Welcome everybody, members of the public. We're going to move over to housing or how on of this housing bill. And this morning we're going to be focused on land use, planning, permitting, all those good things that. Some, which we hopefully identify some, sometimes unnecessarily increase the cost of housing. The length of permitting and try and pick away at those pieces to promote more housing through policy, as opposed to just putting more money into the issue. So. Regina welcome. I don't think we've met. It's a pleasure. If you want to start us off. If I've given you enough to go on. I think you'll give us plenty to go on. Okay. Thank you. Great. Thank you so much. Good morning. Good morning, Senators. Thanks so much for having me. I am Regina Mahoney. I work for the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission been there for about 10 years and prior to that was. Planning director in the town of Milton. And today I'm here talking with you folks. More on behalf of the Vermont planners association. So. Over the summer and the fall, we put together a housing position paper and it's got sort of four main recommendations. So I'm going to be. Sort of walking through that and explaining how. Some of the provisions of age 511. And we have a number of. Pregnant. S226 and S1. Oh, one kind of. Fit in and are supported by that position paper. Just quickly for those that don't know the Vermont planners association is a nonprofit. Advocacy and education organization. We've got about 200 planners. From all levels of government and the private sector consulting organization. And we've got a number of plans. We've got a number of plans for the advancement of planning in the state. So in putting in BPA, putting together our housing position. State statement. We did work quite a bit from. The housing barriers report. Which a number of planners put together over the last year. And really focused on the neighborhood development. And that document is really the grounding place. For age 511. So over this sort of same time period in the fall. Myself on behalf of BPA. As well as. DHCD staff. Chris and Jacob. As well as the NRC. Worked with. Representative bond guards on that bill. So there was a good, really good amount of working. We had a number of meetings and really worked through the starting place of that housing barriers report. And really. Got to a very workable place that. We felt in age 511. So. If it, if it helps, I can sort of walk through. The, the, the, the BPAs for overall recommendations for housing. And then really sort of pinpoint where H. 511. And also it looks like your draft 2.1. Of S 226. Really has incorporated a lot of that. Great, great work in there. So if that sounds like a good approach. Sounds fine. So I, I just sent this over to Scott this morning. But I'm also happy to share my screen as I walk through this. Do you have a preference? I have a preference of sharing the screen because I can print. All right. Excellent. Let me just. So if people have questions as we go, you're going to have to shout out because I won't see your pictures anymore. Okay. Is that zoomed in enough for you to see? Probably bigger. A little bigger would be great. So we're looking at draft 2.1. This is their report. I think. Oh, this is their report. Right. Yes. So our. Overall housing recommendations. Again, there's four main record recommendations. And I think that really is a recommendation to fund and implement water and sewer infrastructure in our existing settlements. Really from a big picture perspective, there's only so much we're going to be able to do without, without working on that. And certainly ARPA. Big help. The infrastructure bill will be a big help. But just wanting to sort of point that out and not, not lose sight of that. So. Could you give us an idea. Of what big help. Means, I mean, what is the. It's probably an unfair question, but very broadly, what is the. Dollar need out there and how much was it. ARPA for this, how much is in infrastructure for this? When will we know that? And we're also have, as you probably have our aware of follow on S 33, which is our mini tip bill. And one of the questions we've been asking. Doesn't. This number one, like. Totally subsumed the need for. Many tips. Great question. And I don't have a great answer for you. I do know in our region, Westford is a, is a great example of trying to put some. A municipal wastewater system in place to help support their. Village and neighborhood designation. Area designation. And they are big proponents of that mini tip bill. And they, they can speak to it much better than I can, but even with ARPA funds on the table, the help of that mini tip would be, is still a quite a huge need. Couldn't give you specific dollar amounts off the top of my head, but these projects, unfortunately, are very complicated and definitely very costly. So I think both ARPA and the infrastructure bill is helpful. But I don't believe that it's solving the need in full. So let me, let me play devil's advocate. And maybe I'm just missing something. The numbers that I remember from Westford. Is they wanted to get essentially a million dollar. Loan through the TIF program. That they would pay off through increased. Property tax payments in the future. Instead of that. Couldn't offer or infrastructure just write them a check for a million dollars. I think it depends on how it's going to, how the program is going to work from this date. I could. Look up how much Westford is actually getting from their ARPA funds directly. I don't know that off of the top of my head. And we don't know, we don't know on infrastructure. We don't have all the details yet about how much money is going to go out. Yeah. And that's a bit of a challenge quite frankly here, just in terms of the money flow and what's duplicative and what isn't. I mean, it's just. It's no secret that I've been a big fan of. Many tips. I went to the governor's press conference stood beside Senator Brock on, on this. And it's pretty easy for us to just throw it in the bill because we've worked it over, but I really like to have this question answered. Is it. And I guess it's certainly necessary maybe for 10 years out when we're going to be asking questions. I mean, I don't know if all this largesse goes away, but is it really necessary now? I guess. I'm sure we're going to be asked. That the house is going to be asking that question. So if somebody could get an answer to us. Great. Mr. Chair, I would recommend talking with Neil Cayman from the agency of natural resources. I know he's worked closely with this, this town of Westford. He's been working closely with the agency of natural resources. And he's been working closely with the agency of natural resources. And they are leading all the infrastructure investments and water and wastewater. And this is also familiar with the mini tip proposal. And I'm happy to job to him. Cayman. KAY. Okay. I mean, I think. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Scott's got it. I'm sure. Okay. Okay. I rudely interrupted. No worries. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Second big recommendation from the planters association is to make some improvements to the neighborhood. Development area designation. And the other state programs. So first kind of. Sub part of that is really. Making the neighborhood designation more accessible for the rural communities. So the more that we can really support. Some. Removing some barriers to that designation program for more communities. I think all the better. We're going to be. So. Five of those are in Chittenden County. And I can just say from, from our perspective in Chittenden County, this designation is a really great, valuable, helpful designation. And really making housing happen. So the more that we can really support. The more that we can really support. The more that we can really support. The more that we can really support. The more that we can really support. The more that we can really support. The more that we can really support. The more that we can really support. So one. Concept there. That was described in the housing barriers report. Was talked about in age five, 11. And looks like it's been added to your. Drafts 2.1. Of 226. Is the concept. Of. Not requiring. A municipality to have water. And wastewater already in place. As a prerequisite to getting the neighborhood. Development area designation. I think the desert getting the designation first. On the table can help invite the housing developers to the table. And then. Water and wastewater is. Something that needs to be permitted. And it will be properly permitted. With housing developments that come forward. And there's also just. Some great improvements to decentralize systems. And the lots more things that can sort of happen from that front. So at least by a project by project basis, just allowing a little bit more flexibility in that program. I think. It's going to be pretty helpful. Does it. Does it potentially. Open up a loophole that will result in. In the future. Sprawl or non. Smart growth. I don't think so because. The neighborhood development. Area designation still has so many other parameters in place. Largely the minimum density requirement. And so we're already looking at relatively. Tight locations. It also. Really needs to. Be. Only buffers. And goes on top of. The other designations that are already in place. And those parameters are pretty tight. And as is the state designations are. Really. You can see in. To be there. 0.3% of the state's land area. We're still talking about a relatively small area. Even with this. Initial provision. Off the table. Mr. Chair. May I just add. I think. We think of our designated downtown. Is actually being bigger areas than they actually are. In the grand scheme of things. And so I. I don't think we need to be concerned about these. These areas just becoming huge and overwhelming and sprawled. Out. We're still talking about a relatively small area, even with this. We're still talking about a relatively small area. We're still talking about a relatively small area. But they're becoming bigger areas than they actually are. They're quite very. Surprise. I think people are always surprised at how actually contained. They are. And my sense of the NDAs is that they're just sort of like the next ring. Around what we all consider our downtown. Is that a fair way of. Describing that Regina.  They have to be contiguous to our downtown and village centers. So I think that is a fair way of saying that. I mean, I would say that this is the district of woodstock. Where I live now, I would hope would be. An NDA, but it's not part of the designated downtown, even though I am a block and a half from route four. So you'd think that I was right in the center of Woodstock, but I'm actually. Not part of the designated downtown because that is a tiny little. Area. So I guess. I think I need to understand this one a little bit more. Yeah. I think it's a little bit more. I think it's a little bit more. I think it's a little bit more. I think it's a little bit more. The design. They get the designated down. The designation prior to them having. Steward or water or war or both. Yes. Okay. Is it both they can. They can have one. I don't have to have either at the time of getting. Designation, right? Correct. I think it's a little bit more. I think it's a little bit more. I think it's a little bit more. I think it's a little bit more. Smart growth. Housing development. That. Insues from the designation. Couldn't go forward until they had the water and sewer in place. Right. And I think the concept is that. Housing development to come forward. And work out a system for themselves. That doesn't necessarily require a much larger complex municipal level. System. Put in place. And. You know, I think the other way to kind of think about this too. Is. That there are. There are not going to be that many areas that are coming forward through this program without. Without. Without water in place or without the potential for municipal waste, wastewater in place. It's just sort of a matter of timing and lining things up. So that a municipality can really start to do their planning. And get their zoning right. Get into the NDA program. And if the wastewater water is coming either at a project specific. Level. That can work great for the municipality may be working more towards water wastewater. It just takes a long time. And so at least everything. All the processes can sort of be working collectively together. As opposed to. Having to have water and wastewater in place first. And then get the NDA. I think I understand what you're saying. But in response to the question, you weren't. Saying that. I think that. There at some point. Before the, the actual housing is built. The water and sewer on a. Municipal level or a system. As opposed to individual. Wells and septic systems. Would have to be built. You're saying. No, they can get their designation. So in essence, you're not just. Delaying for timing sake. You're actually eliminating a requirement. Am I being clear? A housing development is not going to be constructed. Without. A water and wastewater permit. So they will have a water and wastewater system in place to manage that housing development. But it could be individual systems for each house, right? And it most likely. Wouldn't be individual necessarily because of the scale of developments that we're talking about here. It could be. But it may be more of a community system. And so not necessarily publicly owned. But a community system. And I think the idea, the point being. All of these options. Are possible from a water wastewater perspective. And so really it can be more based on the housing need as the projects come forward. Rather than. Rather than getting a municipal system in place. If it's not, if that's not necessary. Okay. Yeah, I think it makes sense. I think I need to. Feel a little bit more comfortable that. The existing law sort of was. The timing might not have been right, but the, it sounded like it was designed to. We have denser housing on a congregate. So I think that would be a good idea. I think that would be a good idea. I think everybody would be hooked up to that, but. Let's move on. We'll get, we'll figure that out. Okay. Okay. Then. Second point under that is. We talked about this for a few years now. And it was in S one. Oh, one. And now it looks like again in 2.1 of 226. The state water, the state water, the state water, the state water or wastewater system in place. And the municipality is issuing their own water, wastewater permits. That there is a redundancy with also having to get the state water and wastewater permit as well. So. VPA supports this provision that would. Go. The city. The city, the state water, the municipality is already permit it. Okay. We're very familiar with that. Yeah. Okay. So. Moving on here. So again, this is under the same recommendation in terms of improving the. State designation programs. and the associated fees that that come along with that. So B1 here we really really support the concept of taking a look at the state designation programs as a whole. There are a number of them they were created for different reasons and we always are finding ourselves in them. In the place of trying to use these programs to define where we want growth to happen and that seems like the most logical reason to have these state designation programs. But it would be great to just be able to take a look at them collectively and with that intent. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah, we've talked about this for a couple years. Yeah. So that's great. DPA is also in support of extending the downtown and Village Center tax credit programs to the NDAs. That was in SO 101 as originally introduced and it looks like it's in your new S226 as well. Also, the concept of applying for a neighborhood designation development area designation by a joint application of two municipalities seems like in support of that great idea. It's also in support of the concept of including flood hazard and fluvial erosion areas in the NDA, where pre existing development already exist in those areas, and if the municipality itself has adopted the rules for appropriately providing growth in these areas. So, if the municipality has their flood hazard and river corridor protection bylaws in line with A&R's rules at the local level. So, in support of that. So, a minor tweak in terms of how the four dwelling units per acre is established and defined for the neighborhood designation areas and BPA is in support of that. Last bullet here, BPA is in support of removal of the priority housing project caps all together. And so I think that's where your original S226 landed and it looks like your new S226 has a modification to that. It probably acts, I'm not sure if it follows what was in H511, but just broadly speaking from BPA's perspective, the priority housing projects are excellent. It's what we need. It's what we want to not only help address the overall housing supply challenge but also the affordable and moderate supply challenge. Just not sure that there's a lot of reason why those should be capped in any way in order to access the Act 250 exemption in these areas. So, I guess, I mean, I guess my response would be if the city of Burlington wanted to build a housing project with 2,000 units, there may be some reason to have Act 250 review in something that big. And just because there's a designated downtown, I mean, I just, I don't know, that's why I think a total elimination of the cap may be a little bold at this point. Chris, you have a comment. Yeah, Mr. Chair, currently for larger municipalities, there is no cap. I don't know what this is intended to do. So Burlington wanted to permit 2,000 units.  It was not required to get an Act 250 permit, nor was was it city place, you know, the one in downtown. And I think it's just a point of equity, you know, it was like, we want to see more development happen in some of our smaller towns, the changes the NDA program are aimed at giving them the same opportunities that our larger municipalities have, what the right number is, you know, being RC feels like it should be more modest in a change but they're open to making a change. Obviously the planners have a different opinion and want to completely eliminated. So I hope that helps. So I apologize. I thought that there was caps, varying degrees of caps on every size community but the theory remains the same in terms of the suggestions for the smaller ones. If you're, if you're eliminating a cap for a real small town, and all of a sudden the giant housing project comes in, should there be Act 250 review in that case, but we'll we'll look at it. I apologize for the diversion. I did have a chair. I know we're going to look at this more fully, but I would just like to ask at this moment, the, what point does local planning and town plan and local zoning Trump no caps. I mean, I mean, because our smaller communities need some protection from exactly that kind of a situation. I guess they're act 250 to fall back on, would we be allowing our town plans and our local planners to be able to make decisions about that. Yeah, I go ahead. So the designation, you know, we do look at the community's bylaws, you know, so they have to do a lot of work to make sure that that housing is located in a right in the right locations and minimize impacts to important natural resources. So it's not just like any town can get this they have to meet minimum standards to achieve the designation to create a larger area to allow a priority housing project to occur. But, you know, to your question, you know, at what point does a large development have a regional impact and, you know, that is kind of the intent of active 50 to look at that. I guess the other pressure to is, you know, the, the suggestion of the removing the cap in age 511 also is based in some facts, you know, the HFA and you invite please invite them to speak. You know, did an analysis of kind of the economy of scales for an affordable. And they found over 40 was kind of the sweet spot. So when we're trying to, you know, get the most out of our resources, you know, afford unit development or more is is more affordable to build. And right now, those can't go into a smaller community unless and qualify for php's unless these caps are changed. Yes, I remember that. Thanks. Can I go back to flood hazard, and then also minimum residential densities. So that is saying that flood hazards and erosion areas with pre existing development presently can't be part of. The designated area. Yes. So currently, the way that the neighborhood designation area works is you first define a geographic area, and then collectively, you know, look at it with the downtown board to see what what's the right place. So, you have to remove flood hazard and river corridors from that geographic area, even if there's already pre existing development there. And as we know there's a good amount of our historic villages and downtowns are right up against these areas. And so, this is not suggesting in any way that we get any closer to any river, river corridors or flood things that we have have now. Just a way to try to acknowledge some infill in an appropriate way of doing it with in these areas so that we're not completely removing, removing them from the potential of additional housing if they've already got housing there already. If that makes sense. I think we need to phone a friend. Mr chair if I could add no offense I mean it's using and it's new to me and I'm just, it sounds like it's an equitable thing where you're getting penalized for having pre existing housing that already works in a floodplain. That's the sense I'm getting but I don't fully. So, Mr chair if I could add you know the neighborhood designation was updated and he does right after Irene, and we're being very conservative about excluding any buildings in in river corridor areas. However, this is inconsistent with a and r's policy that allows infill to happen in within these areas. And what we're proposing to change is basically bringing them bringing the neighborhood designation in the line with existing in our procedures and policies that allows safe infill within these areas. And you know I would add that bnrc does support this. And it's an option, you know, if a community wants to add, you know, or do infill in these areas, they have to adopt, you know, townwide floodplain protections and so that supports our larger level of protecting floodplains upstream and downstream to allow infill in these dancer areas. So, this is something we've talked about at length before and I think we, it's passed out of this committee. It just never made it through the house. And the last one here or minimum resident. What are what are we trying to do on this one. So, the base concept doesn't doesn't change here in order to have a neighborhood designation area, you have to allow for for a minimum for dwelling units per acre has residential density in these areas. So, the way that it was worded before was just a little bit tricky in some places and I see Jake has turned his video on and I'm going to ask for a friend again because he's, he's got more familiarity with how this actually works. I think I remember this one, but go ahead, Jake. Yeah, it's the way it's framed right now it's it's linking the four units an acre to a particular residential use a single family detached dwelling. And this change would say that it doesn't, it doesn't have to be a single family detached dwelling units so long as the local bylaws are allowing residential uses it for drawing units an acre. Okay. We did we pass that at some point ever. I know we discussed in the last bill. Ellen, do you remember we can't if we didn't pass and we came close to passing it. Yeah, we certainly have discussed it. It's Ellen. Yeah, she should. Do you remember the Senate. Okay, so the language, and I probably should double check before I say this the language that's in that's being referenced is different than what has been considered before but it isn't. I, it's so no I don't think so it's it's less about the in the past you have considered different numbers. For the density, and what's happening here is actually striking the reference to the single family aspect and allowing for the calculation to include multi units. So, it isn't in the, so in the past you have talked about the number of units per acre. That is not really what this is doing this is talking about what units count in that density calculation. So does this does that make the proposed future housing in these designated areas more dense or less dense. I don't, I don't think it changes the density necessarily that's that still remains. It just allows. It allows it to be in a variety of housing types and structures. So it could be for single family houses on quarter acre lots, or it could be a quadplex or an acre lot. And before, and before it had a, it couldn't be a quadplex on an acre lot. I almost need a picture graph like a. Back to Jacob on this because this is the, we're talking about the calculation, not necessarily like and how the area is zoned, not necessarily the exact housing in each neighborhood. So it's like he was nodding his head. Maybe it would be earlier anyway when you were saying about the one house in a quarter acre so he was nodding his head there and then we sort of lost his support. See if I can think of a scenario. Let's say you have a zoning district and there are three uses allowed. And one is a single family residential uses there's one is a single family detached falling unit. One is a quadplex and the third is a multi family. The way the bylaws the way the municipal bylaws calculate density for the multi family and the quadplex is units per land area and let's say they require 10,000 square feet or per unit. That would meet the quarter acre requirement. If that same zoning district though, established a minimum lot size of a third acre, which is larger than a quarter acre for single family detached dwelling units that under the current statute. That would not be allowing a detached single family dwelling unit at four units an acre. So this would make clear for all residential uses that that four units is what we're looking for if you allow a residential use that there should be at least four units in the acre. Does that help. It does to the extent I'm starting to feel that this is an attempt to assure greater density under the existing law that could be less density, but here with this tightening and I'm not sure exactly how going to get four units on every acre. For sure, or you're not going to be barred from putting up for acres for four units on an acre. In a single family or for one quarter acre lots. So that more or less what the intent is. Okay. Be done pretty well. Let's go on to three. So three is looking more at local zoning. Not talking about the state designation programs necessarily anymore. And really, what the planners are are coming forward and saying is we'd really love to have a real comprehensive broad look at chapter 117 and full and really think through what, what improvements we, we could make to it. As opposed to some sort of little tweaks that we've, we've done along the way. So, I'm not, I'm not sure that we've got anything like that in the bill. So far really sort of looking at a study committee for chapter 117 for the local zoning but just letting you know we we would be in favor of that kind of conversation. So planning for the planners. You know, and partially I think this is, we've seen a lot of really interesting zoning reform done in other states. And, and part of that is, is based on some real data and work and it's sort of done in different ways and in different places like Massachusetts as an example has a minimum affordable housing requirement for municipality. And there are other states that are certainly looking at eliminating single family zoning as a as an as the only permitted use in a residential zoning district. So, lots out there and I think lots that we should give consideration and thought to. But I'm not sure that we necessarily have the data or the understanding of really what's, what's going on in Vermont for example I couldn't even tell you in Chittenden County right now, how much of our land area is only zoned for single family residential. So I think there's the thought process here is there used to be just some more collective effort on on looking at this more broadly. So just sub parts under this is just really appreciation for the bylaw modernization grant program that's going to be hugely helpful. The municipalities that have this now really looking forward to digging in and making some real improvements. And just wanted to point out that the, the program parameters around that grant program that didn't pass an S 101 are supported by by the planners, particularly in tied with a funding program that can help them make those changes. Part B here is the concept that when you get a local site plan or conditional use approval from the development review board. It should not expire any faster than two years. So this is just acknowledging that some of these housing projects really take a lot of effort to put together. And if you get through your local approval process and you're working on all the other pieces and your local approval expires. And that makes you have to kick back into the program. That's, that's not very helpful. So we, the planners support this provision of just making sure that those, those approvals don't expire any sooner than two years. Do you think there, do you think there needs to be any qualifiers on this I know if you get into the judicial system, there's all kinds of equitable qualifiers for change circumstances, etc. So we, we play this out the world could change and what might have made sense two years ago doesn't make sense anymore. I mean, and we generally do it in form of good cause exceptions or something that has its own issues. But have you looked at has there been any discussion coming to this conclusion on things like that. And I think from the planning perspective, the two year timeframe doesn't feel too long. You know, we zoning doesn't change rapidly. It's quite it's quite the process to actually get it changed. So, certainly there could be some circumstances where something in the underlying zoning changes, but not really too worried about it with the two year timeframe is the process so onerous. I'm trying to remember my years on DRB's. It seemed like there are plenty of permits that were expiring and it seemed like a simple process to get them extended. They may have the best small fee and go in there and say nothing's really changed. But I'm just thinking like, you know, you have something that makes sense to, and certain conditions are put on the apartment. And then, you know, within the next six months or a year a big building comes in and they get approved and then all of a sudden the one you approved before doesn't make as much sense or you want another condition on it. And then the kinds of individual circumstances where I don't know if two years is the right time. What is it now six months generally. So right now that's an excellent question. Right now, there is no requirement for putting an expiration date on these permits. So some municipalities don't include an expiration. They can write it into their bylaws and they can put an expiration in and some municipalities have a year as an expiration date. And that can just be really pretty problematic and pulling together the rest of the rest of your permits. You know, I think the challenge is, which what we've been talking about today can help solve this for some, some housing developments in the in the state designations because they're not having to get active 50 permit as well as a local permit but outside of that, in most places, we are going to be still in a situation where housing developments need to go and get both. And if it takes a while to get the all those other permits lined up within a year that can be a tight timeframe if you're having to get kicked back to the to the local level. Okay. I guess this is probably some sort of sweet point there. Yeah, just going back to bylaw modernization is probably a question for Chris. Is there money in the budget anywhere for more grants for my bylaw modernization. Mr chair Chris Cochran, the governor did budget $600,000 in general fund for municipal planning grants. We've talked about this before. They are broadly cast and not as constrained or targeted as the bylaw modernization grants. Well, obviously we're big fans of that. And we appreciate you getting that money out the door. But if there's not more money coming. Why do we need a statute. Right. And is that enough 600,000 doesn't strike me as maybe enough. Well, you're talking to the wrong person. Yeah, no, no, I know but this bill has, you know, we have opportunities here. I mean, we could dedicate some of that money to a second round of bylaw modernization grants or we could up it or we could cut it, but before we decide on leaving that language in it's kind of, it'd be kind of weird if none of that money got used for additional bylaw modernization grants unless the language that we had in 101 and the house tweaked. Sort of somehow applies to municipal planning grants as well so I teed that up for you Chris where do we go with this. I think you have lots of options on the table for how you'd like to you know I do think the governor recognizes that local zoning can be a barrier to housing production. I think you could carve out a portion of it and dedicate it to the bylaw modernization grants. I do think you know we've talked before the language that the house passed. Remember it got separated from the budget never ultimately did pass so we ran a program that was slightly different than what was in S 101. We had some flexibility to do any number of things. You know the NPG program by itself, you know we could make it a priority for bylaw modernization grants. So, I'm not really giving you an answer but I think there's there's opportunity within the existing program to continue support it without creating a standalone program. Do you think we can enhance the effectiveness of the first round of grants with some money, like provide more support to those towns that got the grants in terms of technical assistance or working side by side or, you know having a resource. Yeah, I mean, yeah I think the next step to me is you know obviously the communities have to update their bylaws to qualify for the neighborhood development area designation. So if you wanted to target a portion of it or make it a priority for us to say, you know, this amount of money shall be you know allocated to help municipalities achieve neighborhood designation. I think that that would be a smart good strategic use of that funding. I think last. Let's do see and then we'll take a break. Right. Yeah, so accessory dwelling units. So there were changes made to accessory dwelling unit statute last year and that seems like it's been really great and helpful there was some flexibility in terms of the minimum size of the ad use and some flexibility in terms of if you are going to require the owner occupancy that the owner could either live in ad or the primary structure. That sounds like from the planning community they are seeing some more interest and folks coming in for trying to get some ad use so that's all great news. One of the things that does appear to be a little bit of a hurdle is a home that is currently permitted from a water and wastewater perspective for more than the number of bedrooms that they already have in the structure. A pretty typical example is going to be that a home is permitted from a wastewater perspective at four bedrooms, but only three bedrooms are actually built and in the home. So in theory there's an additional bedroom that can be added. And if that were added just to the structure itself, there would not need to be any change in wastewater permit because it's just still same use additional bedroom meets the allocation as originally granted. But if that additional bedroom is added as an accessory dwelling unit. Then it kicks in the wastewater permit, which is again just sort of another hurdle and very seemingly an unnecessary hurdle when at the end of the day the structure itself is still only going to have the four bedrooms that already was permitted in it in the wastewater permit. So, partially, I think the change that we've talked about already, which would at least remove the state wastewater permit from the situation in areas where you've got municipal water in place will be helpful for this. But there. Why, why is it that what's the operative law that requires in the example you gave that you have to get another permit. So, Chris is raising. Chris Cochran again. We did check in with an R before this because I, we have heard increasingly that is the septic laws are a barrier to adu production. And I don't, from my understanding and you should get I've got context that if you want to learn more about this for me and our who should speak to this but the concern is, is less about the, the septic capacity, and more about peak flows of water capacity for both those units. I don't have any new expertise, but you know, these are systems that are in the ground for, you know, 50 100 years, and they just want to make sure it's done right. But I can get you context to get additional information about this issue and, and I think there are some opportunities for them to make this easier within their existing rules. Basically, what you're saying is that an or presently says that the demand on wastewater is greater. If, if, if there's two units, that total four bedrooms, the demand on wastewater is great greater than four, four bedrooms in one unit. It was a number of bedrooms but, but broken up between a duplex or an ADU, they're requiring more capacity, more capacity and the concern also was about water supply was their adequate water supply. You know you had two kitchens and everybody's making dinner at the same time is there, you know, so, again, not my area but I do think it's worth a conversation with a and R just to have a get a good understanding of their rules. And the intent behind them. And again, they do have opportunities to make it easier within their existing framework and I don't think they're widely used or recognized. So, this is for septic this is not for people who are on sewer systems right. I mean this is like, yes. And so septic systems already one assumes there's less density I mean you're in a downtown that isn't very. I mean, right. Yeah, you could be in Norwich. This is not an issue for municipalities with sewer and water and capacity, right. This is an issue in rural areas where somebody wants to build an ADU. Yeah, yeah. Okay, you want to mention for it's pretty self explanatory. Yes. So for is pretty pretty self explanatory, nothing specific there but definitely just recognizing and appreciating what the state has been able to do in terms of funding for those experiencing homelessness and just putting out some support to, to keep that going. Okay. So, I guess, have a question. I don't know if you can answer this Chris. You know there's been some talk about a homelessness bill of rights, my understanding is that the house is working on that. And that's a fairly, I think, a big lift in terms of time. And if they're working on it I'd rather not have this committee. I'd rather have this committee deal with it when it comes over from crossover do you have any, or maybe Ellen, it's probably David Hall, who would know more about it but does anybody know what the status of the issues addressing homelessness or we haven't really talked about this year and this committee, and I assume that the house is working and will be sending us something. I do not know but I'm happy to reach out to chair Stevens and inquire. Okay, that'd be great. So thank you committee I'm going to suggest that we just continue on for a few minutes and not take a break and then we'll finish up 15 minutes earlier. If anybody is okay with that unless you have a pressing need. So, Ellen. I'm going to sort of set up meetings with Damien and David I'd like to see if I can set up a meeting with you as well for Monday where we can send some quality time seeing where languages and bills are and what you've heard and what I've heard, and start getting into next iterations we're starting to run into time pressures. We have two more weeks. We actually have three more weeks but I'd like to get least the housing bill out. Before we break for town meeting. I think this bill will obviously today's discussion shows it very well that it's going to have to do a drive by and natural resources and probably have to go to finance and appropriations so it needs a fair amount of lead time. The economic development bill also will have to go to finance and appropriations, but not natural resources I don't think so. And I don't think it has the choice of whether it goes to natural resources or not is one of the full Senate. It doesn't go by rule. So it would have to be a decision of whether they take jurisdiction over it or not but I want to continue to work with Chris and make sure I mean I see a lot of these ideas being directly on point of housing, and I hope that all of these ideas can be preserved but I think clearly they may need some tweaking in terms of getting to those points and that they may have more expertise than we do. So, all I have unless you have some anybody else has some observations I'd like to share this morning. Senator Brock, were you about to raise your hand. Before I, okay. Chris. Yeah, I mean I, Senator Bray did take a look at h 511 and has pulled many provisions in it into his active 50 reform bill. I think they were very comfortable with them. I know being RC testified largely into support to a lot of the provisions you heard about this morning so, you know, I think they do need to do a drive by but I think they're fairly familiar with the bill and and my sense was there was a good amount of comfort. That's good to know. There was a lot of good stuff. I think that, you know, it may not be the silver bullets but I think we're staying true to trying to find some policies that can help housing development. And without necessarily hurting the environment and and on top of it actually helping principles of smart growth, better communities so music to planners years right. There's time, but you know I'd love to see the data that you did from your eco study that showed how your smart growth strategies in Chittenden County reduced natural resource impacts by channeling growth to areas where we'd like to see it happen. Yeah, Regina I would like to. With Chris as a result of the significant amount of time we spent in this committee on accessory dwelling units, and we've come up with a series of brainstorming ideas I'd appreciate him running those by the planners, and see what they think of those because you're, I mean you have some in there but they're less extensive than some of the ideas that we put on the table, many of our ideas are sort of directing resources towards incentivizing and also technical assistance for a used to make it very easy for somebody who has the space and wants to develop their house that they don't run into practical hurdles, as well as legal hurdles. So, so if you guys could work together that would be great. Absolutely. Yes, definitely. Okay. Great. Thank you everybody. 15 minutes early.


You ever been watching the Ravens game and you start calling out the players before they happen? You're like, uh-oh, Lamar's about to keep, and then he keeps. It goes a hand off to Mark England, where I know it's going to him, and it goes to him. Alright, this pass is getting ready to go to Mark Andrews. I already know, and the pass goes straight to 89. And when stuff like that happens, it can make you feel like, okay, yeah, I'm a Ravens fan, I know this team, I know how they operate, I know how they run this thing. But when it's the opposing team's defense calling out the plays, then it's a problem. And you know just what I mean, YouTube team keep it clean. They got em' made it, wood as my homie. And then Raven, Raven, Raven, Raven. Shout out to Raven. So YouTube team keep it clean, what's going on is saying Raven here with another video. And in this video, as we know, the expectations going into the season for the Ravens offense, they were sky high. And even if we felt like they were going to be a couple of notches below what they were last year, that still would be a really good offense. We expected them to still be running the ball with the same efficiency, to still be evolving in the passing game, because we had the same quarterback, pretty much the same pass catchers and the same coordinators. So there was not much change, and as weird and crazy as this offseason had been, Ravens actually had an advantage, because they had something that a lot of teams lacked, and that was consistency. When you have a lot of returning personnel, a lot of returning front office and coaching staff, then that gives you that consistency that a lot of teams want, that a lot of teams envy and that a lot of teams desire. And the Ravens had all of those things. But for some reason, the offense just had not been clicking like that. And we've talked about it extensively on here from week to week to week. And we've come up with our own conclusions and different theories and whatnot. But why not go straight to the horse's mouth? Why not go straight to the source? The main person who this offense was created around, Lamar Jackson, to hear what he had to say was the issue with the offense this year. So shout out to my guy Slim Dog Millionaire from Twitter, and also Oven On Preheat from our Ravens Flock flick chat group. They were the ones that put me on to this Rich Eisen interview that he did with Lamar Jackson. So I'll leave the link to that video in the description below. But let's check out a very important clip from that interview. How would you rate your season to date, Lamar?  Usually, you know, we're high level offense, but it's been all right. You know, it's not what we want to be, but you know, we're still winning, so it's all right, I guess. It just from the eye test, it looks like things aren't coming as easy for you this year. Is that a safe way to look at it, that things aren't? Oh, I feel, you know, it's a lot of, it's a lot of with schemes, you know, we want to get the differences.  So you're hearing on the other side of the line of scrimmage the defense calling out your plays? Yeah, it definitely do, like, run, stuff like that, or watch out for this, watch out for that. Sometimes that's what's going on. So how do you combat that, Lamar? So I guess we're going to have time and let Coach, you know, let us know what he sees upstairs, and we just go from there. And so this time around, you know, so much has been made about the fact that you've been ahead quite a bit and coming from behind has been something that's been difficult for you. And then this is the first time that you were able to come back from a half-time deficit. Is anything like, does that mean anything to you at all, Lamar? Or is it just the way it's the ball's been bouncing? So I guess that's the way the ball's been bouncing, you know. I try to win regardless. I don't care if we down or up, you know, I'm still trying to put points on the board. And sometimes it just didn't go our way. But, you know, just this past Sunday it did. Are you running less than than last year at this point in time? Or what would you say the difference so far? I don't know. I'd just say the paint calling really is... No, I want to say I'm running less or running more. I'm trying to do whatever it takes to win. So listening to that part of the interview, listening to Lamar Jackson speak about the Raven struggles on offense and hearing him talk about how these defenses, they know what's coming and they calling it out. You're saying, watch for this, watch for this. Oh, you're going to keep it. They're going to run. They're going to do this. They're going to do that. That's concerning, man. That's very concerning because as great as you can execute, as fast as a receiver might be, as strong as a running back might be, as good as the offensive line might be, football is mental. So if somebody mentally knows exactly what you're going to do, then they can stop it. They have a great advantage right there in stopping it. And there will be sometimes where it still works out, where it's like, oh, okay, we are going to wheel all way through this play. And even though they know what's coming, we still going to get the best of them. But if that is the case, like Lamar said it, and this is not from any reporter. This ain't from this ain't any rumor. This is straight from Lamar Jackson himself. He said it. Defenses know what they're doing. Now, of course, the struggles on offense this year have not been completely on Greg Roman. So we can't act like that. Lamar has struggled a bit. The offensive line has struggled a bit. The receivers have struggled a bit. It's been a good blend of everything. But at the same time, the play calling, it has struggled a bit too. Not in every single game, not in every single situation. But overall, there's been this sort of lack of consistency in the play calling. And there's been a lot of headscratcher when it comes to the play calling. And this was with winning and with losing. Because I don't want people to think that, oh man, y'all just talking about the play call when we lose. Y'all just complaining about the play call when we lose? No, that's definitely not the case. Because this is something that we've talked about pretty much every week, minus the Eagles game. The Eagles game, I thought the play calling was fine. The Steelers game, oh, some parts it was hot. Some parts it was definitely not. And then in this last game against the Colts, I thought the play calling overall was actually pretty good. And I thought that in the first half, yeah, they did struggle. Big Yikes, they struggled. But I thought the struggles in the first half were more from an execution standpoint rather than a play calling standpoint. But with Lamar Jackson and these Ravens is clear that, and you saw the presser today, if you listen to the presser, there were even little tidbits and little hints that Lamar Jackson gave in there. Because initially when I first listened to it, I didn't catch it. But maybe I just wasn't paying attention enough. Then my boy D hit me up on Instagram. He said, hey, did you hear that? He said, did you hear that? So I ran it back and I was, oh, okay. I see. And then of course this interview with Rich Eyes and Lamar says it straight up. He says, this is the schemes. Said teams know what we're doing. Then Hollywood went to tweet. And I don't mean to keep hopping on this tweet, but he said it too.  And we know that, I mean, you never know, but at the same time, I don't think that was directed at Lamar, it could have been, but I think it was definitely directed at Greg Roman. And with Hollywood saying that, Lamar saying this, like Hollywood was, again, that was to be left up to your own interpretation. But this Lamar, like, he ain't saying it in a disrespectful way, anything like that. But he did let it be known that the schemes. And then the way that he said when Rich Eyes asked him, so how do you fix that? How do you adjust to that? He said, well, it's up to the coaching staff and they just gotta make the adjustments at halftime. And we come back out and see what we got. So he completely deflected it, left it up to the coaching staff and said, hey, they handle that. That's on them. They take care of that. They call it a place. We just roll with it. So it seems like there is a little bit, a lack of trust. Seems like it ain't the big trust there. Seems like it's baby trust. Between Lamar and the offensive players and Greg Roman. So hopefully moving forward, Ravens are six and two. So that's a beautiful thing. We know they're six and two that does have some room for improvement, but they have been improving along the way. But they still got some work to do. And hopefully whatever this disconnect is between Lamar and Greg Roman and offensive players and Greg Roman, hopefully this thing can be fixed and not just fixed, but it can really be enhanced. Because that's been a word that I feel like I was expecting going into this season when it came to the offense. It being it enhanced, it evolving, it taking that next step. And so far we really haven't seen that too much. We haven't seen it too much. Because there's just really been this lack of consistency. But starting this Sunday night, let's see if they can start to build up that consistency on offense and really take this thing to the next level because while you are going against a decimated team with the New England Patriots, they did lose a lot. But one thing that they didn't lose is a really good head coach. It's a really great head coach. And the Chief's game against the Patriots, that was a prime example of how important coaching is and how much of a difference coaching can make. Because that Patriots team, they had to travel on the same day. They had lost that starting quarterback and you go from Cam Newton to Jared Stidham or Brian Hoyer, that's a huge drop off. They had so many players that had already opted out. They had some players that were injured, some significant guys, some starting guys. And it was in a way game against the Chiefs, against the best quarterback in the NFL right now, Patrick Mahomes. And these dudes, the way that they played, despite all of that stuff, they were holding it down. And if not for a couple of just terrible calls, and it's weird to say terrible calls when it comes to Patriots, but if not for a couple of terrible calls, they probably should have won that game. So my point is, when I say all that, is that coaching makes such a big difference. And it can take your team a very, very long way. But at the same time, it can also hold your team back. And I know a lot of people have been feeling like, man, just let Lamar go. Stop having him on a leash. Let him go. Stop holding him back. Let him do his thing. And a lot of people felt like in the second half of that game against the Colts, that the offense actually was able to do their thing. They were up tempo, they came out in the spread, and they were just Lamar was throwing all over the field, and they were moving consistently. They were moving. So they need to just continue to do that. Because I think it was Mike Preston from the Baltimore Sun, think he made a very good point in an article that somebody shared with me yesterday. I think it was Nana from the Ravens group chat on Flick. Make sure you join the group chat on Flick. But the example was that, and I'm paraphrasing because I don't remember exactly what it said, but he was saying that when you run that up tempo offense, they said talked about how Lamar just looked so much more comfortable than he's ever looked this entire season. But when you run that up tempo offense, that gives teams less time to adjust. That gives teams less time to substitute.  And with the Ravens, a fast young offense, that can do wonders for them. So again, we'll see what type of consistency the Ravens start to build upon when it comes to these Patriots up next and just really throughout the remainder of the season. Here's hoping that this offense gets it right, and they can start taking off from here on out. Team Keep It Clean, I love y'all. I appreciate y'all. We out. Ravens. And you know just what I mean. What I mean. You too, team, keep it clean. You see my boy, he like automated. Automated. Whatever. Right in Raven. Right in Raven. Right in Raven. Shout out to Raven. Right in Raven. Right in Raven. Right in Raven. Right in Raven. Right in Raven. Right in Raven.


So when we think of gaming, we don't think of the iPhone 13 mini, but honestly, this little thing packs a punch for the A15 processor. So let's go ahead and find out if we can game successfully with the iPhone 13 mini. Hey guys, Thundie here and welcome to my video on gaming on the iPhone 13 mini. Now before we go ahead and check out this tiny little device, go ahead and smash that subscribe button and notification icon on this video. Now I also want to give a big shout out to our sponsor of this video, J-Birds with the J-Bird Vistarts 2. Stay tuned for more information about them because they are actually pretty cool headphones. So the iPhone 13 mini, it is a small device. Honestly, it is quite quaint, if you will. Fits in the palm of my hand, like it's that small. For me, it's really, really small, I'm gonna say it again. But this is a device that a lot of people like the phone factor in size, 5.4 inches. It feels like it's very nice and poctable. And a lot of people are looking for devices like this who are iOS users. So of course it makes sense to see how well it performs with gaming, which is why Apple has the A15 processor in here. And that makes a lot of sense. You wanna give kind of the same functionality across the board for a lot of people. This also comes with four gigs of RAM and about a 2400 milliamp battery. The right number is on the screen for you to check out. So let's just jump into our very first game. And of course you guys know it's gonna be Call of Duty Mobile. I know some of you are gonna start complaining, but honestly Call of Duty Mobile is a good way to start as a benchmark. And I use game bench here to actually test this out. If you wanna use them, I have a link for you guys in the description of this video. So Call of Duty runs well. It does, it runs at 60 frames per second. We had the game running on its highest setting and it looked good, it played well. But honestly, it felt really smooth. I mean, just in general, which is nice. Now there's no promotion display on the mini, but performance was pretty nice. So I also went ahead and checked out a game on Apple Arcade, which is of course 2K21. Now 2K played well and do not mind the score on this though because I'm terrible, I was terrible at it. I was trying to focus on recording. But also ran at 59 frames per second. Solid 60 FPS, if you will. No dips in performance anywhere. Now the cool thing about the iPhone series this year is that Apple has done some improvements to the speakers. So let's take a quick listen, doing some gameplay on how the speakers sound. On the iPhone 13 mini, they do a good job. But they're not as good I would say as the other iPhone 13 devices, which is why I would recommend you use True Wireless Buds for your gaming experience. And speaking of True Wireless Buds, our sponsor in this video is Jaybird. And I have the Jaybird Vista 2, which I have been using for a while. So it's not something that I don't use. And I can fully recommend them because the six millimeter drivers on them do a really good job for that gaming experience. You get the sound really well. Plus, the application allows you to do much more than just listen to music and customize EQs. You have different sound profiles, which you can use for different things. I have one for gaming. I've got one for working out. And speaking of working out though, this thing is durable. They call it air-proof durability. But honestly, it does a great job in the gym. I use it every time to work. I use it in a lot of places too. Like me, you know, walking around in the park and being aware of my surrounding because of the sound sense A and C and showing off my soccer skills. Well, at least whatever is left of it anyway. And the battery life is great at 24 hours with eight hours per Buds, five minutes of charge you give me in an hour. These are good pair of Buds to definitely pick up, especially with the iPhone 13 mini. So if you're going to do that, definitely head over to your JBordsports.com or your local Best Buy. And if you use the link down below, you'll get 10% off using the promo code. Now let's get back to what we do best here, which is gay. Next up is Genshin Impact. Ooh, this one was very, very interesting. So I play Genshin Impact on the iPhone 13 mini for roughly around 20 to 25 minutes. Within the first five minutes of gaming with Genshin Impact, my frames per second dropped drastically down. And by the time I played for an additional 15 minutes, I had my frames drop down to about 36 frames per second, which is unheard of. Now I'm playing the game at max settings, 60 FPS on the iPhone 13 mini. So I'll say this again, I know a lot of the games are not optimized yet for the A15. So that is one thing to take note, but I was expecting similar results to what I had in the Pro Max, which was a drop down to about 41 to 42 frames per second, not all the way down to the mid 30s. Now this also could be attributed to the fact that the iPhone 13 mini only has four GPU cores as opposed to more on the Pro and Pro Max. So the regular GPU cores definitely showcase here for a game like Genshin Impact, which is very graphically intensive. One thing I did notice is that my screen felt really hot. Now this was not the case with the iPhone 13 Pro Max, which has a bigger surface area. So I'm thinking because of the smaller screen size, you're gonna feel more heat on the screen. Now in terms of temperatures, we've got temperatures about 111 degrees Fahrenheit, about 43 to 44 degrees Celsius, similar again to the Pro Max. So we're having the same kind of temperatures, which means internals are the same. Cooling is practically the same for both devices, I feel, across the iPhone 13 lineup, so that's there. Now we're gonna end up with our last game, which would be PUBG Mobile. Now PUBG Mobile is a game that some people say, hey, play in Battle Royale and play for long periods of time. Also you can play on 90 frames per second. I know you can do that, but the average gamer is gonna pick it up, install and play. Now until it's optimized fully for 90 FPS or more, we will have to see that of course on the Pro Max. But anyway, on this device, I played PUBG Mobile for about 40 minutes. That was as long as my Battle Royale game play session was. And it ran well. It ran well on smooth extreme 59 frames per second. There was no dip whatsoever. So it performed as it should very, very well. And I was quite impressed with that, especially for kind of the longer gameplay period, running to people left and right, trying to get killed, and also eventually winning. Yes, I won my chicken dinner. It's been a while since I've done that on PUBG, honestly. So yeah, that was actually pretty cool. But that means that this performed well enough for me to go ahead and do that quite well. Now the other thing of course some of you would ask me is what about game streaming services? So I went ahead and tried out Xbox Game Pass. Games ran at 60 FPS. That wasn't the issue. And it ran also very well. The one thing I will note though to you guys, and I know a few people have mentioned this before, is the screen did dim down while I was playing Xbox Game Pass, which is roughly around about an hour and a half to two hours of gaming. And this happened with my Pro Max as well. That kind of dropped down the display basically just dimmed down when it was about maybe, I believe it was about three hours of gaming or four. So it's a slightly different time frames, but it did dim down even though my brightness was at the max resolution, or max setting. So that is something that has to do with extended gameplay periods. Now the mini works well. No issues with the backbone, doesn't fall out or anything. So if you're gaming with a backbone, it's absolutely fine. But besides even that though, I really love this green case on the iPhone 13 mini. It is so nice. I know you guys can see it clearly, but it's a lovely case. It's really nice soft silicone filter. Honestly, if you're looking for a case, that's also a good one to pick up for your iPhone 13 mini. Look, the four cores, especially for a graphic intensive game, we're gonna see some dips. Now I'm waiting for games like Genshin to be updated to run with the A15 and we'll of course run that again. But I can tell you that that's gonna show you some dip at some point. In terms of most of the other games, you're gonna be able to play them very fine. Now temperatures will rise up and I don't think it's gonna overheat because the iPhone tends to throw things down from what it seems, at least from the two cases I've seen, where your screen dims down, trying to make sure that your system does not overheat. Battery life. Battery life was better than the mini, but not great. So what I mean by better than me was better than the iPhone 12 mini last year. It completely drained by the time I started gaming. So so far with about two and a half hours of gaming, starting at 100%, I am down to about 70%. Now this is with some charging in here or there. So I'm looking at about a 20% loss, 20 to 25% loss or so, which for the mini compared to what I had last year is much better. So I would say you can game, but still have a charger on hand. So there you go guys. If you have any questions or any comments about gaming on the iPhone 13 mini, let me know or any other iPhone or Apple devices. I'll be covering gaming on the iPad mini as well. So stay tuned for that. And also take a look at the J-Birds Vista 2. Like I said, this is something I use myself. You guys can check them out. Use the link down below if you wanna pick one up or check it out at your local Best Buy. So this is Thundee E-Sane. Thank you, stay tuned, have a fun day and always enjoy your entertainment.


The NRCS we have a couple of different tools available for planning on your operations. One of the tools that my predecessor Stan Bolz created was the South Dakota Drought tool and that's available on our website, the South Dakota NRCS website. You download it and it's an Excel based tool that you use and then it brings in precipitation data from wherever you're closest to so it looks at you can bring up the closest weather station for in your county or the next county over and this is something that takes the past two years precipitation and then brings in that information and compares it to between a 30 and a 50 year average of rainfall and takes that into consideration to give you a percent of normal for the year and we can start projecting based on the precipitation that we've got so far and project like next year's precipitation if it's normal and then in November so you can start thinking about drought planning like this fall. It's really useful for showing where you're at in the year if you're above normal or below normal and then you can use it to help you figure out if you need to maybe do some de-stocking like you talked about or if you need you can buy some more yearlings for the summer or the spring so there's a lot of cool things that go into it and then once a month we take that information and create a drought status map that considers the production for the whole state and then gives it a color so you can see if we're like above normal is green and then as you get down to 80 percent then it's red.


Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage here at Reinvent annual conference for AWS. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, your host. It's our 11th year covering Reinvent. It's been quite the journey and we've watched the evolution of the cloud just continue to grow. This year, it's been really a big story around generative AI. That's the next function, step function level of change the industry over the past year has been talking about how data and how generative AI specifically is changing the expectations of users and also how applications are being built. We've got a great guest here, Angela Shipley, who's a senior physician, executive. AWS, thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. Thank you for having me. So obviously healthcare and life science is a huge market for generative AI. In fact, I was at an event and we were talking about entrepreneurship and all the hot stars and all the LLMs. And one of the CTOs of a big company said, actually it's the regulated industries that are actually taking advantage of it because they did all the rules. The advantage of all the compliance has kind of set up. So there's a lot of data kind of labeled and it's kind of low hanging, a lot of low hanging fruit. And I said, that's an interesting perspective. So healthcare, fintech, oil and gas, a lot of these verticals are actually pretty well set up for generative AI. Is that the case? Or is it, I mean, what's the current state of the GNI in healthcare? Sure, so one of the things I'm hearing when I have the opportunity to talk to healthcare customers is they're talking about three big areas that are important to them. So one right now is what's happening in terms of the cost of care between labor costs, between what's happening with supplies and also with the cost of care itself. So being able to look at generative AI is going to help them. So and being able to look at just AI and ML alone. So let me give you an example. If you want to have a better idea of what kind of workforce you need, how many people do you need on shift at that time? What supplies do you need? Predictive analytics can help you get there. And then over time being able to look at what happened during that time of the year, during that time of the day, and then you can help better control those costs. Another area where we're seeing healthcare providers really talk about this is with their workforce. The workforce is saying I want to be an environment where I have the training and tools that I need right at my fingertips. It's another area where you can use generative AI to do that. So one of the things you can do is some of those repetitive tasks, the ones that are duplicative, you can take those away with Gen AI. So then they can work at the top of their license, which we know is really important for worker resilience. And then the third area are the patients or the consumers, depending on where they are on the healthcare continuum. One of the things we can do for them now is really personalize the care just for them. Providing insights that are at the fingertips of the healthcare worker. And so that patient feels like they're talking right to me and what's important to me. So those are three big ways already that are going to really change what's happening in healthcare. And that's interesting you brought up those three things. I mean, I just was talking to Julie Sosa from the sports team. And since they have the same kind of thing, you got the athletes, patients, how to run the team management, and then the facilities. Kind of the same integrated dynamics that were usually siloed in the past. Can you give some examples of people putting this in action now? Because I'm not going to imagine the productivity gains and efficiencies gained from this, probably pretty significant. So later on today I'm going to be a moderating session that's going to talk about sudden cardiac death. And one of the reasons why the organization who we play for is able to tell schools, school districts, healthcare organizations, as well as sports teams who might be at risk is because they've been able to take thousands of EKGs, run them through a computational model and be able to say who's at risk. And so they're going to be talking about that today. Talking about how they're using AIML to provide that information. And then a healthcare provider is going to be talking about how that's utilized. So being able to see several organizations come together. So we talk a lot about, can you learn from different industries? You absolutely can. And I think healthcare does a really good job of looking to other highly regulated industries like Fenn looking at the government, looking at the automobile industry. They're looking to others to say, how can we use technology that they've already used and implement it to help take better care of patients? That's a great call out point. We've been hearing this this year at Reinvent that it even came up in the keynote briefly. It's working with other data sets, not necessarily your own, you mentioned that. So like you can just look at that. And again, this came up in another conversation where it's like you can look at data from the geography in an area. That's in your data and mix and match data from other sources. Not in a data marketplace way to like sell, but like just for insights. Absolutely. So you think about, that's why we get so excited about HealthLake. Being able to bring in disparate data from lots of different sources, bringing it together. So now we have information. We can turn that information into true insights that help us have in healthcare can help our customers have better analytics. That's HealthLake. Yes. So explain HealthLake real quick. So AWS HealthLake allows customers to bring in data from different sources, unstructured, turns it into structured data that then can be put into, then you can use another service like AWS QuickSight, right? And then you can visualize it and see what that's actually telling you. So you're getting insights from that data. Then you can use it for better operational efficiency, better clinical efficiency. How can you better take care of a particular patient population? Where, what areas do you need to go to next? That's what you can do when you put services together. You know, the code whisper thing and two with Q, amazing opportunities for, I won't say creative, it's not a creative like a creative, problem solvers, it could be anyone in the organization now. The democratization, again, overused word, is now in place. So anyone could identify something and use the data if they have the HealthLake and Q. Yeah, you're absolutely right with that. And we do use that word democratizing the data quite a bit, but I think it's really important. It's really real now. It's real and it's really important. So one of the things that healthcare organizations are saying right now is I might be on the continuum of builder to buyer, but I can upskill and educate my organization. So we have over 600 courses online that can be accessed, or you can have people in the organization who really want to upskill and get a certification, or they come to some place like re-invent where they can really engage live. And then whether they're going to be a builder or they just want to better talk to those partner vendors they're going to have collaborating with to help solve problems, they're ready to do it and they're better informed. I mean, Angela, this is an exciting year for me. I tell you because every re-invent, there's always good stuff, but there's rare moments in life where you have a major change and the word legit next level has been said probably multiple times on the queue, past couple months. This is next level stuff. This is not, I mean, go back five years ago.  It's not just for coders. You got with queue that brings that kind of business user code whisperer vibe. So code whisperer is going to do great stuff to converting databases. So a lot of stuff that's old, antiquated, kind of either in place for regulatory reasons or maybe just they know it's secure, they don't want to touch it, right? Or you see this a lot in healthcare where it's like there's a lot of ransomware because of it. So it's a lot of like older stuff laying around in the hospitals and the institutions. And that's an opportunity to modernize. I feel like this is an opportunity to truly accelerate business. So now going to the cloud, adopting this technology, having the infrastructure ready so you can have whatever is the next emerging technology, gen AI and beyond, that's what's happening right now in healthcare utilizing all these services. So now that you can take different people in the organization and make it easier to do their job. So now those resources in IT have tools at their fingertips so that it's easier for them to move forward. Now look at how much more that they can do. Yeah. And the patient care too angle is really huge because one of the things that's been great on some of the consumer side is I got my eye watch, got my health apps. Now you got AI for nutrition. Hey, make me a meal. I don't really like this food but I want more vegetables. It'll actually give you the recipes now. It's so good, right? It sounds so easy, but it's convenient. So you have the patient or person and then this predictive, hey, I want to sign up for that heart attack thing. I want to know. I'm not going to have one. As a physician what we've always wanted to do is to really make the patient and the patient's family and whoever their caregivers are part of that healthcare team. So now we have these tools to make it easier. Whether it's communication from the electronic health record, whether it's an app that they have that's going to further give them more information. How do, what should my diet look like? What should I be eating? Helping them monitor their progress. This is what we've always wanted in healthcare to really have a team taking care of that patient and to do it outside of the four walls of whatever institution they are. And you know, not to sound like it's more of an operational thing, but one of the challenges I've heard a lot on theCUBE is that preventative side of it helps clear the unwanted patients that shouldn't be in the facilities. Make that more optimized and peaked for when they need it. Absolutely, absolutely. The goal would be to prevent disease from happening. So what's the coolest thing you're working on right now? That's because you're in a great area. It's got a lot of change. So many great things. Give us a few highlights. One of the coolest things working on right now are those organizations, again, who are really looking at predictive analytics. Very excited about that. Very excited about knowing when a staff member's going into a shift, they know exactly what's coming and how it's going to go. So really excited to work with healthcare customers about that. Excited to work with healthcare customers who are saying, I now have those disparate data points coming together and I'm being able to use it to know exactly what I need to do for clinical efficiency. And that clinical efficiency is really important. It's eliminating waste. It's giving those patients that personalized experience that they want and it's reinforcing the workforce so that that resilience is there. The other thing I'm really excited about that some of our healthcare customers are doing is they're looking at what can we do to better make sure we have access to care to all populations, right? At AWS, we think it shouldn't matter where you live to have good health. And so we're really helping with that by looking at health equity from a standpoint of the data, the access to care, and what do we know when we bring all that together. So really excited about organizations who are using it right now to better understand the patient populations that need more help. You know, my daughter interned this summer at OneMedical and I didn't even know that OneMedical's part of Amazon are kind of affiliated but it brings up the personalization side of it and how the changing landscape is out there. Now it's not a OneMedical question but the idea is a lot of things are going on in our organization with Amazon but personalized care has been a dream too for a long time. And AI is the perfect storm for personalization because you have the data. So the question is, is the data set up for that? And what are facilities doing? What providers doing for getting that data so it can be leveraged? Because data sharing but also insights is how much, what data do you have? So tomorrow I'm going to be in a session with Geisinger Health. Their chief technology officer is going to talk about why they're putting their electronic health record in the cloud. Part of the reason they're doing that is so they can get all of those data points and utilize them across the organization. So it's going to help them take better care of patients. So it's absolutely possible. So they're doing it now? Yes. So I think that solves the whole siloed data problem and the benefit to users is what access to other records to get insights around either pre-existing stuff or data. So the benefit is you have all this information inside the electronic health record and now it can be where it needs to be. So is the patient in the clinic? So in the clinic setting you have the information you need. Are they in the acute care setting in the emergency room? Now you have the information that you need. Is it a visit just for other resources in the health system? All that data is where you need it, when you need it to help the patient have better healthcare. I saw on the keynote, Pfizer was up there. Huge story there. The organizations are getting changing a lot in healthcare and pharma. What are some of the examples that you can point to that people can look to and say, that's the future scenario of a company. This is an example of what success looks like as they transition their company to this new level of opportunity. I'll tell you what, healthcare is an ecosystem, right? Of payers, providers, life sciences, companies, all working together for better health and to personalize care. One of the organizations I really like from a provider standpoint is Baptist Health South Florida. One of the things that they've done is they've moved everything to the cloud. And their goal in doing that, again, across their business, whether it's clinical or business operations, they know what's happening and they can act quickly on behalf of those patients and the others that they serve. I had a chance to talk to Adam Sileski for an hour before re-invent for a story and what came out of that was, data's your differentiator. And he said that in the keynote. And adaptability, this is what you get when you bring it to the cloud. Absolutely, there's a large part of the data right now in healthcare that's not being utilized to the extent that organizations would want and that's what coming to the cloud can do. It can really make that data available to them. Final question, what should people do to take that step in the cloud? What's, is it cultural? Is it physical, technical? What's that challenge? What's the advice you'd have for folks watching they want to accelerate the journey to get that data in a place like a health lake or in a place where we can leverage it? I think one of the first things I would say is at AWS, we have for more than nine years had a dedicated healthcare and life sciences practice with people just like me who used to be a chief medical officer, a physician, a pharmacist, a nurse. So we've walked in the shoes of our customers. So as we start to come together, as we look at those mission and strategic goals, we understand what you're trying to do. As we work backwards and we collaborate on how we're going to get there, we're going to help you have those conversations both within your organization and outside of it so that you can really begin your journey of being in the cloud. So you're ready for the emerging technology. That's the goal. Angel, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, sharing your insights. Love this topic. You know, hey, preventative. I need all the help we can get on theCUBE. Thanks for watching. More coverage after this short break. Back to the studio. We'll get back to the short break.


Welcome back again to this series of screencasts on TruthTables. This is part five, and we're going to take a look at a sentence that is a lot simpler than the ones we have seen in the last couple of screencasts. We're focusing in here on a new connective device here for statements that you learned about in your reading. Apple will announce a new computer model if and only if, and I underline that, it announces a new line of music players. So the if and only if right here is what you learned in your reading as a bi-conditional, or more correctly the statement you are reading here is a bi-conditional statement, not a conditional statement, which is like an if then, but it's really a pair of if thens. A bi-conditional statement is true when both of these statements that adjoins are true or when both the statements that adjoins are false. In other words, it wants the two statements that adjoins to have the same true value, whether it's true or false. They can't differ from each other if the bi-conditional is going to be true. A bi-conditional statement, in other words, is just another way of saying that two statements mean the same thing exactly, like today is July 4th and today is Independence Day. Those two sentences are the same, really they look different, but one is true only if the other is true. So let's parse this out. It's pretty simple to do here. The first statement that is in this bi-conditional is Apple will announce a new computer model. And the second one is Apple announces a new line of music players. And so to put this into symbols, let's call the first sentence P. Again, there's nothing to break down in this first sentence here. There are no ands, ors, or nots, or if thens involved. And the same thing is true for this one, so we'll just call it Q. So there's only two basic statements in here. We'll call them P and Q. So this is saying P, if, and only if, Q. Or in symbols, we will write P, and then kind of a double-headed arrow that points both left and right. P, if, and only if, Q. Sometimes you see if and only if abbreviated I, f, f in the literature. So let's set up the truth table for this. Again, the thing to remember is that P, if, and only if, Q is true in two conditions. That's when the two statements that are being connected are both true or when they're both false. If either of these two statements differ in truth value, then the entire bi-conditional statement is false. This is a two-statement statement, and so we're going to set up four rows. Let's list out the truth values for P and Q. True, true, true false, false true, and then false false. We're only going to have one line for this, and this is just going to copy what you learned about bi-conditionals. In the first row, the two statements are both true. They have the same truth value. And so the bi-conditional is true. In the second statement, one is true and the other isn't. That makes the truth, the bi-conditional statement false. In the third line, again, one is true and the other isn't. And so that makes the bi-conditional statement false. And the last one, both statements are false. That makes the bi-conditional true. They share the same truth value. In other words, P and Q really are the same statement. When one's true, the other's true, and when one's false, the other is false. So thanks for watching.