Recently, Let's Build Homes (LBH) had the opportunity to engage with the Vermont House Environment Committee regarding S.325. We deeply appreciate the committee's collaborative approach and the work they've done so far to address the unintended consequences of Act 181. By listening to the voices of landowners, farmers, and community members across rural Vermont, the committee's signaled intent to repeal restrictive elements like the road rule and Tier 3 is a crucial step toward easing our state's acute housing shortage.

While this progress is highly encouraging, we believe there is still room to make S.325 even stronger. To ensure this legislation truly makes housing more affordable, predictable, and accessible for all Vermonters, we recently submitted a memo to the committee outlining our additional asks. These recommendations include expanding interim housing exemptions, strengthening municipal delegation, and eliminating duplicative reviews that slow down construction. You can read our full proposed amendments to the committee below.

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Thank you for the opportunity to testify on S.325 on April 9. We appreciate the thoughtful testimony shared by others and the committee's collaborative and constructive approach. The remarkable grassroots organizing that took place across rural Vermont this session by landowners, farmers, and community members who showed up, spoke out, and made their voices heard played a real role in moving this conversation forward. Their engagement reflects how deeply Vermonters care about getting our land use policy right.

We are grateful that the committee listened to these voices and has signaled its intent to repeal elements of Act 181. We agree that Vermont’s acute housing shortage contributed to the urgency to repeal the road rule and tier 3, which risked making Vermont's this shortage worse.

To support your committee’s efforts, Let's Build Homes (LBH) would like to offer additional feedback on S.325. Our input is focused on ensuring the legislation reduces Vermont’s housing shortage to make housing more affordable and accessible to Vermonters.

Extend and expand Interim Housing Exemption Areas

Until the Tier 1 mapping exercise is complete, Act 181’s interim housing exemptions remain critical.

The Tier 1 mapping is far from complete because the process involves three different levels of mapping decisions – municipal, RPC, and at the LURB – and there are challenges to mapping areas sufficiently large enough to meet the state’s housing goals. Addressing these challenges and agreeing to coherent and effective Tier 1 areas will take time and work.

Therefore, LBH urges the committee to:

• Keep in place the S.325’s current extension of interim housing exemption areas through January 1, 2030, independent of the status of final future land use maps.
• Add language to S.325 that will expand the interim housing areas to Include parcels served by existing water or sewer infrastructure. A substantial percentage of these parcels statewide are not currently in the housing exemption areas. This change will help ensure that the state’s limited existing public infrastructure is leveraged for housing growth.

Delegation of Act 250 Authority to Municipalities

We listened with interest to the conclusion of the Committee’s discussion on April 14 when Chair Amy Sheldon and Representative Rob North described Act 181’s Tier 1 areas as “delegated areas” where the state has shifted the regulatory responsibilities of Act 250 to capable municipalities. The concept of “municipal delegation” of Act 250 was what I advocated for as the Mayor of Burlington to the Environment Committee in 2023 and 2024 (and Representative Gabrielle Stebbins eventually explicitly introduced this concept in 2024 as H.768). Although ultimately the term “Tier 1” was selected, we believe that “municipal delegation” remains an accurate description of this element of Act 181, and we are pleased to see that the most recent mark-up of S.325 now includes this language.

Consistent with this concept of delegation we offer the following recommendations:

1. Support and strengthen VAPDA's Amendments that better empower municipalities to create and shape their delegated areas

   Since the passage of Act 181, thousands of Vermonters around the state have been involved in the creation of the state’s first Future Land Use Map. The first legislative goal listed in the statute for this reads:

   (A) Intensive residential development should be encouraged primarily in areas related to community centers downtown centers, village centers, planned growth areas, and village areas as described in section 4348a of this title, and strip development along highways should be discouraged avoided. These areas should be planned so as to accommodate a substantial majority of housing needed to reach the housing targets developed for each region pursuant to subdivision 4348a(a)(9) of this title. (Emphasis added)

   Unfortunately, the Let’s Build Homes analysis that I presented to you on April 9 shows that the FLU mapping process is going to fail to meet this goal by a wide margin unless action is taken now to change its trajectory.

   The analysis found that since 2021 only 40% of new homes have been built in the interim housing exemption areas (which VAPDA has indicated are very similar in size to the proposed TIer 1B eligible areas), strongly suggesting that the borders of Tier 1B eligible areas are not being draw broadly enough to meet the state’s goal for them to accommodate a substantial majority of the state’s housing growth.

   Despite this, as the mapping of Tier 1 eligible areas has unfolded in recent months, the LURB has been consistently reducing the size of the Tier 1 eligible areas by 10-30% when reviewing draft maps submitted by the RPCs. Some of these reductions have been extremely unwelcome and discouraging to municipalities that have taken the state up on Act 181’s invitation to identify areas where they seek to expand housing opportunities and this has contributed to the backlash against the Act 181 (Castleton’s experience is an example of this).

   To address this issue, the Senate included in S.325 VAPDA-recommended changes to Section 12 – particularly the definitions of Downtown or Village Centers, Planned Growth Areas, and Village Areas – that we strongly support.

   In addition, to ensure that there is no remaining confusion about the legislature’s intent to achieve its goal of substantially accommodating the state’s projected housing growth in Tier 1 areas, and consistent with the concept of municipal delegation, we urge the Committee to adopt the follow additional language in the Village Area definition:

   Notwithstanding the definitions of FLU categories in A-J of this Section, a municipality acting through its legislative body shall have the authority to create a Village Area for inclusion in the Regional Plan so long as that area meets the statutory requirements for Village Areas (see Sec. 49. 24 V.S.A. § 4348a(12)(C)i-v).

2. Municipal Enforcement of Existing Act 250 Conditions in Tier 1A

   A late and little debated addition to Act 181 requires municipalities to enforce existing Act 250 permit conditions within their Tier 1A areas. Municipalities have raised serious practical and substantive concerns about what this actually requires of them and their capacity to do it. These concerns are well-founded: these conditions were not created by the local governments and they may have little or no relation to the local regulations and authorities that municipalities are typically responsible for exercising.

   Further, as use of the property evolves in years to come and property owners seek new permits, these grandfathered state conditions are likely to create regulatory complication, confusion and ambiguity for property owners and municipalities.

   S.325 currently seeks to address some of these municipal concerns by including new language that would keep the responsibility for existing Act 250 conditions with district commissions permanently. However, as a result, dual-jurisdiction will remain in place for hundreds of properties in Tier 1A areas with existing Act 250 conditions, undermining the effort to streamline redevelopments of these properties, and the concept that municipalities that have earned Tier 1A status have earned the ability to regulate land in their jurisdiction.

   We urge the Committee to consider the more fully developed solution to this issue that was proposed in the {Municipal Delegation Framework Report (p.8) the legislature commissioned in Act 47 in 2023:}(strong)

   Existing Act 250 Permits in Municipalities with Delegation

   If prior to the effective date of the Municipal Delegation agreement an Act 250 permit exists for a property, the permit (including any conditions and enforcement) would remain under the authority and enforcement of the District Environmental Commission that has jurisdiction. However, when a property with an existing Act 250 permit proposes redevelopment or substantial modification in a community with Municipal Delegation, the property may proceed under the requirements of the Municipality’s bylaw/ordinance and any other applicable state and local laws and regulations and is not required to be reviewed by Act 250. Consider a mechanism to notify the District Environmental Commission to terminate the Act 250 permit or otherwise recognize that the property is no longer subject to the Act 250 permit. [underline added]

   LBH believes that this alternative formulation recommended by the report is more consistent with the concept of municipal delegation and will result in clearer responsibilities and a clearer regulatory path to new housing redevelopments than the current S.325 language.

3. Expand scope of the DHCD Report on discretionary review to include delegation issues.

   In most of Vermont, building a home requires a discretionary permit, meaning a project can comply with every quantitative rule and still be blocked by a neighbor or board making subjective judgments. By-right housing eliminates that uncertainty: if a project meets the rules, it gets approved. That predictability – a generally standard element of our legal system outside of land use – is essential to creating predictability, controlling costs and attracting the small and mid-size builders who will actually deliver homes at neighborhood scale across Vermont.

   S.325 advances by-right housing through two complementary tools: the 802 Homes program of pre-approved building prototypes and LBH’s ROOT Zone proposal. These work in concert: pre-approved plans reduce design costs, but only matter where zoning actually allows the homes to be built. ROOT Zones let towns voluntarily adopt a zoning overlay that makes residential permitting faster, more predictable, and less expensive.

   Given the House Environment Committee’s discussion of delegated areas, we recommend adding to the study group’s work the following:

   Consider how a model code could facilitate delegation of Act 250 to more municipalities than the handful of jurisdictions that will qualify for delegation under current Tier 1A rules.

   We recommend a further strengthening of the report direction that to accelerate municipal adoption of clear and objective standards to advance home creation:

   Add language to section 10(a) to direct DHCD to “adopt a form-based Vermont Model Code that would be available for municipalities to adopt in order to replace discretionary review with clear and objective standards”.

Mobile Home Parks: Eliminating Duplicative NEPA and Act 250 Review

LBH supports changes proposed by the Vermont Housing and Homelessness Alliance to address a costly burden facing mobile home communities: the requirement to undergo the duplicative review processes of both federal NEPA review and Act 250 permitting for the same infrastructure work.

Mobile home communities represent roughly 6% of Vermont's housing stock and are among the most important sources of naturally occurring affordable housing in the state. Nearly all receive federal funding and are therefore required to complete a NEPA environmental review, which covers wetlands, endangered species, agricultural soils, floodplains, and other criteria that overlap almost entirely with Act 250. Act 250 district coordinators have required permits based on the "potential" for impacts that NEPA reviewers had already determined were not present.

We support amending S.325 to exempt mobile home community infrastructure projects from Act 250 review where they have already received an approved Categorically Excluded NEPA review with an Environmental Release letter.

The changes described above are targeted, practical, and achievable before adjournment. Let's Build Homes looks forward to continuing to work with the committee to keep Vermont's housing momentum growing.