started started with is we need to find that that shared vision and I think we've got a lot already there with our land use goals of our our compact settlements surrounded by working landscape we know it can help us address issues ranging from health to energy to you know wildlife habitat conservation to to clean water and really zeroing in on that and focusing not on identifying what we don't want but identifying what we do want and then making sure that we have the conditions in place for that to happen and that's going to go beyond just adjusting our regulatory system but we need to look at things like our tax system and and a lot of like maybe weird ideas like we heard from Maryland right and and a key point I think to as we do that an important thing is really the relationships that we have with people and building a lot of those relationships and coming together in events like this and talking about those ideas even if they're different than the ones we have and we really need to engage with each other and those relationships will help us be far more resilient when we do have things that are much bigger in terms of their impact on change like what we saw with C-level rise there thank you we might have a couple minutes for questions if there are any questions speak up I don't think we've got a mic back in 6970 one of Governor Davis's biggest advisement was a guy named Ian McCarr who was the father of Earth Day and GIS GIS from one of the interviews I've done with people of that era one of the reasons the statewide land news plan did not emerge from committee was the statewide zoning here but also because we didn't have the capability to map biotic and abiotic resources and study ecosystems in such a way to make decisions we've come a lot farther since then there was an attempt in Dover and Wilmington to do a bit of that and they did have a plan but so how much more robust is the capability of Vermont to do this kind of studying and mapping of resources of ecosystems because this is all about ecosystems the environment is a big thing ecosystems in an area are pretty important so how much more sophisticated accessible is that today thank you that's a terrific question and Mark if you need to like yank me off the stage if I go for too long here and we know we have such a tremendous wealth of information that is that is literally coming online right now like like last night we're working towards statewide parcel data which we'll have complete which unlike out west where we had those straight lines the PLSS we don't have that luxury here it's a lot harder to map property boundaries in Vermont we've just completed in the fall what's called statewide lidar so how many people are familiar with lidar technology it's amazing almost everyone in this room for the three that aren't familiar with it it's essentially if you think of a bat and echo location we have planes that fly with lysars and they'll send a pulse laser gun and get a very accurate location on the earth and x y and z z I just outed myself as a Canadian coordinate and we get multiple returns one the top of trees to the bottom of the earth and then we can run various algorithms to sort of strip all the buildings and trees off to understand our terrain as well as our surface modeling and we are one of a handful of states that will now have statewide coverage of this data one of the first things we're doing with it now is generating extremely high resolution land cover data right now we have we used to have 30 meter resolution a few years ago about 10 meter we'll be going down to half meter resolution which is close to 2000 times more accurate and I think we will be the first state that has that data and information and we're really excited about it on top of that we'll be extruding imperial services and building footprints with height attributes tree canopy with height attributes and it allows us to do a lot of much more accurate hydrologic model modeling in terms of flood planes and a number of other and understanding our rivers a lot better so those are you know just a handful of of the things not to mention how much easier the technology is to work with and and how many more people know how to use it so 25 years ago we had a user base of 128 entities and we had someone who our entire database fit on on 12 floppy disks and someone people would fill out mail orders and send them in and usually now is when someone says like I did that and send in the mail but so and now as of just last year we had 77,000 unique users go to our geodata portal we have over a thousand datasets in it and to think of that difference like 77,000 compared to 128 and 25 years it's massive and there are also um this shift to using things as services as opposed to we used to send data right people used to download data now they stream data like you stream Netflix because these things are changing so quickly so you want to be able to get data directly from the source so we've worked with the agencies to federate access to these authoritative data sources so that you could just stream them as things change you don't need to you know go try to get the new whatever dataset you are actually looking at whatever the freshest data is so maybe I'll stop there John is at the Executive Director of the BCGI so if you want to get any information on BCGI you can contact QAT you can contact me at john.he.adamsatvermont.gov or any of other means you can just come talk to me I'll be here in the afternoon yeah people don't talk to each other enough especially not in my profession thank you John so now that John has given us lots to think about I think it's time to turn the proceedings over to Rebecca Stone Rebecca's been working with VPA and the rest of the committee on this conference to facilitate to design a facilitation around the afternoon breakout sessions and I'll let Rebecca give us the lowdown on that and I think just from a logistic perspective there is a sign out sheet there's a list outside that tells you where to go if you're interested in a session I think Rebecca will cover that too thank you great thanks Mark and thanks to everybody you've just taken in a ton of information and data and opinions and we're really excited now to flip that around turn it over to you it's time for VPA and folks in the room to hear what you all think about Act 250 what's great what's working what could be improved what will make this act really fulfill its commas into great things so I have a few announcements I'm going to introduce what we are about to do for the next hour and a half and how it's going to happen we actually have a jam packed hour and a half so we'll try to give you some pretty good instructions I do have a fun announcement in addition to the work announcement so what's one you guys want first fun or work fun okay good choice so after this all wraps up if you are not jetting out of town VPA is generously buying appetizers for folks for a little planner's therapy over at Worthy Burger so if you need to process and get some things out come on over it is a cash bar but we invite you to join us on the patio do you want to get a really quick sense of how many people might join it's not a firm commitment but I want to tell them how much to make so raise your hand if you think you might come over and join us all right you can still change your mind so after the conference if you do want to do that pack up you can swing by the self-reliant and farmers market on the green on your way that'll be rocking and come over we'll have appetizers around four at Worthy Burger all right so now the work that has to happen first as I said the purpose of the next breakout sessions are really to get your input on what you've heard today and give some structured recommendations that can inform the work of the commission so I think we heard this morning that there will be a report and somebody coming out of this conference everything you are about to tell us in the breakout sessions will be captured in that report as we've also heard this is an incredibly diverse group in the room today that is wonderful and it also means we are not looking for you all to agree on anything so when you get into your breakout sessions we want to make sure it's a really open honest free-flowing conversation that you feel free to speak your mind and that there is not pressure to come up with a group consensus on what is said we will capture all the different opinions and want to know how you all think we won't be recording because we want to make sure it's a really open and honest conversation and everyone feels free to really share opinions so what you're about to do is to pick one of 10 topics that are in your packets if you did check out the posters that were in the back of the room it's the same 10 there they all have a room assigned so you can look in your packet we are going to do two rounds of conversation how many of you have ever done a world cafe? a lot of people so this is similar in that we're going to have one conversation to start that's really about doing an assessment and a temperature check on act 250 related to a particular topic and then a second session that builds on that first conversation we're not staying in this room there are no paper to scribble on on the table so not quite a world cafe but we do want to make sure we can really get through that assessment part in the first round mostly save the recommendations and then we'll come back to that after a short break you are free to stick with the same topic for both rounds of conversation or you can switch if you want to check out something else you may find that your first conversation gives you great ideas about a different topic and you want to bring those ideas and make sure that topic has the benefit of what you've heard we are going to take about a five-minute break