Witness urges program evaluation, not a full new needs study, for farmworker housing in S.328
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Summary
A Champlain Housing Trust witness told the House Committee on General Housing that an existing farmworker housing program has produced 90 dwellings serving about 360 workers with roughly $4.3 million spent; he and staff urged a program evaluation rather than a full new statewide needs assessment and offered to provide vetted replacement language for S.328 §9a.
The House Committee on General Housing heard testimony on April 8 about S.328’s farmworker housing report requirement, with Chris Donnelly of Champlain Housing Trust urging the committee to pursue a program evaluation rather than commissioning a full new needs assessment.
Donnelly, introduced by the committee chair as the first witness on the omnibus housing bill, said the program that followed a 2020 needs assessment has produced about 90 dwellings that serve roughly 360 farmworkers and that the program has spent approximately $4,300,000 to date. “We have invested in close to 90 different, dwellings that are serving at 360 different farm workers,” Donnelly said, summarizing results of the RFP process and subsequent implementation.
Committee members pressed for details on scale and funding. Donnelly said the original 2020 report recommended about 600 dwellings to support 2,000 workers and that Champlain Housing Trust has received part of an allocation (described in testimony as about $5,600,000 total authority), closed $4,300,000 in funding, and had roughly $1.3 million available with further requests in the pipeline. He characterized some of those figures as estimates and called the program oversubscribed without additional funding.
Polly Nader, policy director with DHTV, told members the 2020 study synthesized prior academic and advocacy work and supplemented it with a farmer survey; she noted independent researchers at UVM and other organizations remain engaged on farmworker housing issues. Committee members asked whether the new work would repeat prior fieldwork; witnesses said the department preferred a focused program evaluation (how funds were spent, barriers encountered and implementation lessons) rather than commissioning another full, large‑scale needs assessment this session.
Members also debated the report’s scope: whether it should be limited to farmworker housing (employer‑provided housing for employees) or broadened to a larger on‑farm housing study that would examine farmers’ capacity to build housing. Nader said the senate had added language to acknowledge on‑farm housing challenges, but the administering agency lacks capacity for a full, broader study this year and would instead collect programmatic and stakeholder feedback to inform a future, more comprehensive analysis.
The committee asked staff to aim for a timetable that would place any report on the legislature’s desk in the usual fall window or shortly thereafter; members discussed the practical deadline of returning results by November/December or by January 15 if necessary. Chair closed the questioning by asking staff to coordinate witnesses if members wanted further technical detail.
Next steps: committee staff circulated vetted replacement language for the §9a report requirement and said they would return with additional witnesses and more precise funding figures if members requested them. The committee recessed until the stated reconvene time.
