Good morning. It is Thursday January 26th. We have Doug back to talk about the underserved community. Are you calling it UCI or something internally if they're looking for this? So for the record, Doug was formed Deputy Secretary of the Agency of Administration. We're calling it the underserved community index because that's the federal terminology. I would say that I prefer to stay in line with the federal terms just for that it makes some things easier. However, if the Vermont legislature finds the term dissatisfying, we can we can always brand it something else in Vermont. We're not obligated to use that term. We don't have to be that accommodating yet. We're just trying to understand it, but that's helpful. So would you say other states have underserved community indices? Do you know how many and are they using the same index or is it differing around the country? So throughout the pandemic, maybe I'll brag a little bit here, Vermont has moved faster than pretty much everyone else. We obligated our coronavirus relief fund faster. We spent it faster. We also and when I say we in this one rare case, I'm speaking of both the legislative and executive branches, how we work together as a state. I don't normally do that, but we appropriated to policy purposes that were well aligned. The White House has commented on how Vermont's approach really aligns with. They have. Yes. We've received praise in some of our federal pandemic programs for how we're approaching them. So when we went to create this index, we did not find we looked for other states to see if any other states were were doing this. We're taking the federal definitions and trying to define more clearly what were underserved communities in their states. We were unable to find any other state parallels. The closest we found in some of our programs, we introduced a BIPOC priority and we felt that that was without writing a full justification case. We felt that was fairly safe to prioritize BIPOC businesses in most of those programs because also there was some precedent that the legislature chose to prioritize BIPOC in several cases. So we said, we doubt that anyone will protest if we do this. And we didn't have any issues with that. So other states had prioritized BIPOC communities. They've prioritized identity based communities, basically referring back to decisions they've made previously about those identity based communities. Geographical communities, I think the states are still pretty disparate on how they think of them. I think some of the discussion in the house that we've had so far about this really highlights the indexes can be challenging. I think when you highlight a need, some people view that as a negative and we're not trying to be negative. We're trying to say we are seeing, we saw a lack of participation. We saw a need to identify a group that we could help participate. And that's kind of how we came about generating it. The other state materials that we, after looking for other states, we drew on the Vermont social vulnerability index. And the rural capacity index was an index generated by a non-profit third party organization that it was generated during the pandemic. So it's a more recent index. Who generated the capacity index? I can get that answer for you, Senator. Is that national or state? It's national. Not knowing the name, I believe, I don't believe it's a fully centrist, fully nonpartisan organization. I think they do have center, center right leanings to be candid. I think I don't think it's a completely unattached organization. So it's the rural capacity index is one reason we didn't just try to use that was that it did seem to have a specific perspective that it was going for. And we wanted to try to balance the capacity side with the need side of Vermont, because we know Vermont is a complex state. We have some extremely progressive individuals. We have some conservative individuals and we all try to work together instead of defaulting to one perspective or the other. I know Senator Harrison has done, I don't know if you're on the spot, but she's looked at what happens after the top towns, right? I mean, the top towns, they're small. And of course, to the federal government, they're probably a little bit microscopic, right? I mean, I think they think most of Vermont is rural, but we're here looking deeper at rural capacity in our state. I applaud that. When you get below all the small towns up top, I think some funny things happen with the population centers, they're in an order that might not speak to the common reasonable person as where the need is. It might be a matter of they have half of a certain position, but more of a different position. Senator Harrison, I don't know if you wanted to speak to your observations at all. Sure. Well, a couple of questions first. So I didn't realize that there's a federal index. Did you look at how the federal index is calculated? So there's a federal definition, a high level definition. Okay. And then the states, the feds leave the discretion up to the states to further define and identify what their underserved communities are. Okay. So this index was our attempt to identify those communities. So yes, the feds kind of, especially with state fiscal recovery, they published a rule, they published the parameters, and there are multiple areas in there where they give guidance, but it's still up to the states. And in this case, the state legislature created all those programs within that, within those barriers that the feds created. But they stayed away from with the exception of income limits, which I personally wish they hadn't set income limits themselves because we use different income limits in Vermont. But the income limits are the one area where the feds actually use numbers and broadband. Right. But for most of it, they leave it up to the state. And I would say, what you're seeing is not surprising. One thing in that we have one massive benefit of talking through things like this with the legislature is that everyone can look at and know their list of communities and point out inconsistencies very quickly. Right. So one thing we found a knowledge, ability to truth it. Yeah. So on the capacity side, we are pulling the town administrator and university presence indicators. And right now we're looking at replacing them. We're making the population. We're, we're going to bucket that differently. And probably looking at right now seven buckets, seven tiers. And we're looking at the municipal budget per capita is actually really interesting way to look at towns in Vermont. We have a range of $300 spent per capita up to over $5,000 spent per capita by a municipality. So there's a massive spectrum of how much a municipality is spending per member of that municipality. And we want to recognize that. And that's a pretty interesting. Yeah. Because that's it can't be a choice of the municipality. Are you assuming that that's the choice that the municipality is making? I mean, in some cases, there might be a taxing capacity that's not being used. Yes. And that's why we have a very full grant list is going to be another variable that we add in. Okay, to represent. Yes, the capacity side in particular, we are, we're meeting with several legislators and VLCT to talk about how much we can't we explored a measure related to roads and unpaved versus paved. Yes. Oh, it turns out that's very controversial. Right. People feel strongly and sometimes not paving a road is a choice. Oh, very much so. Exactly. But we do have whole towns that do not. I represent a town that does not have a single paved road. Correct. But it's at a data level, you can't separate the towns that choose to pay for their roads and choose the towns that can't pay for it. Right. So that's what the municipal grant list factors intended to represent is. Okay. What's the tax base in that town? How much tax could they theoretically raise if they chose to? I don't know if you're at liberty to say, but what I don't want to happen is there's multiple groups meeting, Senator Harrison and Senator Clarkson, we're going to join some House members in talking about the in banks. That is tomorrow. It's either tomorrow, possibly today, but is that? That is the group I was going to send out an invitation. Yes, we're only meeting with one group of legislators. Yes, yes. Perfect. I just I didn't. Okay, I want to be good. Close. Yes, I was going to say you were included as I recall. Okay, that's really helpful. So you're going to be part of those but I think it's really great. Right. So I would say from the administration's perspective, we feel good about what we published from a from a scientific perspective. It was a reasonable way to approach it. However, once you get into the nuance, we can improve it. We can modify it to make it more accurately capture the nuances in some of Vermont's smaller and medium sized towns. And I think that'll be very valuable. We're definitely not wedded to the original form. Good. Just a couple more questions. Is there any other process in the state that categorizes towns? So generally speaking, and actually Chris Cochran is more of an expert than I am at this. But from what I've seen from working at the tax department and from interacting with community development, historically, Vermont tends to just draw a line related to population level. And we talk about it and then we figure out what the right line is. But then below that population level, everyone has the same access and we hope that people that don't need the program don't approach the program and people that need it more are able to access it. So I think that's the most common method is based on the town size. I might interject just to say, I'm very attached to the environmental justice, you know, principles we set forth last year, which in a way that doesn't divide urban and rural, we started to talk about who has low spending per capita, who has degraded infrastructure, you know, who has undesirable land uses in higher quantities in their communities. And that process is underway, and that was supposed to be set in motion so that advisory council could come together and create a mass of the state that talked about whose infrastructure and whose environmental benefits aren't being experienced to the same level. Madam Chair, I would say we evaluated the work that's been done on that index and the direction it's moving in. And it's, I think, an excellent lens for looking at environmental justice. It is a very different lens from what we're looking at here because of a lot of things that are measured. If you look at the map of how the current index measures impact, it does actually tend to, in reality, favor the rural or favor the urban areas. It shows a higher impact because most of the elements that are included in the index only exist in urban areas. Many of these smaller towns don't have degrading infrastructure because they have no infrastructure. So from an environmental perspective, I'm sorry, that was a very blunt way to put it. No, no, but it's true. Yeah, but I would like to look at how you're measuring that because we started with thresholds that really captured rural population to have higher poverty levels. And then we looked at where there's limited English proficiency and higher populations of people of color. But when you, I mean, that is an existing federal map. It's one of the most detailed federal maps that exists with EJ screen. And now they're beta testing of, but I find that vulnerability impacts. So I would, I would just challenge that. I don't know, you know, if the state has done a good enough job ever mapping, you know, sort of who is experiences environmental benefits. They're not all infrastructure. They're health related. They're life poisoning related. They're a number of indicators that exist in the federal framework that flooding vulnerability, people vulnerability. So I just, I challenged that it's, it's that world. I didn't mean to imply it leaves it out, but I would say more of the variables apply to an urban setting than a rural setting. So it didn't, it wasn't a, it wasn't a light switch type situation where it leaves them out completely. But I do, when I looked at the map and overlaid it over our population centers, it had a strong correlation. The social vulnerability index also had a fairly strong correlation, although that was a bit more mixed. If you actually look at the national social vulnerability, Vermont actually scores rather well relative to other states on social vulnerability. So that's said, I don't know, Senator. Well, I guess just one other major question is if this index is going to be used for years, then I think obviously we need to take more time to get it right. If it's just going to be used for this for the three million dollars, I believe that needs to get out quickly. It can be, it doesn't have to be as close to perfect in my opinion. So the index, the intended use of the index is for this to expedite the release of this three million dollars to get a list that admittedly not perfect, but good enough to give us a first round of releases. And then I know House Commerce was particularly interested in an appeal process so a town could come to AOA and say, we really should be on your list. And for AOA to look at the facts of that town and to say, OK, you know, this conditions in your town, we can add you to the technical support. Right. It's just funny because the people who would likely need it don't have the capacity to do that. I mean, it's just that I think that's true. I think it all depends on how we interact with them. If we go overly formal and rigid with the towns like we do in many of our programs, then, yes, they won't have the capacity to get through an appeal. If we approach them in a reasonable manner, have a conversation with them and we don't box it in with too many too much process and formulating criteria. I mean, any time you give discretion to an administrative official, that's a consideration. If it's long term discretion, that's more troubling. If it's short term discretion, you can sometimes go with who you know is making the decision. And do we trust that individual or not to behave fairly? But discretion is always a tough call. The other use of the index is not truly long term, but is for ARPA programs that are running through 2026. We've looked at it and I know before I cited four or five, there are three programs where the use of the index would be strongly appropriate. And most other programs, it might enter as a waiting factor after we talk to the program staff, if they feel as appropriate. But for most of them, it's kind of a it's not a certain that it would actually be very appropriate because some of the programs like three acre storm water, they don't necessarily serve these these populations that we were trying to provide assistance to. So the risky systems program is ten million dollars of water for small residential water systems. The legislative language there clearly signaled an intent to prioritize smaller rural communities. The of course, Act 172 has its own prioritization mechanism and we are actually trying to align our index more with some of the criteria from Act 172, which is the municipal energy resilience program. Distance from an urban center is how they act 172 program is is contemplating geographic location as there is and we're also going to look at integrating distance from an urban center into our capacity side of the index. So I think that's one of the new variables we're considering to replace town administrator and presence of a university. We found the town administrator data to be after we dug into it and got enough examples. It was like, OK, this is not not representative of the towns. Right. I think it is somewhat representative, but I would have given not as much as we had hoped a middle score, you know, like a 50 rather than 100 or zero, like a 50 or zero, that kind of thing. It certainly is an element of a town's capacity. Oh, I would think so because center parks. So I am. No, right. No, no. And I won't hold on to it. Yeah. So that's good. So I have a question for you because I found out the other night at the Working Lands meeting that Brian at the New Paul Costello, Brian's last name, I'm just putting it on. But who runs what? Low, I believe. Right. Right. For my account for all development has actually gotten ten million dollars of earmark from Leahy to do very similar work, not actually to help all the towns access the IRA infrastructure and ARPA money. But to do very similar capacity building, helping the visualize and then helping implement them through the project's completion. That it's similar. It's similar enough so that it strikes me that and they're one of the partners on helping roll this out. That it would be great to also bring them into the conversation and figure out how we can make these two efforts work because they have a whole lot more money. They could identify more towns. I think it's for. I mean, do you remember what it's for? It's for 20 towns, I think. Yes. So they're and it's very exciting. And I think it dovetails in a very constructive way because part of this is getting. I mean, our objective here is to help towns access and fully use all the federal money that's been put on our plate in all these different programs. And that's part of what they're trying to do, too. Anyway, it just strikes me as we go forward that we should be working together, hand in glove, so that we don't duplicate it and that we use up all that money in constructive ways. Absolutely, Senator. We have started having conversations with Brian about that program and how the two can interact together and how we can avoid duplication. I think one of the biggest ways we will avoid duplication there is that that funding, a significant amount of funding is also for a narrower type of projects. So it'll it'll help the towns build capacity in a certain lane, but it won't help them with some of the general scoping as much. But we are still early in the conversations. And yes, I think we would absolutely want to coordinate with them and make sure we're not duplicating. I think we also ask that, you know, if they were going to be one of the areas that responded to the retainer agreements or not. I think the there's a lot of potential there to make sure we work together. And I think that's been extremely important in rolling out the ARPA with with all the programs created in all the different agencies. We have a very high level of activity in Vermont between projects towns are initiating by themselves. Projects coming out of A&R, V Trans. We have a lot going on. So coordination is amazingly important. How are you defining an urban center? So we haven't settled on a firm definition. That's one thing I wanted to talk about tomorrow. The census uses five thousand. So the U.S. Census uses five thousand. Yes. And that's actually the threshold for what they define as rural. So below five thousand, they define as rural. So by default, it's not rural. Right. Yeah. So the five thousand is what we're contemplating is for app 172 for distance from a population center of five thousand or more, which is a little over 20 towns in Vermont. And I don't want to comment too much, but I think what was consumed before was the gradient level, you know, right? The capacity is like zero fifty or one hundred. Right. And if there's a way to create a much more absolutely, you know, granular gradient, they are thought would be helpful. Yes. A lot of towns are near somewhere near a face of five thousand. Right. Population was one hundred fifty zero. Now it'll be in in steps of 14 percent. So the one hundred eighty six seventy two. So it'll wind down a little bit more. Just to follow up on the urban rural, the they can be completely different economically. You can have a high income urban center surrounded by rural low income or you can have low income urban surrounded by high income rural. Yeah. Yes. So that makes a huge difference on the on the capacity. Yes. I think it shows up more than we want to show. But but need is huge and I would say I do feel like the the need in some index that we created. I do feel like presents a pretty strong, holistic view that's very nuanced. It does look at percentage of income above one hundred and fifty percent of FPL labor force participation, population growth or loss. So it does provide more of a snapshot of the the need the the affluent is the need in the end. Sorry, I'm just trying to find all the different various in your report. In the spreadsheet. So it's in this life called needs subsidy. So OK, I haven't seen that. The needs of index and obviously you'd be open to adjustment if people felt strongly. I'm sorry. Why do you use above 50? Why don't you just do the income? Because the income above one hundred and fifty percent is the available data at the census level. It doesn't have some of the other thresholds that we like to set. We don't have the data to support it necessarily. It's estimated data. So I know I know some of the processes that go into estimating those other thresholds unless it's based on tax data. And this we couldn't ask the tax department to work on this research because it didn't have a taxation purpose. It would have could have been considered a long term. That's not true. Long term, if all these projects happen, the tax base will go up in all these towns because the grant list will improve. And hopefully these communities will be more sustainable. So actually it does have big taxes. The primary reason we use 150 was that it is the census threshold. And if there's another reliable data set, we're happy to look at it. And if it's preferable, we're happy to replace the income indicator. I think wherever you draw the line of income, the percentage up and above and below, it's a relative. You know, we're comparing the different communities. So as long as we're comparing apples to apples, I think it's a it's a good indicator. Yeah, unless one. I mean, some communities are very much more poor. I know that's bad. That's a good word. I'm much more. Right. And at the very low level, and I I'm just not familiar with the above 150. So I can just take a look at it in the meantime and see if it does. If you're below 150, you are not able to make ends meet. You are not able to independently support yourself generally at one hundred versus 50 percent of federal poverty level. That is quite quite low. But then if your community has, for example, a lot of folks in the 80 percent level versus the 80 to one hundred and fifty, that might be a different type of community. Right. Yeah. And that's where you get into the nuances of a particular community. A community may have, you know, you see some very divided communities where they have a large population of extremely low income and then they have a large population of extremely high income. Right. And I think if this was intended to be a general policy tool applied like for the next 20 years in Vermont, you might want to try to study those differences and generate a more comprehensive view of the communities, which of course, if you're trying to maintain that would be a massive effort to try to maintain. But I do think the reason we use the census table was we felt it was representative. It was available. And for short term use, it's felt appropriate. OK. Any final questions? I'm really glad the working group is in place. And when asked, your other thoughts of the work. Right. Yes. So it's a challenge because it's been scheduled in the middle of committee time. So I'm I still haven't had well, so that's a problem. So I need to check with. Ruth. Actually, I think it's scheduled on floor time. Isn't it 1 p.m. tomorrow? Tomorrow we're on the floor at 1130. Oh, sorry. My calendar. One o'clock is. Sorry. It's a newbie thing. That's OK. Thanks so much. I appreciate you. I mean, we like indices if they help us, you know, make a better decision. Can you send out a new version of where you are now that you've adjusted so much for this? Is that possible? Will we get that tomorrow at the working group? I'm hoping a new version will be available tomorrow. We are. We just arrived on the new ways to segregate the data yesterday, and I'm having the team run through the statistical checks to make sure we're not actually violating any like, you know, error principles and things like that. So we use the same statistical standards used for the Social Vulnerability Index and we don't want to bias the data by dividing it up the way we think it might make sense. So I think that's one of the challenges. But I hope to have a new version to look over tomorrow. Yes. Right. It's perfect. Thanks so much. Thank you. So Megan. Is she here? And is Gary your witness? At least you are with us, but I'm OK. The invitation to invite somebody Gary is on soon. OK, great. So we'll let you stage and I let him know. I don't know if you let him know as well, but he might have a little more time. Starting now. So I appreciate the opportunity. So for the record, Megan Sullivan, I'm the Vice President of Government Affairs for the Vermont Chamber of Commerce. The Vermont Chamber is the largest state state president's organization. We represent small, medium, large businesses in every industry across the state of Vermont and appreciate the opportunity to be here today to talk about your own this housing bill. I'm just going to sort of start a big picture on workforce. There are and and Senator Ron Hiddle, I know you've used this before, but there, you know, over 20,000 job openings in the state. So if we had a unemployment rate at zero and we told every graduating kid that they have to stay in Vermont or they chose to stay in Vermont, we would still have a lot of job openings. We just don't have enough people in the state to fill the openings that we have. I had the opportunity to read a report from JFO. I brought one copy. I don't know if this issue brief on demographics is on their website, but if anyone would like to see it, I've got to hear. And there's a line from it that I want to read. Unless Vermonters age 65 and older decide to leave Vermont in droves or younger working age people flock to the state and great number of numbers, Vermont's ratio of old to working age people will continue to rise, placing a greater burden on workers to support both young and old. Now, Kelly from AARP was supposed to be here before me. And I know at some point she'll come in and she is going to say what I would echo is that our mature Vermonters, our sage Vermonters are an incredibly important part of our community and we don't want them to leave in droves. We want them to have an opportunity to stay in age here, which means we need to ensure Vermont's secure, sustainable and equitable future by attracting more working age people here. But recent graduates, seasoned professionals alike are deterred from taking jobs here or remaining here because of the housing shortage. We know that legislators from every party, businesses from every industry, communities across the state have all agreed that housing is a fundamental challenge for Vermonters right now. And while that's going on, we continue to see stories in the news, which was highlighted in an op-ed that that the Vermont Chamber did with AARP and Vermont Professional Color Network about communities where housing developments are being downsized, are being delayed or being derailed, usually by a few individuals who are looking at local and state zoning pieces in order to impact the ability for those housing developments to move forward and saying not in my backyard. And I think most concerning is when those yards have really benefited from state investment in infrastructure. Seven years ago, the Vermont Futures Project, who I hope may be coming into this committee at some point, they are much better at data and figures than I am. But they set a target of 5,000 new homes per year to meet the demand. And since that in 2016, we've seen, especially in the last few or hundreds of millions of dollars invested in housing, but the crisis continues to worsen. VHFA has come out with updated numbers that are even higher than where the Vermont Futures Project was six years ago. So we know that money alone can't solve this problem. I did a quick look on Indeed, which is just one job posting. And there were today and there were 8,900 jobs posted that pay over $45,000 a year, which is usually the salary that someone would be making if they can afford a $200,000 home. I then compared that, so that's all jobs over $45,000. Compared that to Zillow, what's available in the market. Twenty two hundred thousand to four hundred thousand across Vermont, 57 homes, 9000 job openings, 57 homes available. There is a mismatch between the workers that we need and the houses available for them to live in, to work here and call for them on home. The proposals that are in the omnibus bill that you're considering are great steps at reducing those barriers, getting at solutions that aren't just putting money to the problem. We know that investments are important and need to continue, but we also need to reduce the barriers because we need a continuum of housing. If right now we have affordable housing or subsidized affordable housing and people who can buy a seven hundred thousand dollar home on 10 acres. We're missing the opportunity for people to move through the continuum to grow their careers and their families in Vermont. And this bill gets at the idea of equity in or I should say economy of scale by creating density. If you can build a house for a duplex for a little more than you can build a single family home, you're creating affordability and economy of scale. It also reduces the cost by the amount that a developer is going to be spending on permits and legal fees for going to going through all of these processes in a way that really looks at where do we want housing? What's a smart growth area way to do this? So since two thousand nineteen wages in the state have gone up twenty one percent according to the old data. So I'm sorry since for what's twenty nineteen second quarter of twenty nineteen to the second quarter of twenty twenty two twenty one point eight percent in this past year we saw an eight percent increase in wages. So employers are raising wages. We know that housing is still out of reach as wages have gone up. And so employers are taking that next step of saying we can't continue to lose employees or lose recruits to the state because of this. And so the employers that can are getting involved in trying to find solutions. A anchor employer in the state of Vermont and a huge hugely important player as we have these age demographics. The University of Vermont Medical Center is one of those employers that is trying to participate in how to get to solutions. They are building a three hundred unit three hundred units of housing in South Burlington. They have twelve hundred job openings. So it's a piece but it's not everything. We need opportunities for their employers and for their employees and for all employees whether they're the entry level health care worker who's looking to get trained and grow a year or a seasoned professional that we want to prove to the state and their family like Gary is and we're looking forward to hearing Gary to say that you can come here even if you need affordable housing or if you have an higher income and this can be a place where you can attain housing in an affordable way for your family. Gary is here on the screen with a beautiful background. It looks like West Virginia to me but. You're muted Gary. Sorry. I think they'll have my I think we need to turn up the volume. It's just got. It could be. Tell me how to do it. Just hit this. OK. Here we go. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So thank you guys for having me. My name is Gary Scott. This is this background is Uganda Africa by the way. So not not anywhere in the states. But where is that that is that is Murchison Falls in Uganda Africa. Africa. OK. Is that as high as it will go? Weird. OK. It's just not as loud as we'd like to have it. Well I'm not sure what it started. You guys want to ask some questions so I'm sure I just share my experience coming to Vermont. I think your personal you know your experience coming to Vermont is valuable. As Megan set up you know you all have a lot of job openings and are trying to build housing. What that experience has been like I bent the ear of your new CEO yesterday about shared housing home share systems and getting nurses into the neighborhoods around the hospital with home share situations. But that's my own kind of issue. So just yeah you have the floor for a little under 20 minutes. I don't think I'll take that long. But let me just share my personal background. So I came here in 2020 November of 2020 and I moved into a hotel and ended up having ended up having to stay in the hotel for over seven months because I just couldn't find anywhere to stay every place that I tried to get there were immediate cash offers over and beyond over and above the asking price. So coming here as a middle what I would call an upper middle class salary still not been able to find a place until I was able to contact someone who knew someone and it took me seven months when I got here was one or time so there was not a lot for me to do or people for me to know. But until I made relationships at work and found someone to actually help me. I was trapped in a hotel and I can't tell you during COVID pandemic cyber attack the mental health challenges that you faced in the hotel for seven months. You're alone families not here. But even after that trying to try to find permanent housing that I could afford coming from Texas where we my wife and kids we have a nice home there. Five bedrooms, you know to two car garage, whatever trying to find something that's comparable to here to that in Vermont was just not possible. And so if you have to make decisions on whether or not you want to bring your families and your family here and take a step down in terms of your housing situation. And even if I could have found housing, it was it was not attractive for us as a family. And then it was just not affordable. You know, I think the first house we look at the only house we really looked at it thought about purchasing was a three bedroom to two car three bedroom to bath home. And there was over seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars and not a huge home, small home. So just the challenges of trying to relocate here as what I would consider an upper middle class family and having challenges, I can only imagine what entry level workers are making trying to afford housing here. So we're trying to be created by the University of Vermont Medical Center in terms of trying to partner with folks, developers to try to come up with with employee housing. These are things that we used to do back, you know, 100 years ago or 50 years ago or so as an employee as an employer, trying to make sure our folks have housing is going to challenge. We've had folks move here and actually is sad to say, but have to stay in their car for a little while. And that's not how we should treat people. I think Vermont is a great place, a lot to offer. But unless we can get folks to come here and have housing for people, I think we're setting ourselves up for a future that may not be as as bright as we will want it to be. Housing is a is a big part of why people take jobs in different states. If it's affordable here and I'm not saying low income house, I'm just an affordable house, even for for everyone from all spectrums. So the challenges for me, I think we're very unique. I am a vice president coming here and having challenges not only because I didn't know I was 21, but the real estate agent that I used every place she brought me before I could even offer in that were 27, 20, 25 offers way over the asking price. And these places would take significant amount of money to before you can even move in. So in addition to not having the volume of housing that we need, the ones that do come on the market are just not affordable for the everyday person. My department is that I manage a lot of the entry level folks, the folks that clean the hospital, EBS, we food services, maintenance security. And I hear from my folks on the daily basis how hard it is to find house here and the challenges associated with housing and child care. Child care is a separate issue. I know, but it kind of ties together. So I've also worked with folks in the community who come here as refugees from Afghanistan and the challenges that that some of those folks face and finding housing. Though we have a lot of non-properies that work with those people, housing is still a challenge. So Vermont is a great place. I think we have a lot to offer. If only we could work on housing. I don't have the answers, but I think being creative, like what we're trying to do with working with different developers trying to to bring on employee housing will make a difference for us, but but not for the entire state. Thank you. Any any questions? It is really heartbreaking to hear about your employees sleeping in their cars, just trying to work in our hospitals and save lives. That's, you know, that's frightening. Senator Clarkson. So, Gary, it's sort of it's brutal. And I'm just curious, where did you finally land and the other challenges? How far from your job? I mean, how far are you having to commute now? Because that's another piece as we look at climate resiliency and climate, you know, how we reduce our global warming impact is like one of our challenges is how much further people are having to commute to their work. Yeah. So can you give us a note? Yeah, I was I was lucky. I was lucky. I talked to my boss, who has been a long a lifetime Vermonter. He knew he knew someone who was able to find me a place after a month. That's frustrating. Yeah, very frustrating. Yeah, so so I landed about four miles from the job, so I don't have a long commute. My job is yeah, I could I could bike. I could bike to work. I can't walk to work, but I can bike to work. And my job is that I have to be here at the drop of a dime sometime. So I'm close. I'm very lucky and it worked out for me. But we have an employee that we were pursuing. A very bright engineer that we needed to have on our team to help us with our future master planning. And he he refused the offer because of how he and his wife looked around the house and he was like you're out just we just can't afford to live there. Very bright guy. I mean, he was a brilliant, brilliant guy. And we lost him because him him and his wife felt like they couldn't afford to to move here. Yeah, we've heard that from several employers, sadly. Senator Brock. You mentioned that in looking at a variety of houses over time, there was a tremendous amount of competition over the asking price. Based on how you wound up after finding a recommendation, do you feel you've got value for what you paid or do you think you overpaid? So I'm renting I'm renting because I can't afford to buy and I do feel like I'm overpaid. I you know what I'm paying for a two bedroom apartment townhouse here would be a lot less in Texas or Alabama where I was born raised. The places that you've been at before, do they have a housing problem like for my house or is my unique. So I think you're in your experience in my experience in Vermont is unique. I've never had it. I've been all over the country. I've worked in Ohio, Cincinnati, Ohio, Florida, making Georgia, Atlanta, Georgia, Birmingham, Alabama, Adamsville, Tennessee, Dallas, Texas, I've never, ever, ever faced challenges like I faced when I got to Vermont in Dallas. At the time when I moved there, there were approximately 1700 people relocating to Dallas a day. And we were never having housing issues in Dallas. When you see the trend moving up, people deal. You're allowed to deal. You're attracting so much talent and business into Dallas that the governments allow you to, there are no restraints on taking care of housing. So I've never, ever seen a challenge like I've seen in Vermont. Vermont is a, is a very unique, a unique state. Thank you. No, I'm fine. I mean, welcome. I'm curious. I'm curious, Gary, you know, what's making you stay given all of those challenges? I mean, we're lucky we haven't lost you too. What do you tell people if they're looking and trying to stay? And where's your family? So my family is still in Texas right now. I have a senior in high school that once he graduates, he's going to come up here. Not sure if the entire town will relocate right now because of the housing situation and the facilities and not be able to afford a house. The inability to afford a house housing. But, you know, Vermont for me, I don't, I can't speak for everyone. But for me, my job matters to me. It has a lot in terms of defining who I am as an individual. So when I'm happy on my job, I'm pretty happy everywhere else. So I'm happy at the medical center. I value the work that we do. I love the work that we do in serving our community and serving Vermonters. We have an uphill battle in terms of serving this state over the next 10, 20, 30, 50 years. But we were up for the challenge. And the joy and the satisfaction that I get from working at the medical center and serving Vermonters plays a big part in why I stay. I'm not a cold weather guy at all. I never thought that I would be back in the north at all. But since I've come here, what has been very important for me is that I've had to seek out community, to be honest with you. I've had to find a community of folks to be around, to spend time with, to connect with. And that's a diverse group of people. But it's not as easy as it seems. You have to be someone who puts yourself out there. So me having this community that I, and then from all backgrounds and walks of life, having that community and having the work relationships on my job and what we do for this community makes me love Vermont. I'm not a skier, so I'm not going to lie to you and tell you I snow ski or I love the winters or I snowboard or snowshoe. I don't do anything in the winter, but the spring and summer and fall are the best. But I know I can't say it. I can't say it. Maybe we'll get you all ice fishing. So that was my first winter sports. But I don't think so. It is a little scary when you walk out of the ice for the first time. It's cold. So, Mr. Scott, I'm sure you're very busy. I don't know if anybody has any more questions. No, we can let Megan wrap up on the themes for the few minutes we really appreciate your time and we appreciate you being here in persevering through all of that. It shouldn't be this much of a struggle to become a promoter. Yeah and you may become our poster person for the outdoor recreation industry. It's great to have you to be our voice for a need. We are all sadly very clear on. Well let me say thank you guys for having me and in whatever way you guys need me to serve. I'm open to serving. Thanks for your time today and I hope it's been been valuable and I look forward to hearing from you guys for whatever you may need from me in the future. Great thank you. Thank you. I'm wonderful but he loves his job. Yes. He loves his job enough to put up with. We have great jobs. There's so many amazing things that just happen hidden in the hills and valleys in Vermont. And it's amazing the number of people who are living far far away from their jobs. I had a nurse who was contacting me about the housing situation and she lives in Highgate and commutes back and forth every day because that's the only place that she could fly, place to rent that she could afford and she stopped earning minimum wage by any means. And that's to Northwest. She's committed to doing it. Yeah. Well she's known. Not to Northwest. She goes to the UVM Medical Center in Burlington every day from Highgate. From Highgate? From Highgate. Yeah. One of my daughters who was is an emergency room nurse and she commuted from Unisburg in Burlington. I think she's recently gone to Northwest. I'm hearing the same thing from the senior living community folks but they're living in Waterbury community in Burlington every day. That's Waterbury, Burlington is standard. They place them there as a starting point. Yeah, and they're like We hear, I mean in every industry, healthcare certainly, but even the manufacturing member of ours who works with Second Chance employees to get them out of corrections or substance abuse and into jobs that say that given, you know, they can't find a place to work. So they live in the Northeast Kingdom and they already have transportation issues, cars that are unreliable. That adds an hour. If you're driving an hour each way, that adds two hours of childcare that's needed. Finding opportunities and employment hubs in our smart growth areas to say how do we how do we build density so that we can add to this continuum. Again, we're supportive of continued strategic investments. We also know that breaking down barriers to allow this market to work better is is going to be important. The missing middle program last year was an investment in middle housing. I think that was gone in a month. There are some interesting proposals that we're excited about that would allow employers that aren't the UVM Medical Center that can figure out how to do employee housing or wonder if that's going on our insurance bill. Well, that wanted that are that are frustrated. They're entrepreneurial and say this is a problem and we need to be involved in solving it. They are not developers. They're not in real state. This is a totally different business for them. And so an opportunity for them to invest in the creation of housing. You know, there's a proposal that's been worked on that I think may be coming out in a house bill that we're excited about that could provide employers that opportunity to invest in housing that could get at this workforce and see middle housing programs. We've heard a lot of different ideas. We have we're going to get to funding next week and look at incentives for commercial residential and great, you know, employer supported. But is there any ideas that you have, Senator Brown? Oh, okay. Senator, I have a question. You have builders and developers as you're some members, I think, right? Obviously, they need employees. And we're looking at the career and technical centers. But is there anything we should know about from that sector? In terms of increasing their capacity or are we hearing from them? We're hearing from them. Oh, yeah. Okay. I mean, I think it highlights that every industry is struggling right now. And it's just constant. So, you know, how we can support employers who are interested in developing housing? You know, it's something we looked at briefly last year with, thank you, with the with the project in Springfield, with that done project in Springfield, that was very specific to that. But it raises the bigger issue in terms of over being in talking about his housing, he's had to create for his employees. I think there is sort of a place. We figured out how we can enable employers. And so if you could come back to us, maybe with a proposal on how we could specifically help employers who are so disposed to to invest in this and what would make it worth it for them. And what I mean, I think that that would be kind of actually an interesting aspect to this bill is because we want to do it for all employers, not just one, which has been sort of a problem. Yeah.  But I when is it being brought to us, Chris and Megan? Soon. Okay, so good, because it's initialization. I've talked about it. And, you know, it's hard to do it just for one. But if we could come up with a concept that worked for a number of entrepreneurial businesses, that would be great. Because we're, you know, we have members that are interested from large acre employers to restaurants that are that are just have that entrepreneurial scope and say, right, we need to be part of the solution. So we are eager to hear about that. Fantastic. So we'll have you back. Great. And we are moving on to keep Gallagher trapped from our resources council. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's Kerry wanting to say hi, everyone. Hi, good morning. Can you hear me okay there and hearing there? It's all fine, I guess. Hi, I think it feels like something's up. Hi. Well, this is good. I'm up there and the voice is coming behind. I got the music you're not hearing. My mistake is to look there. Yeah, you're coming in. Okay, great. Well, thank you so much for having me in this morning. Katie Gallagher. I have spoken this committee in the past in my capacity as the Sustainable Communities Program Director with the Vermont Natural Resources Council. But I believe I'm speaking to you today with my Waterbury Planning Commission hat on and Brian Schup will be back into the committee to speak more specifically on behalf of the NRC related to the specific provisions in the bill. But I am currently the Vice Chair of the Waterbury Planning Commission, member of our new Waterbury Housing Task Force, which just at our very first meeting last night, which is exciting. I'm also an active member of the Vermont Planners Association and previously was a planner in the Maddiver Valley where I supported their nonprofit housing committee. So I am happy to be here today to talk about Waterbury's recent experience in the past six months or so related to housing. But if it's all right, I'd also like to share a little bit about my own personal housing experience here as a as a young person who's been dedicated to living and staying in Vermont. So I've been here for over 14 years. And over that time, most of it has been in Burlington, living in first the UVM dorms and then all different types and structures of apartments and drafty old beautiful buildings within my in-laws basement for a time. And then thankfully, as of three years ago, we were very fortunate to be able to purchase our first home, which is a old 200 year old single family home with an accessory dwelling unit and Waterbury Center. My partner and I benefit from having family members that have purchased their own homes, having the resources and time to be able to go through this process. And I know that you've you've heard from folks already about how difficult this process is, especially for first time home buyers or folks who don't have families who have purchased homes in the past. And, you know, even for us, I just want to say and reiterate that the process was incredibly confusing and disheartening. We were looking for a house in Waterbury Center, sorry, Waterbury in general actually looking at first in the village, because we were hoping for a place that was in a walkable community where we can walk to the grocery store, to the elementary school. There was this was in 2019, I think we probably spent about four months or so before anything came on to the market. And when we finally found a house that fit our criteria because we were probably naive at that point, we were ready to make an offer, even though our agent strongly cautioned us against that house because of its high cost and pretty obvious structural deficiencies. But we're like, we'll fix it up. It's fine. And then I had my mom come in who has a background in real estate and she said the same thing. And then I knew that we'd never hear the end of it. So we should probably move on, which was a good choice because now I've since met the couple who who ended up purchasing that house and they confirmed our luck in moving on with stories about large rodents running across their bed. So we dodged a bullet there. Unfortunately, this other young couple did not. But we got lucky and ultimately finding a home in the historic village of Waterbury Center, which for folks who are not familiar with this area, I think it is a hidden gem, but it is separated from the village. And so it does still require us to have to drive down to the village to get groceries and get to the health center and all of that. So we found this home when the owners have lowered the price. This was again 2019. So time of really low rates that we were able to afford. This was three months before COVID hit. And so we got incredibly lucky. The house, as I said, came with an existing accessory dwelling unit that was built for their grandmother before. I did want to know and I think I might have shared this story last year when I was here, but the ADU is great for us, but it did cause complications through the purchasing process because the bank's appraiser first struggled to find comparisons to value our house because there just aren't a lot of other homes, I guess, with the ADUs that were similar in the area. And because the apartment was added to the back of the house, like so many Vermont farmhouses, they just built on and on and on in the back. So it's not connected to our main living space by a finished area. There's this kind of unfinished shed in the middle. And so it doesn't actually count towards our square footage. And so we got dinged in terms of how much square footage we had in our house. So it lowered the value of our house in that way. But the town's assessment does count that square footage. So then we get to pay more in property taxes. So just kind of a weird situation going on going on there. So then during COVID, we watched a lot of YouTube videos, we renovated our downstairs. And as interest rates dropped again, we decided to refinance our house and found out through that process that our house was now being assessed for more than $60,000 more than it was about a year earlier, which, you know, getting great for us now that we own the house, but we wouldn't have been able to come close to affording it if that was that was the case. And I still get notifications from our real estate agent showing up, you know, houses that were in our price range in the area. And, you know, I still am pretty sure that we would still be renting, because there has not been, you know, just that the supply of homes have gone down even more significantly since then. So, you know, we will probably be renovating and chipping off lead paint for the rest of our lives, but we got incredibly, incredibly lucky. And I generally feel a lot of guilt around all of my friends who are not able to find homes. And so many of whom are now, you know, it's already kind of hard enough to live in Vermont. A lot of my friends from the University of Vermont left immediately. And as I've been trying for 15 years to convince them to come back to Vermont, now it's even now it's even harder, which is pretty sad. So given my professional background in planning, I could not resist joining the Waterbury Planning Commission when a spot opened up last year. And because I apparently like to suffer. But at that time, it also happened to be that housing was and still is having this moment revitalizing Waterbury, which is our downtown organization had recently worked with a consultant to produce the housing needs assessment that highlighted just how much we need homes in Waterbury. And as you were just mentioning, Waterbury is is actually ahead of a lot of communities in providing homes. But we are still pretty far behind, especially in that missing middle housing section. The select board over the past year was discussing the need to create a municipal housing committee, which has now since been done, and we're starting to talk about what our priorities and goals should be and what we can accomplish as a municipal housing committee. And of course, the impact of COVID and the increased lack of supply of housing was really putting into focus just how many of our local businesses work. And again, still are many of them in crisis because their employees cannot find housing. And I'm sure all of you are familiar with with Waterbury being pretty close to Montpelier, but it is, you know, given its central location, and its proximity to to ski mountains often gets, you know, in both a positive and a negative way is kind of the intersection of a lot of different people and movement, which is great, but also means that a lot of folks are looking to move here and we don't have the housing for them. So for the planning commission, I believe we are on our fourth year of working to update our zoning bylaws. COVID got in the mix there and slow things down and there are some other issues, but this has been a really long process. Before my time, they decided to split up that process to make it more manageable by splitting the town into two sections. So essentially, everything west of 89, which is the village center, and then everything on the other side of the highway, which is going up towards the Waterbury center area. So right now, we are just trying to wrap up that first phase one, which again is after four years of work that's already been put into this. This past fall, we were working through some of these tough questions related to density, setbacks, dimensional requirements. We were able to use the enabling Better Places sky that was produced a couple years ago by the Department of Housing and Community Development. That was incredibly helpful to actually be able to put in specific numbers or at least have a reference for what we could be using to gauge where we should be heading. There was a lot of questions about how to determine what those specifics are, especially when you're trying to have those kind of specific standards that make the most amount of sense for your community and in specific districts. So we're working through all of this, trying to talk about how far can we push density and all of these tough things that we know we're going to get some pushback on but make it realistic and practical and something that will be supported by the community. At the same time that this was happening, this was last fall, the town was proposing to voters to sell a municipally owned vacant parcel and water berries designated downtown. And they were going to sell it to Down Street Housing and Community Development for an affordable housing project. This on paper was a perfect opportunity for Smart Earth affordable housing. The project would have allowed the town to sell the parcel, which they had been looking to do for several years. It's currently or now it's been sold, but it was a temporary parking lot used to be the site of the old municipal buildings got flooded during an Irene had to be taken down. They turned it into a parking lot for the Main Street Reconstruction project that just happened. So this was a way that they could sell the parcel in exchange for affordable units that the town desperately needs. It would also allow them to sell it to Down Street for a relatively low price, which affords Down Street the ability to create this new development. The project is going to add over 25 units as currently proposed on I think that's about point point eight of an acre. So that's providing a financial benefit for the town determines of the tax base, but also the town's utility district, which is looking for new customers to come on. And again, it's located within the designated downtown, which has been planned for growth specifically through the municipal plan and our bylaws for years. And that has been confirmed and reconfirmed by by voters for I don't know 1520 years or so. So all of that said, this project was proposed, and there was immediate and vocal opposition. We support constructive community input. We held three public hearings between August and the ultimate vote in late October. There was direct conversations between Down Street and the surrounding neighbors of the project. But the opposition and just how strongly it came out from the very beginning led to Down Street making several concessions at the very beginning. And again, just remember that this is leading up to the sale of the parcel. We haven't even gotten to the point of Down Street owning this land to actually move forward with the project yet. So some of the concessions that they made, they targeted the development more toward a workforce population, which is certainly housing that we we need. But but they were able to kind of move it up a little bit more into that higher income bracket. They capped the building at three stories, even though our zoning allowed for more. Three stories is very common in Waterbury downtown. I believe we also have some four stories. And that was also a very common complaint that this was out of character with the area, even though it's literally next to other three story buildings. They designed the building specifically with architectural features that match the character of the area, which which is great. But these included things like front porches. They also are putting in a gable to set back the third floor so that it appears as if it's only a two story building. So not only did they cap the stories, but they're trying to make it look even less to appease those residents who are who are concerned. And they provided preliminary design plans that were requested by the town. This is something that is not usually done at this stage because again, Downstreet doesn't own the parcel. They're not able to get in and actually do engineering and infrastructure work. So that caused kind of further complications because now folks kind of had this schematic schematic design to narrow in on, oh, the driveway doesn't look like it's going to be wide enough. It will be wide enough. That's not the problem here. So anyways, the good news is that the proposal did get passed. It was voted in favor overwhelmingly at the end of October. But if you spent time in Waterbury during the couple of months that this was going on, you would not have been clear. I was not clear what was going to happen at the end of this. And, you know, after the initial vote, residents still have an opportunity to petition to appeal that vote. So even after the first vote, we were still waiting, I think a month or a month and a half into December to finalize that to wait and see if that petition was going to come up. So who would they appeal to? And then Senator Clarkson has a question. Who would they appeal to in that process? So that's a good question. I think that the appeal would be to the, in this case, it's a little bit of a unique situation and that it's the old village that owns the parcel. So Waterbury used to have a separate municipal village that now has turned into one town. So the utility district took over that village. So it's that the utility district that technically owns the parcel and that members of the utility district were voting on this because they were essentially the old village, if that makes sense. So I believe that the appeal would be to appeal the vote. So it would go back to the utility district. But I could double check. So it's a different appeals process than Act 250. So how many appeals are allowed? How many appeals are allowed under? Just one. So they would, they have the opportunity to, if they can get 5% of voters. So again, just in this case, it's just the utility district former village. So not that many in terms of population. If you get 5% of voters, they could appeal. And I believe it would just go to a revote. But now in this process, you know, that, that didn't move forward. When Down Street does ultimately come with a specific proposal for the development, then it will go through the DRB process, in which case, then we have another opportunity for, for an appeal through the DRB. So I guess my question is the additional compromise, you began at 25 units, how many did you end up with? And you have the finished process. Right. Yeah. And so I think the, so that they had estimated, and I was trying to find that before, it was somewhere between, shoot, what were they saying? It was like 24 to 28 units or something like that. So I said 25 is kind of the middle ground because they didn't have a specific number yet. Yeah. So, so that I, the, I would guess that they still don't have, or maybe they do at this point, but that specific number does depend on all those technical pieces that they still need to line up with. Senator Harrison. Just hi, Katie. So did the utility district, how did they formalize their decision because they won't own the property anymore, right? So did they put covenants on the property? Right. Okay. That's a good question. I don't believe so. I know that they made the decision to sell to Down Street. It was a multi-year process. They had entertained other proposals and ideas probably over the past 10 years or so. They ultimately came to this decision when they said what is the town most need and affordable housing kind of raised to the top of the list. And since Down Street already has three other projects, housing in our town, they figured that that was, that was a reasonable way to go. But I don't, there's no covenants or things like that to my knowledge on the property. So then Down Street might not technically be committed to that, legally committed to that, but it would be difficult publicly obviously for them to change their mind at this point, right? Right. I think that's true. And I believe that was, that was one of the concerns that was, that was brought up. So Katie, you're on this affordable housing test first. Do you have, does Watergate keep a goal for how many units it would like to bring on? You're also, your title is Sustainable Communities at BNRC. So, you know, we're hearing the environmental concerns be weaponized, right? Around, you know, if no new people is good for the environment. So if you could sort of zoom back out and comment on what a sustainable community looks like and what it's like to have that conversation in your, in Waterbury. Yeah, yeah. So I do not believe that Waterbury has a quantitative goal for units yet. There was, you know, from the Regional Planning Commission and assessment several years ago about what that projected number and like what our fair share would be. There was an understanding that that data was not totally accurate. And so I don't believe the town has, has really used that. We, in our conversation last night with the Housing Task Force are talking about additional data that we could and should be gathering and surveys to the community to see what, what they think would be most useful. Our town plan and the way that our zoning has been written is explicitly guided towards smart growth. That said, because we still have a ways to go and implementing that, we have seen a lot more and probably the, the majority of our development more in the outskirts and Waterbury Center and outside of our, those areas that are planned for growth. And so just kind of as an example of that in the, the Housing Task Force meeting that we had last night, there were several members who had recently moved to the town from, I think probably in the past two to three years and all of them were in the center, but discussed that they were interested specifically in moving to a more walkable downtown. So they were all interested in living in the village that had to move to the center because that's where there's more land and more housing. And so we, we certainly see that still, you know, on the Planning Commission, I see the, the zoning reports and most new development. We do have a couple of good multifamily housing projects that are happening in and near the village, but there's still a lot of single family homes in particular that are being built out in those surrounding areas that I would hope to see reduced or at least provide other options that, that don't necessitate that the only way to find housing is to build a single family out in, in our open lands. So as you, as you work to help communities define what sustainable means, how do you talk about housing in the environment? How do I think about housing in the environment? Your title and your role? Yeah, so for me, though, we can not talk about the environment in terms of natural resources, natural resources, or climate and climate action without talking about smart growth housing, particularly because 40 or more percent of our greenhouse gas emissions is related to transportation. That transportation emissions largely is coming from single occupancy vehicles. And those, those miles driven are because we have built our communities out and out and out of these community centers that forces us to drive, again, to get the groceries, to get to school, to get to our jobs, as we were talking about before. So until we address land use and how we plan for and develop our communities, we're never going to address that component. I also strongly believe that that smart growth development and having greater opportunities for housing and sustainable transportation in our community centers is really critical for resilience in a climate and environmental sense. I moved to Vermont from Connecticut and I just moving to Burlington, which, you know, is a little bit outside of Vermont. It's it was immediate how much people actually cared about their neighbors and the environment in a way that was not the case where I grew up. And so as we think about all of these changes that are coming to our communities, both environmentally, socially and economically, we need to have communities that have ties to each other and to where they live in order to, you know, weather that storm, so to speak. So again, I for me personally and my professional and personal life and and probably a one trick pony in that I talk a lot about how smart growth housing is a climate solution and and also in terms of protecting our working landscape and not fragmenting our forests and our farms, which we know are also suffering. We need to both support housing in those locations that we want it will also ensuring that we have protections in the places where we want those. So that's under the fact that we heard that supported by Gary Scott and his testimony is one of the reasons he loves living in Vermont is he can get out and enjoy it. Oh, sorry. Excuse me. Page page page. Sorry, I'm not I'm new. Thank you. OK, sorry. Also, yeah. So we had that reconfirmed by something very frustrated by his inability to find housing and yet treasuring our our our outdoors three seasons of the year. He was clear about that. But I mean, we have that confirmed time and time again and the number when we first did our creative economy work in 2009, quality of life top reason to be here. And that is our our ability to outdoor rec and arts and performing everything, but outdoors are preserving our our working landscape and our wildlands and for us for us tracks are critically important. Senator Harrison. OK, just a question on when when you're looking at Waterbury, did you have or did has the housing committee talked about? I'm sure you have talked about renovating old buildings in historic buildings. What amount do you have a sense of how how much that would make a difference? Say if if you were able to to all of those buildings, like, like how big of a of a opportunity is that? Right. I don't have an I have a good answer off the bat. That is something that we talked about and we have several members who are really excited about the idea of adaptive reuse. There are certainly buildings and especially in our in our village center that could be used for housing that are have been vacant for a while. So that's I think one of those those data pieces that we be looking to to gather in the upcoming months. OK, thank you. And if you come up on one, especially statewide one, let us know, please. One more question. I'm going to ask parking. I assume that might be something of an issue downtown Waterbury. The changes proposed and I'm former Montalier Planning Commission member many years ago, but the parking hasn't gotten any better. It proposes that for something like the Downstreet Project, your zoning can't require more than one. Parking space per unit. If some of those units may be most of them end up with two cars. What? That's the one thing in this proposal. I know for a lot of the older urban areas, it's an issue. And I'm just going to check that out. Is that would that be an issue? So that's something that several of my fellow Planning Commission members and I are interested in talking more about and we haven't had an opportunity to discuss it at the Planning Commission level yet, but we we do know and expect that that is a difficult issue. As with the Downstreet Project, there was pushback about removing that parking lot, even though it was always meant to be temporary and in fact, was never fully occupied in terms of the the project specifically. We well, I guess, not on behalf of the Planning Commission, but speaking personally, Downstreet still has the ability to to provide more parking as they see fit and just as a kind of part of why it would be, I think, better for the developer to have that ability for to provide that flexibility rather than the municipality requiring it is because they're also hearing pushback on other things. So we have community members who are concerned about, you know, there should be more green space or things like that. So they're trying to balance all of these different things. So we are in an area where this this project would be essentially right across the street from a transit stop. It's in our walkable town town. So it's a place where you really don't need vehicles. So if they were able to make that decision that they're going to provide less than the parking lot, the parking spaces for, you know, for each unit to have two spaces or something like that in order to provide more green space. That is something that that I would feel comfortable letting down street to make that decision. OK, and you would feel comfortable if they decide to put it all to green space or only do the one unit. You would feel comfortable that on a late night like last night, there is adequate parking available in Waterbury that people because if you work in Waterbury Center, there's no public transit that I know of. Not with any regularity. And if you work in downtown right, the train go there. So there is the bus. Right, there's a commuter that goes from Route 100 down to the village. But you're right. I think we absolutely should be having a conversation about transportation in conjunction with our conversations about housing. Fair. Well, thanks so much, Katie. We really appreciate your time and your work in Waterbury and beyond. Committee, we're going to go and get a minute break till 1045. So we're on break. And we're live. Thanks so much, Ron, for joining us. We're back from a break in seven economic development. Good morning. Good morning. OK, I guess I'll just start off. Thank you for inviting me, Ron Regensky, town administrator for the town of Hyde Park for the last 12 years and in my thirty third year in northern Vermont planning, zoning administration and a hundred other hats. Looking at retirement, hopefully within the year. So that's my story. Based on all of that, I think I've seen quite the progression in Vermont getting to this point. And I I don't want to say too much because I do want to go over my comments that I've already shared with Keisha, Senator Rom, but I do want to some have some ad lib time at the end of that. So I'm going to get right into the comments. Is the email just to summarize where Hyde Park is on housing? We are in the middle of a bylaw modernization grant from the state, working with regional planning to basically look at our 2016 bylaw. And I and I mentioned the 2016 bylaw because that was a major rewrite and it hasn't changed a lot since then. We've made some tweaks, but we have updated regularly almost every year and we're getting ready for the update in twenty three later this fall. In 2016, the town adopted some of the same concepts that you're looking at in the proposed bill, primarily the. I don't call it banning of single family, but I call it the flexibility to homeowners act, so to speak, where they can come into my office as a zoning administrator and say, we'd like to, you know, we're downsizing. We're getting older. We're a child's coming home after college. They want to live with us and they need to hear for the last bunch of years, the 30 percent cap. And we had that, of course, and prior to 2016, but we just couldn't understand it. And we decided the planning commission select board to adopt the bylaw that basically reads very similar, which is residential use, use the showmatic, see the maximum number of lovable dwelling units. Excluding from that calculation, ADUs and duplexes. So very similar language where any place, single family homes are allowed. Duplexes can also be proposed. No other provisions, though, no, no flexibility and out the other constraints, lot lines and setbacks and those kind of things still apply. But it's really just the unit and density question we were trying to resolve where people were, you know, it wasn't a long line, so to speak, but it was a thing that we had to deal with with trying to explain why they were capped at 30 percent and why they why they might be denied at 35 percent from what they wanted to do. So with that in 2016, nobody was sure what was going to happen. Again, we had the 30 percent already. We just basically removed that cap. And the average has really been minimal. We have about an average of two ADUs, duplex type projects that come in every year. We have three thousand twenty residents, fifteen hundred parcels, grand list of about three million for comparison. Of the current two thousand twenty two grand list, we have fifty three second units. I think that's how I'm looking at this bill as well as what our current bylaw provides. What happens to the community when second unit is allowed wherever single families are. So I actually went through our twenty two grand list and counted fifty three second units that were either I guess you call accessory dwelling unit, a duplex, a second home on the same parcel, a business with the apartment for the owner, those kind of uses and they all work well. So those people that have those various different uses do not get denied in Hyde Park. If you wanted to do any of those combinations of residential commercial two homes, our bylaws allow that. And we really do see, you know, it's more of an individual interaction where people aren't confronted with this with a block, a roadblock, if you will, they have the flexibility to take whatever path they want to take. Our housing stock overall is about 81 percent residential, 19 percent non residential. And again, we were doing about one to two units a year on the successory. So we didn't, even though we've had the flexibility for going on seven years now, we didn't get flooded with a whole bunch of, you know, either outside investors coming in to convert. We didn't get a lot of homeowners trying to convert. And I think some of that is due to the fact that people like their single family home. I mean, they simply like to live, at least in Hyde Park, in a more rural area. They move there for that reason, and they're not interested in the apartment and they're not interested in converting to a duplex. The other constraint, a lot of the subdivisions that were created in seventies and eighties prohibited the duplex. And I see you're trying to get rid of that deed restriction next summer, I think, is the date with new projects couldn't have a deed restriction. The other thing that we just talked about last last week was somebody was the incentive, you know, what is the state doing to incentivize people to convert? So you have the various agencies that are all working to try to either educate people, help them through the permit process, or give them the incentive grant. And those I think that combination of, you know, education, outreach, incentives, and not so much on the regulation. I think the one the one change of allowing people to add the duplex is a big step. And then coupling that with the incentives and guidance and support, which is also in the bill, is good. I don't know if we need to sort of pressure the village centers at this point.  We know we don't have wastewater capacity to accept that kind of growth. I don't think the state of my agency of natural resources is going to change the wastewater formulas. Whether it's municipal sewer onsite sewer, they're still going to require a certain capacity for that new kind of development. Whether a town can check some boxes and say we want that and we want to use that extra provision. They can do that on their own now. That's kind of what planning is all about.  So I think there's a maybe more time to think about that kind of infill pressure of mandating it without really checking with the local communities from a planning perspective and a capacity perspective. Totally supportive obviously with Hyde Park not seeing a huge problem necessarily with the duplex option on single family house lots. We do get some confusion from homeowners with a fire marshal. So I hope you'll have testimony from the state fire marshal regarding their additional burdens, if you will, on a small project, which is what the homeowner thinks it is, but it ends up being a big project depending on how the design is done. And if it's be I think if it goes over the 30%, I think the state is requiring a public building permit. I mean, I don't know that for sure, but that's one of my questions I have is can the fire marshal see any light to make it easy for people in other states have done this. I think Oregon is one place I found where they had a building code that was drafted to try to make it easier for homeowners to create that unit while still protecting the fire safety of both residents. So that may be a little that's way beyond my reach, but it's just something that I've heard from homeowners when they get into this. Get into this. You may have seen it toward the end of the zoning language. There's a study of what other states have done like like Oregon. So yeah, yeah, I think that's important because you know, we're not the first state dealing with this. So I know California is a little ahead. Some of the western states might be but there's really no problem letting them go first and then borrowing from them if they they hit hit the silver bullet kind of thing. Overall, I think when you look at housing, High Park in particular has, you know, 19% of our housing stock is mobile homes. That's due to a very large mobile home park plus we've never prohibited mobile homes ever since day one of zoning.  So we never had those but that did build up the single mobile home lots kind of scattered around town plus the sterling view mobile home park and 19% plus the 53 second units on the other single family home lots is a pretty good note is that 336 affordable units on just the grand list data. If you want to just kind of get a bearing of what that provides to the region. And tell us what is going on. Oh, sorry, we have a question Ron. Yes, go ahead. Ron, I saw I was late. I had a meeting. Ron, when you talk about 336 units out of how many how many housing units do you have in yeah, there's there's a total of it you work. Yeah, there's 945 single family homes and that's the R1 R2 if you're familiar with the 411 form. So every town reports on the 411 that's the combination of R1 R2 which is under six acres over six acres. That's the 945. The mobile homes themselves is 283. So we've got a good percentage of residential like 81% the combination of all those is residential. And on all of those we have the 53 units or second units that we don't count as another we don't count that in a different way other than just trying to recognize it in our in our grand list. One of the suggestions I had as you get into this kind of tracking units and how things are working the grand list system with the Kama PVR department there. If there's some way to tweak the information that is collected by the towns. So right now if you look at our grand list for example, you'll see the property description it might say house plus barn plus apartment house plus two apartments two houses. And it's really it's all into a text file and it's really not it's not easy at all to collect that data so that in a year or two of the housing provisions go in you say oh can we go to PVR and pull the permit you know per pull the grand list from a retired and see what we did change. You won't be able to do that. So I think it's important to at least figure out how you're going to study performance standard or performance measure on this touch on some other areas that are really helpful like data collection. So yeah, and quite honestly I wish you had testified for our rental registry, which you know some of us still care a lot about because exactly it's getting it would get exactly at our ability to track houses and rental units separately. Yeah, we this way. I think I don't know how else to get. Yeah, I don't know how else you do it on a statewide basis if the individual towns aren't collecting it. You know your incentive program how many how many residents in Hyde Park took care of the $53,000 incentive. I'm not going to know that that's the state program. I don't know if our listeners would know that they just see an addition. Yeah, so yeah, that fits into one of the challenges we have which is we've got to make it clear on the grand list what's there. Any other questions? And what does it remind me because Linda Martin as you know was was a dear and beloved colleague, one of my classmates here in 2004. I know Hyde Park is small. You've 945 single homes. How many residents again? 3,020. Well, 3,020 population. 1,500 parcels overall. Total parcels is 1,500. And of those parcels, 81% of those parcels is residential. Right, yes. Got that. Thanks. And how long have you been the government ministry? Yeah, you missed a great story. I'm sorry. 12 years and Linda's been very helpful while the town clerk has been out on medical. We've actually been work related related to all this is just a really side comment. I don't know if you're going to get into it is the whole reappraisal issue we have. Not only the reappraisal mandate that we'll be getting in June, which 80% of Vermont towns are going to get probably, but also we're we don't have a board of listers. They all resigned to the burden and training of PVR.  I'm sure you've heard this before. So we tried to figure out if Linda Martin, Linda Martin from Wilcote and Duncan Hastings from Johnson. We're banding together to try to sort of solve a regional assessor position, mostly because PVR in the state of Vermont isn't going to be moving that quick. We talked to PVR about what the limitations are with helping towns and they said there's statutory limitations on why they can't sort of touch the grand list data. They can guide us and work us through the rules, but they can't really help in the sense of work work. So without listers and with a cost of 95 to $125 an hour for contracted assessor, which is the statutory option when your board of listers is vacant. We're looking to hire a professional assessor that's actually an employee through the regional planning office. It'll be the first one in Vermont where there's actually hopefully a staff member of some sort at the regional office that would work with the three towns of Hyde Park Jericho, I'm sorry Hyde Park in Wilcote and Johnson. So that's almost done. We have the agreements done. We're advertised and we're trying to find the person that wants that position. And that's even hard these days. So anyway, I just wanted as a side piece to that, we are struggling and we don't know if the state can solve it or if each town is going to have to solve it or we're just going to ignore the reappraisal mandate letters. Well, it's not falling on defiers because there are three members of Senate Finance who also serve on this committee and are hearing about this. And Linda Martin's belong to many of us whose son-in-law is actually here too.  We're trying as a group to try to solve our problem. But I'm hopeful but we haven't we've been working on it for a year and we haven't solved it yet. That's really helpful to know. You know, sometimes we don't hear from our kind of mid-sized communities enough. So this has been really valuable. I thank you for all your service and hopefully we'll still be able to tap your knowledge as you move toward retirement. No, any time you have my e-mail contact and I appreciate your time and inviting me. And I think we invited you yesterday. So we really appreciate you coming up short with us a lot. Clear the calendar for you. Thank you. Give Linda a big hello. Thanks. I will. Thank you. Thanks, Rhonda. OK. Bye-bye. Thank you, directors, as many as for your patience as we are running a tiny bit behind. We also we don't want to keep you for more than a half an hour, but we don't have anything after that because of the weather. Hopefully we don't feel rushed and we'll just I'll make we'll do one little thing committee about assigning combinations, you know, combinations of administrative requirements, but, you know, you just don't have to feel rushed and we're grateful to have you in our committee. Great. Thank you all very much. And I don't know if everyone. Yes. So our policy and research analysts is currently passing you hard copies of the deck that we'll be going through today. This is Jay Green. Jay has been doing a wonderful job in the office on anything related to data research. You have questions. If you want good sources or resources, Jay is an excellent person to help you find them. Wonderful. Thank you for just hand out to. Yeah, of course. So I don't think I need to set the stage too much. I see already the themes you're touching on, which is really valuable to our committee. Many people have noticed that I have placed the color of law really prominently on our shelves. I think we need to have a real conversation about the history of housing and wealth building in this country and probably now more than any time in recent history, we have a wealth gap between huge increases of people's home values and huge rental costs for people who don't own a home. And that affects us here in Vermont with our racial home ownership gap in a big way. So we're grateful to have had your work on some pieces of this bill and have your committee. Thank you very much. So for the record, Susanna Davis, Racial Equity Director for the state. I am showing a screen right now and I have captions enabled at the top of the screen. I do know that Zoom also permits them at the bottom of the screen. If there's anyone watching and hates this, let me know and I'll turn it off. So today I'm going to talk a little bit about how zoning can impact different aspects of people's lives, including, but not limited to their physical health, their social health and their general well-being and outcomes. You all know that I tend to be long-winded. I'm working on that. So please don't be shy to tell me to slow down, hurry up or answer particular questions that may not be hitting. We appreciate that. All right. So first, it's extremely important that we acknowledge that when we talk about use and disposal and expansion or transfer of land, we're talking about unceded Indigenous territory. And this is an important point because it gets at the issue of humility, gets at the issue of ownership and who philosophically and legally has the right to say how land should be used. Are we incorporating Indigenous voices into this policymaking? If not, why not? And if so, is it happening in ways that are tokenistic but they do not actually address the historical length theft and other harms that have been perpetuated against the community? So first, I just want to talk a little bit about redlining. I know you all are familiar with it already. This may be routine to you, but I think it's important that we just set the stage a little bit. So redlining, as we know, was not just a continuation of an existing policy of segregation, but it was also something that acted as a beginning and as a catalyst for further enforcement of segregation policies in the US. So what you're looking at right now is a map of Manchester, New Hampshire. This is one of the original maps from the H-O-L-C, which was established in the early 20th century to basically redline the country. The reason that it's called, this practice is called redlining is because what effectively happened was neighborhoods and metro areas were divided up geographically based on how desirable they were to the average consumer. Average, of course, being a metric that was anchored to the average affluent or middle-income white family. So the way that this works, these are the original maps from the H-O-L-C, they are publicly available. The way that it worked is that areas that were considered most desirable were coded in green areas that were still considered desirable but slightly declining were coded in blue, areas that were considered indefinite decline were yellow, and those that were considered hazardous or just outright undesirable were coded in red and determined redlining. So what you'll find is that a lot of the reasoning for why certain communities were redlined really were very much based in demographics and other social inequities, raised being one of them. So what you'll notice is that here in Manchester, here on this map in Manchester, area D6 was redlined and considered undesirable because of, quote, Belgians. It's the only description that's listed in the maps, Belgians. I guess they didn't appreciate chocolate. No, evidently not. I'll show you another one. This is Greater Boston area and you'll see two areas that have been marked. One is B8, which is considered slightly less desirable because of, quote, threatening Jewish infiltration into area. Another section, D7, is listed as hazardous because, quote, area becomes less desirable north of Dover Street with orientals concentrated in this spot. So race and other social identities were absolutely used as factors to divvy up communities. Why does this matter today? Because if you take a redlined map of a region in the US from back in 1939 and you overlay it with a map of today showing inequities, they will light up in almost the same exact places because physical segregation is one of the most long lasting impacts of discrimination in this country. Residency patterns have not changed too dramatically in most of the country and it makes sense. People tend to inherit housing from their parents. You often live where you grew up or near it. That's starting to change with recent generations who move far from home for opportunities like college or other things, but for the most part, residency patterns have remained largely the same in the United States, which means that the physical segregation that took place more than 80 years ago is still very, very alive today. Now you'll notice that I showed you maps in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, none in Vermont. The HOLC did not have redlining maps for Vermont. That's not to say that Vermont didn't have a very active and well-known physical segregation policy. For example, this is an excerpt from a respective land covenant that was from a property in South Burlington, Vermont that states, quote, no persons of any race other than the white race shall user-occupy any building or any lot, except that this covenant shall not prevent an occupancy by domestic servants of a different race, domiciled with an owner or tenant. This was right here in Vermont. Now do we know H-155? Sure, 155. You can say any number to most of us. I don't remember the number, it's on me. A house bill. Either just that. The bill that got rid of covenants. Yes, yes. The bill that got rid of restrictive covenants was addressing exactly this. So we know that even if we don't have a formal color-coded map from the HOLC covering Vermont, we know very much that physical segregation still existed in Vermont. Now, I wanna talk a little bit about how we look at maps and how we look at these data. Physical segregation, I said earlier, is still alive today. What you're looking at right now is a map that discusses divisive school district borders. Now, you don't need to have too much experience in what this really means, but the gist of it is this map shows where in the country there are borders between two school districts where there is a 10% difference in school funding and a 25 point difference in rates of non-white enrollment. In other words, this is identifying points in the country where you've got two school districts budding up against each other that are majority white, majority non-white, and there's a significant funding difference. What you'll notice is that there are no such borders gained from Vermont. Now, this is what we often mean when we talk about being data driven versus being data hostage. Being data driven means looking at a map like this. Being data hostage means thinking that Vermont's all good because we're not lighting up here. In reality, this is showing a deeper divide, which is that Vermont doesn't even have enough school districts with majority non-white populations for us even to register on this map. So what I wanted to communicate with this is that physical segregation patterns are still revealing themselves in data today. And sometimes those data make it difficult for us to understand what is the true nature and reason for what we're seeing. In other words, there are no dots in Vermont. Is that because we're doing great on funding or is it because we're doing really bad on demographics? All right, I'm just going to sign. I looked at Maine and I have to believe that Maine is now more racially diverse than Vermont. If that's still not true, fine. But when we say second widest, Maine has such a much bigger population in my view of indigenous people, first of all, and then it seems to have a growing population center that's far more diverse than ours. We have been- I don't know if you looked at the vibe yet. We have been the second oldest and second widest state in the country after Maine on both fronts for a number of years. I did recently hear someone say that we are now the first widest. I'm actually not certain that that's true, but I could be wrong. I just want us to look into it at some point, because Maine has some changes happening and it has the first black woman to be speaker of the house. Not that that, again, is the entire demographic, but I would like to make sure we're getting enough statistics right. Per capita, it may, though, be trudging along at sort of a similar pace. That's true, they're doubled per population. They have doubled their population. So, and we're making inroads, albeit incredibly slowly. We are on a 45-minute commute from Boston. That is fair, too. York County, Maine, which is the one just above Portsmouth. This was the fastest growing area, I think, in New England, and it's a straight shot down the interstate. And that's it. The upper reaches, I've been to Port Kent once. That was enough. Like I said, yeah, no, it's in the side, but I know how to define the name. It's like Nashua, New Hampshire, that Boston commute has spread out. Exactly. And you know, I think that what's important here also is that we want to get to a place as a state where we're not racing for second place on this statistic. Absolutely. Absolutely. And we want to move first now. Yeah, and I think approach matters, too, because I know that a couple of years ago, a senior official in the state of Maine was asked, do you have a problem with racism? And that person said, well, not at all. Being the second-witest state in the country, which isn't really happenstance. Yeah. You don't get to be number one by accident in any metric. Right. And I look at Montana, you know, which, well, I can't tell if Montana's wholly blocked. My geography is still terrible. Oh yes, it looks like Nada. If there's nothing going on there, I mean, I did appreciate that it was the color of law. You know, Richard Rothstein highlights big fights in urban areas, but Maine at one point, you know, similarly to the time frame to the eugenics era, just moved all black people out of the state, kind of ran them out of the state. And, you know, we have a smaller number but similar stories in Vermont of people running people out of specific towns. It's happening right now, women of color, in our second place. There's a new be out, I read somewhere, about an island off Maine that was populated with Portugal and slaves that had run away and it was removed during the eugenics movement, even though they had survived very comfortably. Right. For 100 years. Yeah, just the stories we're learning of were simple, removal or kind of pushing people away. Well, they're wrong. Even outside of the United States, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, okay. So we already know that the residency patterns have been in effect from de jure, which is law-based and de facto segregation, right? But it doesn't come out of nowhere. A lot of this arises from social values or what society wants us to believe are the social values. What you're looking at is a tweet from the former president who says he's happened to inform all of the people living their suburban lifestyle dream that they will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in their neighborhood. This is a sentiment that runs across party line. It is not applicable to any one politician or any one person in recent history. This is the quiet part being said very much out loud, but this is a sentiment that you will find in every political leaning in this country. The idea, when we think about low income housing or affordability of housing, that somehow a major consideration should be the feelings or the finances of affluent people around them. What this does is it positions a public good for people who are not wealthy as needing to be checked against the portfolios of affluent people in neighborhoods. This gets at the urban rural divide, right? White flight, which happened all around the country and the ways in which the suburbs emerged seemingly overnight. Even the ways in which we title certain towns, places like Whitehaven, et cetera. If there is a Whitehaven Vermont, I'm not calling you out. But there's a Whitehaven in so many other states at the safe bet. So this is how we have messaging that influences land use policy. This is one part of the land use policy cycle. So first we take a policy. We say as a policy, we do not want homeowners to have to deal with too many multi-unit buildings or low income housing near them. They don't want to be next to the pores is the policy. So then at that point it turns into a regulation. Oh, hey, let's limit multi-story buildings. Let's not do up zoning. Let's limit only to single family. You have to have minimum lot sizes of this acreage. So if you can't afford that, then you can't buy it here. It creates those regulations. At that point, the distribution of neighborhood amenities is another critical piece of this. Once we know who can and cannot live in a place, that's when the investment happens. As a matter of fact, I mean, investment happens throughout, but that's when you figure out who's going to get self-storage facilities, dollar stores, and parking lots, parking garages, and who's going to get Froyo shops and civic centers and libraries and human spaces. The inequitable distribution of neighborhood amenities is a downstream and an upstream effect of what we're seeing in residency patterns today. And of course, that inequitable distribution of benefits and burdens has impact in a lot of areas of life. For example, we know that when people own land, as opposed to rent, they tend to have higher rates of civic participation, which means they're more actively involved, particularly at the local level. So that means this is where our nimbyism comes in. It means that the people who are more likely to show up in local board votes, people who are more likely to petition or appeal to zoning needs, people who are likely to oppose certain development projects in neighborhoods, tend to be people who own land. By contrast, you have a lot of people who are renters who feel disconnected from their communities, because when we look at things like ecological programs, I wanna do my part for the ecology, but if I don't own my roof, I can't put a solar panel on it. Who's that subsidy going to, right? So people feel less connected and less empowered through disparate rates of land or home ownership. Let me just ask you, if you track community solar projects to see if renters are able, I mean, I don't know the answer to this, but it strikes me that the one plus of community solar projects is that renters could participate and that the credits would go with them wherever they rented. And I just love to put a pin in that to find out. I think that's a great research question. Jay. Jay. Jay. I was looking at the back of the bar. Jay. I thought Jay was a director. He knew you. What's a noted? No, it's an interesting plus, maybe a hidden plus. Yes. No, there was another interesting point you just made, which is people that live in rental units that don't own it are less inclined to be involved in the community. If that's true, we're already having trouble recruiting, volunteer fired, EMTs, select board, any one of those members. Is there a balance between rental and home ownership? Are we, if we push too hard to have our downtowns full of rental units, what kind of a social impact is that going to have? Or maybe select boards will have spots a seat for renters. All right, I think if you create, I mean, I hate using an anecdotal, but I was asked to join us at Burlington commission as a college student. That helped me even run by legislature as a renter. I mean, you know. You could have a spot for renters. Right, right. And just to make sure that there's no barriers and there's encouragement. But it's not just where they rent. It's the feeling of belonging, of owning a part of the community. It's not while somebody gave me a seat, not in the token renter on the select board. It's that inclusive feeling that you have a stake in this community. It's where we did the non-citizen voting in popular. Yeah, but that's not necessarily renters. I mean, there's a lot more renters than non-citizens out there. Yeah, that's correct. And it is, all the social used to be fraternal organizations, but there were a few female ones have just about gone away because people today are not joining those, the America to Tocqueville is gone. Oh, they don't say they're going to Tocqueville. Yeah. Yeah, you know. And we're looking at how to wear it. The volunteer fire department is not doing a very good job because they've only got two people where they work 10 miles away. So it's got implications about... And that's why we're trying to create more home ownership to reddit the balance of we need more rental units and home ownership units.  Or if you're paying $2,000 a month in rent, it's really hard to save up. And it's hard to volunteer if you're doing that. But it requires it. I have a renter who's a volunteer firefighter. They do it. They do it, but we need to work on that. I have a few thoughts before I get them. I'm reminded that I forgot to fully introduce our office, so I'm just going to pause us. And just I assume that because we're all coming back, that we all know everybody, but that's not true. It's a lot like coming back, but I heard your... Orientation. Orientation. That was wonderful. Okay. So yes, I also wanted to mention that in addition to Jay, we also have an education and outreach associate. Her name is Shalini. Yes. Shalini uses she-series pronouns. I use she-series. Jay uses they-series pronouns. And so we threw together our office of racial equity. I saw her last night. No. She was... No, she was... No way to the future, Skalkins. Yeah. So as we start having conversations about interesting questions or what have you, I'll be sure to direct the ones related to outreach to Shalini so she can head those up. And of course, we've attended to Jay so that they can also head those up as well. I've been trying to find a study that I saw in Harvard back as eight years ago that I'm trying to find again that said when a city becomes more diverse, people are less inclined to want to pay taxes and invest in that city. You're... No. I mean, yeah. That was the white flag thing. Yeah. Well, great. You don't want to invest in a city where there's a lot of... That's why we started TIFFS. Right. Yeah. I know that New York City is having that problem, but it's the most diversity in the entire United States and it's... It's just a harder lunch to know so I was trying to find a way to... Well, it might be interesting to check out how Montreal is doing. Right. Because migrants have the most diverse group of friends I've ever heard of. I mean, it is just so, yeah, so diverse. Well, you know, interestingly, when there's an increased diversity in a town or in an area, there's also a greater rate of civic participation as well. So there's those hand-in-hand benefits. We talked about the balance between rentorship and homeownership rates. I know that as recently as just a couple of years ago in Vermont, the homeownership rate for white people in Vermont is 71 percent and for people of color, Vermont was 48 percent. And I believe the former director of the Burlington Area Racial Equity Inclusion and Belonging Office in one of their reports, I want to say it was January 22, also shared a startling statistic about the black homeownership rate in Burlington. Yes. And it just happened to be bad. Yeah. And I would also say to... Sorry, Keith interrupted you, but we do have extra time. You know, when I worked for the city of Burlington, to get on a board of commission, you still have to state your political party. And for a lot of people of color, especially new Americans, that was like, okay, I'm never going to apply for this, because I don't want to... Like, if I associate with a political party in my home country, I could be assassinated. You know, so we took that off and that used to be such a strongly held principle that you had to have to receive a political party on these boards of commission. And just removing that really changed who came to the table. Absolutely. You see, that's why most Vermont towns, except we pay the mayor, it seems to me, are nonpartisan there to run for those elections and then run in the partisan election for the Senate. Very different attitude. People that would support you locally once you went partisan wouldn't put your sign up. The other thing that I would say here is when we think about allocating seats on boards, whether it's for renters or for people with certain political parties, I think that sometimes embedded in that is the assumption that that factor will remain the same throughout their lives. One of the things that a lot of Americans forget is that just because you own a home now doesn't mean you always will. People in 2008 or 2007 thought they were set and comfortable and then the bottom fell out and a lot of people ended up becoming renters who didn't think that they would. A lot of people ended up using food shelves who never thought that they would. And so to some extent, if we want to encourage mobility and we want to encourage transition and evolution in people's lives, then we want to be careful. I think about how we designate a seat on a board for a status that may be fluid in a person's life. Like, for example, we may say, oh, we want one disabled person on this council to be the token disabled person as if they can speak on behalf of every single person with every single disability. But on top of that, most of us as humans age into disability, right? And so I think what it means to be disabled needs to be reexamined. For example, eyeglasses are a disability aid. We don't think of them that way, but they're so... I do. Well, because they're so unique, but it's a lot of people don't. But in fact, they are, right? And so thinking about what does it mean to... What does it mean for a person to be a member of a community today and then tomorrow something might change dramatically in their lives? And just to pin on that, increasingly older Vermonters who have had owned big homes are wanting to downsize and are renting in assisted communities. You know, so actually there's sort of a slight interest, interesting shift. I mean, you're right, it is all fluid with chunks of time in between. But there is also, I would say, a trend to wealthier people renting at the end, near the end of the, for the last 20 or 30 years of their life. Absolutely. Possibly. Always brings lots of discussion. Yes. Thank you. And by the end of our time, I'm sure by like 1155, Jay's going to have an answer to our communal solo arrays. No pressure. He's at least smiling back. So, in addition to civic participation, there are also very strong ties between land ownership and land use and community health. So we know that people who tend to own land or own their homes often influence the siting and the distribution of health promoting amenities or health deleterious amenities, right? If we have enough people who say, no, we don't want this facility here in this neighborhood. Okay, we'll just put it over here where there are fewer people showing up to board meetings to put up a fight. Now, in terms of the distribution of health promoting or health deleterious amenities and burdens, I want to talk a little bit about food justice. You may have heard of food deserts. Those are places that have few or no healthy food options. Food swamp is another term you may not be familiar with. It's where the area has a significantly higher number of unhealthy food options compared to the number of healthy food options. In public health, we usually use the metric of four to one. We know that the existence of food deserts and food swamps tracks extremely closely with the prevalence of obesity, diabetes, heart disease. And I remind the committee that at the very beginning of 2019 when we were looking at all of the underlying conditions that made a person at higher risk, these were three that were at the top of the list. We know that food injustice hurts everyone across all sectors. For example, at the individual level, poor nutrition leads to negative health impacts for the person. Widespread negative health impacts for the person, for the community means higher health costs and lower productivity in job sectors. As a matter of fact, the cost of diagnosed diabetes has gone up by more than a quarter over five years. It now totals more than $327 billion with a B dollars. And that's just the cost of diagnosed diabetes. I think we all know someone who knows someone who has unchecked around diagnosed diabetes as well. We know that the cost of obesity and I'm using this term with an asterisk, not to pathologize body size, but because this is the medical term that's used in the statistical finding. We know that the cost of job absenteeism that is related to obesity has cost businesses more than $4.3 billion a year. And it drives healthcare costs of over $200 billion a year. So the costs are significant and what we're talking about is do you have 13 fast food restaurants with one grocery store or do you have healthy food options, organic smoothie shops and other health promoting neighborhood amenities? In recreation and exercise. Absolutely. Transit. Yeah. And when we talk about food justice it's not just at the consumer side, but it's also at the production side. We know that agricultural workers are among those who are excluded from the workplace provisions of that were brought out about way back when it was started was was passed. Since then they are a lot of agricultural workers who of course are here in Ramon. This is an agricultural state and yet what we find is that when it comes to food justice we often think about people's access to food but not necessarily the industry in which it's being produced. We know that there's a disparity between racial groups and ethnic groups in the composition of people who are producing food. For example, we know that Latinos in the United States are experiencing climate change the hardest out of any ethnic group in the country because more than half of us live in the three states that are experiencing climate change the strongest that's California, Texas and Florida. We know that Latinos are more likely to work in industries that are affected by climate change like agriculture, manufacturing, construction. 80% of farm workers in the US are Latino and we know that almost half of us are living in counties that frequently violate clean air standards for healthy groundable ozone, fine particulate matter, etc. As a matter of fact, I think I read a statistic recently that a Hispanic child is eight times more likely. This is great.  Don't quote me on that. That's really startling. And now I'm questioning myself. Email us. I will. That's super high. It's very high. Maybe it was this kind of eight-year-old. I don't want to embarrass myself. I'll come back to you with that. In any event, what we know then is that when you couple the zoning issue, food justice, food production with labor issues, what we find is a very dangerous mix that we have here in Vermont where a lot of people are in substandard housing that may not be known to anybody because they are in areas that are zoned for agricultural production, which means they may be exposed to hazards and other physical or other hazards that may be compromising their health because oftentimes their employers are also their landlords. Then the ethical question comes up about whether there's a chilling effect for these people to be able to complain about either their housing conditions or their work conditions because both are precariously at risk. Then when you throw immigration status into the mix, we've effectively got an entire group of people in this state who likely are suffering on the housing or the employment or the food diet side and we just don't have this ability into it. While we're speaking of climate, I thought I would just mention that we're talking about housing and zoning and segregation and little pockets of communities but nothing is fully siloed. No one is ever truly separated from the consequences of the actions of our neighbors. We now know that because of the way that humans are that there is no place on earth where rainwater is safe to drink. Right? This is all this is what is the seventh grade the water cycle comes down from the sky goes back up through evaporation. Well, now we've evaporated up the so-called forever chemicals and now it is at the point where you can't even drink the rainwater. So that is all to say that though we're talking about separation of where people live there is still very much an interconnectedness where the action it doesn't matter if this health deleterious facility gets cited in my neighborhood or your neighborhood it is still going to have a synergistic effect on all of us and I think that that level of unity and understanding is lacking in a lot of the decisions that we make about where to put things in life. Now, we talked about formal forms of zoning but there are other ways to zone too. There are other ways to shuffle people into and out of different areas. What you're looking at right now is our two maps that show where and how taxes for corporations are collected and where and how property tax assistance for struggling families are collected. So the map on the left talks about circuit breaker laws which provide a state level refund to households who have property tax payments that the state deems unaffordable usually because the household income may be below the threshold. So you'll see that Vermont has one of those circuit breaker laws it's 17 states plus DC as of 2020. On the right you're looking at a map that shows how many states require combined reporting for state corporate income tax. The reason this matters is because combined reporting lets a parent company and a subsidiary well requires a parent company and a subsidiary to report as one entity for income tax purposes it's a way to get around tax evasion by having separate entities that are really kind of the same reporting. So Vermont is one of the states that does require combined reporting and you will notice that there are just a handful of states that don't even have appropriate income tax at all. Now I want to show you another tax map. This is a map of where the IRS audits people the most. It's a heat map so the darker colored areas are the places where the greatest number of audits are happening per person or rather per 1,000 filings. I have the capability to zoom I will zoom up a little bit to say I can't tell. You're looking at Orleans and Essex counties in Vermont the lowest income. And that's not because I can't even see the Vermont border speaking up so this is Vermont right here. Got it. Got it. So I see and I apologize for the hollering on the map. The contract isn't great. I did. We didn't make it. That's okay. Now that you've blown it up because of income. Low income low income inability to understand the tax forms. So this is a map of where the I apologize. No, I'm just trying to figure out why. Yeah. So this is a map of where the IRS audits more. I'm going to show you this map again. In the reverse way. So on the left is where the IRS audits less. And on the right is the National demographic percentage white. That's pretty stark. Again, this is what we talk about when we talk about overlaying maps of inequities. They're lighting up in the same places and a lot of this has to do with physical segregation. And a lot of cities now do track that the percentage of property tax that people have paid is higher in those cities. They don't have as many appeal opportunities. They don't get the same treatment. They are you know, scrutinized more. I mean, I felt I said I find I felt like I saw that in Burlington with who was able to successfully appeal their valuation last year. Absolutely. This is a map showing the change in population in the state of Vermont. This is using 2020 census data. The map is provided to us by the Vermont Center for Geographic Information. I'll put this here and I'll just show it for a few seconds so that you can look at where the populations are growing and shrinking. So that as we think about housing, where to sight housing, think about what are our most popular area, populate populous areas. Where is it hardest to place housing and why? And where is there going to be a need? Because remember this is a picture of who is here. This is not a picture of who will be here. The prospective Vermonters, the future Vermonters, the residents and visitors who have not yet made contact with our state. We've got to be able to plan for them too. So this is right. Help help me. Those of us are blind. Oh, yeah. The dark green is easy at most change the higher population. So the change this is measuring the change in population change in population 2010 census and the 2020 census. So the areas that are purple and blue have lost the greatest number of people since 2010 residents and the areas that are green have gained the greatest number of people since 2010. Got it. And we certainly saw this of doing reapportionment. Right. And I don't you know I try to make sure I'm up to date on the statistic about the in migration to Vermont is is majority people of color and older right and retirees but it goes back to senator Cummings point you don't just want rental property where people are are growing a population you get a lot of opportunities as well. They may start out in an apartment but raising a family in an apartment is difficult quality babies upset neighbors right in the morning you know well insulated apartments so you need if you want to encourage families you get that single family option people don't move to Vermont to live in the city and so it's how will we find that balance so that you can rent that you are able to save up enough by in renting to buy a modest price and I think what we're hearing is some of that is beyond our control because of the cost right now that might come down but you can't build a two hundred thousand dollar house that's habitable and have and that's that's the struggle we've got right now it's the cost right I mean we heard from Gary Scott earlier this morning you know who is a Vice President at the hospital who is renting you know and not I can't figure out how to make sure his family will get here in a year I've got silly whose daughter was going to build on his land and the house about doubled in price in two years and the interest rates went up and that didn't count a foundation and site work system which tens of thousands if not hundreds more so in that I don't know how we fight combo of everything I want to end with this this is not Vermont specific but it really it really for me was very impactful to see so I want to share this with you this is series you don't see it yet you will so we see it last so so many many we see it but it's like super tight so and I'm looking for it over there so we know that if you go back 30 years 80 years we will see the impact of actions that were taken or the events that happened those decades ago on today but I want to go back even further I want to go back to the previous prehistoric which is a term I don't understand everything is historic what where's the pre has like what's the illicit we didn't write down and he gets before the past people mean in any event I want to go back to the beginning a million several million years ago how about that yes this is a a journey what we know today as Alabama and what it shows is a a band of greenish lines that show where the cretaceous sediments were deposited now this has to do with tectonic plate movement has to do with the receding of ice et cetera right the cretaceous sediments were located across that band what we now know is Alabama that ended up becoming really fertile blackland prairie soil it is no surprise then that those same areas are lighting up when you look at a heat map of the population of people who were enslaved in Alabama in 1860 I'll do I'll just pause here and zoom in on this quadrant of the screen so that you can look at those things a little bit larger so then it's no surprise to us that the average farm size in 1997 would still be concentrated the largest farm sizes around that same belt and that therefore by 2010 the black population pretty much remained concentrated in that area which brings us to 2020 election results so when we tell you that that's by counting obviously not by state this is by counting so when we say that segregation and residency patterns are influenced by past decisions the decisions that we're making today as policy makers are not going to solve our problems in 10 months or even 10 years because even today in 2020 we are still dealing with residency patterns that were set up for us back in the Cretace period so I I leave this here again I recognize this is not our jurisdiction however this is a an ecologi