Dear Editor,
After passing several challenging bills in the last few weeks, the Vermont Legislature adjourned until June 16, because of an impasse over negotiations in our education transformation bill, H.454. Many other bills addressing housing, homelessness, health care, and several other major issues required compromises from both the House and the Senate to be passed out of their committees of conference. The education bill has proven the thorniest.
Thank you to those of you who’ve written me about the education bill. The volume of email has been impressive. I am glad so many constituents are following this critically important bill closely. The outpouring of concern and interest about protecting our public education system in Vermont is heartening. While I appreciate your input, I am not one of the six legislators serving on the conference committee which is currently negotiating this bill, which means all other legislators have limited ability to affect negotiations. If you have concerns about the direction of the negotiations, I encourage you to email all six of the conferees listed on the legislative website under Committees of Conference, H.454.
State Rep. Charlie Kimbell and I both served on the conference committee for our big housing bill, S.127. While the final negotiations centered around our proposed Community Housing Infrastructure Program (CHIP), there are many other elements in this bill. S.127 includes: 1) the creation of a welcome addition to our housing toolbox, the Vermont Infrastructure Sustainability Fund within the Vermont Bond Bank, seeded with $7.5 M, to provide capital (low interest loans or bonds) to extend and increase public infrastructure in towns where lack of capacity or extension is a barrier to housing development; 2) increased funding for, and updates to, the very popular and well-used Vermont Housing Improvement Program (VHIP), which provides matching funding for renovating vacant, blighted, unweatherized, and non-code compliant properties, and the creation of new accessory dwelling units; 3) increased funding for our brownfield cleanup program, and a new, less costly avenue for removing contaminated soils; 4) a task force to generate a plan to develop supportive housing for people with developmental disabilities; 5) increased funding for our Manufactured Home Improvement and Repair Program, which helps mobile homeowners and park owners improve existing homes and incentivize improvements; and, 6) provisions to prevent discrimination on the basis of a person’s immigration or citizenship status under Vermont’s public accommodations and unfair housing practices act.
And, most significantly, this bill creates the CHIP program – a new housing tool, a project-based approach to smaller scale tax increment financing projects that we hope will stimulate housing development in all corners of the state. It is designed to enable a town to build the housing it wants and needs. The measures in CHIP allow for all types of housing and mixed-use developments, with incentives for building affordable housing. The housing needs to be for primary residences for rent or purchase. Municipalities can either finance an infrastructure project themselves or engage with a developer to finance a project which scales to a community’s needs and size. With tax increment financing, the tax increases coming from the added real estate value of the housing development are redirected temporarily to help pay the financing cost of the housing project. The education fund doesn’t see the taxes attributed to the increase in value immediately – it sees it at the end of the financing of the project in a substantial increase to the Grand List. This increase in Grand List value only happens because of the temporary redirection of the revenue stream. Vermont needs to be building 7,500 new housing units a year to accommodate our needs. We hope that CHIP will help us fulfill this objective.
I appreciate hearing from you. I can be reached by email at aclarkson@leg.state.vt.us; by phone at the Statehouse, Tuesday-Friday, at 802-828-2228; or at home, Saturday-Monday, at 802- 457-4627. To get more information on the Vermont Legislature, and the bills which have been proposed and passed, visit legislature.vermont.gov.
Sincerely,
Sen. Alison Clarkson
Windsor District