Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Representative Robin Scheu (Chair, House Appropriations)]: Good

[Representative Jill Krowinski (Speaker of the House)]: morning members and welcome to the caucus of the whole to hear a review and the highlights of the budget. Just a reminder that we will be wrapping up around tentwenty, tentwenty five for the joint assembly and the members of the appropriations committee and staff from JFO will be available during the lunch break in the will of the house to answer any questions that don't get answered this morning. So with that, I will turn it over to the chair of house appropriations, representative

[Representative Robin Scheu (Chair, House Appropriations)]: Shai. Thank you, madam speaker and good morning everybody. Good morning. We will have some copies of the highlight sheet and other things. Think Joint Fiscal is bringing them right now. How is that for timing? James, are those copies of the highlight sheet? No, they're printing. They're printing. Okay. So you'll have to listen to me until you get your copies. And then, I can't remember if the speaker mentioned, but from twelve to one, we will also, the committee and joint fiscal staff will be in the well of the house. We did this last year over lunchtime. And so after you look at things and have time to digest it and you have more questions, we will be here to answer specific questions about things that you, you know, if you don't want to ask now and you want to ask privately later or whatever. We'll be here from twelve to one in the well of the house, with our fabulous JFO staff to help answer all those questions. Okay. So the FY twenty seven budget is H nine fifty one and it represents a 1.6% increase in funding across all funds. That includes the education fund, the transportation fund, increases from federal funds and the general fund. So it's going up, 1.6% to a $9,334,000,000 total state budget with all those funds. The general fund part of it, which is what we spend a lot of time thinking about in our committee, is going up about $52,000,000 or 2.1%. So it's, it's not huge increases over past years. We're living within our means. For those that are interested, we agreed with virtually all of the governor's asks. So the budget that was presented, back in January, has much of it is in the budget today. So the budget, as we always do, fills all the statutorily required reserves and meets all the pension obligations and, makes essential investments in healthcare, human services, housing, economic development, education, public safety and the environment. So we have a lot of things there. Our reserves will be filled up. One interesting fact, if I haven't already told you this before, we are the only state in the nation that does not require a balanced budget in our constitution. So fun fact to tell your friends. But we do balance the budget every year, so the budget is balanced. I And think I'm going wait just a minute because you're all picking up pieces of paper so nobody's listening. Thank you. I also sent an email out to All House this morning with links to all the budget documents. So if your favorite one isn't here and you want to see the reserves or something else, can get it through the links that I sent out in the email this morning. Okay. So when you get your sheets, if you could sit down, we're only going to have about ten minutes, but we will have office hours at noon. Okay. So I'm going to be referring mostly to the highlights document, is the 8.5 by 11 that says that has all the colors and numbers at the top. That will be the document I'll be referring to for right now. Okay. So as I've said, we have, filled all the reserves and paid done all our pension obligations and and we really looked at trying to make essential investments that, support Vermonters and their needs. The highlights document, we've separated it out into highlights of base appropriations, base or ongoing appropriations and then one time appropriations which are as they sound. They are one time for one year and there's no guarantee there would be anything in the following year. So in the area of healthcare and human services, we are providing additional funding for the designated agencies, the specialized service agencies, home and community based service providers and Medicaid skilled home health services. This is a group that does a lot of our work for us out in the field and we want to be sure that they can afford to work, to do that work. So affordability works on both ends, what it costs and what people need to live on. So that's there. We have appropriated 500,000 to the Bridges to Health Program. We have appropriated additional funding for the AHEC, Area Health Education Program to continue to offer primary care loan repayment and provider placement services. This has been really important. We have all heard the, struggles that primary care is having across the state and we want to continue to support having more primary care docs in our state. So that's one way we're trying to do it. We're also providing money to Vermont's free and referral clinics, which supports healthcare services to Vermonters who don't have health insurance. And this is particularly important this year after the federal government stopped the premium tax credits and people's health insurance has skyrocketed and many people can't afford it, so they don't have it anymore. On the housing front, we agreed to put $4,000,000 into base for the Vermont Housing Improvement Program or VHIP that has been very popular and successful over the last few years. We are statutorily funding 100 of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board for almost $38,000,000. There is money in here that the governor put in for a homelessness and housing initiative for 82,000,000 and change. All of that money is in this budget. Haven't changed the dollar amount at all, but you will see, I think it's on the floor today, H938 is House Human Services program for this. So all the money the governor put in the budget, we haven't changed total dollars in the budget, but we have a bill that describes the whole program. So you'll hear that on the floor this afternoon. But the money is all accounted for in the budget as it was by the governor originally. So that, the total dollars aren't changed. Maybe where they are located has changed a little bit. We also established a new permanent classified position for a disabilities housing coordinator within the Department of Dale. Have heard a lot over the years and we did a pilot project for $5,000,000 over to do three projects around disabilities housing. And it seemed to us that really a good first step to go down this road longer term is to have a coordinator in place to orchestrate these things as opposed to us doing things piecemeal. So that's being set up that way. We also added, about 450,000 to support the Vermont Access Network. Those are your local television, community television folks. We have established two new permanent positions for the at ANR for the Flood Safety Act, happened in 2024, and they need positions to enact it. One of the interesting things is we established another position for a mediator at the state relations Vermont State Relations Board. And the reason we did this, it affects the entire state. The federal government eliminated the 126 mediators, federal mediators they had. If you've ever been on a school board or a select board, if you have had to negotiate, a contract and you've reached an impasse and you call a mediator in, it's a federal mediator and they come at no cost to your board to help negotiate that contract. I was a school board, we had a federal mediator. Those positions are gone. So we don't have that. So we felt pretty strongly that it was important to have a mediator here, at the state level that could could work with municipalities and school boards on this. And if school boards or municipalities were trying to do this themselves, we were told it would be about $450 an hour. So you go through one mediation and you know, that could kill your budget. So we felt that it was more cost effective and helpful to communities if we had a federal mediator. So that's just a little history behind why we did that. Sometimes the little things make a big difference. We also, have an attorney for the state ethics commission to focus on municipal ethics, regarding we we put that in a in a bill a couple years ago, it's been an unfunded mandate, they haven't been able to support municipalities, and now they can, and an additional attorney at the Human Rights Commission. We've given some funding to the Defender General for public defense contracting and training. And we also in this budget, as we did last year, we account for the money in other separate bills that carry their own appropriations. So we aren't mixing up lots of different bills into this budget. We stopped doing that last year and we're continuing to do that. On the one time side, we have put in, money which we do every year for the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program over at the treasurer's office that helps low income people get their money that's owed them from taxes. We also are doing a pension and benefits funding task force. You may have heard about that on the floor yesterday. The closer we get to 2,038, the more important it is, the more volatile our investments are. And we want to be sure that, that we can fully fund our pension money. So the market becomes more it's just like when you get closer to retirement, you want to be sure that your money is, that you have the money that you need for retirement. And the closer you get, the more important that becomes. So this is a task force that was, suggested to, to take a look at that and make recommendations for ensuring that we get our pensions. We don't lose any money on the pensions and we stay on track. We have provider stabilization grants for $2,000,000 We have Meals on Wheels between Global Commitment and General Fund. That's a little over $1,000,000. So we're taking care of folks who need that. Vermont Legal Aid for an immigration attorney and their legal aid hotline which doubled the number of calls from one year to the next from 11,000 to over 22,000 calls to their helpline. So they need a little support there. We have appropriated a million dollars to DHCD for the Rental Arriers Assistance Fund and also for the Manufactured Home Improvement and Repair Program. So we're covering housing in lots of different ways. And then home share to expand across more of Vermont. We also have money for NOFA for their Crop Cash and Crop Cash Plus and Farm Share programs. The Food Banks for Monters Feeding Vermonters, money for the conservation districts, to VSAC for Freedom and Unity Scholarships. So Vermonters can go to college and get the education and it raises the family income eligibility threshold for these scholarships from 65,000 to $80,000 so we can support more Vermonters going and getting an education which supports our workforce as well. And then finally we have, just over 1,300,000.0, to the Community Resilience and Disaster Mitigation Fund for disaster release assistance when communities who have been affected by flooding and aren't getting FEMA money so we can support those communities and not leave them. So those are some of the highlights. I'm not going to go over all the rest of them. We're running out of time, I know. But if you have a couple of questions now and then we'll have the office hours where you can ask other questions at noon. So I don't know if anybody has any questions they want to ask now. Well, okay. We will all be around, and we'll be in the well of the house. And with that, I think we're done, madam speaker.

[Representative Jill Krowinski (Speaker of the House)]: Alright. Thank you, everyone. Please stay in the chamber. We'll be, preparing for the