Welcome to the Jenkins governance meeting. We're recording today. It is the 8th of September 2021. We abide by the Jenkins code of conduct. Let's share that screen and take a look at the proposed agenda. Here's the agenda proposal. Anything that needs to be added to the agenda before we begin working through the agenda. There was one thing I left on the notes in the last meeting. Sorry, I'm muted. It says zoom says I'm muted. I said I postponed talking about commercial support lists. I think we can postpone talking about it again, but we can put it in the bottomless and see what happens. Okay, great. Good. Okay, thanks. And I added something since I did the initial draft all I could suggest that he was wondering if we might consider moving the meeting one hour later to make it easier for him to attend. I think we'll meet going to be very late one hour later. Okay, so same here. Okay, good. Thank you. Elise at the same thing last time we asked, but I don't, he's not here to say anything. Okay, so topic for discussion will discuss it when we get there. I think it sounds like the answer is, that's not a great time for others. Okay. Any other topics we need to add. Okay, so news news, the Jenkins project confluence instance was attacked. We've blogged about it, we block the releases we reset user passwords. Investigation is continuing but releases are now allowed, although Tim Jacome reports that the continuous delivery releases through JEP 229 or not yet working so needs more investigation. So to add here in the current state confluence will not be back. So we failed to maintain it correctly in the past, and I don't want to bring that service back so I'm currently investigating options. Because that instance did contain valuable information. Most, I mean, we already migrated a lot of information to the to the plugins to the kitchen for tourists but confluence you contain a lot of information. Sorry, we only partially did it. We only partially did it through. So in the current, yeah. What I was, where I was talking with Mark in the earlier chats about this is I was thinking we could spit it out on a private VM somewhere that doesn't have internet access, and then is running through the exact same code that we do the migration thing with. So it does all the trimming of the stuff we don't care about dump bunch of ASCII doc files, and then commit it to get repo that handles the plugin side the non plugin side. It's pretty much the same thing, but we just have to make sure we don't release anything that's secure that would lock down for security reasons. But that was my thinking. So, so first, I already copy the machine on the different machine so it's already, we already have a backup both for database and for the machine. I'm working on that temporary machine, which I would like to be as soon as possible. I tried to other option in my case, I explore dumping, exporting everything to HTML files. So I have them on my machine at the moment. So the only thing is the rendering is not as nice as on confidence that's the first thing and second thing, the URL change. So for example, if you go to Confluence, you will not see that HTML and stuff like that.  So that's one of the options. Another option that I'm currently looking at to see how feasibilities would be to just deploy to use Confluence clouds, because the reason why we can't use G-Rack cloud is because of the limit on who has access to it. But in this case, we could just consider that maybe five or 10 people have right access to Confluence clouds. I already have a license for it because I did some experimentation with Atlassian clouds within the year. So that would be another option. I don't, I'm against adoption. I'm minus one on there. I do not think we should deploy Confluence again. It was a pain to maintain as pain to keep spam out. I don't think we want to ever have it running again. I'm just saying Confluence cloud, we don't, that's the last option. We don't, we don't maintain it. Oh, but I don't, I think we already have enough pieces. We don't need more pieces. Yeah, true. My plan was just to have a read on the Confluence clouds. But yeah, you're more than welcome to hand any of this off to want to me because it is interesting to me. So I don't mind doing it if you have other things to do. Okay, I can, I can give you access to the machine. And we can see together after this call. Excellent. Thank you. Okay, so Olivier and Gavin will work together on alternatives for what do we do to get that to not lose the data that's in the Confluence server without ever bringing back a Confluence server. Thank you. All right, next topic was the Jenkins 2.303.2 the next LTS is has been delayed by two weeks agreed with the security officer, the release officer and others, and it will include security fixes. So the extra two weeks will give us some time to assure that they're in there, etc. And then 2.310 has been skipped due to the Confluence outage. Confluence instance issue. And I'm assuming Jenkins 2.311 next week, though we may have it this week, depending on. So on that topic, we still have access to the container that generated the version 2.310. So we may manually finish the release, or we can just trigger a new weekly release. Okay. Any objections at the board level, Gavin from you are from Evelina if we were to call the 2.310 weekly release a loss and just say we're not going to do it. Is that okay. No, no objection from me. So just for the context already finished manually releases. I mean, I did once or two. They were. So, I'm pretty confident to finish it as long as we keep the container ready. I don't think it matters I mean the version numbers never. At one point they were like you could say this is 52 weeks ago, but really honestly the version numbers are not absolutely enough for us to ever make that distinction so it doesn't matter if we want to burn 310 that's fine 311. Great. So you've got the flexibility all the VA to make the call burn it or don't burn it either is fine. But yeah, that's great. Thank you. Next topic. I put this on Gavin did you want to share hosting status how it's going do we need to enlist additional help, etc. We need to have more people it's not really that big a deal. I haven't really done it in a week because of the conference issue I haven't touched anything to do with releases. But generally it looks like there's not a lot of requests to come in. I have like six I haven't dealt with yet. Tim is helping with, I think Tim and Mark are helping with the actual RPU repository which is probably the bigger more complex one. The initial initial hosting requests are pretty simple. There's one so far there's one plugin I kind of wanted to say no to, and I don't know why I shouldn't, but I kind of just keep bringing off. Essentially this user wants to add a Java applet and a new TCP port to Jenkins as a plugin and I kind of just want to say I don't think this is a good safe thing for the community you could have it for your own personal use that's fine but I don't want to deny it from. So. And then Daniel did reach out and say there are some tooling he can run for scan so he may or may not start doing that I don't know. I'm not totally worried about. I'm just going to, you know, keep plugging away, try to do my best where I can. I'm going to put it all into, like I said in the mail and eventually I would like to see hosting and GitHub access all that as pull requests so we have that all managed we have recorded we have a history. So right now we have no idea who has access to what we post. No it's tracking. It's actually an Artifactory access not GitHub access. Right. It's no GitHub. Yeah. And it's, it's really hosting partially right so it's tracking it's tracking one piece of a hosting request because a hosting request is more than just Artifactory access it's also GitHub access. It comes in as a geo request, then it does a bunch of checking, then it wouldn't get approved, it forks the repo please the RPU request, it's just there's a lot of moving parts and I want to reduce that and I, you know, for that's one thought I want to reduce. And the other side is, I know we've had trouble when someone says I want to take over this thing and we're like okay. Well you have to do this step and this step and this person has to do this one and this person has to do this one and it's really complicated and I kind of just want to make it all pull request so that one person can improve it and all done. But I don't see that happening in terms of just one of the things I love to do. I like it. Okay. Great. Anything else that you wanted to share there Gavin in terms of hosting. Nope, I guess I'll start approving them again now that we're not fully green lit but we're greenish. Right, we're no longer we're not no longer hard red. Yeah. Like a weird yellow we vomit green thing. Oh, oh thank you that was a lovely image by my days just started your welcome. Yeah. Elections let's go to something more positive Olivier. So, I hope that you, that you read my suggestion so the idea is to use this course as a place to submit nomination, and also to record people, I mean to restore people want to participate to the election, explain everything the proposal. So that that's basically the main the main change that would happen compared to last year. So no good form, or no other option. So that's, yeah, that's something that I would like to improve. I did not receive feedback, except to Gavin and I like, so I guess people are fine with that proposal. So what I would like to do for the next step by my initial plan was to start promoting the new election, starting by for tomorrow, but I think I will need some time to write a blog post. Oh yeah, if people are fine with the deadline, I will maybe just delay everything for by one week, or maybe several days. So the most important thing is we have enough time to collect nomination and to collect and to register participants. So, so Olivier one thing that wasn't immediately clear to me is sending a message to the group election committee so I can see the group here. How do I send a message to the group is there some action I do here on. Anything can go up. So I guess there is a permission that I request here. Normally, so let me double check normally. That's something that I tested with Timion, but I guess he has an access so that's so if I were in order to, in order to subscribe to vote. I normally normally if you are in the group, I go here and I would click this button to request. Next next to that button you should see a message but I can fix the permission for tomorrow. Okay, so, so I will go there. I will click here and here there will be a button that says send a message to this group. If you go to the group voters selection voters I think that's a name. Okay, election voters, which is here. And that's the same because I disabled the ability for people to notify members of this group. So yeah, this is a permission issue that I can fix tomorrow. Mark, can you write a reply on that thread on which thread on the previous one just says the the one that this thread that one. I just read it like a comment saying I went to try to message this group and I don't have permission that way if anyone else has the same problem they can see it and reminds of the viewer I did fix it later. There was election committee group right. Group, but there was no button to send the message. There was a button to request to join. But not to send the message. So, is that what you're suggesting, Gavin. Yeah, more of us. Yeah. Great. Okay. Excellent. Okay, so I read, go ahead on on the blog announcement idea and earlier the news. I made it a lot easier on Jenkins IO to turn on commenting. I don't just reminded me. So essentially you can just say discourse true, and it will enable commenting you don't have to create a topic and link it and everything else with that before, which I think Mark I looked at it looks pretty good. Yeah, and I was, I was truly impressed. The, the, the change means I can reference discourse and it will create a thread automatically if there isn't one. So the, the example is here on this most recent blog post. When we look at the bottom of it, discuss one reply. There's a reply. I go check. I think the reply is just me making it listed. Well, except now there's no control here that lets me click it so we may have some more work to do. I can't get there. Yeah, I'll take a look. I'll take a look. Right. Yeah, Mark, Mark, can you just quickly check the election committee group. Sure. Here. Yes. Oh yes, there it is. And so now you can send a message. So now I could, I could send a nomination by typing it here. I nominate as such and such great. Okay, that's nice and easy. Super. And while you're here, maybe you can show how to join the election photo group. Oh yes, I can do that certainly so election voter group here. So I'm currently in it. So I'm going to leave first. And now the way you join it is you click here. It appears and you click the join button in the top right hand corner and now I'm a member. Yes. And so what I will do at the end of the month, I would just export the email address every people in this group. And then we'll use a tool that we use the last year and two years ago, which is a condors voting system. So invitation will be sent from that application. And ballots then are likely sent in sent through condorses in October or is that in. I guess you'll tell us the timeline in the blog post. Yeah, so my proposition was to wait one month so people could take one month to nominate officer of board members. And during that timeline, during the same time, people would also register to the vote to the voter group. And then we would take one week to review the nomination and contact the different nominees to double check with them if they are interested or not. And after one week, we would send an invisible would close the group on the voters nobody will be able to join. And then we would, we will invite every members of the group to participate the direction. And, and during the nomination phase, I will nominate the names of nominees be visible or you'll just accept if you get the same nomination multiple times for a person. We can accept, like we'd like we did last year we can accept multiple nomination. Just look at the end of the month how who were the nominees would double check that with them, because we don't want to embarrass them or whatever. Right. Okay, so, so the nominees names won't be public that just then just the committee will know about the nominees until you've had a chance to qualify them to see are they are they interested and willing. And yeah, and the reason why the group of reviewer addiction committee group is small is because we only have person there. We're not interested in you will not participate to the addiction. So for example, Kevin has amended for one, one more year. I think even in that as well so that's why they are in the group. Great. All right. Any other, any other questions or concerns with regard to elections. Okay, so then I guess the next step for me is to write a blog post and open up your own Jenkins that are your websites and once, once the blog post is ready, we officially, we officially start the election. Yeah, I wanted to just be sure I get a record for sure of approvals so Gavin you're okay with it. Yes. Olivia, you're okay with it. Hey, sorry, I had a trouble with finding the unmute button. I'm okay with it. Yes. All right, excellent. And it's your proposal but I think we should record your plus one, Olivia, you're okay with it. Yep. Excellent. Thank you. Okay. Okay, so proposal to the move meeting one hour later I think this one needs to wait until Oleg's available. And we have a discussion, we can certainly discuss it another time. I would be interested to do it at another time. Yeah, even another day. Okay. Gavin commercial support list is there anything you want to do there you want to discuss there. If you want it, I just haven't pushed it. So essentially, I'm, I really want, like, you know, as someone who does a lot of support, I want to make sure that we have the companies that are offering commercial support, an easy way to offer for users to find easy way to find which one they want to pick. I just don't have a good solution for it. Maybe we just do a page on Jenkins IO, and people manage it by pull requests. I don't know. The page on Jenkins IO managed by pull request is the best one. My only concern is, and every new company will try to put themselves at the top. As long as I not concerned as they don't do it. I can just see that you know there's flights like I want to be higher than you. And we have we actually have that that exact condition already is a worry in this page right here. Where right there's an there's an implied ordering here that that probably shouldn't be implied but I don't know how to do a non ordered page right. I want to randomize it. Let's be that we want a solution is make it like make it metadata like what is it yeah we're yaml files right or whatever. So we have metadata and then we just JavaScript render it and say randomizes each time. I like that that's actually a very creative solution so so, but I think you've got a valid point if we don't have something like that. There's something implied by ordering in that we may not intend to imply. And we also have to define a rule about when we can remove a name. Yeah, because otherwise it's too easy to just put your company name there and have and be listed for years. So this is something that we should review I don't know once a year. Like I said this is something I really want I just, it's a bigger problem and just being like yeah can I get approval to do it. Right, right. So is, is this a case for Jenkins enhancement proposal is this really outside of the realm of that kind of thing. I think I would be interested to see if there are company who really want that and really want to be listed there. So maybe we can just maybe we can just invite them to a discussion. Yeah, but say I should reach out to the existing link that was on the wiki. If we can get that list again. And then, and reach out to them and see if they want to be listed some still. And if they do then proceed to find out what would be useful for them. Hmm, right. Okay. Yeah, because because there certainly are companies, at least I think there are companies still that that are doing this all over the world it's not not just one company kind of thing so yeah good. There's a dozen on on the wiki page it just was those four years out of date because no one could update it. You can drop the word postpone because we started talking about it. Yes, very good. Okay. So I guess that's an action under for me to see if I can get around to reaching out, although it's not a high priority for me. And certainly understood. And I think reaching out to others is much more value than in Jenkins enhancement proposals I mean I'm going to just delete that. Yeah, because I think you've got. Yeah, I'll reach out to get some notes and then we can put it on the on the community on the community page and see what we get to because I did start a topic about this. Right. Excellent. All right, any other topics we should be discussing today. That sounds good. Okay, thanks everybody. I'm going to go ahead and stop the recording.


G enjoyable morning and thank you very much everybody, for coming into this presentation, this as Michael said is another country that was part of that UNU wider project looking at growth and poverty reduction in Africa I was involved in a case study in Rwanda we actually had two studies in Rwanda. That one focused mostly on poverty and the links between growth and poverty reduction. I've been working on poverty and Rwanda for about 15 years, on and off. And so, of course, when one does poverty calculations, one routinely computes gini coefficients and looks at the evolution of inequality. But we never really properly analysed the case of inequality. So I wanted to try and look and say what's happening. Now, if one looks at some gini coefficient data, and of course, WID is the source for this, not the one that Finn talked about that was updated this morning. This is the one of a few days ago. If we just compare countries in the East African community, Rwanda has the highest level of inequality. Now, Kenya's about 45, Uganda's about 43. The latest figure for Rwanda is 49. Burundi and Tanzania have much lower figures. Rwanda's got the highest inequality in the East African community, but it's also got higher than most other countries in Eastern Africa or even West Africa. Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, and so on. There is also in WID data from Rwanda from 1985, it says four there, but it's five, with a very low number. Exact providence of that, I'm not quite sure about. I don't have the data. Rwanda is a high inequality case for sure. Yes, there's countries in Southern Africa that are more unequal. Central African Republic has also got a higher value in WID, but this is a high inequality case. Now, what I'll give you is just 30 seconds, some features of Rwanda. I want to talk about consumption inequality, which is a sort of basic preferred measure which is generally used. But I want to also look at income data and see whether that gives a consistent story. We usually prefer consumption data to income data. It's better measured and so on. But I think it's important to look at the income story as well. It's also important to look at the income story because it helps to explain. Because income tells us how people get their livelihoods. Consumption doesn't tell you that. It just tells you what people spend and what people eat. It doesn't tell you where it comes from. Land is obviously an important story, so we'll talk about that too. Most of the data I'm going to use for the first 10 minutes of the talk are from 2000 onwards. But at the end, I'm going to try and say something comparing back to 1990. Rwanda is a special country. It's not a typical African country at all. It's got the highest population density in Africa. Like many African countries, it's dominantly agricultural. Like quite a few African countries, it's got a long history of conflict, culminating in the 1994 genocide. But a lot of conflict before that as well. It's a special country in many ways. It's also a country which has got quite good data, quite good survey data. There have been three surveys since 2000. These have good quality data. This is what's used for the poverty analysis. This is also what's used for the poverty story. If one looks at the recent history, and of course some of this is growth from a destroyed economy in 1994, but it's not just that, there's impressive growth of consumption over the 2000s, and over the 2005 to 2010, 4% per capita growth and consumption. Poverty fell significantly. Much faster than was Michael reported in the case of Burkina, for example, 59% in 2000, 45% basically in 2010. We're using, of course, real consumption per adults and so on. Those growth incident curves show the pattern of change. That shows the pattern of growth of consumption by percentile on the bottom. What one sees between the first and the second survey, one one sees in the early period is slight increase in inequality. That's between the first and the second survey. The growth is slightly faster at the top of the distribution compared to the bottom, but looking at this one one sees a different story. Faster growth at the bottom, slower growth at the top. Those charts already tell you what's happened in equality over these two sub-periods. It's gone up slightly in the first period, and it's gone down certainly in the second period. Now if one calculates measures of inequality, and there's different measures of inequality at the bottom, the ratio of the 90th to the 10th percentile, the generalized entropy index, two versions of it, the GE1 is the tile index, and the Gini coefficient. What one sees is an increase in inequality between the first and the second survey and the bigger reduction in inequality between the second and the third. So inequality at the end is lower than it was at the beginning. What one also sees in those data, though, is that these are high levels of inequality. These are high levels of inequality compared to the other African countries we saw. There's no question about that. If one tries to disaggregate a little bit and sees what is the pattern by region or by an urban rule break down. So this is the capital city, Cigali, other urban areas and rural, and five provinces. What one sees is a very big difference between urban and rural areas and between Cigali and the other provinces. The other provinces are much more rural, but one sees much higher Gini coefficients in Cigali compared to the rest of the country. If one uses a tile index that has the property of decomposibility and we can say how much of the overall inequality is due to inequality between groups, here between urban and rural or between the provinces. What one sees is that there is a massive contribution of inequality between the groups. Here, between 25 and 30% of the whole inequality in the country is just accounted for by the differences between these three parts of the country. That's massive. Compared with many other countries, that's a huge number. There's a very big urban rule differential here. That's for sure. For those that break down by province one gets slightly lower numbers, but it's still a big story. Or if one does the same thing at a district level, the same story. There's a big degree of geographic inequality here. That's consumption. That's the preferred measure. That's the measure routinely used for talking about inequality. The survey also collects information on income. We can look at different components of income and as I said, that's interesting because that can help us to understand that people are not able to pay for consumption. It's linked to livelihoods. Now, the problem is the income data is usually not particularly good. People don't report accurately their incomes and so on. There is some of this. We've calculated income in this data. The measures are not too bad and generally get better over time. So there's underestimation of income in the first survey, less underestimation in the second, and income is similar to consumption in the third. When there's a scatterplot of income against consumption, that graph in the bottom right, broadly there's a positive association and this is taking out the common elements. So things like consumption of own production are included both in income and consumption. Taking those things out, we still get a positive association. So I think there's reasons to think that the income data is probably okay. So what does it say about inequality? Well, again, the same structure as we had before, genicoefficence and tile indices, but let's just look at the genicoefficence high inequality, income inequality is higher than consumption inequality. That's not a major surprise. It's less accurately measured. It's more volatile. That's not surprising. But again, we see the same difference between urban and rural areas, perhaps a bit smaller here, and again we see the same difference between Cigali and the rest of the country. What we don't see there is a clear trend. There's not a clear trend. The story of consumption inequality increasing and then decreasing, that's not shown in the income data. Now again, that's possible and it doesn't mean that the consumption numbers are wrong. These are less accurate data. But what we do see is the urban rural gap. Broadly speaking, the features that we saw in the data I think are pretty much confirmed here. Now it's a huge agricultural economy, so therefore land is potentially a very important factor. So if we look at land inequality, now there's information where people are asked to report the plot sizes and so on. Land inequality, again we can calculate genicoefficence for plot size for area of land. And then again we see in the yellow shaded column, the left yellow shaded column, quite high values of genicoefficence. That shows the same pattern as the consumption, it increases and then falls. What we also see is very large numbers of households cultivating extremely small areas of land. Point two, hectares or less, is basically not enough to cultivate to feed a family, a routinely sized family and they need other activities. But there we have between 30 and 40% cultivating these very small areas of land. Now I want to say something about the economic activities that people do. Because I think that is an important part of the story. What we can do is calculate people's income from different things, from agriculture, from business activity, from wage activity and so on. And what we did is to try and define different activity groups. Now that's classifying people into basically 10 activity groups. The first five are where people get two thirds or more of their income from one source, agriculture, farm wage work, non farm wage work, business, transfers and rent. That's the majority of the sample but the majority of the sample is here. Agriculture only. And the other ones are people that are combining different activities. Now what this compares is the first and the fifth quintile just to broadly a transition in between those points, what we see is that the bottom of the distribution three quarters of people are reliant only on agriculture at least in the first two years. In the third year in the first quintile quite a few people move into combining agriculture with wage work. Either in farming or non farm activity. And there's a sharp difference between the first and the fifth quintile. Partly this is an urban rule difference but it's more than that. Now this movement into combining activities may suggest some sort of increase of diversification. Movement away from complete dependence on agriculture. Now if we define those groups we can look at inequality measures within those groups as well. And we can compare the levels of inequality. The levels of inequality are high in the cases shaded in yellow where basically people are not reliant in agriculture. Where people are working in other activities and business activities reliant in transfers, reliant in non farm wage. These are the high inequality activities. In agriculture farm wage work and other things inequality levels are generally lower. If one also looks at income shares by quintile agriculture is the very large source for the first four quintiles. It's only in the fifth quintile that agriculture becomes much less important and other things more important. Now the other thing one can do with the income data is one can do a sort of decomposition. The genicoefficient can be decomposed into inequality from the different constituent components of income. So here we have six components of income. This column shows the average share of income coming from that source. This is the genicoefficient of income from that source. Now some of the high values there are because there's lots of zeros. The last one shows the share of overall inequality which is due to a particular source of income. Now if we compare the two shaded numbers for agriculture the last column is lower than the first column. Agriculture is nearly 40% of where people get their income from. It only contributes 23% to inequality. Whereas these ones, the non-farm activities contribute much more to inequality than they do to income. These things contribute quite a lot to inequality. Significantly lowering inequality in agriculture land inequality seems not to show up so much in there. Land inequality I think matters for other reasons. Maybe increase the diversification. Maybe some evidence that public transfers are getting to poorer groups. I'm going to take a couple of minutes to just talk about extending back. These are surveys since 2000. Geneside happened in 1994. There were a lot of surveys conducted in Rwanda, especially agricultural surveys in the 80s and 90s. One in the 1990s collected a lot of income information and expenditure information. Methodology is different. It's difficult to perfectly compare. It's only rural areas. It's an agricultural survey. But let's see if it's possible to compare that with the later surveys. So what we can estimate from that is income and food consumption. Not total consumption, just food consumption. Now one I've tried to report there is different inequality measures for 1990 and the three later surveys. Focusing only of course in the rural areas when we're using the later surveys. The income data these numbers jump around an awful lot. 2000 figures are much higher than the 1990 figures but it jumps around a lot between there in 2010. Food consumption data is more stable and the food consumption data also doesn't show a consistent increase. In fact it doesn't show an increase in inequality over the period. The food consumption data is the data I prefer. I think it's the more reliable data. In rural areas maybe there has not been a big increase in inequality over this period. But of course remains. We can do the same socioeconomic group type analysis. We see pretty much the same composition of activity in 1990 as we see in the first two post-genocide surveys. We can do the agricultural source decomposition. We get pretty much the same message. So what in summary can we say? I presented you lots of numbers. I presented you lots of figures and stuff like that. Some of them I have more confidence in than others. What do I think we can say? Inequality in Rwanda for sure is high. The numbers that were talked about for Brazil this morning by the Minister current unique coefficient is not that much higher than what it is in Rwanda at the moment. Rural inequality may not have increased that much. Yes, the recent data showed some reduction in inequality between 2005 and 2010. Land inequality shows the same thing. But I wonder if that's sustainable. I think this is driven quite a lot by surveys that are always susceptible to the economic conditions when they're specifically carried out. The harvest in 2005-6 was relatively poor. The harvest in 2010-11 was better. Where does the harvest impact most in the distribution? We've seen it in the data at the bottom. So I think something of the pattern that we see of reduction of inequality is partly due to that. But other things are important too and transfers do seem to be reaching poorer ourselves. Reduced land inequality also may be important. The urban rural gap I think is hugely important and the gap between Kigali and the rest of the country. This is a really important policy issue. In Burkina Faso the problem was too much migration. I wonder if the problem is probably the opposite. Population in Kigali is very tightly controlled. People are brought in and poor people in particular are shipped out periodically. The government introduced what was effectively construction of new villages in rural areas from the late 1990s onwards. Another important factor. The way in which Kigali has developed I think these things contribute to this urban rural inequality.  Now, I think that it is important that the government and the activities are a big driver of inequality. Now that's not a surprise and that's true pretty much anywhere. And poor people can get non-farm jobs and we do have more poor people doing non-farm jobs. But they have more difficulty getting non-farm jobs and they get less good jobs. The non-farm jobs they do are pretty much unskilled. They may not be agriculture but they're basically manual construction type jobs. They get less access to them and they get poorer opportunities when they do. There is more diversion in 2010-11. More people are combining agriculture with wage jobs. That I think is a good thing. That I think is a sense of diversification but I think that could well be driven by a decent harvest in that year. Which therefore increases demand for labour and increases opportunities for work. It's not certain that this is a story that's another survey being completed at the moment it's not certain whether this is a story that will continue and will show up in the current survey. Thank you very much.


So we're going to shift gears to something completely different, H549 and act relating to the sighting of outdoor cannabis cultivation, which was introduced by Representative Lloyd Houghton, which is here to tell us what the goal is. Thank you. So Representative Lloyd Houghton, I serve the City of S-Extension. So thank you for the time to give very brief comments on H4-549. I want to be clear, the City of S-Extension is not anti-cannabis, but there are real conflicts between dense housing areas and outdoor cultivation. It's difficult of a city, approximately four and a half square miles, to achieve both state goals. So Rep Dolan and I on behalf and along with our municipality are asking that we prohibit outdoor cultivation in an area served by water and sewer or based on density. We do have zoning in our community that has a place for outdoor cultivation. Unfortunately, there is a site that is doing outdoor cultivation that is not in that zoning place. So we're asking that you look at the density and outdoor cultivation and make some changes. Thank you. Questions? I guess I'd love for you just to say a little bit more about the conflict or what you're trying to achieve. So we have, I don't know if you've been to City of S-Extension again with four and a half square miles, and so we have a lot of dense communities. You know, variance lines are about eight feet between property lines. And so prior to the city have any zoning requirements on cannabis, the state gave a person an outdoor cannabis cultivation license in a dense neighborhood. And so there has been conflict of having that outdoor cultivation in that dense place. And since the home act passed, we have changed our land development code or in the process of doing that to incorporate all of the home act provisions that in this neighborhood, one of the things would be that you could have a four unit building on a very small piece of land. So we expect density to increase within become more dense within the City of S-Extension. And that with some of the issues associated with outdoor cultivation, like being able to see into the cultivation site, noise, odor, lights, it's just causing a lot of conflict within the community. Thanks. Representative Stevens. Thanks, Senator. Apologies. I really don't know any of the rules about this whole subject area, but I'm assuming it's legal if a homeowner has like, if I recall correctly, they can have like two plants or something. How does this relate to that? This is the license, and I don't know the specifics. I'm sure legislative counsel will be able to help, but this is a license actually for outdoor cultivation where he is a whole settler. Got it. Okay, thank you. So you're referring to, thank you by the way, you're referring to someone that's cultivating more than two plants? Yes. Like maybe 10 or 20 or whatever to resell? They have, yeah. So I think it's, again, legislative counsel will tell you the growing amount that they're allowed. They also have 50 ducks on the, my understanding is right now it's up to 50 ducks on that same property because they're using the manure for the outdoor cultivation. So again, we're talking very dense neighborhood 50 ducks and quite a bit of cannabis grow. They're trying to grow wacky quacky. Thank you for. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, wait, tell me, put my finger on and kind of have a quick foot here. What exactly is the conflict? I guess, dense neighborhood, right? What's the root of the conflict? The conflict is that because of Act 270 that we passed last year, that this is being allowed in an area not zoned for outdoor cultivation. The area is very dense. There are odor issues. There is concern with security because you can see in to the operation. There is concern that it's only going to get worse as we actually become more dense. So it is a conflict between these two state goals. We have put both into land development and zoning code. We would like zoning to occur, I mean, outdoor cultivation to occur in the section of the city that is less dense. So just, I don't want to beat the horse, but I just want to make sure I understand it. If it were a community garden there, people would probably go great. I know there's something here. I just want to get it, get at what it is. Why is this objectionable when a community garden wouldn't be for instance? So community garden, odor, doesn't have the odor, doesn't have the sounds associated with the ducks, doesn't have the security issues associated with someone walking by and being able to see that there's an outdoor cultivation growing in that space. There is concern with children in the neighborhood, and there is concern that it's close to a school. That's what I was looking for. Okay. Okay. Couldn't that be addressed in Amunus, Florida? So no, because we passed Act 270, and again, this is where Legislative Council is going to really be able to help you. He, the grower, the outdoor cultivator, was able to secure an agriculture license as well. And so that allows the cultivator to do things is where, way outside of my knowledge, that conflicts with what we feel should be appropriate for an outdoor cannabis cultivator. Yeah. Yeah. From here, we'll have questions for Legislative Council. Thank you. And, yes. Thank you very much, everyone. Have a great day. Representative Dolan, I see you here. I guess we would have you, we'll invite you to introduce your two bills that we're going to take up. If you can be very brief, that would be awesome. So please join us, and we'll get into the walkthroughs, I guess. Welcome. Thank you. My name is Cary Dolan. I'm the representative for Wastefield War and face to more town in Dexbury with my co-summate over there, Representative Tori. And a former member of a different generation of this committee. Of a prior life to this committee. It's great to see you all. I'm introducing two bills, and I see that our council's here who will probably do the walkthrough, so I can skip over that section. You know, walkthrough them, please. We just need to know what the purposes of the bills are. Thank you. H586 is related to flood protection and climate resilience. It is to maximize the amount of new and existing federal greenhouse gas reduction and resilience funds that the state may receive. It's the intent is to have resources to finance Vermont's greenhouse gas reduction requirements in the Global Warming Solutions Act, as well as infrastructure needs for a clean economy and investments in climate resilience strategies. It is to maximize the opportunity to secure important public benefits, including economic vitality, clean air and clean water, and to support the coordination across government. In some, while many states are establishing what is known to be green banks or state climate mitigation and resilience funds to achieve these goals, this bill builds on the functions of existing entities, the state treasure, agencies, instrumentality of the state, and clarifies the eligibility and use of existing funds to meet the same goals of what a green bank could achieve. Why now? Well, we know that we have statutory requirements relating to the Global Warming Solutions Act. We know we need investments in climate sequestration and storage to meet those requirements. We know firsthand, after experiencing flooding in July, August and December, that we need to make investments in climate resilience in order to avoid or minimize impacts and drive down the risk to public safety, recovery costs to natural disasters, and minimize the disruption to our economy. We know that nature-based solutions are our first line of defense, typically the least cost option for climate resilience, and this is intended to enable municipalities to achieve greater resilience in the future. And I understand you'll be walking through the various sections of this bill. I do have a number of suggestions on who could be witnesses, and I could give that to your media assistant. And if this bill does become law, the value I see is that it will enable Vermont to make strategic investments meeting our greenhouse gas reduction goals and improving communities' resilience to climate impacts, including driving down the cost of recovery that is paid for by all of us taxpayers. Okay, that's bill number one. Any questions? So you can feel free to find me if you have questions. Now, I think there was a ploy or a kind of a fun kind of tease, and on the part of the perhaps our legislative council, but that bill was 586, and this bill is 568. This one, the second one, relates to municipal planning, the existing municipal planning grant. Now, this bill builds on the importance of an existing municipal funding stream, the agency of commerce and community development's municipal planning grants, by addressing resilience planning with additional funding. Why do we need this bill now? Well, similar to the last bill, flooding is Vermont's most frequent and costly natural disaster. And this year alone, we experienced substantial flooding in many parts of the state. Such flooding risks facing communities are not going away. And there are reports including the 2018 National Climate Assessment Report, the 2021 Vermont Climate Assessment Report that shows that Vermont is experiencing a substantial increase in the average precipitation rate since the 1990s. Flood impacts and their cost of recovery will continue to expose Vermonters and our communities to these heightened risks, to public safety risks, to property damage and loss, and economic disruption and high recovery costs. Since our municipalities are the first line, are on the front lines, when it comes to facing these risks, this bill seeks to help municipalities by helping them identify, prioritize, develop and implement project pipelines that will help them help themselves in reducing this risk. Why is this important? It builds on an existing program. It does not create a new program administered by the agency of commerce and community development. I recognize that their existing funding source is critically important now, now more than ever, in helping municipalities update their plans and their bylaws, particularly when it comes to addressing our housing needs in municipalities, especially in our downtown and village centers. This bill also recognizes that this particular funding program is highly subscribed. Their demand for these funds outweigh the available dollars, I think two to threefold. What this bill does is not replace, I divert those funds, but adds to the available funds while it expands the planning and implementation scope to include resilience. I understand you'll walk through the components of this bill, and I too have a number of important or suggested folks for you to speak with if you decide to take up this bill and happy to give your committee assistant that list. So in sum, we know that the recovery from tropical storm Irene was, that the lessons we learned was when we empower communities, offering them resources and technical assistance to address their vulnerabilities, we can make a difference in improving, helping them improve their resiliency moving forward. A great example and case in point is in Northfield, and the development and restoration of what they now call the Water Street River Park Project is what helped them improve their resiliency to such a level that they were able to avoid substantial damages from this current July flooding event, that part flooding. And so those are two important bills I see to address some important priorities that are facing Vermont and the municipalities across our state. Thank you. Thanks for your time. Okay, okay. On the site of council, would you please join us? Unfortunately, that's my iPad at home, so I won't be able to drive. Is that a problem? No, we can do it on our own. That's fine. Would you like me to start? Ducks and cannabis. Okay. Let's talk on text. First, municipalities do not have authority to regulate farming in Vermont. Farming is defined in several different ways under the required agricultural practices. One of the main ways it's defined is what's called the Noah's Ark, that if you're on four acres or more and you have over a certain number of animals, then you are exempt from municipal regulation. And the number for ducks is 100 ducks. But the parcel in that exemption at issue is one half of an acre or a little bit more than a half an acre. But you can qualify as farming if you sell more than $2,500 in agricultural products in a year, which I think a person with 30 to 50 ducks will be able to do with their eggs. No matter the size parcel, you can still be a farm. No matter the size of the farm. Make $2,500 or more. So that activity is exempt from municipal regulation, the ducks. Last year in H270, as referenced by Representative Dolan, you addressed the municipal regulation of outdoor cannabis cultivation. So a few years ago when you were first discussing whether and how to regulate cultivation of cannabis as farming, you said no, it wasn't going to be treated as farming. It wasn't going to receive all the regulatory benefits of farming. But then the next year, small cultivators came forth and said that that created problems for them because they had such a small amount of land where they could grow outside that it was difficult for them to basically grow and do what they needed to do subject to municipal regulation. So you enacted a provision that said small cultivators, those under a thousand square feet, could receive the regulatory benefits. Some of the regulatory benefits of farming may be exempt from municipal zoning and regulation. They would be exempt from H250 and they would continue to qualify in the current use program. They wouldn't lose their current use ability or current use enrollment just because part of their land was enrolled as cannabis cultivation. So then what happened after that is that there were a couple of instances around the state where municipalities were not, they had voted to allow cannabis cultivation but they were adopting ordinances that were severely limiting on that cannabis cultivation. There was an instance where there was a cannabis cultivator licensed, had been approved by the TAM but then subsequent neighbors didn't enjoy the odor and other aspects of the farm and moved to create a 500 foot setback from the property boundary for any cannabis cultivation which would effectively have regulated that cultivator out of existence. So what you did in H270 was twofold. You gave all outdoor cultivation of cannabis the regulatory benefits that you gave small cultivators a year before. You basically said that they were exempt from H250, they were exempt from municipal regulation and they could enroll in use value. Can you rewind just for a second and explain what the small cultivators issue was that they needed something different? So it really came up with regard to use value. So they were in use value, they were going to cultivate cannabis that effectively was a land use change or development under current use which triggered the land use change tax which required them to pay for taking that land out of the world because it was no longer farming. You said that they could continue to be involved in current use and their cultivation of cannabis when it changed that and they came forward and they asked for those additional benefits of being exempt from H250 and exempt from municipal regulation. But what spurred the conversation was were they going to be allowed to remain enrolled in use value. So then H270 came forward and you gave those benefits to all outdoor cultivators. So they would not be regulated under H250, they would not be regulated by municipal bylaw, they continue to be eligible for use value, they were exempt from certain sales tax for things like agriculture inputs and then they were entitled to a rebuttable presumption that their cultivation did not constitute a nuisance, basically giving them the right to farm protection that all farming has. So that's the one part of H270 or Act 65. The other part is that you amended the cannabis control boards authority or municipal authority under cannabis control to say that they could not exercise their ordinances in a way to regulate a way license cannabis cultivation. It could not regulate a cannabis establishment in a manner that has the effect of prohibiting the operation of the cannabis establishment. So that's what you did last year. So to respond to Representative Smith's question why couldn't this be addressed in municipal bylaw or municipal ordinance because you said that municipalities don't have the ability to regulate that cultivation under the Act 65 H270 from last year and because that site qualifies as farming and they're exempt from municipal regulation as farming as well. So I thought we hadn't granted them like the status of actual farming but we gave them some of the rights of a farm. Gave them initially three of those what I call the regulatory benefits. Yeah.  They still have to get a licensed electrician to do wiring in their buildings. They still have to comply with water quality laws. The things that farming traditionally is exempt from these cultivators don't receive all of those regulatory benefits. Representative Smith. Thank you. Would that mean that if someone owned a 100 by 100 lot and they could claim that they're in agriculture they could build a structure without going through Act 250? Technically yes. It proved that they were farming under the RAPs. You have to be farming. So you can own 50 docks and claim that you're farming? The Noah's Archivist arose because of concerns like that. It was particularly an issue in Barry where a person was on I think it was like an eighth of an acre lot and that person had about 40 chickens and three roosters and the roosters were creating a lot of issues in the neighborhood. And the property owner said that the town couldn't regulate them because they were farming. And so that's when the agency bag changed the definition of farming to put in the Noah's Archivist. That's only on four acres or more. Underneath four acres you can still qualify as farming if you generate $2,500 from the sale of agricultural products. Is that a monthly figure or is that a yearly figure? You have produced an annual gross income from the sale of agricultural products of $2,000 or more in an average year. What's a year? All right. Thank you. Let's look at that. So but what really is the issue here and what H549 addresses is that the Cannabis Control Board likely never should have granted the license for that site or cultivation on that site. That it wasn't an appropriate site for cultivation because of the proximity of other residences, schools, et cetera. And so what H549 does, it doesn't change the regulatory benefits that you gave outdoor cultivation. What it does is it empowers the Cannabis Control Board to prohibit certain applicants for outdoor cultivation. Can I just you say they shouldn't have allowed it? Under what grounds should they have not allowed? That's the point. They say that they didn't have grounds to not allow. That's why they were allowing it because they didn't. They argue that they didn't have a criteria or application requirement that would allow them to disapprove of the license based on siting. So you're saying the resolution is that they should have and they should have not that they could have. They couldn't have denied it previous. That's what their argument was. I think if they had been creative they probably could have, but they didn't. So you see H549, the first section is the Cannabis Control Board's authority or criteria that it reviews when it's reviewing an application for an outdoor cannabis cultivation. And you'll see on page two that in the following areas of the municipality, when the property is used for outdoor cultivation, this is where it shall not be allowed. Well, this is actually, I'm sorry, this is where it will be allowed. So reading cultivation cultivation of cannabis shall occur only in the following areas of municipality when the property is used for outdoor cultivation. An area with a population density below 500 persons per square mile. So much of say, you know, Chittenden County in the more urbanized areas, it would not be allowed in that because the density would be greater than 500 persons per square mile. It also would not be allowed in an area that is served by municipal water and sewer infrastructure or an area that is prohibited from cultivation by the Board. So that would give the Board the ability to say no to certain cultivation applications. And then in section two, this is the Board's authority, the Cannabis Control Board's authority to adopt rules. And on page three, you give it authority to adopt rules regarding location or siting requirements for outdoor cultivation, including areas where outdoor cultivation is prohibited because of population density or other criteria. Further questions? Representative Ungertz. What is an area? That is not defined. It could just be the site or the applicants, you know, close cultivation site. But that wouldn't have any density. That wouldn't have any density. It's the site itself. So how do you figure out what the area is? And the bill would take effect on passage. In response to your question, Representative Ungertz, how did you define an area for the purpose of the Home Act and areas served by water and sewer? Because that's the term. What is the area? An area that's not secure, I mean, it's water and sewer. Same clarity as a block. So the Government Operations Committee is typically the ones that address cannabis, but this is, you know, a bill that's clearly in our area of land use as just brought up at a previous exchange and how it relates to, well, also, I don't have this. I haven't calculated the 500 people per square mile, but someone mentioned to me, it would be over 20 towns in the state that would be prohibiting outdoor grow. So I think just some interesting things that get brought up by this challenge. Representative Ungertz. Thanks, Representative Ungertz. It's interesting too because I recall my first year there were at least a handful of bills on the House Transportation Board and the answer was generally for some of these bills, you know, we don't pass law to address one problem. And I guess I feel like this raises a lot of questions, so I need to like read it and sit with it because it feels like the little, you know, you do this little thing and then this thing and if it's one problem, is that when we start crafting state law? I don't know. Well put, I guess I'm going to ask you, Michael, if you, is there, I mean, you suggested that the solution would be to allow the Cannabis Control Board to limit, but are they, they're not really a land use regulation body and how are they going to choose where to allow or not allow?  And so their authority is well within yours to change. Yeah, and I mean that this property with the ducks qualifies for being a farm. And so then we reach into that kind of area as well in the definition of what is agriculture in the state of Vermont, which in fact, you suggested that the Noah's Ark came out of a particular suit, but as I recall, it also came out of the Clean Water Act and small, the definition of a small farm. No, the definition of the small farm, the numbers are much greater. Oh, and you remind me that Noah's Ark is. So for cows, you can have 199 cows. For chickens, it's in like the 700s. No, but that's before you become a medium farm. I'm talking about the minimum threshold to be a. There is no minimum threshold under the Clean Water Act. It's zero to 199 cows. It's zero to 699 chickens. Okay, I'm just kidding. All right. Yeah, I'm going to theme upon representative Steppen to comment as well. I had that same concern. If this bill was to pass, would this particular site be grandfathered because they haven't just although when the next time their license comes up, it would be denied. They would most likely not be able to qualify. And it was this legislature, maybe not this year, current legislatures that passed this. And some of the conditions he talks about with Dr. for example, which is arguably agriculture, unsightly smell, future expansion. What's to say a municipal municipality has regulations, but we're trying to push the expansion out or growth in certain areas. And we determine there's an area that's maybe cultivating cannabis now, but we've just said, no, we're going to expand our number of homes we can have there. So now would have put this example in violation in the future. I'm concerned about that. We increased housing in a particular area. And I would sense, well, you have to be more than 500, but I just, we should have known these things when cannabis was approved. And now we're trying to micromanage. I just, I stumble with this a lot. Representative Stibbett was saying, is there a sense of not in my backyard? Is this currently being litigated? Do you know? I don't know if there's litigation. There's definitely dispute. I have heard several things, including that the property owner is seeking another site. But I'd also heard that the property owner is defending his rights as a farmer in a licensed cannabis provider. And they required to, she mentioned, Brooklyn mentioned security. So is it required to be fenced? There are some fencing requirements. I would have to turn to Michelle Childs on that. She's typically the cannabis staffer. I got this because of the docs. I was just going to ask, why did you? And if this, I mean, but this property, even if we adjusted the cannabis grow part of it, this person could still be a farm with their ducks. Yes. All right. Do members have further questions on this? Representative Stibbett. I mean, if we are going to take this up for a passage, I would love to hear from the cannabis control board, probably the city and probably the farmer, maybe an agency bag. I mean, if, if you were to take this up, the agency bag would be the first place for the duck issue. And then the cannabis control board, I would bring in Pepper Brinn, talk about that, what authority they think they lack or don't, to address this type of issue. And then, you know, the farmer and a six junction officials. But interestingly, the bill is addressing the cannabis, not the ducks, and doesn't actually have anything to do with the, you know, whether it's a farm or not. That's correct. That's what the sponsors are looking for after their consultation with their municipal officials. Representative Von Garns. Would the same person have, instead of any of this, had pigs on that property? That the person made $2,500 a year from? This is not the first time that small farming activities have occurred on small parcels and have created conflict. The most, the most called from my experience is small farm in the Brattle Barrow region. They were on, I think, two acres, maybe three. They had crops. They had animals. And then they started a logwood cutting operation. And the logwood is really aggravated the neighbors. That's not farming. And so the municipality got to regulate that. Representative Smith. This sounds like a one-issue deal that we should be regulating. Used to be farmers had respect for the neighbors, but apparently this duck farmer really doesn't. We had to consider rationing to find an alternative business, I think. But we shouldn't be addressing one issue. I don't think. I mean, that's a valid argument. The response to that is that the land is expensive. And if people want to get into farming, they're going to try to do that on whatever land that they can get access to, to do it. And sometimes that will create conflict. The land, traditional ag land right now, depending on where you are in the state, is selling for unbelievable prices. So the government operations committee was intending to pursue some updates to the cannabis section of statute. And they've asked for this possession of this bill. And I wanted us to opine on the ramifications from our perspective in terms of land use and zoning. So that's why we're looking at it at this moment. So members, keep thinking about it. Let me know. You have further thoughts. Representative Sacker. My only thought is just that here in the bill, it would add restrictions to where you're able to grow cannabis. And maybe a middle ground would be to just give municipalities a little more flexibility that they could prohibit based upon some of these new criteria, but wouldn't necessarily have to. All right. Thank you. Now we'll shift gears to Representative Dolan's bills. Should I just go in numerical order? So that brings you to 568. As Representative Dolan noted, there's already a grant fund in statute. It's called the Municipal and Regional Planning Fund. It receives 17% of the revenue from the property transfer tax. That money is then used for three different significant sources. 10% goes to the Vermont Center for Geographic Information. Then 70% is dispersed by ACCD for performance contracts. It's really performance grants to regional planning commissions to provide regional planning services. Then 20% is dispersed to municipalities as a municipal planning grant. What Representative Dolan's bill would do beginning on page one, section one, is first rename the program as the Municipal and Regional Planning and Resilience Fund. And then on page three, in what the disbursements to municipalities would be authorized for, on line 17 would be to allow for funds for municipal planning and resilience purposes. And then on page four, again, for what the municipalities could use the grants for, page four, line 17, they could use them for flood protection and climate resilience. And then on page five, in section two, it's session law. The agency would be directed to rename their municipal planning grant program as the Municipal Planning and Resilience Grants Program. And then there would be $1.5 million of general fund money appropriated to the Municipal and Regional Planning and Resilience Fund for the grants for the following purposes. To assist municipalities to support resiliency planning, identify the plan for resiliency projects to reduce damages from flooding and other climate change-related hazards. And to fund regional planning commissions, increase in staff in order to support municipalities in conducting climate resiliency planning, project development and implementation, and hazard mitigation locally, regionally at a watershed scale. And on page five, section three, there would be new positions. There would be one position at ACCB for the Municipal Planning and Resilience Grant Program and one position at A&R for the Water Investment Division at DEC for purposes of assisting in financing climate resilient projects from the Special Environmental Revolving Fund. Does everyone know what the Special Environmental Revolving Fund is? Well, there's actually several of them. Several of them don't have any money in them. But a couple of them do, most notably the Clean Water Special Revolving Fund and the Drinking Water Special Revolving Fund that are funded through EPA funds. Those funds typically fund in assortment of projects, water treatment, storm water. They do some flood mitigation already. They do some flood resilience already. The Agency of Natural Resources has an entire division that's largely dedicated to moving that money to municipalities and in some cases private individuals. And so that's what that division does. It moves that EPA money, which is cost shared with capital funds from the state to municipalities and qualified private entities. Michael, did you draft a larger resilience bill, the 723, I think it is? Is that the Washington County delegation? You did draft that. And is this language in that bill to your number? No, not exactly. There are a couple of different programs in that bill that are similar. That's one of my concerns is the sort of keeping track of all of the positions that Regional Planning Commissions and ANR, how to track that. Again, this bill I think was requested by Ways and Means. Representative Sebelia. Madam Chair, who is taking the lead in the Legislature on recovery bills? Well, we've had one meeting among the chairs who've received the different bills to try to figure out what's out there in the universe and how that should happen. That feels problematic. Also, it depends on how you define response. Because the Senate bill is largely devoid of money, but it's policy oriented. Is that response or I don't know how you're defining it? Members have questions on this bill? Senator Morris and Bongart. Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm just curious. We're putting, this bill puts up 1.5 million, it's proposing to put up 1.5 million from the General Fund to the Municipal and Regional Planning and Resiliency Fund. And the Planning, those Planning Grants are usually done from the Regional Planning Commissions. So, we have this pot of money and I'm thinking it would be distributed municipalities or the Regional Planning Commissions for the purpose of... So, there's three different ways that this fund gets used right now. Ten percent, stop the pot, goes to VCGI. Then, 70 percent is passed through ACCD to the Regional Planning Commissions. And then, 20 percent passes through ACCD and grants to municipalities from Municipal Planning. So, my question is, are the two positions needed? The 125 projected proposal for ACCD and the other 125 for ANR. Is that administration of that disbursement that required two additional people? Maybe you can't answer that. I mean, the argument is you're giving them 1.5 million dollars plus the existing revenue stream of 17 percent of the property transfer tax is probably going to require some additional staffing at least during that 1.5 million to get that money out the door. For ANR, there's always a long line for that program. Whether or not that line is because of staffing or because of the demand on the relatively little lack of funds. I mean, it's millions of dollars but there's tens of million dollars in need. And so, whether they need somebody else, I don't know. I think that's a question for that. Thanks, Senator. Thanks, Senator. I'm sorry if I seem to be pretty slow today. Clarify, 1.5 million for ACCD to essentially go to RPC staff to help me need. That's the first bit. Am I getting that right? So, the 1.5 is on page 5 and it goes to ACCD and it's for it's for different, there's two different ends. It's assistance to municipalities using municipal planning grants for resiliency and then there's funding to the RPCs to increase staff to support the municipalities and their climate resiliency. Okay, so there's 1.5 to ACCD to help and then to increase staff to RPCs in some. Then we have 125K to ACCD for a new full-time position and then 125K to A&R to help make sure we get the EPA dollars. Okay, I mean, how many times do we hear that in particular our small towns and communities don't have capacity and we know that the federal government has rolled out multiple millions and billions of dollars that we know in particular our smaller towns aren't able to access. So, I mean, knowing the bill's sponsor, she usually does a lot of homework and doesn't make things up. I'd be curious to hear more from some of our communities about whether this is helpful, whether or not this is something that is needed. My guess is it probably is giving how much flooding and how much communities have said we would love to get this funding or this funding, but we don't have the staff, we don't have the resources, we don't have the time or the expertise. I don't know if any of us have worked on EPA grants, they're pretty miserable. I don't mean miserable, I just mean they are intense efforts. So, I don't know if it's the correct framework, but I guess I just say if I connect the dots between what I'm hearing from smaller towns and rural communities and places that have been completely underwater, I'm certainly hearing a need. I don't know if this is the right one, but Representative Fongard's going to do it. Just to make sure I understand this, for the last few years there have been line items in the budget for municipal planning grants. Is this really the same thing except adding resiliency to what it can be used for? Or as the positions? The positions are because you had the two things going on, the 1.5 is really the equivalent of what we've done in the last couple of years where I forget what the numbers have been, but it's been in that range. And we're just adding that that can also be used for resilience. So that's what we're doing. In a way, this is just a, this could be looked at, that part of it, could be looked at simply as us saying continue what you did the last couple of years to do some planning grants and provide this addition, this ability to add. With the nuance that you're now caveatting that line item that's going to be used for the grants and for RPC assistance to municipalities for resiliency. So you're limiting that line item more than you would have done in the past. Okay, it's actually limited. I thought I was thinking it was more expanse, expanding saying and that's what I think, but not what I hear what you're saying. If you look at page five, that 1.5 is going to be for assistance municipalities to support resiliency planning and identify a plan for resiliency projects to reduce damages from the municipal planning grants from use for more than that. So it's limiting not expanding. Okay, that's it. So I want to see. Yeah, I guess I would agree with representatives sevens that there's a lot of need out there, but this does kind of feel disconnected from anything strategic and contemplating kind of the massive scale of work that is necessary out there. So just kind of struggling with that. Yeah, what this could get connected to. Well, I think that the Committee on Ways and Means would like to connect it to a larger support for our municipalities, which is why they asked for it. But as far as how it's connected to supporting policy that may be under discussion in Senate or that interface between the money to support some of the policy changes. What's missing? Money is the piece that is missing. Well, the interface is what's missing. Yeah, I think that's what you were saying. Yeah, I'm saying yes. Yeah, so it's hard for me to say we should fund, right, which something that is question about the clearinghouse and I think ways and means and appropriations will always be the clearinghouse on the money pieces of it. Then the rest of us do the policy work. Okay, so to that extent then the policy in here, us to see, I would like us to connect that to something. If we in fact are passing out a land use bill, it seems like it would be a good bill to incorporate, land use in this moment and going forward.  So I don't know, I guess I'm just kind of reacting to actions they react. I'm just wondering where's the bigger plan here? Formulating it. Great, that's awesome. Thank you Madam Chair. I think I got my just my question just got answered with that piece about ways and means, but page eight, line 20, is the use of at least $5 million to be made available to leverage existing in a new federal state ministry. Might be in the other five, 36. Oh, I'm sorry. The numbers. Okay, okay, here mine. Next representative story. How about that? I was just thinking about my regional planning commission is how they have a limited term position for a climate and energy plan who's been doing and raising more supporting returns. So I see this as really playing into a role in making it a more permanent thing that our towns are reading operations really need that staff capacity. And I'm also thinking about the climate action office and the municipal tool for what they're working on to really make it easier for municipalities to do more climate planning local. So to me, this seems like a really well timed effort with an existing thought and existing tool that is oversubscribed right now. So the Washington County flood recovery bill has a different way of doing exactly what she just describes representatory. It would just provide funding, the full time fund those climate mitigation staffers at the regional planning commission, because right now they're half time max. And so the thought is that they need to be full time. And so the Washington County bill, this could definitely be used for that. But the Washington County recovery bill mandates that there's money for the sole purpose of fully funding those positions. Thank you. That's where I've seen it. And is there just drawn general funds? Is it drawn what? General funds to fund it? I think so, but I can't recall. There's a lot of funding in that bill. There is. Further discussion of representatives? Yeah. So with regard to the regional planning commissions, and I, you know, I hope and expect this will come up as part of the Act 250 conversation in the end resilience. It's really my sense and I've been spending a lot of time working with the regional planning commissions that they are not properly configured. They do not have the proper governance or interface with our communities for the scale of the work that we are asking them to do or contemplating that we might pass in some, you know, some of these massive changes in Act 250 and the incredible need and urgency that we have with climate change.  I know that they themselves are asking some of these questions and working with their national organizations on this, but I think it's really important for us to kind of dig in here if we are going to, you know, before we're adding any more money on top of this, let's really understand what's needed. Any further comments or questions on this bill? Okay, let's see any. Let's take our last break to what we've been going on. Well, let's look at the next bill. 586. So, 586 does several things, seven different things. It creates a new special fund called the Climate Infrastructure and Resilience Fund to provide loans for climate mitigation and resiliency. It amends the Clean Water Board funding restrictions to increase the cap for water quality enhancement grants, 5 million to 8 million as a cap. It amends the Clean Water Service provider model and the authority for Clean Water Service providers to direct that they will prioritize projects for climate mitigation and resilience. It amends the water quality enhancement grant program to allow for use of that money for climate mitigation and resilience. It calls to fully fund VHCB and to give VHCB authority to do climate mitigation and resilience specifically. It amends the basin planning process to require A&R and the basin planning to identify projects for climate mitigation and resilience. And then last, it requires that the flood risks in the state be mapped fully. And there are a couple other things. So, let's start with a refresher on the water quality enhancement and Clean Water Service provider model. So, a few years ago, when the state was faced with meeting the Lake Champlain TNBL and after a couple of years of the implementation plan, it was determined that the state was not going to be able to reach those goals in a timely manner without more on-the-ground local implementation of water quality projects. But the state just didn't have the staffing and the resources to get that money out for the more local projects. So, you created the General Assembly created a model where there would be for the impaired watersheds, what are called Clean Water Service providers, that they would be a local or regional entity made up of multiple players that would be granted money to then award for local water quality improvement projects. There are a couple of different grants that were created underneath that program, one of which is the Water Quality Enhancement Grant, which would be grants directly to, well, pass us through A&R to the New Water Service provider for the Clean Water Service provider to award to for the different types of water quality projects. So, what Representative Dolan is proposing in H586, and I'm going to skip over the first two sections, is beginning on Section 3, the Clean Water Fund and the Board is required to recommend to the General Assembly the use of all the money that goes into the Clean Water Fund. Part of what they're intended to recommend is the amount of water quality enhancement grants that go out each year, provided that they've capped that youth, the General Assembly, has capped the maximum amount of water quality enhancement grants at $5 million per year. It can be less than that, it just can't go over $5 million. And what Representative Dolan is proposing is that that it be capped at $8 million a year, and that's largely because on page 5, Section 4, he's expanding what the Clean Water Service provider and the Water Quality Enhancement Grants are going to be used for. It's not just going to be about water quality anymore, it's going to be about water quality and climate resilient watersheds and mitigation. So, you'll see that in page 5, Section 4, lines 18 to 21, about when a Clean Water Service that will Clean Water Service provider picks a project, they will prioritize one that has either water quality, climate resilience, or supportive ecological health and states water. And then similarly on page 6, same type of proposed change and project identification prioritization selection, they will pick one, a project that's water quality, climate resilience, or ecological health. And then in Section 5, the water quality enhancement grants may be used for in addition to water quality, which is already authorized to achieve water quality, climate resilience, or supportive ecological health. So what could a Clean Water Service provider do is more than just water quality, it could be climate resilience and mitigation or some sort of ecological health project. So that's the change to that program, existing program, existing Clean Water Service provider, existing water quality enhancement grant and be used for more than just water quality. Section 1 and 2 creates a new program. There would be a new special fund that would be created and you'll see on page 2, lines 10 through 12 to enable the authority to make loans and provide other forms of financing for climate change mitigation and resilience projects. So what is the authority? Well, the authority is made up of a climate infrastructure and resilience fund board consisting of the Treasurer, the Chief Executive Officer of BIDA, the Executive Director of BHCB, one person appointed by the government, one person appointed by the Speaker, and one person appointed by the committee on committees. And they shall develop a statewide strategy for the authority to finance climate change mitigation and resilience projects and they'll have an authority to recommend as part of that strategy how to leverage existing federal, state and municipal private resources to support investment in climate change. Now this next part, I don't really understand and that is that the fund shall consist of two and one-half percent of the state's cash balance. Well, I told the sponsor I didn't understand that and she said that that is language that the treasurer had recommended. I don't know what that means. I fully admit that I don't know what that means. And so I think if you're going to pursue this, finding out what that means, whether or not it's a consistent revenue source or not, I don't know. This is a loan program, right? This is a loan program, yes. And so those are the key parts that the rest of it is really, you know, the fund can accept any sources of money going through the regular approval process. The general assembly can appropriate money to it, direct revenue to it. And that's, those are just kind of whether plate language is special for them. And then section two is to create positions for this program. So in addition to other appropriated for the following state entities in fiscal year 2025, there are funds appropriated for this program. So 125,000 to VITA, 125,000 to the treasurer, 125,000 to VATB, 125 to the Department of Public Service, 125 to ANR. Did you get the name of all the sections yet? There's more sections, I think, right? Oh, yes, there are. Folks have questions on this. This is a section that Representative Dillon would think referred to as like generally a green bank. So the next major section, page seven, line seven, section six, VATB's authority would be amended to give them a specific authority for planning for climate impacts and approving climate resiliency. And then in section seven, VATB is by statute supposed to get 50% of the property transfer tax annually. They never do. You not withstand that language in the big bill every year. And so this would direct in fiscal year 2025 that they receive all of that 50% and that it be used for the following climate change mitigation and resilience activities, page eight, line 14, continuation of their work to achieve more efficient weatherizing climate resilient housing, expansion of support for environmental infrastructure investments to improve climate resilience, expansion of support for working lands businesses to achieve climate mitigation improvement of soil health, and the use of at least $5 million to be made available to leverage existing and new federal state municipal et cetera resources, basically to cost share and employ innovative financing mechanisms to support promote investments in nature-based climate resilience projects. What percent do they get now? Ends on year to year. But in statute, what is supposed to get 50%? This is reiterating. All right. Questions? All right, moving on. Center seven. Thanks so much, Chair. I feel like the number like around 20% is that I know you said it varies here is that I'm just looking for a range. It's like 17 to 20. Okay, thank you. Moving on page nine, section eight, the Clean Water Act, the Federal Clean Water Act requires states to do a continued planning process. A&R fulfills that requirement by doing basin plans for all 15 watersheds in the state. So section eight directs A&R as part of its basin planning process. You'll see this on page 11 to identify beneficial flood mitigation projects or practices that will store floodwaters and mitigate impacts to communities from severe weather. To extend, they already do this, but this is really just to clarify that it is mandate of all basin plans going to the future. Section nine is the directive to VCGI to use available LiDAR to develop flood risk maps for the state of Vermont. And then in sub B to direct A&R to complete the mapping of foreign hazard areas for municipalities in the state. So many years ago, you directed A&R to do what is called river corridor mapping to map not the inundation flood risk that FEMA maps map but to map fluvial erosion hazard risk, which is fluvial erosion flooding is discrete, intense storms, which cause scouring flooding, not inundation flooding. The fluvial erosion basically creates new waterways or water paths. That's the greater risk of flooding in Vermont. There is inundation flooding in Vermont, but fluvial erosion hazard flooding is more common, especially now these days. And A&R is directed to map them. They have been mapping the river corridors for fluvial erosion hazards, but they're not, they're not done. And so this would direct them to complete those maps. And then the last section would page 12, section 10, it would direct A&R to develop a statewide green infrastructure for climate resilience program to basically incent green infrastructure for the management of stormwater and downtown villages, how to reduce heat islands and how to avoid the social and economic disruption of climate impacts. There would be a staff person appropriated funds for age 12, line 15, 125 to A&R to full-time staff that program. And then that's the bill. The bill does go into effect on passage as directed by the sponsor. You might want to look at whether or not some of these things could get stood up in the timeframe that you want them to get stood up on. Any questions on this one? I think we've exceeded our normal break bandwidth. So we'll take a five-minute break and then come back with council overriding.