 Good afternoon and welcome to the House Committee on Environment and Energy. This afternoon we're gonna continue discussing S100 and we have with us Mayor McCullough from Montpelier. Welcome. Thank you. Good afternoon, Madam Chair, members of the committee. My name's Jack McCullough. As of last month, I am the Mayor of Montpelier. Before that I served on the city council in Montpelier for five years. And for the entire time I've lived here in Montpelier in Vermont, about 40 years. One of the main activities that I've been working on has been advocacy for housing, especially for low-income people. As I know you're aware, our state is facing a severe shortage of affordable housing and housing for all income levels. This crisis is affecting communities across our state and Montpelier is no exception. We are in dire need of more affordable housing options for our residents. In recognition of the extreme housing shortage in our city, Montpelier City Council has established housing development as one of the very top priorities in our strategic plan. We've been working with housing developers throughout the city to address this need. And while these efforts have produced no affordable housing, particularly in downtown, we're painfully aware that much more needs to be done. We believe that Act 250 has a significant impact on the creation of new housing. So in our view, it is important to update the Act in ways that support the creation of affordable housing in our, for our residents. The amendment being proposed by representatives, civilians, Sims, and going crucially is a step in the right direction. We believe that these reforms will help increase the supply of affordable housing in Montpelier across the state, while also preserving the character of our community. I've often said, you know, Montpelier has been at a population of about 8,000, close to a hundred years, and clearly could absorb a significant amount in increase in our population without doing a violence to the character of our community. In regard to S100, we specifically support exempting the construction of four or fewer units from counting toward determining jurisdiction for Act 250 and raising the threshold for Act 250 to 15 units to 25 units located entirely within a designated downtown, designated neighborhood development area, village center, and a municipality with permanent zoning and subdivision bylaws for a designated growth center. Montpelier has permanent zoning bylaws. We have a professional zoning planning and development department, and we have capacity to evaluate applications that come to us and to apply the legal criteria that apply both to our own bylaws, and to Act 250. While we believe that to address our housing shortage, we really need to move aggressively on larger developments and you're probably aware of areas that we're looking to develop in the country club road property to the east of in the east town and savings pasture, which many of you have probably heard of. We also think that an increase from 10 to 25 units for the threshold would enable us to facilitate smaller developments in appropriate areas, particularly those that are downtown. We recognize that these changes to Act 250 will not, on their own, solve the affordable housing crisis either in Montpelier or in the state. Additional measures will be needed to address this problem fully, but we believe these changes are an essential step forward to create more affordable housing in the modern. Thank you. Happy to answer questions. And I have this in writing and we will be submitted to the committee. Thank you for your testimony. Do members have questions? Representative Smith. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. How big is the problem in Montpelier of homelessness? When the motel program ends and people are turned out on the street, we're expecting maybe 100 or 200 people to be, yeah. One of you, there's been recent news about the fudge in Burlington. And it leads me to believe that it's not a great idea, but what's your thought on it? I thought it's a potential temporary idea and we've looked into it here in Montpelier. One of the real issues with the pods and with any form of shelter for the homelessness is not so much the structure itself, but staffing and program. We know in Burlington they were ready to go a year ago and they didn't have the ability to staff it. The company sells these products, won't even sell it to you unless there's an organization in place ready to manage and provide programs. So it could be a partial solution. Now, we invested a lot of money just in the last year on converting a hotel down on the very Montpelier road to shelter and it's good, but it's limited, we need a lot more. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you for your testimony. Thank you very much. Next, we have Zach Hale joining us. Hello, Zach Hale and I live in Bennington, Vermont. I do have a PowerPoint if I can bring that up real quick. Let's see, let me just share my screen. All right, thank you for this opportunity. Just thought that I'd bring some examples that wanted to cover the 10-5-5 rule and just discuss kind of the challenges that I'm facing as a developer in Bennington, Vermont. For some reason it's not going. So I'm with Hale Resources LLC, we're a real estate development property management company. We're a family owned and operated. We've renovated about 50 properties in Bennington, Vermont since 2009 and that includes about 125 units that are in our portfolio and ones that we manage for other people with our property management company, community resource management. Again, here to talk about the 10-5-5 rule and the barriers that we're facing because of it. And I'm not here to discuss actually 50 as an issue that has caused anything in the past or gotten us to where we are today. I think it's important to just recognize that we have a housing crisis right now and I just wanna address what challenges we are facing currently and with future growth of our company as well. One of the major tools that we've utilized over the past few years is V-HIP and happy to talk about that later if anyone has any questions. But so this is a list of all the units that we've utilized V-HIP for or that we plan to. On the bottom there, 809 Main and 319 Pleasant Street, those are two that we have in our pipeline and are currently working on. 809 Main Street is actually something that's in our portfolio now and 319 we're about to close off. And as you can see, adding units to the market since 2001, we have nine here. Before I get into some of these examples, I just wanted to mention two different things about where we are today with our housing and maybe some of you already know this, but when it comes to Bennington, 78% of the renter households are actually one or two person households. And there's a disconnect between what is available and what people need for housing because there's a lot of large structures. As we can see with the housing stock and when it was built, it was many decades ago back when families were larger and also it just goes to show how old our housing stock is as well. And here are three or different examples of just those massive buildings that this is on Pleasant Street in Bennington, area of town that we focus on a lot. And these are big old buildings at the end of their useful life that have been inefficiently cut up over the years. And they're in need of repair, some serious repair. I'm just gonna remove these, but Pleasant Street just very densely populated here. And in this 0.2 mile stretch here, there's about 117 units from these larger buildings getting cut up. And just to put that into perspective, Mabel Street right here is 0.2 miles as well. There's 33 units. So I just kind of wanted to mention that about some of these areas in downtown. So this is 701 Main Street. This is the first VHIP project that we did. And as you can see in the pictures around it, this is a commercial space that was vacant. Actually this building, there's another one next to it that we'll get to both of these buildings were vacant in 2020 and so we purchased this property. And we turned the commercial space into two, on the first floor of this building into two different units. And so here are those units. And as you can see, we kept the storefront and everything that's actually in a historic part of town. And so we kept a lot of that historic nature of the building, but created some beautiful units out of it. This is 705 Main Street. This is directly next to it. And this one we also renovated. This was a two unit at the time. As you can see in the picture on the left, you would walk into that kitchen and then this is the middle pictures with your back to that kitchen. And you can see that extra door there. I mentioned that door because what we did was we closed off that area so you can't walk through these spaces anymore. If you look in the top left corner that is that doorway that I was just pointing out that is now an entrance to an apartment. And we created this apartment upstairs that did not exist. So if we're keeping track right now, that's two in the other building and one here. So that's three units. This is a project right down the road, 219 Pleasant Street. This was a 10 unit that we actually converted into an 11 unit. And we did so by, if you look at the top pictures, you can see the roof isn't quite as large as it is down in that bottom picture we put those dormers in which gave us enough space to actually add a unit to this building. And so what was a 10 is now an 11. That's four units we've added. And there's a picture of the building after it's done. Here's some pictures of the units that we renovated. And you can see the kitchens in the bottom left and the kitchens now in the top left bathrooms. So that was 319. Now I want to talk about 323 Pleasant Street which is this one in the middle or on the left. And so this was a three unit or a three bedroom unit that was on the first floor. And as you can see, actually we had the kitchen all torn apart because we had to replace it as we're planning on just renovating this. And as you can see in the bottom left, those inefficiencies I was talking about on the bottom left, there's that really narrow space. That's actually, you had to walk through that to get to the bathroom. So this unit just was horribly laid out. And as you can see on the left, we had an efficiency and this three bedroom and would be the blue space. So that was what it was. And this is what we turned it into. As you can see, there's a one unit, a two bedroom in the back. There's a two bedroom over here in the top left and then a one bedroom down here. And these are those kitchens for each unit, some bathrooms. This is what we turned that space into. So this was adding another one. And so right now what we have is a eight or nine. This one we haven't done yet, but this is our next project that we've been awarded. We're planning on starting this, hopefully by the end of the month or by the end of next month. And we are gonna take this commercial space. This is a 3D model that this is the floor plan it created, but I didn't have an existing condition, but this is what we plan to turn it into is a unit here and a unit here. So this would be adding two units to the market with that commercial space. And just to give you an idea of some of these, the size of some of these projects too, this is a $200,000 project for this eight or nine main of turning those two units, that commercial space into two units. And so the next one I have is 319 puzzles. So if you remember this picture, the one with the boarded up windows on the right there, this is another unit that currently sits like this. We have this property under contract and we do intend to renovate this. It's currently a two that we wanna turn into a four. And so that would be another two units that we add to the market. And this one will actually not be owned by me either. This one will be owned by my sister and my brother-in-law, but because both of them work for hail resources, which is a business I own and then that business will manage it after, they are considered the same person when it comes to the Act 250, 10, 5, 5 rule. And so this will add to my unit count and get me to nine units. And so right now we have 321 Pleasant Street, which is the single family home in the middle of both of those properties. This is actually a picture of what it was before we rented it out. And here's some pictures of what we got it back. This is the second time that this has happened and we've really determined, okay, this is just like not this, we need to reduce the size of this house. It's a single family home and just make it into two one bedrooms. And hopefully we will not have to do renovate it again. But because we're at that 10, 5, 5 rule and we're at the nine units, we have them all planned out. This building has actually been sitting vacant for since October, which it could be two units, but we're actually looking at probably the best idea, like the best thing for us to do is just to tear this building down so that we don't have to do this anymore. So that's really where we're at at this point in time. And it's funny too, because I bring up this picture once more because as you can see this large building over to the left there is 650 Main Street. And this is a priority housing project, which is an amazing thing. And it's allowed us to really push a redevelopment of that property along very quickly. And so right now we're looking to put 37 units in this building and along with a community space and a childcare facility and getting through active 50 has been a really big part of that. So I just wanted to point out where our designated downtown is. As you can see, this star all the way to the left, that's 219, that was one unit we added. Those two next to each other, that is 319 Pleasant Street and 323 Pleasant, which is three units we'd be adding. This star in the middle here is 701, 705 Main, three units, and then this star all the way to the right is 809 Main. So there is our nine units all together right there. And so to do that one unit that I had mentioned, add that one unit to the portfolio, we'd have to go through active 50. And so I just kind of bring it up next to the VCDP program guide because our two guides active 50 is 51 pages, VCDP 30. And really the thing about active 50 in this situation is I literally just don't have the capacity to go through an entire active 50 process to add one unit to the market. It's supposed to be the 10 criteria, which I've looked into. And I'm not sure that we're covering a lot, we're affecting a lot of these things. And when you really get down into it, it's actually about 30 criteria. I would just say, I bring this up just because this shows the village centers and the different areas where those priority housing projects could happen. And I really just, I saw this visual and I just couldn't believe that there's all this other land that these things could happen. We have these very historic structures in these areas that need this redevelopment. And I think that this is where the state is trying to push the funding and being able to get through that active 50 process would just coincide with everything else that the state is doing. And in addition, this is a property in Rutland and we're trying to expand to Rutland right now. This is a perfect example of having this VHIP funding, some VHCB lead funding, weatherization from 3D thermal and efficiency Vermont. This is additionally the budget for a CDBG grant that we are awarded. And when we finish this project, these will be the rents will be pretty low and it'll bring in about $51,000 per year. This was a three unit that we're gonna turn into a five unit. And I just bring up this pro forma because as you can see the net cash flow is not significant from this, but if you reduce those two other units, then we're not cash flowing. And so it's adding these units to the market or adding these units to the projects that allow them to move forward, to increase that cash flow and cover the cost of debt that you need in order to take these, to get these projects off the ground. So we're currently using state funding to renovate existing structures. We got tight margins. There's a build that's trying to encourage dense development and our housing stock is very old and needs attention the most. At 250 is just really the most thing is just the time. It's just adding one unit to the market and having to go through that process is just impossible, but there are additional costs and the uncertainty is quite large when you're bringing in a lot of different funders. I think making it so that less than four units does not trigger the active 50 threshold or increasing to 25,55 in all designations including village centers or even making existing structures exempt would significantly improve our ability as a developer to create more housing and do this the most efficiently soon. And that's all I got. Thank you for your testimony. You've given us a lot to think about. I am, do you end up owning all of these properties that you've just walked us through? Yes, we do. One of the benefits is like we own it, we renovate it and then we manage it and it's just keeping those costs down is one of those efficiencies except for that one unit I mentioned, one building I mentioned that my sister will own with her husband but we'll still add to our account. And do you have a active 50 permit on any of your projects now? No, the only one that would have triggered it would have been that thousand square foot building that was exempt. But right now I have projects that I could be moving forward and I just don't have the capacity to go through an active 50 process to add one unit to the market. I mean, it's a 50 to $100,000 job that I should just be able to hand off to my crew and they can just take care of it. And instead I need to go through this whole other process that I just don't have the capacity for. Yeah. And can you tell us how the VHIP program works for you? What does it mean for you to apply for and engage in that process? My team puts together a budget. I then fill out about two or three pages of an application. I include our lease and it's really simple. I mean, VHIP is something that we can, I could apply for in an hour. And then after that, they come and take pictures. They then go through the, and then they award the grant if it meets the criteria of everything. And then we have another walkthrough at the end of the day and we submit invoices. But that's, I mean, it's just like any other project except for that we have assistance from the state. And it's been a game changer. When it comes to upgrading our heating systems, doing exterior repairs, renovating units that haven't been renovated in 20 or 30 years, VHIP has been amazing and it keeps the cost down. We're now required to do fair market rents. And we're running to people that wouldn't normally pass our screening criteria because we're partnering with people with entities like Pathways and Pave and we're doing MOUs and we're having service providers assist us with renting to people who are facing homelessness. So it has also changed a little bit of the way that we operate as well. And how long, I guess, how many of those projects have you done with VHIP? We've done about 30 units and 22 of them were units that we renovated and then we're at nine, well, we'll be at nine that we've added to the housing stock. And then like we're kind of done with that part. I mean, we have, the thing is is we have all of these units that come available that are three bedrooms that have two entrances that could use some upgrades that we could turn into two one bedroom apartments. I mean, that happens pretty often but we will not be, I mean, we're going to just turn it over and rent it out rather than adding that extra unit to the market that meets the needs of people living in our community. But we're just, we can't do that, honestly. Other members have questions? Representative Morris and then Sabine. Thank you, thank you very much. Mr. Hill, what are you installing for heating systems in these units? So typically we're doing, we're replacing what is existing. So sometimes it's propane, sometimes it's oil. We haven't found, I assume you're wondering if we're putting like heat pumps in and stuff and we just haven't found an efficient way to do that. Typically when it comes to heat pumps you need a very tight envelope. And because we're not completely renovating the property and put it like doing all new insulation and making it very airtight, heat pumps just aren't efficient enough to heat something like that. And we'd have to leave those heating systems in any way as backup. Is that a common boiler furnace or is it the split per unit? Even if it was split, we would put in one heating system for the entire building and include heat in the rent. That is always how we do it to avoid any issues. Thank you. No question. Yeah, well, now I have another question. Yeah, thank you for your testimony this morning. So I just want to make sure that I'm understanding a couple of things. It sounds like you pay the heat in your pulse type. And when you're renovating them, are you improving the weatherization at all? Yeah, and actually in 323 Pleasant Street, we actually worked with efficiency Vermont and three thermal and did all spray foam in the downstairs portion of that building. There were two units that were rented upstairs that had tenants in them during construction, but we did significantly increase the insulation of that particular one. And we do that when we have the opportunity to, but typically we're not doing that. We do that when we have the opportunity to, but typically we're not doing the entire building. When we're doing these renovations. And then my second question is on the, I don't know if this is the right person for the question or not, but so in the bill, we're envisioning. I mean, I mean, would that help your situation? I feel like it would not help your situation. Maybe. Yeah, it's interesting because, so I see, I'm actually in Rutland right now. And I'm seriously interested in expanding up here and focusing on the housing stock that's here. There's a lot of vacant properties that, you know, this is what we do. And one of the things that I've noticed about a lot of the vacant units here is that they are duplexes. And from an operational standpoint, one of the hard things about a duplex is that if you have one issue during the year, it no longer becomes profitable in that year and you end up losing money on it. And so when we give advice to family and friends, we typically say nothing less than a three unit. If you want to have an investment property, unless you're living in it. And then, you know, it changes it. Okay. Thank you. Representative Smith. Thank you. If you are at liberty to say, and you don't need to. What do you get for rental. On a one bedroom in a two bedroom. It don't feel as though you have to answer that question if it's private. No, no, no. I think, you know, anything that I can do to help. You all make decisions as I'm happy to share. I'm happy to share. When it comes to the VHIP units, are you asking about those? Particularly or just in general. The one common general. So we have to do HUD fair market rent. And I believe those are around eight 30 or something for a one bedroom and 11. Between the 1,000 1100 for two, but I'm not 100% sure. I'm not 100% sure. But typically with a one bedroom, we would get about 900, 950 for a market rate unit, unrestricted unit. And about 1100 to 1150. For maybe upwards of 1200 for two bedroom. Thank you. Well, Any further questions. Thank you for your testimony. You're welcome. Please let me know if there anything else ever comes up. Happy to help. Anyway, I can. Thanks for the opportunity. Thank you. All right. Next we have Charlie Hancock joining us via zoom. As well. Good afternoon, Madam chair, members of committee. Can you hear me okay. Pretty well, we may need to ask you to turn your video off, but let's, let's try with an on for a minute. All right, let's go for it. Internet up here in the, in the great north is always touchy. So we'll adapt as we go. So again, good afternoon and thank you for the ability or the opportunity to chat with you today about us 100. Again, for the record, my name is Charlie Hancock. Your agenda is correct. I am a consulting forester with Northwood's forestry. And I'm always happy to chat with you all about anything to do with trees or national resources. But today I'm here with my select board hat on. I've served as the chairman of the Montgomery select board for just shy of 10 years now. And I have some, I have some thoughts around S 100 that I would love to share for you. You know, it's towns like Montgomery that really form the backbone of our state. And so we need to ensure that whatever we do around housing and development, that it works for communities like ours. Because Montgomery has a population just shy of 1200. So we're one of the 90% of towns in the state with a population less than 5000 people. And so we need to ensure that we have a population that is less than 1000. Or also one of 141 or about 50% of towns. That don't have a town manager or a town administrator. I highlight that because it means that the work of the community is carried on the backs of volunteers. Those volunteers are assisted critically by entities like our original planning commissions. And so for this reason, we strongly support the addition of housing resource navigators at our RPCs. And so we're working on that. And so we're working on that. And so we're working on that. So the item that we have in the bill is passed by set an economic development and it's in the amendment presented by the rural caucus. Montgomery and many rural communities like ours are small, but when it comes to planning and zoning, we do have our act together. One example of this is that Montgomery was one of the first in the state. If not maybe the first in the state to work with DC and a city coordinator to help move that forward. So that's the key. So again, I'd like to highlight that there are several occasions to reach a balance between resource protection and encouraging smart growth development inside of our village centers. And I point these out because sometimes there's a feeling in towns like ours that when pillar doesn't think small rural towns are capable. But we are capable. And we want to do big things and we want to have the ability and flexibility to build on our strengths. caucus amendment to S 100, which really level the playing field and let us sit at the big kids table when it comes to planning for the future of our community. Like so many communities, large and small, housing is one of our top priorities. As such, our community launched a really ambitious municipal wastewater project back in 2019 to serve our two designated village growth centers, not only to sustain our existing and in most cases, aging housing stock, but to allow for and encourage new infill development in those designated areas, which can still support it. Our story sounds a lot like other communities of our size, you know, 92% of our existing wastewater systems in the center and the village are on small lots without suitable replacement options. And the wastewater capacity is already limiting new housing and business development. One of my favorite, but least favorite examples of that is less related to housing, but in terms of business development, trout river brewing. Folks probably familiar with that. They ended up opening shop in Lindenville that were going to be in Montgomery, but there was no wastewater capacity here. So they didn't. So we've already lost opportunities. So we're trying to really kind of filter the future to capture both the business development as well as the housing development. So now having started that project in 2019, we're now set to break ground next spring on two septic tank effluent pump or step systems, which are small diameter forced main collection and conveyance systems. We'll have one system for Montgomery village and one for Montgomery center, both of which are designated village centers in our community. A full build out capacity, these two systems are going to serve 375 equivalent residential units with 175 parcel connections occurring on day one. Those day one connections account for about 283 ERUs or about 75% of full build out capacity. So that's leaving us with that 25% additional capacity to reach that full build up that we're looking at 50 years in the future. As we've worked through this project, affordability has been at the heart of balancing what we build to meet the needs of today, but also, like I said, ensuring that 50 year build out. Today we've raised $15 million in state and federal funding for a $16 million project. That's 95% from state and federal resources. And that gets us to the user fees of 1.4% of MHI for our community or on $410 a year. I just note that because these projects are insanely inexpensive. And when you look at small communities like Montgomery and other rural communities in the state, our grand list, our tax base can't support a lot of the big ticket items. And so when we think about affordability and the local versus state and federal funding, we really need that to support to get to that affordability. Another important thing that we really learned is that rural wastewater looks really different than urban and suburban wastewater development. These aren't the traditional projects with infrastructure in the road right away with manholes every 50 feet and high intensity lagoon treatment systems. Those traditional models don't work when we think about the need that are really at community scales. We've had some people equate the system we're building to things that they see in actual planned unit developments elsewhere in the country because they really are these community-scaled systems. And that's because the traditional systems that we see in larger communities just don't work logistically. And they cost up to five times as much to build. The unique nature of these community systems gets specifically at the capacity considerations that we have to think about and how capacity in turn affects affordability. Section two of S-100 has a direct bearing on what this means in practice. When we looked at capacity and thought about 50 years from now, what do we want to see? What do we want to influence? We literally went lot by lot in each of our designated village growth centers to say, what's there today? What do we want there? What could be there? And parcel by parcel built out this system according to what we knew at the time and what zoning would be allowing us to do. And so the concern is that the added future capacity to the system to account for the potential full buildout under this one-size-fits-all approach in S-100 would mean increased costs today without the user base to help financially support the system. It's really a balancing act and a one-size-fits-all approach taken to wastewater infrastructure may inadvertently tip the scales in the wrong direction when it comes to what we or what any other rural community can afford to build at this time. Related to affordability, we need to break down as many barriers as we can and reducing the cost of these systems once they are right-sized, especially given the inflationary pressures that we're seeing on materials. I mean, pipes, I mean, everything. It's just it's in crazy the amount of increase we've seen. And so that's why we support the Rural Caucus Amendment, which waives prime agricultural soils, mitigation fees for an alternative or community wastewater system that will serve development within a designated area or, in our case, within our two village centers. This may seem like a small thing, but every dollar saved in developing a project is a step towards affordability. Frankly, the only places in towns like Montgomery, where you're going to find the disposal capacity for systems like the one we're building is that hay meadow or that corn field just outside the designated growth center. Our friends in Westford have another great example of how this works in communities like ours. In addition to insuring affordability, we want to streamline the process for housing developers to ensure that we can attract projects and to get them completed expeditiously, removing duplicative processes and eliminating red tape wherever possible, while still ensuring the best outcome for the community. For this reason, we support the Rural Caucus Amendment, which removes duplicative A&R water and sewer permitting, as was passed by Senate Economic Development. We also strongly support increasing the 10-5-5 trigger for Act 250 review the 25-5-5 for all designated areas, including village centers with permanent zoning and subdivision bylaws, as well as to exclude projects of four units or less from counting towards the 25-5-5 limit, both of which are found in the Rural Caucus Amendment to S-100. We allow these and other designated growth centers in the state. There's no reason that we shouldn't allow them in our designated village centers. I say that as an advocate of Act 250. I've sat in multiple committees over the last four bienniums, advocating that we should expand the extra jurisdiction to our highest ranked priority forest blocks, the slow forest loss limits, limit fragmentation and ensure that we maintain a viable land base for our working lands enterprises and for climate resilience. I am far from an Act 250 heir, but I do think we need to balance. We need to find a balance in reducing the permitting, the permitting burden in those areas that we have affirmative. We said, as a community, we want to see growth and that our local processes guide that while the adjustment to 25-5-5 is not the blanket exemption of Act 250. Many of us have asked for in our designated growth centers. It's a fair compromise that moves us towards these shared goals. This tweak in jurisdictional review isn't just an academic exercise for us here in Montgomery. Recently, a local e-owned company called Trout River Developers purchased a 16-acre parcel right in Montgomery Center, which encompasses the last significant area for high-density infill in this designated village center. Phase one, which I've already started construction on, is a singular mixed commercial residential building. Ground floor is going to have a restaurant and an ice cream shop with two two-bedroom units upstairs. We're pretty excited for that, especially the ice cream shop this summer. Phase two, though, focuses on building out much more senior and affordable housing with a mix of single and three-bedroom units. Raising the cap on jurisdictional review will allow the project to more efficiently navigate the permitting process while still allowing for local review and approval and reducing duplicative efforts. So in brief, just to recap, we do have some concerns about a one-size-fits-all approach to zoning tied to wastewater infrastructure because of the capacity and affordability questions that it raises. Instead, leaving these questions in the hands of local planning and zoning whenever possible, we do strongly support adjusting Act 250 to increase the 1055 trigger to 2555 for all designated areas, including village centers with permanent zoning and subdivision bylaws and excluding projects of 40 units or less from counting towards the 255 limit. We support removing duplicative A&R water and sewer permitting. We support waiving prime ag soils mitigation fees for alternative or community wastewater system that will serve development within a designated area. And we support increasing the capacity for smaller rural communities like ours by adding housing resource navigators to the RCPs, all of which are included in the rural caucus amendment to S100, which you're all now considering. With that, I'll end and thank you for your time. I'd be happy to take any questions. Thank you for your testimony. Yeah, Rep. Yes, I understand that. Thank you, Chair. Tell me the name of the wastewater treatment system that you guys went with so I can online or what the general name is or. You're asking for the kind of system, not the company that we're working with? The kind, yeah. I'm sorry, the company or the kind of system? Yeah, so it's a septic tank effluent pump or step, STP and small diameter force main collection and conveyance system. Essentially, it's it takes the traditional wastewater systems that we think about in any kind of residential development, like right here at my house, where you have a septic tank and each field. And what it does is it uses tanks on each individual property as a first layer of treatment. But then the force main collection and conveyance system essentially takes the wastewater to a centralized treatment facility, which acts more or less like a large leech field. There are some secondary tank filters, but it's that leech field and groundwater filtration, which acts as that as that final layer of treatment. And again, that's very different than some of the systems we think about. I mean, when we first talked about a wastewater system in Montgomery, people said, where are you going to put the lagoons? Where are you going to put those big, stinky things we don't want to see? We're not building that not only because we don't want to, but because it makes absolutely no sense for communities of our size. To be honest, as we've worked through this project with DEC, which has been a fantastic partner. There have been moments where we've kind of discovered together that we are forging new ground in a way. You know, these systems are new in Vermont. Some of the technologies we're using are new. The way we're designing them are new. But if we're going to build systems that work for communities of our size that are affordable at the scale we need them to be, we got to think differently and we got to start acting differently. Representative Tory. Quick question for you. Thank you very much on that description of the technology. How does some energy come into the picture? How does energy? How does it power? How does it power? Yeah, so there's a few ways that we can do this. The way that we are looking to do it is to run power actually from either pump stations or the centralized collections collection facility itself, run power through the system with the pipes within the conveyance system. Most of it is gravity fed, but there are pump stations within each village center that need to be powered. So we're going to have hard power through the pipes. There are going to be generators associated with the pump stations as well as backup. The other way to do it, which we thought about, was you can actually tie the power system into each individual property. So actually tying it into their own their own their own box. The issue here is that with the way that state and federal funding works, all the infrastructure associated with this project is owned by the town of Montgomery. And we really don't want to be owning things that are inside of other people's houses. And so running the power along the along the lines of the system itself, with the backup generators, the pump systems or pump stations, we can we can meet these ends without having to tap into individual power supplies. Any further questions? Representative Sebelia, so just on your your system that I hear you saying you're forging some new ground. Are you aware of other similar types of systems being completed or having been completed? Yeah, so we've we are aware of some systems that are similar at a smaller scale that have been designed elsewhere in the country using similar technologies. But again, these are for like more of big planned unit developments and not for rural communities at the scale that we're thinking about. So to my knowledge, there's no other system in the state that is set up and operating quite like we are right now. There are other communities, though, right now that are wrestling with these same questions. I think Wakesfield is still working through one Westford Greensboro. So in a way, we're all a little bit like guinea pigs in a fun, exciting way, trying to figure out how we can get the assistance bill approved by DEC and and done all in an affordable and affordable way. But one thing that we've talked about over and over again with our partners at DEC, our partners at USDA Rural Development and just around local communities is that we want to serve as a model. I mean, once we get done with this, we want to be able to say to folks, here's what worked, copy it, do it. Here's what didn't run away from it as fast as possible. And here are the tools that you can use to help, you know, make that dream a reality in your community. You know, rural communities like ours talk a lot, you know, ever since we launched this project and kind of word got out about it. I get calls, you know, once, maybe once every two weeks from some community or some planning commission in the state saying, hey, we want to do this, we're thinking about doing it. Where do we start? What do we do? And so kind of building those blocks of resources, you know, community to community or through the RCPs or through DEC, it's all going to be critical to make this happen. Because, like I said, you know, half the communities in the state are going to advance these projects on the backs of people like me who thought, oh, yeah, both the wastewater system, it'll be fun. They said, yeah, it'll be easy, right? So the more resources we can give to communities that don't have in-house paid staff, the more likely we are to see success. And just what stage is this project at? Is it? Yeah, so we're moving into final engineering in Montgomery Village now with the intent to break around there next spring. Next spring through summer, we're going to finish final engineering in Montgomery Center and break around there the following spring. And then our drop dead date for completion is the end of 2026 for no other reason than that's when a lot of our funding sources turn into a pumpkin. Thank you. Can you give us a sense of the costs and how much the town is paying out of those costs? Yeah, so, like I said, the whole project cost right now as of today is about 16 million. We've managed to raise 15 million through state and federal sources, leaving one million coming from local sources. That one million is coming from user fees that go towards debt service and O&M costs. And then we also instituted a local option tax last year, yeah, last year, which is dedicated solely to the debt repayment on this system. It's written right into the charter that those monies can only go towards the debt repayment for a system for this purpose. And so those funds, which we had pegged at about $35,000 annually, those are the local dollars going into support this as well as the user fees for the users, which as I said, we've gotten down to about 1.4% of mean household income. We had gone to the community at one point with a broad-based tax increase to support the debt service. And that was voted down. The community said, look, we've got tax number of other pressures on us right now. We're also trying to do this at that point during a pandemic so people were a little bit touchy about big changes like that. So we went back to the drawing board and said, hey, if it's not going to be kind of a broad-based tax increase to support this, what are our other mechanisms? And that's when we looked at the local option tax and figured that that was the way we wanted to go. Representative Bongards. Hi, Charlie. How many gallons a day do you estimate for each of the two systems? Oh, God. That is a number that I have written down somewhere, but I do not have on the tip of my brain. For some reason, 50 to 60,000 gallons stands out in my head, but I don't recall if that is overall capacity daily or some other number. I'd be happy to track that down though and email it to you. Okay, that would be great because I think that systems under 100,000, those community systems under 100,000 don't have the density requirements so you might, it might be, but I want to check on that, I think I'm right, but let me. You are. Great. Okay. Yeah, and I will check too. I, unfortunately, remembering numbers is not my strong suit. I could tell you the Latin name for an obscure plant out in the woods, but numbers, just not my thing. That's fine. Yeah, I think of you all, that would be great. We'll do. Thank you for joining us today. Great. Well, thank you very much for your time. I think members, we're going to take a five minute break. We're going to re-communicate our meeting and continue discussing S100 and welcome Ed Stannick. Thank you, Chairman Sheldon, Chair Sheldon. A way of introduction. My name is Ed Stannick. I'm a resident of Barry City. I was employed for 30 years as a district coordinator for the activity program, district five, which consists of the 35 towns in Washington and Memorial County. I also served for six years as a member of the Barry City School Board, including one year as chair. And for three terms, as president of the Vermont State Employees Association. I mentioned those backgrounds simply because my testimony would be provided from those three different perspectives. And I thank you for this opportunity to testify. There's no doubt that Vermont is experiencing a severe housing crisis. It is likewise certain that this crisis has been growing for years. Solutions to this crisis require clarity regarding both the causes and the potential solutions such as those contained in S100. The Act 250 permitting process and housing issues are pretty much revealed by statistics. The NRB provided this committee on April 21st, last Friday with statistics about the processing of Act 250 applications. In the written version of my testimony, I provide you with direct links to those submittals from the NRB. The long story short, those statistics reveal that over the last five year period, over 3,000 housing units have been permitted by Act 250. And that 89% of those 3,000 units were processed by Act 250 as so-called minor applications. Meaning that there were no hearings, there were no parties involved. There was an expedited review. The average processing time for those applications was 73 days. The NRB also provided statistics about appeals. Legislators are often told that the appeals of Act 250 decisions are causes of delay and cost. But indeed, in the annual report given to the legislature, this one was dated February 15th, 2023. And again, I have a link in my testimony. At page eight in that report are the statistics on the appeals of Act 250 over the last five years. Over the last five years in total of all land uses, there have only been 30 appeals of Act 250 applications, only 30. That's an average of six per year. And that's all land uses, not just housing. Thus, it's reasonable to conclude that there really is no demonstrable proof as opposed to anecdotes and myths that the Act 250 process is a measurable cause of the housing crisis. Over time, priority housing projects have been exempted from Act 250 review. The NRB also provided this committee last week with statistics on the number and locations of the preferred housing projects that have been permitted. Upon closer review, it's interesting to note, although there are hundreds and hundreds of projects which were permitted and therefore exempt from Act 250, many of those projects have not proceeded to construction. So simply expediting permits does not automatically equate with shovels going in the ground. It would be interesting to look at some of those projects permitted, not yet under construction as to what causes the delay in construction taking place. Legislators are also told that Act 250 is a duplicative permitting process and that towns with zoning and subdivision bylaws are adequately prepared to assess the impacts of proposed development. Some towns indeed have strong bylaws and well-trained DRB members, but they are a minority. Many DRBs have significant turnover in membership, while others have members who see their role as fostering growth rather than applying bylaws. And some members unfortunately have conflicts of interest. To be clear, this is not meant by me to be at broadside against local control. Nearly my honest observations for many years of witnessing the administration of municipal bylaws in the 35 towns in District 5. Although the legislature has mandated many studies over the decades of the Act 250 program, to my knowledge, there has never been a comprehensive quality control study of how the enabling provisions of 24 BSA Chapter 117 have actually been implemented by the towns. For the last 50 years, the complementary, not competitive, not duplicative, but the complementary roles of municipal DRBs and active 50 district commissions have served the public interest well. It has not been uncommon, for example, to have a DRB indicate that certain issues and complicated cases like flood plains, like ground fields, even traffic, that those issues, quote unquote, will be taken care of by Act 250 and the DRB passes the ball on those issues. So it's worked quite well for the last several decades in terms of a hand in glove approach to how development gets reviewed. I'd like to move on to some comments specific to sections in S100 itself. Section 16 in the bill is the provision which raises the threshold on jurisdiction from 10 units to 25 units. This provision originates from a fixation that reductions in land use regulation will somehow result in an increase in the construction of new housing despite the lack of proof that existing regulations have been detrimental. So we're going to raise the threshold with no indication that there's a significant problem caused by the current threshold of 10 units. Section 16A in the bill proposes a new master plan permit process. The town can enter into this before a district commission. From my perspective, it's difficult to fathom why any town would want to pursue such a permit. Even worse, attempting to implement this section seems most likely to result in significant costs to the town and the making real of the concern of the Vermont Supreme Court that the administration of Act 250 can turn into an administrative nightmare. The court said that years ago in Ray Agency of Administration which was a master plan case ironically involving the Capital District itself in Montpelier. So again, section 16A sounds good. Master plan permit process, I think very few if any towns are even going to take advantage of it. Section 17 is the provision which talks about enhanced village designations which would increase the jurisdictional threshold from 10 units to 50 units. The enhanced designation, the way I read the bill would be met with three rather anemic requirements are met by the municipality. One, that there are permanent zoning and subdivision bylaws. Two, that there's municipal water or sewer infrastructure. And three, that there's adequate staff on the town level to carry it out. So think about that. Those are the three standards which result in the enhanced designation raising the threshold from 10 units to 50 units. What happens to the combined and cumulative impacts of the build out over time of those multiple units in the small compressed setting like the village? Act 250 has experience on the other hand dealing with those cumulative and combined impacts over the course of time. Section 17C in the bill extends the scope of a report which the NRB is to give to the General Assembly by December 2023. That report was originally to cover a quote on quote necessary updates to Act 250. S 100 would add to that charge by having the report include jurisdictional standards for housing projects that will lead to affordability and what would be the effects on the quote on quote natural community resources protected under the Act 250 criteria. To cut to the chase, I feel strongly that the NRB is incapable of producing a sufficient report because it lacks the expertise and experience to do so. I will discuss this in more depth in a few minutes under my testimony for section 19, that being the inability of the NRB to perform its duties. But as an aside, I testified before this committee during the last two legislative sessions, I believe there is indeed much wisdom in pursuing consideration of new location-based jurisdictional triggers for Act 250. I think that's a really important idea to move back to 15th and 21st century. I can be as pragmatic as the next person where it comes to legislation. And then frankly, I'd be glad for you to think about a horse trade. In other words, perhaps jurisdictions should be seated to the municipalities and ANR permitting in the valleys and Act 250 should be retooled to deal with the impacts of growth in the 21st century and the higher elevations. I use 1500 feet as a line in the sand, protection of the headwaters and stuff like that. But that's not the subject of S100. That's down the road. And as I said, it's an aside about further considerations in a comprehensive way of changing the jurisdictional triggers for Act 250. Back to S100, sections 18 and 19 in the bill, talked about enhanced designations for designated areas. Again, I think there's a strong probability that a few of any towns will make use of the convoluted process as it's spelled out in the bill. For more to the point, this would all play out in front of the natural resources board itself. I and others believe that the NRB is a failed administrative entity. It's been floored from its creation back in 2005 during the so-called permit reform legislation. The NRB has never performed or been involved in any fact-finding proceedings. Fact-finding is as much an art as it is an acquisition of skill sets. Few, if any, NRB members have had any actual experience on the district commission level. Pro-active rule-making is an integral function of any administrative body because the rules ensure the orderly and efficient operation of the program. The fact is the NRB itself has not undertaken any rule-making efforts since 2015. I listened to Mr. Hell's testimony a few minutes ago and it doesn't have to be that way for a developer such as Mr. Hell building development. If the NRB had a hands-on approach to overseeing the Act 250 program, they could have been extremely proactive over the last several years. They could have revised Act 250 Rule 51 which deals with so-called minor applications. Provisions could have been added to Rule 51 specific to housing, to speed things along. For example, Mr. Hell should be invited in for a pre-application, meaning that the district commission staff. It's absurd to handle a developer like Mr. Hell the 32-page application form that makes no sense. Back in the day, there used to be a short form for projects like that. How come that doesn't exist anymore? The NRB really hasn't done its job. In terms of reducing cost for these projects, I think the fee could be reduced. That would require a legislative amendment since fees are locked in by statute, but either a reduction in the fees for housing projects or a temporary waiver of them would certainly reduce the cost upfront for a developer like Mr. Hell. The point here is that if we had a proactive NRB, affordable housing would move more efficiently through the process as it is right now. The NRB in addition has been without a rudder. It does not engage in substantive work in its meetings. We inform this committee to conduct a review of the NRB meeting minutes. And one would see that it now meets on a quarterly basis and the average meeting time of its meetings are 10 minutes. So this is the entity to which the charge would be given to carry out all these other processes as spelled out in S100. It simply isn't capable of doing it. There have been proposals in the last couple of sessions to replace the NRB, which are much more viable board. Unfortunately, those provisions haven't gone anywhere. So in summary about Act 250 changes, the net outcome of the approach in S100 to address housing by means of a reduced role for Act 250, from my point of view, we'll have no tangible effects in resolving the housing crisis. Regulation will only result in the dismantling of the process that has worked well for many years. I wanted to address three other factors about the housing crisis. This comes from my perspective on the school board in Barry City and also at the President of the SCA. I was on the school board down here in Barry between 1984 and 1990. At that time, Barry City had jurisdiction over K through 12, including what was then called the Vocational Training Center. That was the transition period when high-tech jobs were coming in, right? All the kids were being encouraged to train for computer skills. Some of us asked, but what's gonna happen to the ongoing traditional trades, the carpenters, the plumbers, the electricians? Are we going to ensure an adequate workforce going forward? That was all lost in the shuffle of high-tech jobs. We made additional inquiry of the Department now agency of education. We got no assurances from them of policies and programs to train carpenters, electricians, and plumbers going forward. So this crisis has been a tidal wave building over time. Now we have an inadequate workforce to construct affordable housing. In my written testimony, I provided a link to a good article in seven days from last fall, which took a look at the workforce in Vermont. And indeed, the fact is, we need 500 to 1,000 new trained people for these construction jobs in order to build housing. They simply aren't on the radar scope. Again, this is no surprise. Back in 2000, the district commission I worked for reviewed the $300 million master plan for still mountain resort. There were substantial issues across the 10 criteria. The district commission retained its own expert, an economist named Tom Kovet. I'm sure some of you are aware of Tom as he does work for the joint fiscal office. And Tom, on behalf of the district commission, took a look at the master plan provided by the corporation. And the point is this, even in that time period of 2000, it was recognized that all the construction of Zinguan and still mountain resort could not be sustained by the Vermont workforce. There simply were not construction workers to do all that construction. So the secondary impact for that project was construction workers that were going to come into Vermont to build the project. Where were they going to live? What would be the effect on affordable housing? Were they going to be pushing Vermonters out of apartments and other places to live? So again, that was over 20 years ago. This crisis has been building, building and building. And the issue here is, we can issue all the permits in the world and grease the chutes as much as we want. But if there is not an adequate workforce, who's going to build all this housing? Who's going to renovate the housing? I walk around here in Barry City and there's empty homes all over the place, but no people with skill sets to renovate that housing. I fear this is only gonna get much worse. With the money, the awkward money coming in and the anticipated construction projects for infrastructure, there's gonna be even more pressure put on the workforce to do those projects at the same time we're trying to build affordable housing. So I think that's a very substantial missing link in this discussion about the affordable housing crisis in Vermont. Who's going to build all this housing? Another concern is the Airbnb phenomenon. You know, we think Airbnb has been with us forever. Airbnb only began in 2008. And again, to cut to the chase, here in Vermont, the number of short-term rental units has risen from about 6,600 units in 2017. And it's around 9,700 units at present. Another word to point is this. During that five-year period, there was a loss of over 3,000 units that would otherwise provide housing for full-time Vermont residents. They were converted into the land use, which would otherwise have been met by hotels, motels, beds and breakfasts or ends. So we are now missing 3,000 apartments and homes, which would otherwise house Vermonters. Now Vermont's not the only state that's facing this phenomenon. I would encourage the committee to take a look at studies and reports performed by other states to come up with a remedy for that. And in fact, other states have implemented successful solutions to address the loss of units to the Airbnb phenomenon. This really cries out for immediate legislative action to return these existing units in Vermont to the housing pool, not for tourists, but for full-time residents. Think about that. 3,000 units disappeared from the housing pool in the last five years. And the second category of missing houses, the way I'll put it, is the phenomenon caused by second and third homes in Vermont. You may have seen an analysis done by the Pew Family Trust, which considered housing vacancy rates in the States across the country. Vermont is tied in first place with the state of Maine for the highest vacancy rate of existing structures, existing residential structures. A significant factor of this is seasonal homes in Vermont. There indeed was a time in Vermont from the 1950s through the 1970s when there actually was a surplus of housing in Vermont. And that dovetailed well with the policy at the time to increase the tourist economy in Vermont. It worked well at that time. But I think now the time has come to revisit those policies to see if they should still be encouraged. Think about that. 20% of our housing stock is sitting vacant because people only use those structures maybe two or three weeks out of the year. There's quite a array of tools in the legislative toolbox as to how all those units can be pushed back into the housing pool for full-time Vermonters to provide housing. So in conclusion, the housing crisis in Vermont has many causes and it's been unfolding for decades. Unfortunately, there's no quick fix. But one thing is clear at least to me, reliance on accelerated deregulation and market forces will not solve the crisis. Further deregulation through increased jurisdictional exemptions will only weaken the effective Act 250 permitting process and lessen the opportunity for legitimate public participation in district commission proceedings. In all honesty, it's a bit of magical thinking to assume that reductions in regulatory reviews will somehow increase the construction of new housing. At the same time, the desperate need to reintegrate available housing units back into the bank of homes and apartments, full-time residents, rise out to regulatory measures. Thank you for your consideration of my comments. I'd be glad to answer any questions. Thank you for your testimony. Representative Smith and then Stabilia. Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. I'm reading the exceptional vacancy rate of Vermont housing stock. And it's saying here, there's a high percentage tied with Maine. Now, when they're considering this, are they considering, I own a camp with no facilities, I pay non-resident taxes on it. Is that part of this consideration? I believe what they did, I'd be short answers, yes. I believe they took a look at all inhabitable residences in the States and then determined, I think the fact that they use how many are vacant six months or more of the year. And that was the definition they used to come up with the vacancy rate. And that report is available online. Would it be safe to say, you think that there may be, if there's a thousand or 1500 hunting camps in the state, that's part of this misunderstood percentage? Based on the definition of the Q trust, I guess that would be true, yes. Okay, because it just seems like there's not, I'm sure there's a lot of seasonal homes, and probably seasonal homes is no comparison to what my camp in the woods is, but I'm just curious as if those were considered. Representative Sebelia. Yes. Thank you. Thanks, Madam Chair. Thank you, Mr. Stanek. I have three items I wanna ask you about. I heard you talk about the success that we've seen with Act 250 thus far. Can you point to something around that has worked really well with Act 250 that has led to the building and housing? So how has Act 250 encouraged housing? Yes. I think one clear answer is in the statistics themselves that Act 250 has processed 3000 units as minor applications. So they went through the process in a matter of 30 to 60 days. I think that's a significant contribution to housing in terms of expediting the ability for shovels to go in the ground. So going through a permitting process was an incentive. It helped increase housing in the state. Yeah, another good example too, was Act 250 for over 25 years now in reviewing the large master plans for ski areas has been taking steps to attach permit conditions for mitigation payments by the resorts towards the funds for affordable housing. And in fact, that prime of the pump. I think one of the first commissions that did that was District 5 in the context of the Still Mountain Resort. So for every unit built at a resort like that, there's been a contribution paid to the regional housing trust to help subsidize construction of affordable housing. So there's an affirmative example of how Act 250 has actually, in the real way, have been helping to fund affordable housing. So not one of my remaining two questions, I would love to follow up with you on how those funds are expended and where throughout the state. You talked about the need for 500 to 1,000 new people to build housing. And of course we have a pretty significant workforce shortage across all of our sectors. Where do you think those folks will live that if we could get them here? Well, that's a great question. You know, I volunteered for quite a number of years here in Barry at the Good Samaritan homeless shelter. And I'm so great to see some of those people now living in our community because that provided the relief they needed. I guess answering your question. Now I see a lot of folks, a lot of young folks now who would benefit from skill sets that would help them move out of either a homeless situation or an unemployed or an underemployed situation given the skill sets that they move up the ladder. And then in turn, that would be able to help them sustain affordable housing units. So I'm not sure I'm answering your question but I just wanted to make that link. You know, the training of a workforce would also be able to help people move into housing and help solve the problem. I'm not sure that, thank you for your answer. I'm not sure that that actually addressed my question. Of course we've got a huge demographic shift in our country and a shift in the global workforce but if we were to bring in a skilled workforce if we were, and of course we needed for housing and other infrastructure projects. You know, I'm not sure where we would put them. I'm not sure, you know, where the housing is for them through the state, which I guess would lead me to my next question. You may or may not know, I live in a resort town, one of the larger resort towns in the state Dover. And the buildings in our town, we have one-fifth of our grand list is residential, four-fifths is non-residential. The employment base, the employment opportunities for folks are not centrally located in along the spine of the green mountains where a lot of these vacant homes are. So, and I've heard this notion before, of somehow we can incentivize, put in place some sort of policy with these vacant vacation homes that could help vermonters. You know, talk to me a little bit more, you know, I mean, we might be looking at in the valley where I live, you know, four, 5,000, you know, homes, well, probably three or 4,000 units, 5,000 units, but no employment base. So, how, you know, how does that, and my question is because I feel like that's just an ant, you know, something that we can point to and say, we don't need housing because we got that, we could just make that housing for vermonters. So, how does that work? Housing on the base of Mount Snow for folks that are trying to work in Springfield at the hospital or in Brattleboro at the retreat or in Bennington at McMoulding. How does that work? Well, I think that's why the legislators should have a study commission on this to figure out all those, the answers to all of those questions. I mean, one answer that comes to mind is a solid transportation system would make it feasible for people to be transported from the rural settings to the areas where the jobs are. You know, in all honesty, I don't have the answer to your question. I think the point I just try and make is that there are existing units in Vermont homes which are not being used. Meanwhile, we have full-time Vermont residents that are struggling for a place to live. It seems like there's a disconnect there. I don't know the answer, but the reality is that there are these residential units being underutilized. So, you know, just last question actually, just back on this topic. So, you know, in Dover, where we have this plethora of housing for our weekend residents, it's 30, 35 minutes to our employment centers. So does that housing in our mountainous region and then 30 to 35 minutes round trip to employment centers, I mean, is that kind of fitting into our ideal of smart growth? Well, we're living in the age of people working remotely. I would note that. So it would seem to me that, you know, folks could be living in some of these residents assuming that there's adequate infrastructure available and working remotely. And I think a lot of folks are working remotely for Connecticut and New York, but probably not at Mack Moulding or on the floor of the retreat. Thank you. Other questions for Mr. Stanek? Thank you for your testimony. Next up, we have John Adams. Good afternoon. Hello. I'm John Adams, director of the Vermont Center for Geographic Information. And is it possible to share my screen here? Yeah. Thank you. And given screen share. Excellent. So I've prepared a few slides for the committee relating specifically, I guess, to population estimates. The question I received around population estimates and designated centers. See, for those who aren't familiar, I don't think I've been in this committee for a while now. What does the Vermont Center for Geographic Information do? A big part of what we do is build some of the state's foundational data sets. So things like our statewide partial data, our elevation data, our imagery, and administrative boundaries. We lead the use and development and coordination of our geographic information system. So working with our partner agencies at A&R and Enon, Vermont, and Agency of Transportation. Make sure we're coordinated and making data available that meets certain standards. And then we work to empower folks with access to data and visualization, enabling them to see it and use it through things like map viewers and participating and helping folks like the committee and working on things like providing data when requested. So we've received a number of requests throughout, I think, S100, the life of S100 and before related to designated downtowns, one of them being related to the size of those designated areas in relation to the state. So here's a slide showing the 32 square miles in relation to the 9,600 square miles of the state of Vermont. And just recently we asked the question, does anyone know the percent of the population living in designated centers in Vermont? And we went and looked at some numbers and came up with an estimate around 12.7% living on inside designated areas, that would be all of them, and to 87% on the outside. We did this using a population model using 20, 20 census data, Enon, Vermont residential points and additional data sources like the Chinook County Regional Planning Commission's housing data, our parcel data, and then others like Green Mountain Power and other local sources were available. Typically we would use just census data, but since we're dealing with such discrete areas that wasn't possible. So census blocks are the most granular geography for which population counts are available. This gives you a picture of sort of the different geographies that census data is published at. If you look at that block level, when we say, okay, telling which blocks are, let's say in a designated area, you would capture areas that are much larger than those. So this is an instance where we're just trying to capture the small yellow point. You can barely see that, and we would be counting far too many people. So we built a high resolution population model. We actually did this during the pandemic to help the Department of Health with drive time analysis and the distribution of testing and vaccine locations. And it's really based a lot on the Enon, Enon points and then refining it, excluding things like seasonal units from the Grand List, camps, and then making adjustments in some areas to adjust for home ownership, resort towns, put some interesting challenges, but we tried to refine it as we could, and then also we're accounting for institutional housing. Since then there've actually been a number of other housing models and more of them now publicly available. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory has gotten much better, very recently using, also using census data, but a number of other sources, including some that we published like our parcels and building footprints and then other local sources. And their estimate using their data is very similar to ours at 12.4%. I have made it, we could publish the population data on this map viewer. So if you were to go to s100.matvt.com, you'll see a number of data layers that we've been adding as some of these requests come up for the population estimates you would need to toggle them on. So you would select the layer tab, click on the I icon, and that would turn on the population estimates, and that would give you a high resolution estimate from the land scan or from the Oak Ridge model, each of those points representing approximately one and a half acres in size. So these are the slides that I've prepared for the committee and I'm happy to answer any questions related to this or any of the other map layers we have available. Great, thank you. We do have a link to this mapping tool that you've shared with us, but I also would love it if you could send us your slides after we wrap up. Yes, I have sent them to the committee. Okay, great. So I have a question about the areas, the designated areas that you calculated. Does that include the half mile and the quarter mile around like a downtown or a village center? Like for a neighborhood development area? That does not. I have, we did calculate for a half mile around all of them, so it would be a half mile around every designation, including the neighborhood development areas and growth centers. And that population number leaves around 37% of the state population. So much bigger, larger percentage of the population is living in a half mile of these areas. Okay, that's important because it goes from 12% to 37% within a half a mile of those. Okay. Do members have questions? It's your chance to ask mapping questions. A lot of this is based on mapping. Really great mapping tool. Great, thank you for your testimony. Representative Stebbins. Thanks, Matt. Maybe. Hi, this may be a very unfair question, but I'm wondering given that what you do all day is mapping, how you've seen other communities sort of balance some of the questions that you've been hearing be asked in S100. And if you have no comment, that's fair. I'm not sure I can comment, to be quite honest, I have not been following the discussion in S100 and not very familiar with the issues that was asked this pre-question and have been asked others related to specific areas, but some of it I don't have in the full context. Okay. Representative Vaughn-Gards. Good, I think that you said that the current designated areas in Vermont total about 32 acres, square miles. Square miles. Okay, that helps. And if you included, if you expanded that to the half mile around each of those, do you know or can you calculate how many square miles we're gonna be talking about? I'm not gonna try to do that up the top of my head, but I'll follow up and give you that number that would not be a hard thing to do. That would be great, thank you. All right, I'm not seeing any further questions. Thank you for joining us. You're welcome. Thank you. Great, except we have Brian Redman. Madam Chair, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. For the record, my name is Brian Redman. I'm the director for the drinking water and groundwater protection division in Vermont's DEC. A little bit about my background. I've been working in the water in wastewater regulatory programs in a variety of capacities for over 20 years now. And I spent the last seven years as the director for what's known as the drinking water and groundwater protection division. The division that I manage regulates Vermont's public water systems. We issue permits for soil-based wastewater systems. We issue permits for private water supplies, so wells and springs. And we issue permits for connections to municipal or to public drinking water and wastewater systems. The topic of water and wastewater infrastructure is a very wide-ranging and broad topic that spans multiple programs across DEC. So I will rely on my experience and do the best that I can to answer any questions that you may have, but I may need to get back to you if I don't know the answer, given that this spans a lot more than just what I manage at DEC. I'd like to start just by saying, in terms of S100, ANR supports increasing housing opportunities in areas served by municipal water and sewer infrastructure that have the capacity to serve. Section two of the bill establishes prohibitions for making water and sewer capacity quote available. And from our perspective, ANR thinks that these provisions provide the tools necessary to ensure that the water and the wastewater systems are suitable for the development. More specifically on page five, lines six and seven, we see as important pieces of the bill. I also wanted to provide the committee a little bit more context on how these drinking water and wastewater systems are regulated and specifically as it relates to this question around capacity. Starting with public water supplies, Vermont's public water systems are highly regulated entities through a series of both state and federal regulations. The state issues permits that regulate numerous activities in public water systems, including public water systems ability to expand. Vermont has many small public water systems. I'm gonna use round numbers here, but there are approximately 1,400 public water supplies in the state of Vermont. Approximately 400 of these public water supplies are classified as public community water systems. So those are the water systems that serve our cities, towns, villages and fire districts. Those are classified as community water systems. Approximately three of the 400 community water systems in the state of Vermont serve populations of under 500 persons. We have a number of very small water supplies across the landscape. 300 of those four? 300 of the 400 serve fewer than 500 people. There are only seven systems currently in the state of Vermont that serve populations greater than 10,000. So not a lot of large systems and lots of small systems. Seven. Greater than 10,000? 10,000. Seven that are greater than 10,000. 400 in total of community. Of those 300 serve fewer than 500 persons and seven serve greater than 10,000. It's a mouthful. A systems ability to expand is limited by its design capacity. In a public water supply context, that could be its source water capacity. So the source of water, if it's a well or a water body that provides the community with the drinking water source, it's treatment capacity. So the ability for the public water system to adequately treat all water that serves the community or its storage capacity to meet the community's needs. You'll hear this again when I get to wastewater systems but all water systems must operate within their design capacities to meet their permit limits. Those are the upper level thresholds and they have to operate within those limits to be able to expand. So a water systems ability to expand is controlled by state-issued operating permits. And these systems can fall into basically three categories under those operating permits. No restrictions on expansion. And this is the majority of our municipally owned community water systems. They can freely expand and grow. Not permitted to expand but may have some limited capacity subject to our approval. So they may have a design limitation that they're bumping up against or historical legacy data was brought over and we may not have a documented yield, let's say. And there may be a limited amount of ability to expand based on data that we collect on a routine basis. Again, these are highly regulated activities. And so there are a few systems that could not be permitted but with some more engagement with the agency there is ways for limited expansion. And then finally, there's some that have a documented inability to expand. That could be due to a limitation on the design side. So as an example, a small community may not have enough source water to meet their needs. They run out of water. They have to haul water to meet the community's drinking water needs. Those are the types of systems and we do have a few in Vermont where we would have them on a moratorium from expanding their service. There are also instances in the community water context. Think homeowners associations. Those are classified as a community water system, privately owned but community or small fire districts in the municipal context that those water systems have been built out to their for their intended use and are fully built out. So many of those systems that are essentially at full build out are not able to expand until system improvements are undertaken to increase the ability to expand. So moving on to wastewater systems. Let's see. Do folks have water system questions? Yeah, Representative Sebelius. Yeah, on the community water systems, thank you on the HOA. That was a question that I was coming to there of the 300 or of the 400 community systems. How many of those are for HOA versus designated area or for town? I don't have the data in front of me, but we can pull that. You don't have the data. It's not with you. Yes, I can tell you how many of the community water systems are homeowners associations. It's essentially the data that you're looking for. Yes. So for instance, in my town, we do that have public water. And we have, I don't even know how many community water systems, probably a dozen. So, and none in our residential area. So that is a really important data piece for me. So if you were able to provide that. I just like to provide that. We definitely have the data. Representative Pat. Are the homeowner association type systems, are those considered public or community water systems or are they considered private utilities that would by statute anyway be regulated by the UC? So under the Safe Drinking Water Act, they would be regulated as public community water systems. So from a regulatory scheme side of things, they're considered public community, but they're homeowners association by legal organization. So they are privately owned, typically not for profit, typically not subject to public service. Are there any still any private utility water companies still in existence? I know they're regulated by statute, but I don't think, I don't know if there are any left of those. I believe there are a small handful. I can get the list if that's something of interest, but I do think there are a few left. Oh, we have a question from Representative Logan. Thanks. Thanks for asking that question, Representative Sebelian. Just to be clear, a municipal sewer, municipal sewer and water infrastructure. Is that public sewer and water infrastructure? What's being referred to here in S100 or do the systems that you're talking about that serve homeowners associations count as municipal sewer and water infrastructure? It's not sure on the definition. Yeah, I think, again, I'm not able to speak at all aspects of the bill, but I believe the intent is to drive the density into areas served by public water and sewer that I think are in designated areas if I'm not mistaken. So yes, I think generally speaking, that's not gonna be your homeowners associations. They are called public water systems, but not really, I think what this is driving at. Okay, I'm gonna start with council also because the definitions are on our end, so. I'm curious how much that had a lot of influx of federal dollars. Some of it's targeted for infrastructure. How many communities have either expanded or have been able to add a public water system or are planning to? So I will follow up after my testimony and provide a list I had gotten your note about interest in understanding what's proposed for under construction. And I will provide you a list of what is current. On the drinking water side, there's very few. In my tenure, we've developed very few public water systems in the state. The two that come to mind right off the bat would be the town of Weitzfield, similar to the situation in Dover, a number of small public water systems. And that public water system was built there to consolidate those. And then the South Albert fire district, number two. Right now under consideration is the development of a new public water system for the town of Tillington in response to widespread contamination of PFAS. So that's the municipal scale drinking water project that you'll see on that list. There's many more on the wastewater disposal side. I think you've heard from Mr. Hancock from Montgomery earlier today. The agency has a village wastewater initiative to look at the development of wastewater capacity for villages that are currently not served. So I'll provide the committee with that list plus anything that's been sort of inquired about from the agency, I will file that. As far as the federal money is concerned, we're at a moment in time where we have a transformational opportunity through the bipartisan infrastructure law, there's significant increases of funding specifically for public water systems, a six-fold increase from what we historically see. The agency is developing a number of programs done through our annual intended use plan to identify the ways that those funds will be spent. A significant increase in just plain refurbishment of outdated infrastructure. That remains a priority and is still a priority with those funds. Can you just, is there a brief history? Like I feel like we're in a moment of significant interest at the federal level on water and sewer, but, and then, you know, some of our towns have had it for a very, very long time and then others never got it. And so I'm thinking that somewhere in the background there's maybe Clean Water Act, federal level, something motivated it and then it sort of went off. Petered out, is there a, you know, the history of those investments at the highest level? Yeah, I do think that there are people in the agency that would be better to speak about this than I. So Neil Kamman is our director of our Water Investment Division and Eric Blatt is director of engineering. Eric has been with the agency for since really the beginning of this, even watched all this unfold, but essentially it was transitioned from construction grants into the Revolving Loan Program. At the highest level, that's really the trajectory that this has seen. And we've been administering the Revolving Loan Funds for a number of years now. We saw the major increase under the Recovery Act in 2009. Now we're seeing the substantial increase under the bipartisan infrastructure law. So there's a real focus on making sure that our water and sewer infrastructure is really suitable for the future. That's the opportunity we're in right now. I'll let you keep going, please. Okay, so I'm gonna switch gears briefly to wastewater systems. So my role as the director, we oversee the soil-based wastewater systems. Peter LaFlam, who's our director of watershed management division, oversees the direct discharge wastewater systems. So in the state of Vermont, just to kind of give the big picture, there are 94 direct discharge wastewater treatment facilities in Vermont. So these are the treatment facilities that are being treated and discharging into surface. We under our indirect discharge program, which those are the soil-based wastewater disposal, sewage disposal to the soil into the groundwater and indirectly into surface water. We have 14 permits for municipal systems under our indirect discharge program. The list that I will provide the committee is our Village Water and Wastewater Initiative funded through ARPA. There's a, you'll see a number of communities on there looking at soil-based wastewater disposal to meet their community wastewater needs. And I will follow up after this testimony with my remarks as well as the list. All wastewater facilities must operate within their design capacity to meet permits. So similar to drinking water, there's design requirements for the system and the municipalities that are operating those facilities must operate within those design parameters. On the wastewater side of things, both organic capacity, so think waste strength, as well as hydraulic capacity, so think flow, volume, can limit a wastewater system ability to expand. EEC issues permits to wastewater treatment facilities that require facilities to operate within their capacity limitations. And similar to drinking water, the allocations for wastewater capacity are managed by the municipality themselves under those permit limits. EEC issues permits to connect for both drinking water and wastewater systems through its wastewater system and portable water supply program. So that is our quote, WWW program. And that is a program that is administered under my division. I think that is all I had for you today. Thank you for your time and I'll try to answer any questions. Thank you for your testimony. You've been asked a number of years in a row and are being asked again to consider eliminating the hookup permit at the state level and letting the municipalities who can manage it themselves, manage it themselves can use help us just remind us what those permits do. So the WWW program, one of the permit triggers is that when there's a increase in design flow or a change in use of a building or structure that would trigger our permitting requirements as well as any new connection to municipal water and wastewater. There was a fair amount of this discussion that's been happening for several years as you've indicated in the 2019 regulations. We developed a new exemption that allowed designers or consultants of these projects an exemption from receiving permits if they could certify to the fact that the infrastructure that was serving that building or structure is suitable for its new and intended use. So we created an exemption in 2019 but the vast majority of connections require or require permits unless they're exempt. So has there been uptake on that 2019 change or people certifying that they're? I think some. Yes, I don't have the numbers in front of me but yes, in exemptions put in place that people will use it if they qualify. And can you, is it a redundant system? Can the state do it and the municipality do it? Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think in previous years, the agency has supported the provisions for the Transfer of the Connection Program. I think since that time, there's been a number of different conversations happening and I think right now, working with our sister agency at Commerce and Community Development to offer language to look at the connections a little bit closer. I think bringing the stakeholders to the table I think is important. I think the connection permits involve sort of four parties. Right now it's the development community. It's the consulting community, so the licensed designer, engineer and consultant. It's the municipality and it's the state. And I think bringing those, I think the consultation I've had with some of the municipalities that I rely on for feedback on our programs have offered some very good suggestions. And I think bringing people to the table is beneficial to make sure that the system that is designed is the best system for them on. Okay, so am I hearing two things? Is there work that's needed or are you bringing language to do that work that's needed? I think, yes, we are gonna propose language. Okay, and what's your timeline on that? Soon. That would be good. Very good. We look forward to getting that tomorrow. Fabulous. Representative Bogarts. I just wanna make sure I got a couple things right to set up right here quickly. So we have 94 direct discharge systems and 14 direct discharge systems. We have a total of 185 indirect discharge permits for sewage systems. 14 of those are municipal systems. So I was trying to narrow the field for where we may see housing development. So an example would be the town of Warren, the town of Rochester. Both of those communities have soil-based wastewater disposal through an indirect discharge permit. And the other systems backed out the 14 from the 185. So the other systems are, right, like they're like housing development or something? Small, municipally owned. Yes, I think, yes, small. That's the 14, right? The 14. So I was asking about the others. The remainder of the 185. Okay, largely manufactured housing communities could be in there. Small HOAs could be in there. Ski resorts are probably the biggest. Ski areas are largely indirect discharges. Yeah, and I'm happy to provide the committee with the full list if that is of interest. I have limited time to sort of crunch the data. That's, you've given me enough. Let's see. I think, yeah. John Adams is gone, but when we look at the mapped areas of places with wastewater, does it include the indirect and the direct? I couldn't really see the map to it. Well, not the data he showed us, but like I've looked at it in the Atlas just on my own and it does show the sewer service areas, wastewater treatment areas, service areas is what I should say. And so does it include those, both of them? I will need to look for the sewer sheds are there for the indirects. I don't know offhand. And so there are 94 municipally owned direct discharge, but only 14 in there. Inicipally owned indirect discharge. Which I think is where that's probably, those are the areas that we're really talking about. Right. Representative Clifford. Thanks for having me, Jim. Thank you for just talking. So what classification would spray fields fall on? Us, sorry. Class would like spray fields. Indirect as charges. Indirect, okay. I didn't hear what you asked. What category would spray fields fall under? So indirect regulates subsurface sewage disposal as well as spray, and then the land application of non-sewage waste. That's sort of the parameters of what requires an indirect discharge from it. Are there further questions, Mr. Redmond? Not seeing any. Thank you for joining us today. We look forward to all that extra information. Thanks. All right, members, our next witness, we're going to, Mr. Brian Lowe has a bit of a time constraint. So we're going to welcome him up and let members know that we'll take a break after. That's the first, because you have a limit. Fine. Thank you. I'm happy to adjust if you need. It's child care pickup. I don't mean to hold. No, no. And we're good. Thank you. Thank you very much. Actually, very good. Would it be helpful to go right into remarks? Yes, please. Thank you. My name is Brian Lowe. I'm the Executive Director at the Vermont Council on Rural Development. I want to thank Chair Sheldon, Vice Chair Sebelia, and Ranking Member Bongar. It's an opportunity to testify with you today. And I'm testifying specifically to an amendment proposed for S-100, not on S-100 itself. I'm also aware I'm the final witness at the end of a long day. We don't have to actually hear the amendment after you. We haven't heard it yet. We switched it with Representative Sebelia who's going to present the amendment, but that's okay. We can do this. We do it all the time. I am very grateful to be with you. Thank you. And I will still keep my remarks short and focused, though. So the Vermont Council on Rural Development is a state rural development council. It is charged by the federal farm bill with serving as a neutral, nonpartisan facilitator and convener in rural parts of the country. For us, that's Vermont. Our mission is to support Vermont citizens and residents to build prosperous and resilient communities through democratic engagement, march on resources, and collective action. Broadly speaking, we have several programs focused on strengthening local capacity, but much of our work is in communities where we are invited to focus on identifying local priority projects, connecting people to resources that make those projects happen. This gives us a lot of exposure to different kinds of challenges and opportunities that communities face and trying to advance different public projects and in particular infrastructure projects. As outlined in the proposed amendment that you'll hear about from Representative Sevillea shortly, the Rural Recovery and Coordination Council would convene a broad group of legislative leaders, administration officials, non-profit, and academic partners to focus on structural changes that could support coordination across all levels of government in service to rural economic development, resilience, and environmental goals. Depending on the committee's timeline and interest, there may be an opportunity to add a select member or two to the composition of that council to highlight further rural voice. And then the Vermont League of Cities and Towns has the ability to support that process should the committee want to make that amendment to the amendment. Moving this amendment forward would strengthen the important work the legislature and administration have already done in this session in creating the $3 million municipal technical assistance program, which you did as part of the Budget Adjustment Act. That is designed to assist communities, practice state and federal funding, communities that are scored as kind of relatively low capacity, having the first place in line to access those funds. The council outlined in this amendment would work to identify ways to hear and support rural voice, to increase municipal capacity, to increase regional collaboration and the integration of state regional and local plans, as well as state regional and local policies and investments, and establish an office of rural economic development for some period of time to be determined. This kind of coordination would be useful not only in building on the $3 million set aside to increase local capacity that the legislature has already acted on. It would be important because it is happening at a time where there are this disparate amount of federal funding programs that are available that could support new infrastructure investments that we hear about in communities and ultimately lead to more housing creation. The work proposed also reflects some of the needs that we're hearing in communities, especially a desire for additional capacity to support a full kind of spectrum of engagement from community engagement to identify specific local projects all the way through grand administration and project management and closing out of these grants. Many times infrastructure projects that communities that we work with identify are also projects that help support housing creation, whether that's the wastewater in Montgomery or Burke or London Dairy or downtown investments in places like Putney or renovations or new builds directly. Bringing a broad range of voices together as a council as is contemplated in the amendment would help chart a useful and productive path forward to potential structural changes that elevate the capacities that we hear about a lot in communities even further within state government. But the last point I would make is that VCRD is envisioned as having a role organizing and supporting these meetings. In talking with Vice Chair Sebelia, we wanted to make clear that we'd be helping facilitate these meetings. I'm not just providing a ministers for actually running the meetings. That is our kind of job and function as an organization. And we think it's really important to have a clear role of exactly what we would be doing. As facilitators, we don't have a particular outcome in mind. Our job would be to draw out the wisdom of these council representatives and make sure that a broad range of voices are heard and make sure that there's a clear and timely path forward for this work. And then the last point I wanted to make may be a rookie mistake, but while we appreciate the funding allocation in this proposed amendment, I wanted to note that we felt after doing our budget for this program that we could do this for less than the 40K allocated. And in fact, we think we could do it for about 30K, not $30,000. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your leadership. I'm happy to answer your questions. Thank you for your testimony. Would you be able to submit that in? Yes, absolutely. To Kate, when you're gonna have a chance. Thanks. Members have questions? Can I speak to this? Shall I make? I think we get a few, sure. If you want to speak to this part of it, because I think if we have further questions that you can still be here for, that's a good idea. I think, you know, Brian's done a great job in talking about the ongoing work around rural capacity. But I think a number of us see that for our small towns that hill is kind of growing. It's not leveling off. When we think about climate change, when we think about globalization of the workforce and digitization, these challenges are continuing to grow. Adaptation is continuing to grow. And we are looking at, you know, Burlington and Halifax, both having to interact with the state at the same level. And that's really challenging for Halifax. You know, are there systemic ways that we can think about that could be helpful to Halifax in order to be more proactive and likely to meet the pretty significant adaptation measures that are going to be necessary with climate change for our rural communities and then building up and modernizing infrastructure. So we see this as foundational to beginning those kind of longer-term conversations. And I think anything that you would clarify or clear up? No, I think there's an excellent summary. And it feels like a useful functional body to serve an important purpose and help elevate, consolidate, and act on some of the rural voice concerns that we hear in communities across the state. Can you tell us a little about your background in developing this section of this part of this program? So this is sort of work that I do. Community development work is my job that I do outside of here. Looking at ways we can build capacity, having communities come together to learn together, maybe work together, share resources together to do things that they're not necessarily able to do on their own or that they don't have the capacity to do it on their own. And so looking at kind of a systemic way for putting this in place throughout the state for our rural communities, I think the work that we're doing is helpful. Actually, it's not enough, but it's helpful. And I think that model could be built on and replicated throughout the state, particularly I think about infrastructure, I think about climate change adaptation and a lot of our little communities. So that's an answer to your question. I didn't know how much you worked with the people that are in this group to come up with this proposal. The Chief Performance Officer and Secretary of Commerce and Community Development. I think we've had ongoing conversations with them, members of the rural caucus, we've worked, certainly worked with VCRD, members of the administration, the LCT on how are, how are we gonna help our rural communities grapple with these significantly increasing challenges? So I'm not sure if I have gotten there yet, not sure if that's why I think so. I wonder if it would be helpful to just elaborate slightly in that earlier in the session, the really outstanding work creating that $3 million fund for communities to draw on from a capacity perspective that helps provide a funding stream to support specific capacity needs community to community. What is missing though is how across disparate federal programs and some disparate state programs, how the experiences of those communities and how the experiences of a variety of different nonprofit and state partners in a very different funding environment, how that is being kind of pulled together into structural recommendations that come back to the legislature to consider. And so some of what is of interest from a VCRD perspective in this bill is how this structure that representatives of the other have laid out is a way to kind of consolidate some of that wisdom into a group that could make serious recommendations back to the legislature to consider in the next session. Great. All right. Well, thank you for your testimony. Now, the members will take a 10 minute break. We're going to reconvene our meeting. Can you discuss S100 with some language that is being brought to us from the rule caucus? I am Laura Sebelia, Representative Sebelia, welcome. Thank you, Madam Chair. It's a different perspective down here. Bigger. You do, actually. I think this chair, I just a little feedback. No, no, thanks. Our witness is at a disadvantage. I know. I need to write. I've asked about it. I can't hear you as well, Laura. Well, Representative Pat can hear me better, he said. So I guess it's all going to work out. Madam Chair, thank you for time to present this amendment on behalf of the rule caucus this morning and committee members. I thought you'd think it's still morning. Yeah, this is on this speaking this afternoon. So a little context on this amendment. And again, I am bringing this on behalf of our folks. Our caucus members spent a lot of time as a number of folks did, including our arranging member, Representative Baumgartz in conversations this summer and fall with local developers, town planning commissions, regional planning commissions, realtors, VLCT, BHFA, BHCB, DHCH and others to learn more about the challenges and opportunities that our communities face around housing and to identify policy recommendations. Rural caucus pulled those ideas into H111, which had over 50 sponsors from all parties. H111 received strong support from the rural caucus and was incorporated into the rural omnibus bill. That omnibus bill, a number of proposals were brought forward by members and that caucus then voted on what top 10 should be included in our omnibus. This was included. Many of those ideas were incorporated into S100 as passed by Senate Economic Committee. This amendment represents things that were in S100 as passed by the Senate Economic Development but were cut in other committees and or were in H111 that were not included. So the amendment, I'm sure, I think it's up on our page today. It's under my name, but it ends. We were just discussing this. This is really the rural caucus amendment. Although it's listed under Ellen. Ellen. Yes, under Ellen. So on page one of that amendment, we are looking at Act 250 language in section 16 of the current bill that raises the Act 250 jurisdictional threshold for housing units from 10 units to 25 for downtowns, neighborhood development areas, growth centers. This is a temporary provision that would sunset on July 1st, 2026. Our amendment would add village centers with permanent zoning and subdivision bylaws for increasing the Act 250 trigger to 25 units. This was in the as-passed by Senate Economic Development version of S100. And our amendment removes the sunset. The amendment would also exclude projects of four units or less from counting towards the 25-5-5 limit. Other sections of the bill encourage duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes, and this section is intended to recognize the encouragement of those smaller multi-family projects. Page two of our amendment, we are looking at wastewater connection permits. This would remove- Questions as we go, if you want to do a little bit. I will, please do do a little bit. Okay, okay. Page two, wastewater collection permits, connection permits, removes duplicative ANR, water and sewer permits. For a water or sewer connection, a person who receives an authorization from a municipality that does not need to get the same permit from ANR. This was in the as-passed by the Senate Economic Development version of S100. And my understanding is this committee has looked at this provision in the past. Page four of the amendment deals with prime agricultural soils. It would waive the prime agricultural soil mitigation fee or an alternative for community wastewater system that will serve development within a designated area. Right now, NRCS maps soils and when soils have lost their agricultural potential due to development, projects must mitigate the loss of prime ag soils on site or pay a penalty fee. B goes to the Vermont Housing and Conservation Trust Fund for Conservation of Land. Right now, the ratio to calculate the prime ag soil mitigation fee varies. A big box store pays three to one fees. An industrial park pays one to one fees. Development within a designated area is also one to one. And residential housing with a density of at least eight units of housing per acre that meets the definition of affordable housing has no mitigation fee. Right now, we are trying to help communities that lack wastewater systems get that critical infrastructure. These are big, complicated and expensive projects. This amendment waives the mitigation fee for an alternative or community wastewater system that will serve development within a designated area to help reduce the cost of these important and expensive projects. Page six, we are looking at the Rural Recovery Coordination Council, which Brian Lowe just walked through. Actually, he provided support for. Let me tell you a little bit more about why we brought this together again. As conceived, this council or task force, if you would study and make recommendations on how to strengthen coordination between agencies and stakeholders in rural economic development and community development. The establishment of such a council would build on the work we did in committing 3 million to the AOA Municipal Technical Assistance Program this year, which was a one-time appropriation intended to assist those communities with a high need for state and federal grants but lower capacity for assessing and applying for those sources. The Rural Recovery Council would identify structural changes to support rural community development, including a permanent structure for ensuring such programming exists within state government and recommending changes to engage rural voices and regional collaboration and prioritization projects and recommending how municipal, regional and state plans policies and investments can be integrated and mutually supportive. Where we would establish an office of rural community development and how to support capacity and multi-town coordination and collaboration. The members of the council as outlined are the Chief Performance Officer, Secretary of Commerce and Community Development or Designee, Commissioner of Public Service or Designee, Secretary of Transportation Designee, Director of Racial Equity or Designee. One or more representatives from the RPCS appointed by the Vermont Association of Planning and Development Agencies. One or more representatives from the RDCS appointed by the Regional Development Corporations of Vermont, Vermont League of Cities and Towns or Designee, a member appointed by the Vermont Communications Union Districts Association, Secretary of Natural Resources, member appointed by UVM's Office of Engagement, the Housing and Conservation Board and a member of the House appointed by the Speaker, member of the Senate appointed by the committee on committees. Again, this is looking at a pretty big gap that exists where in many other states there's county government and we're looking at some pretty, the capacity of county government. We're looking at some pretty big challenges here for all communities. These communities have less capacity to deal with them. On page 10, we're looking at the Municipal Planning Grants Funding. The sum of $750,000 appropriated in fiscal year 2024 from the General Fund to the Municipal and Regional Planning Fund. This was in the as-past by the Senate Economic Development Version of S100. We are adding language to give priority for funding to municipalities that do not yet have a municipal plan or do not yet have zoning bylaws because that is a key aspect of this housing bill. The intent is to recognize that all towns have zoning bylaws and this would prioritize municipal planning grant funding for those communities. And finally on page 10, Housing Resource Navigators. We heard from Vapta about this. This would have the Vermont Association of Planning and Development Agencies, higher housing resource navigators to work with municipalities, regional and local housing organizations and private developers to identify housing opportunities, match communities with funding resources and provide project management support. This was also in the as-past by the Senate Economic Development Version of S100 and $300,000 in funding is appropriated. It doesn't likely meet all of the need, but it is at least a start. That's it. Representative Pat. Is what was removed after the Senate committee, from the Senate committees, is it all the money stuff or is there other things, other changes as well? There were, I think all of the program funds were removed and then there were some 250 pieces that were removed. So the money was removed, but not put in elsewhere like in the budget? They have not finished their budget. Yes. Typically it goes from the Senate to the Appropriations Committee. I'm just trying to get a sense whether they were opposed to it or whether they just, you know... I think they stripped the money out of everything. What is a rural community? That's a good question. That's a good question. It depends on which agency and which entity you are asking. So it's just not defined here. Do you have, what's your working definition? It's a good question. I would say it is communities without really much in the way of full-time staff with smaller populations, you know, away from pretty significant infrastructure. So I would consider most of my community, I would consider all of my communities to be rural, including the one that has a ski resort in it. Pretty far away from healthcare facilities, major outside of the resort, major employment opportunities, education, institutions. So they're pretty far away from those types of communities. Representative Boehnert. Representative Sibylian, can you help me understand on the picture one? How the, how the four units works, is that because if we're talking in the paragraph above about saying 25 units or less won't count toward the need to trigger active 50. And so we talk about the four a few, what does that mean in one building or does it mean four and then four next door? Or how does that all relate to 25 units? What does that act? I can't, I've been able to figure out what that actually means. And I feel like we need to tighten this language up. So I think there's a concern that while we're encouraging duplexes, triplexes, those types of things, what we had heard Zacale talking about, this is kind of constraining that the 25.5.5 is probably for your larger projects that you might see from like a VHC or others. So. So you're thinking that the four units is in designated areas, less, four or less in like what we're looking at with Zacale. So four less in one building. Okay, that's, if we talk about tightening it, that's one thing we want to understand. Okay, so that's what, that's in your mind, that's what this means for four units or less in a building would count as one. In my mind, yes, representative Bonn-Gartz, but I have not done nearly the work that you and representative Sims have. So I just wanted to know what we're actually, yeah, okay, that's okay, we can figure that out. Any other questions? Representative Morris. Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm not saying why 25 or more units is located entirely within the four or five areas that are supposed to be the four units. Do those have to be inside those same areas or can they be outside? I think that the language here is not clear enough, but the intent is that it also would be in those designated areas. Yeah. All right, let's see any further questions. One more. On the last page, I'm thinking about the navigators. Is it likely that would translate to two? 300,000, but it could be two or three. But if I might kind of expand on this a little bit, I don't work at a regional planning commission when I'm not here, I work at a regional development corporation, but it's a regional entity. And when we think about this type of a tool, I think it could be extremely, extremely helpful out in all of our communities, really. And even if we only had a few to start that were shared throughout the state, I think just that kind of dedicated purpose could be extremely helpful. We've talked about it in our shop, just talking with communities who thinks they wanna build housing, who has land that is suitable. Is there infrastructure for that? Okay, now if there's not infrastructure and it's suitable and the community wants it, how do we kind of start connecting resources there? And there really is not that entity out looking at housing, though. Representative Smith. Thank you. Laura, did I hear you, Representative, did I hear you say that this is gonna help communities without wastewater facilities? You did not hear me say that. Okay, then I'll scratch that, dog. The table. Either clarify your question, the this that I think you might, what are you referring to? Well, I thought I heard you say something in here about helping communities without wastewater facilities without. I don't believe I said that. Okay. I think you're wrong. Yes, you're through the work group. I mean- The workforce group, yes, excuse me. Oh, thank you. I'm out of chair. Thank you. I'll translate between you. So there's a couple of, this bill is really targeting our housing to places where we want it, which is in designated areas that have water and sewer and designated areas that have bylaws. And so this is looking at how do we make, how do we help support the formation of bylaws in some of our more rural communities? How do we prioritize the development for expansion of existing wastewater? And it's also requesting an additional million dollars to do a study. The money's an interesting question. Is there 30,000 in there for the, I don't, the rural community groups? Well, I see 750 and 300. So 750 is for the, that's for the Municipal Planning Grant Fund. And 300 are for the housing navigators. That was in the Senate bill as it passed out of economic development. And I was stripped out in Senate Appropriations Committee as all funds are. Quick. Thank you. For consideration by their appropriation. Yes. Madam Chair, I think you were pointing out and noting as well. Each, yeah. Now in the bottom of page nine as the 40,000 for the. Yes. Facilitation. May I ask one more question? You may. Thank you. Do you feel this is going, this amendment is going to be a plus for small communities that already have local planning in place? Yes. Okay. I think it will be a plus for small communities that don't have local zoning in place in terms of motivating them to think about how they can, these are important tools when we're thinking about climate change and modernizing our infrastructure. You know, broadband, water, wastewater. Good.