After passing several challenging bills in the last few weeks, the Vermont Legislature adjourned until June 16 due to an impasse over negotiations on our education transformation bill, H.454. Many other bills addressing housing, homelessness, healthcare, and several other major issues required compromises from both the House and the Senate in order to be passed out of their respective committees of conference. The education bill has proven the thorniest.
Thank you to those of you who have written to me about the education bill. The volume of emails has been impressive. I am glad so many constituents are following this critically important bill closely. The outpouring of concern and interest in protecting Vermont’s public education system is heartening. While I appreciate your input, I am not one of the six legislators serving on the conference committee that is currently negotiating this bill. Which means all other legislators have limited ability to affect negotiations. If you have coancerns 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 Representative 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 CHIP (Community Housing Infrastructure) Program, there are many other elements in this bill. S.127 includes:
The creation of a welcome addition to our housing toolbox—the VT Infrastructure Sustainability Fund within the Vermont Bond Bank. Seeded with $7.5 million, this fund will 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;
Increased funding for, and updates to, the very popular and well used VHIP (Vermont Housing Improvement) program which provides matching funding for renovating vacant, blighted, unweatherized and non-code compliant properties and the creation of new accessory dwelling units;
Increased funding for our brownfield clean-up program and a new, less costly avenue for removing contaminated soils;
A task force to generate a plan to develop supportive housing for people with developmental disabilities;
Increased funding for our Manufactured Home Improvement & Repair Program which helps mobile homeowners and park owners improve existing homes and incentivize improvements;
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.
Most significantly, this bill establishes the CHIP program—a new housing tool that employs a project-based approach to smaller-scale tax increment financing projects, which we hope will stimulate housing development throughout the state. It is designed to enable towns to build the housing they want and need.
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 itself or engage with a developer to finance a project scaled directly to a community’s needs and size.
With tax increment financing, the tax increases resulting from the added real estate value of the housing development are temporarily redirected to help cover the financing costs of the housing project.
The education fund doesn’t see the taxes attributed to the increase in value immediately— it sees it at the of 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.
Sen. Alison Clarkson can be reached by email: [email protected] or by phone at the Statehouse (Tues-Fri) 802-828-2228 or at home (Sat-Mon) 802- 457-4627.
