Committee backs funding request for Vermont regional planning commissions

The House Government Operations & Military Affairs committee on Thursday recommended favorable funding for Vermont’s regional planning commissions after hearing officials describe how the commissions are funded, how funds are distributed and how recent federal and state changes have tightened budgets.

Charlie Baker, executive director of the Ginnie County Regional Planning Commission, told the committee that RPCs were created by statute in 1968 to provide towns with technical planning support and noted, “We have no ability to tax or anything like that.” He said roughly 95 percent of RPC revenue comes from state and federal grants and about 5 percent from voluntary town dues.

Devin Erie, executive director of the Rutland Regional Planning Commission and chair of VAPTA, described how RPC budgets vary across regions and explained the distribution formula the Agency of Commerce and Community Development (ACCD) uses. “It’s like a 50-50 breakdown generally between the equal share and then those town population and number of town factors,” Erie said, describing why areas with many towns or larger populations receive larger allocations.

Officials told the committee the primary state support for RPCs flows from a portion of the property transfer tax; that fund is shared with other land-focused programs such as municipal planning grants and the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. Baker said the legislature adjusted allocations after a recent budget adjustment act and that the commissioner of finance recommended about a 1.3% reduction to the four programs in that bucket this year.

Erie also described how federal changes have cut emergency-management-related funding that had flowed to some RPCs. “Both reductions…were a direct result of FEMA reductions,” Erie said, and he added that a current funding freeze has left some RPCs with no emergency-management line in their budgets. In Rutland’s FY26 budget, Erie said ACCD funds totaled $716,000 of a $2.8 million budget, with roughly $1.2 million shown as pass-through funds for projects such as brownfields and clean-water work.

Committee members asked whether municipal assistance or local planning assistance lines are uniform across RPCs and whether towns or state funds pay for that work. Baker said municipal assistance often refers to town-contracted project work — for example, managing a sidewalk project — that towns pay for directly, separate from the core state municipal assistance allocation. The committee also discussed a proposed one-time municipal technical assistance request from the Vermont Council on Rural Development that could help towns afford contracted planning services.

The committee’s chair called for a vote on the RPC budget request and recorded a favorable recommendation after members expressed support. The committee then took a short break before moving on to other line items.

The record includes differing numerical references to the size of the statewide request: presenters described percentage changes (a 3% RPC request, a 2.6% governor recommendation and references to '7.8 and change') and later referenced $7,000,000 as the core municipal-assistance bucket. The exact single-dollar amount being recommended for FY27 was not specified explicitly in committee testimony and appears inconsistently in the transcript.

Next steps: the committee’s favorable recommendation will be reflected in its report to the full House as the budget process continues.