Senate committee reviews housing bill draft 3.1; pauses on rental-reporting pilot and immigration-related language

The Senate Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs Committee met to review its housing omnibus, draft request 250841 (draft 3.1), and agreed to move most sections forward while tabling or flagging several items for further testimony or amendment.

Cameron Wood, legislative tax staff, opened the committee walkthrough, saying, “So we're walking through your committee bill related to housing, but we do not have a bill number yet. You can see it's draft request 250841 draft 3.1 is what we're looking at.” He briefly summarized the document and highlighted that recent testimony and edits were incorporated and that changes were highlighted in yellow in the current draft.

The bill retains a series of programs and changes across multiple subjects: modifications to the Vermont Home Improvement Program (VHIP), statutory placement of a manufactured-home repair program, creation of a Vermont Infrastructure Sustainability Fund at the bond bank, extensions and changes to VHFA-authorized tax credits for down-payment and first-generation homebuyer programs, study language on housing for people with developmental disabilities, brownfields funding requests, accessory-dwelling-unit (ADU) property-tax exemption language, and provisions on manufactured/off-site construction.

On VHIP, Wood summarized a primary change: “the primary changes to PHIP here are, doing away with the 5 year forgivable loan. So moving forward, it would only be grants for 10 year forgivable loans.” Committee members discussed aligning some allocations with the House position (one example raised: 30% of annual VHIP allocations to a 5-year requirement, per the House). Department of Housing stakeholders noted the draft removes a previous requirement tying a 10-year forgivable loan to leasing to specified populations and instead allows rent set to fair-market rent plus utilities in calculating…