The Senate’s omnibus housing bill hasn’t hit the floor yet, but it is already on rocky footing.
A fragile coalition backing S.100 is beginning to fracture following new amendments made Wednesday in the chamber’s Committee on Natural Resources and Energy that would reduce the scope of proposed exemptions to Act 250, Vermont’s 50-year-old land use law.
The legislation aims to make headway on the state’s housing crisis by easing regulatory barriers to development at the state and local levels. And, as initially crafted, it attempted to strike a grand bargain between municipalities and the state, who frequently point the finger at each other’s rules and regulations in debates about why residential construction has slowed to a crawl in recent decades.
The Vermont League of Cities and Towns is typically opposed to anything that would infringe on a municipality’s autonomy. But Ted Brady, its executive director, said the League was willing to play ball — if the state made significant concessions of its own.
“It was a pretty grand, spectacular compromise that the Senate Economic Development Committee came up with,” Brady said Tuesday, in reference to the panel that crafted the original bill, “because let me tell you, I’m not happy with 50% of what’s in that bill.”
Brady acknowledged the housing crisis and “that municipalities can play a role in solving that crisis,” he said.
“But we cannot do it without the state. And the Senate Natural Resources Committee today decided that that doesn’t matter. The state doesn’t need to do its fair share.”
A key constituency — environmentalists — has remained skeptical of the state-level reforms contemplated in the original bill. They pushed lawmakers to delay any changes until reviews of Act 250, already commissioned by lawmakers, come back next year. An amendment that advanced on a 4-1 vote Wednesday by the Senate natural resources panel attempted to respond to those concerns.
The land-use law is triggered when someone attempts to build at least 10 units of housing within five years and a five-mile radius. The bill initially sought to increase that threshold to 25 units.
The new amendment agrees to the new 25-unit threshold, but only in a narrow slice of Vermont: designated downtown development districts, designated neighborhood development areas, and designated growth centers.
Just as significantly, that new 25-unit threshold would sunset in 2026.
Sen. Chris Bray, D-Addison, who chairs the natural resources committee, said the panel wanted to compel future lawmakers to review that new threshold once it had those new studies in hand.
“By building the sunset in, we’re saying: OK, we’re opening the window for three years on housing. We know it’s urgent, people are calling it a crisis. But meanwhile, we don’t want to just keep on doing that without the benefit of these reports,” he said.
The earlier version of the bill also would have removed the ability, under current law, of any 10 people in a town to appeal a zoning decision — a change the League strongly supported. The natural resources amendment would add the power to appeal back in, although residents would have to demonstrate a “particularized interest” to do so.
Brian Shupe, the executive director of the Vermont Natural Resources Council, said his organization was generally pleased with the new amendment.
“Some of our concerns remain in effect, but they certainly narrowed them and addressed some of the more egregious problems with the bill that came out of the economic development committee,” he said.
Shupe also argued that the more meaningful parts of the bill — those that would force municipalities to allow denser housing in areas served by critical infrastructure, like water and sewer — are the very things the League resists.
“I understand they come from a strong local control position. That is their constant. Where they’re less productive is actually coming up with solutions to problems,” Shupe said. “There are statewide issues at hand here. Housing is a statewide issue and protecting state resources like water quality and wildlife habitat are state issues. So local control doesn’t always work in that world.”
But if the League walks, so too could Gov. Phil Scott’s administration. Scott’s housing commissioner, Josh Hanford, stressed Wednesday that officials were still parsing the latest amendment, and that he couldn’t yet say whether they supported or opposed it. But he also enumerated several concerns, particularly around Act 250.
“There’s concern that the housing responsibility is being placed squarely on the municipalities and that the state isn’t taking its share of the responsibility,” he said.