AGCVT Weekly Legislative Wrap - Week 20
I hope you’ll excuse the belated update, everyone. Come Friday, the fate of the Legislature’s landmark education bill – and therefore, legislators’ much anticipated adjournment for the year – seemed more uncertain with every passing hour. So I opted to wait until the dust settled come Monday to make sense of it all for you.
And the outcome may be unsatisfying. As Vermont Public, VTDigger and SevenDays all reported, negotiations between the House and Senate on the ed bill disintegrated on Friday. By 11:30 PM or so, both chambers threw in the towel, failing to meet their self-imposed adjournment deadline. Now, the bill’s conferees are expected to continue negotiating (though their schedule remains unclear) until mid-June, when the full Legislature is due to return to the Statehouse for their so-called veto session.
This is a long way of saying, we’re in this weird, liminal space where the Legislature isn’t technically adjourned, but most of its business has been wrapped for the year.
So where does that leave us? Despite all the chaos, we’re sitting pretty, having made meaningful headway on the legislative priorities we identified back in January. One major victory came last week: After weeks of terse discussions between the House and Senate – punctuated by threats from key negotiators to walk away from the table entirely – on this year’s housing omnibus bill, S.127, both chambers came to a compromise with much fanfare on Friday morning. Kisses were even blown, as reported by SevenDays. The final product of CHIP – a new, project-based TIF program for housing infrastructure designed in S.127 – represented a hard-fought win for AGC-VT. A fleet of housing advocates and champions in the Legislature pushed to right-size the House’s proposed rules for the program, in order to ensure that the program would be accessible to small projects in rural communities – not bogged down in regulations only surmountable by large developers in Chittenden County (no offense to those of you who may be large developers in Chittenden County). Here are some highlights of the final product:
- Cap: The program’s cap was pushed to $200 million per year in property tax retention, up from $40 million.
- CHIP sunset: CHIP will now “sunset” (expire) in 10 years, up from just five (lawmakers can extend this sunset date in the future, if they wish).
- Floor area requirements: At least 60% of a CHIP-funded project’s floor area must be dedicated to housing (up from 50%) or “meaningfully address” the program’s purpose, which is “to encourage the development of new primary residences for households of low and moderate income across both rural and urban areas of all Vermont counties that would not be created but for the infrastructure improvements funded by the Program.”
- Affordability requirements and tax retention rates: Not every project funded by CHIP will need to include affordable housing units, but those that do can take advantage of a higher tax increment retention rate of 85%. Projects that do not meet affordability criteria will still receive a 75% retention rate.
- “But-for” test: Advocates fought hard to include an important caveat to the often difficult-to-prove “but for” test. Now, CHIP applicants must show that the project could not have penciled out but for the CHIP financing, or “would have occurred in a significantly different and less desirable manner than as proposed in the application.”
- TIF sunset: There is now no sunset of Vermont’s preexisting TIF program, as floated in previous House versions.
We’ll be sending out a full post-session legislative report, which will include details on how the advocacy team performed on our fundamental priorities for the session: affordability, education, workforce development, transportation, employer issues, housing and public safety.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you all. I’ll be spending much of this summer and fall rethinking this weekly email blast and how it can better serve you all next legislative session, so please do send your feedback. And keep in touch with me over the coming months as you see the impacts on the ground of newly implemented laws, rules and procedures.
Have a great summer and keep in touch,
Sarah Mearhoff
Director of Advocacy and Communications
Associated General Contractors of Vermont
