Senate advances changes to landlord-certificate data collection; tax department, VHFA and VCGI outline dashboard plans

The Senate Economic Development, Housing and General Affairs Committee reviewed proposed changes to the state’s landlord-certificate data collection and discussed a related plan to extract assessor (CAMA) data for a statewide housing dashboard.

Jake Feldman of the Tax Department said the landlord-certificate exists primarily to verify renter rebate claims and that the department’s priority is preserving high compliance so low-income renters receive credits promptly. "The purpose of the landlord certificate is to collect the data needed for back end verification of renter credit claims," Feldman told the committee.

The House-passed language under review would remove some previously proposed fields (for example, gross monthly rent per unit and the year the unit was built) and replace municipal parcel identifiers with the school property account number (SPAN). Legislative council counsel Cameron Wood told senators the bill would also change the public-release requirement: the earlier requirement to publish a full spreadsheet on request was removed, with the tax department instead required to submit an aggregate report to the legislature.

Tax and housing officials said those edits reflect a tradeoff: adding more unit-level survey fields would risk reducing landlord participation and therefore jeopardize renters’ access to the rebate. Department staff reported a large improvement in processing speed after prior reforms: where 25% of renter-credit claims were issued within 60 days under the old system, 96% were issued within 60 days after the reforms.

Department of Taxes officials and Vermont Housing Finance Agency staff said they support the revised language because it aims to preserve high compliance while collecting useful property-level information. VHFA Executive Director Mora Collins told the committee VHFA has about 15,000 subsidized units in its datasets and emphasized that a complete statewide picture would require more outreach to non‑subsidized landlords.

Cameron Wood and Tax Department staff also explained a separate but related data-channel change: municipalities will provide an extract of their CAMA (computer-assisted mass appraisal) databases to the Tax Department. Jill Remick, director of Property Valuation and Review at the Tax Department, said those CAMA fields already exist in many municipal systems and are public information. "This is information that lives in their system. It's public information," Remick said, arguing that pulling these fields from CAMA is the lowest‑friction way to add building-level data (year built, number of units, number of stories) to state datasets.

DHCD and VCGI staff described a housing dashboard — a new tool the department built with VCGI — that will track building activity, targets for 2030 and 2050, and regional progress. DHCD Deputy Commissioner Nick Formalari said, "we created this new tool from scratch," and VCGI explained the dashboard currently uses E‑911 hookups as a starting indicator of new units and will be expanded as towns and vendors add fields such as unit counts and year built.

Officials emphasized that the changes are intended to protect the renter-rebate program’s integrity while improving the state’s long-term data about where housing exists and is coming online. The committee did not take any formal votes; members directed legislative staff and departmental partners to continue technical work on extract formats and to coordinate outreach to municipal assessors and vendor partners.