Okay, thanks.
Great to be here and awesome to share the stage
with Liz and Bob, that's a treat,
and thank you for all the great work that you do.
So I'm gonna share some research that we've been doing,
just actually finished up a round with funding
from Forest Ecosystem Monitoring Cooperative,
which I'd like to share with you.
So it's looking at parcelization trends in Vermont.
And so there's a couple key terms to focus on.
We're not talking about outright forest loss,
that's estimated by the Forest Service
through their FIA analysis.
So like in Vermont,
there's an estimate we're losing over
12,000 forests outright from
forest land conversion every year.
Then there's sort of forest fragmentation.
The impact of that development has on the ground,
which you can see here,
when the roads and the driveways and houses go in
we have forest fragmentation.
What we're tracking is parcelization.
We're measuring the creation of more and more parcels
and through the subdivision process.
And that typically can lead to disjointed ownership
and parcels leading to more management complications.
How development is done on those parcels
can impact ecological or economic integrity of the parcels
for resource considerations.
So we've done four rounds of this research.
We put out multiple reports.
I'm gonna back into a website to show you
where you can read the reports
based on the different years that we've analyzed.
We've done this using Grand List in data
that's collected by, for property tax purposes,
but there are land use classifications
that are part of the property tax collection process.
And we put those into categories
in order to see land use change on the ground
and what's happening.
So we really opened this up to a much larger analysis
of the Grand List data from 2004 to 2016.
That was kind of our phase three report that we put out.
And then most recently what we've published
is cleaning up the data a bit and now focusing
on the year's 2005 to 2020 as a study period.
I'd like to again acknowledge that this was primarily funded
by FEMC and we had a host of partners,
some of whom are in the room here,
but a collaborative effort between VNRC,
the Agency of Natural Resources, the tax department,
people like Deb Brighton and Brian Voight, researchers,
Vermont Center for Geographic Information
and folks from UVM.
And there is a executive summary that's available,
which I'll show you about in a minute.
So getting to the trends themselves.
So in Vermont,
I guess like this data I look at is like, kind of depends.
If you look at the cup is half full or half empty
and I would say like the cup being half full side of it
is that we still have a lot of land in Vermont
that's represented in large parcels.
So 50 acres was kind of an arbitrary delineation we made
just to say "What's a large parcel?"
And you know,
over 70% of the privately owned acreage in Vermont
is represented in parcels over 50 acres.
So still a lot of opportunity to maintain intact parcels.
Again, this is focusing on private land.
That's what the Grand List calculates.
We're not looking at public land trends.
Cup half empty or trending towards that
is based on the classifications.
Woodland, which is undeveloped forest land is,
we're seeing a pretty rapid decline in representation.
This does not mean the forest land is gone,
it just means that it's been reclassified.
It means there's been a dwelling, a house,
that's been put on that parcel
and it's no longer considered to be undeveloped woodland.
And then over time we know that there can be impacts
as that development occurs on the landscape
and how it occurs, you know, really matters.
We're losing farmland too,raw sort of bulk farmland,
and we're seeing the residential category increasing.
And we measured this and we saw, you know,
over a 19% decrease in woodland over this 15% time period.
I do wanna say that some of that
is land going into public ownership, which is, you know,
a good trend from a fragmentation perspective
or an ecological perspective.
How much we weren't quite able to tease out
but we are confident as a team
that it's not an overwhelming amount.
You know, we could focus on it being
a certain percentage of it, but it's not.
The overwhelming dynamic is that,
and maybe I'll show this one to you first,
is that there's a really strong correlation
to the uptick in residential category
and the decline in woodland.
Okay, so we were able to find an association there.
I'll just go back to this slide
because this really just gives you the acreage numbers
so you can see sort of where we're at in these categories.
This is a very general way of looking at
some key categories, Residential, Woodland, Farmland,
and then Other which has a lot of different
miscellaneous sort of categories in it.
But then we looked at large parcels too
and the trends were the same.
So we saw really the woodland category
going down noticeably for large parcels as well.
So, similar trend whether we look at
all parcels or the larger parcels.
Farmland going down too,
and we measure this over a period of time
so you can see where there's been more pressure.
This just gives you kind of the representation
of these categories in Vermont.
And so, you know, residential actually has the most acreage
associated with it across these categories.
And so that doesn't mean the land again
is just all residential.
It's again the classification that the listers use.
But what this can show you is that
over this 15 year period
we saw a noticeable decline in the percentage
of undeveloped woodland that's represented in the state.
For example, 25.6% in 2005
now down to, getting close to to 21%.
So, you know, if we do the math
and we keep on on this trend every 15 years,
at some point we're gonna start
to run up against some really concerning trends.
And then we looked at sort of the woodland category
and we looked at it across the counties for example.
And I think there were at least like four counties
that had a 30% or higher decrease across a 15 year period.
So then we start like in certain geographic areas,
we're really seeing a noticeable change.
And so what that means just on the landscape
could be sort of a different examination,
a spatial examination.
This is sort of just aggregating
the numbers from the Grand List.
Okay, so then acreage, where's the acreage?
There's still a lot of acreage
as I told you before, in large parcels,
this is just breaking it down into some
different categories for you to consider here.
So there's still, as you can see,
a lot of the acreage in the larger parcels.
But that's starting to decline as we would expect
from parcelization and subdivision
and we're replacing it where we see the uptick
in the smaller parcels.
And then, so it's interesting to see, you know,
that the number of parcels in the two to five acre
or five to 10 acre size category,
that's where we saw really like the fastest growth.
And that could be, 'cause that's like
minimum lot sizes in zoning, you know?
A certain, and there's a lot of conversations
happening in the state right now with the housing crisis
is how do we create more density
and how do we create smaller lots?
And some towns have higher lot, you know,
minimum lot requirement
and lots of conversations about "Is that a good thing?"
'Cause we want large parcels
to be enrolled in current use for example.
But then if that's the minimum lot size
and we keep on doing that at,
you know, 25 acres over time then
are we having the density that we want?
So that's a whole other tangent we can go off on.
But it's just interesting to quantify
where we're seeing the growth.
And this was really interesting
'cause we were able to quantify that
parcels less than 50 acres in size
increased over 19,612 parcels
that had a new dwelling on them over the study period.
This is really interesting 'cause we have,
we have a narrative in Vermont
that we don't have population growth.
We did see some during COVID,
we saw in migration happening from Covid,
some climate migration happening
and that was a noticeable uptick
which maybe is starting to level off now.
But in general we don't have population growth.
We do have second home development.
We do have homes being built in Vermont.
Not enough. We do have a housing crisis.
But I think this is just really interesting
when you look at the numbers
that we do have through subdivision,
we do have new dwellings going in on the land.
Okay, so what we,
the sort of like the holy grail
that we've been chasing for a long time
is how do we actually take this data
and look at it spatially too so that we can understand
are the subdivisions happening in the right locations,
or where are they happening?
And so working with Deb Brighton,
she had the idea that we can actually look at
property transfer tax returns
as a better way to actually link up spatially
where these parcels are located.
Now that we have digital parcel maps in the state,
the tax department's been working with us
to actually improve the integration of that
as a new data tool.
We did a case study in Addison County.
We looked at a three year period,
we were able to map where the subdivisions occurred, okay?
And out of 18,000 parcels, more and more,
there were 125 parcels were subdivided
over a three year period, okay?
This shows the location of them.
And then we overlaid that with the regional planning map
and we were able to kind of look at
the designated land uses.
And I think about 68% of the subdivisions
were in areas that were considered either
conservation or rural or agricultural lands.
Okay?
So the overwhelming majority of the subdivisions
are in zones that are really for more resource management
or conservation than where we want our concentrated growth.
Then we overlaid it with the forest block analysis
that the Agency of Natural Resources has done.
Anybody wanna throw out a guess on how many of these
parcels or subdivisions were in
intact forest blocks or intersecting?
[Man] 98.
[Jamey] 98?
You're close.
Any other guesses?
-I guess I gave it away there. -(people laughing)
91%.
So, I don't need to tell you all
the concern about this from a trend
and we all know why this is happening
and why people want to live in our forest areas.
It's an attractive place to be
subdividing and building homes.
Okay, so I wanna take a couple minutes
just to then back into the parcelization tools,
which allows you a way to analyze the data
that's in here and show you where you can find the reports.
Okay, great.
So this is, this is available,
if you just go to VNRCs website
and you go to the Forest and Wildlife program page,
you can back into the parcelization website
or it's vtforesttrends.vnrcorg/home.
Recommend you just go to VNRC website
or Google "Vermont Parcelization".
So what we have is our homepage
and then we have a tool called the Data Explorer
and VCGI Steve Sharp helped us to design this.
And what this allows you to do
is examine the data by toggling different years
that you may be interested in looking at.
So what I'm gonna do right now is I'm gonna say
I'm interested in the whole study period.
I'm gonna back out 2016,
I'm gonna look statewide across Vermont
and I'm going to,
so you have different options here.
You can look at the change in parcel size
or the parcels that have dwellings.
I'm gonna look at acres and parcels by type.
Okay.
And here's the trends that we are looking at
or talking about at a broad scale.
Okay.
But then you could look at it at the county level,
the town level if you're doing
some work in a certain region.
And then I'm just gonna show you that
there's different ways to explore,
like percent change over time
if that's what you're interested in.
And again, you can toggle through
different geographic regions in different years.
You can explore the metrics
by year and geography.
And then we have a final tool here,
"Explore change over time through a line graph".
So just lots of different ways to look at the data.
Then if you're interested in reading the reports
where we've analyzed what all this means
and what the trends are showing us
and if you're interested in seeing the recommendations,
the land use policy recommendations,
the data management recommendations
we're making around parcelization
and studying parcelization.
The most recent executive summary is available right here
that analyzes the most recent data we have.
And then you can see that there's a number of other
of our previous reports in here.
And then you could also
very quickly just let you know that we have
a webinar you could watch,
which kind of talks about this more.
And then if you're interested in actually
downloading the raw data and using it,
we've made that available as well.
And then if you wanna find out more about the project,
you can go to the About page.
So with that, I think my time is up,
and be happy to take any questions.
(audience applauding)
-Chris, -(indistinct speech)
thank you for raising this Chris.
And just let folks know that the phase two study that we did
that's available up here,
we actually combed through like, 22 case study towns,
reviewed their subdivision regulations
and we looked at whether the amount of subdivisions
were triggering Act 250, and as an exercise,
1% of the subdivisions,
and there were a lot of subdivisions that we measured
were large enough to trigger Act 250, and another 1%...
You know, overall maybe 10% of the acreage
was still under some kind of continuing jurisdiction.
There had been a large project,
but subdivisions in Vermont are not being designed
to trigger Act 250 right now.
In fact, most people develop to not trigger Act 250.
So there are a lot of conversations right now happening
about the fact that,
we're not, Act 250 really isn't playing a role
in looking at subdivisions and yet our,
we've got this sprawl happening in our forest lands
and we need to have some kind of functioning criteria
for forest to do good site design in forest.
And we'll see there's gonna be a big
effort attention this year to try and overhaul
and comprehensively reform Act 250.
And personally I hope that
fragmentation criteria that's passed the legislature
three times but hasn't become law yet,
can magically make it across the finish line this year.
But we're also looking at ways to streamline Act 250
where we wanna have designated growth and not make it easier
to incentivize development in the right locations.
Any other questions?
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
(audience applauding)