Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Good afternoon. This is the House Appropriations Committee. It's Friday, 01/30/2026. It's just after 1PM, and we are continuing our exploitation of the FY27 budget. And we have with us the Department of Human Resources this afternoon. Welcome. Some of you here, and maybe

[Unknown committee member or staff]: somebody's online too. I don't know

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: if Jason's online or not. But if you have your documents, if you want to share the screen, you're welcome to do that. But introduce yourselves and take your questions. Thank you.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Good afternoon. I'm Beth Fastigi. I'm the Commissioner of the Department of Human Resources. And Harmony Wilder and Holly Front are our financial folks, and maybe Jason on the screen as well. I've been the Commissioner of Human Resources for about nine years. And so I know many of you on this committee. Some of you are new to me, so nice to see you and meet you all. We're just going to start out in our budget book. We didn't have a screen to share. Was hoping you all have that, but if you want. Oh, we have this. That's it. Okay. Just flip through and let you know which pages to go through. So, starting on I've got it flipped over backwards. Slide four. I think you'll see This is just DHR, kind of who we are. Our vision, we are a professional human resources team providing continuous and superior service to our most important asset, our people. So that is our vision and our mission. We partner with agencies and departments to create and retain an engaged, motivated and inclusive workforce. Our One HR pillar, are we 're working to break down silos within our department and within state government, build up people, maintain organizational effectiveness, and build an inclusive and engaged workforce. And then we also have a list of guiding principles that we use to guide our daily work. On the next page is page five. See our kind of a one page budget summary for our governor's recommended budget for fiscal year twenty seven. You can see from that pie chart, we're mostly funded through an internal service fund. It's 83% of our funding through internal service funds, and that's $16,700,000 then followed by 10% of our budget is general fund, internal department transfers, and then a tiny special fund.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: How many employees, how many staff are

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: in your office? We have seven exempt and 105 classified positions. And more than 80% of our budget is the cost for our personnel. And a 5% increase in our overall budget, and that is primarily due to the increased cost of salary and benefits. Big things we're working on this year is continued focus on our system modernization project, which was funded last year. We're not asking for additional funding this year, but the funding that we got last year, we had already done the preliminary work on the contractor. So basically, July 1, we set off running. We got the contract moving, and we have been diving right into that project. The other huge project that we're working on is the Enterprise Resource Planning System program, which changes our system VTHR, so the whole VTHR system, the accounting system, as well as the budgeting system. So that's a big statewide

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: That shows that we were actually surprised it wasn't a budget adjustment this time. But how many years has that been going on?

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: We started actual in earnest with configuration and architecture in January and February.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So there's been a lot year.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Of 2025. '5, yes.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: But we started funding it a few years before that. So there was a lot of stuff that was done before the actual work. So when did do you remember how long ago that sort of

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: So I started in 2017, and we've been kind of advocating for an upgrade of the VTHR system since I started with the state. But I think the money was There were two appropriations. The first one

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: oh, it's such a was like 12.5 12.8. Yeah, 12.5.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: It's the money that we put aside in 2022, like put into that modernization fund. That's right. And

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: then a couple of years ago, we did the 11.8.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Yeah, so the first appropriation, I believe, was for AOA appropriation, and the next appropriation was an ADS appropriation.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Do you have a timeline for when that's going to be done?

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: There is a whole big project plan. So the first piece of it went live already, which was the budgeting piece. So that was used this year to do your budget so that our team met ADS finance. So that was kind of a tiny portion of the project. And then the next phase is DHR's piece. And so we are first aware that we've been heavily into design and configuration of that.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So it would be another year or two before it's

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Our scheduled go live date is this fall. Oh, okay. Great. Thanks.

[Wayne Laroche (Member)]: And what about the timeline for the classification that's been going on for a while?

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: We started that this summer. So we're right now part of that piece is redesigning. So we have an old classification system called Willis. It's a point based system. And the big, huge first piece of the project is designing a new system on how to compare jobs with each other within departments, vertically within departments, and also horizontally across state governments. So that's the piece we're actually working on now. They're designing that, and they call it the architecture mapping. So we've been working on that for, I would say, really, the past three months has been a pretty intense effort for that. And that's I can't remember if our timeline is eighteen months or two years for that project. But I'm very much looking forward to seeing the results, the mapping, and where we go from there. I haven't really seen it yet, but the folks on our team that are working on it, and they're also working kind of across data seem to be pretty excited about it.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Holly, do you want to add something to that?

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Yeah, actually, talking back to

[Holly Front (Financial staff, DHR/AOA)]: the workday from agency administration financial services division, I'm trying to ask a question of when that workday appropriation that loan,

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: dollars

[Holly Front (Financial staff, DHR/AOA)]: 1,800,000.0 was appropriated in 2022 and through January we've spent $9,700,000 in that. And so there's about $3,000,000 left in the AOA appropriation. Those funds are primarily used to pay the other occasional.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Our vendor Guidehouse, who's the big project implementer, and then we have an Attain partner, is another vendor that is our business process transformation partner vendor.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Great, thank you very much.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: So then, do you have other questions on the results?

[Unknown committee member or staff]: We're good. Okay.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Actually, the next several pages go through our departments and what each department does, but I'm going to bring you to page I think it's twelve, thirteen, 13. And that's just a nice picture, and I can talk through kind of our, the various divisions within DHR there. On the top left, page 13, you'll see the it's our classification position management group. And what we've put forth there to demonstrate is requests for classification reviews. So in 2025, we reviewed three ninety two job classes. That was 20% of all of our job classes. And the reviews impacted thirteen thirty employees. Class reviews do have a budgetary impact instead of unplanned budgetary impact. And in our workforce report, you can see the results of class reviews over the years. But it's typically an unplanned budgetary impact.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So that's been something that we've seen a lot of in the last almost the whole time I've been on this committee, but at least certainly the last four years, there's been it felt like an increase, and quite a lot of them over the budgetary impact. Are you seeing these requests for reclassification reducing, increasing, staying about the same every year? What's your sense of how that's going?

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: It ebbs and flows, but it's always pretty heavy workload. Know. Year to year, we may have that. I do have that year to year.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I'm sorry what the trend is. Because at some point, isn't every state employee going go through this? There

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: is a timeline of when you're supposed to look look at your job and do that every year. With our new system, be the same at all. The system we're using is over 40 old, and it's really we're very much behind other states in what we do and how we do this. So creating a new architecture mapping, they will still be reviews, but we're hoping that it would be more on a regular schedule rather than upon request. So now we're really basically on request. When you create new positions or when someone's job is changing, or if the department or our collective bargaining partners or the employee feels like it's time for it to be reviewed, they can ask for it to be reviewed.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: And The fact that there have been a lot of RFRs, and I think that they always go up. They do not always go up. They do always up. They don't always go up.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: But they go up. I think we have a statistic in there. Think it's 80% of the time. About a third of the time, they do go up.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So I just wonder if that means that we've been sort of underpaying people or what The that's

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: way our system works right now, when you look at classification and compensation, all those things, there's several areas where you look at. And with our system right now, we have a lot of it is kind of stuck in this one bucket. So a class review, people use the class reviews as a means to increase the compensation, where really you shouldn't be using the class reviews for that. You should be using what's happening in the market and so what's happening in the market and also what are if the job duties have been increased, that would potentially increase your pay. But it might just be that's how the evolution of that in the industry and maybe in the marketplace, it wouldn't increase pay. So that's one of the things we found out during the studies over the years is that we've got all of this stuff in the classification piece, which really shouldn't all be there. So people do use that as a means to reward employees or promote employees. We're really trying to focus using our merit policy, where if you're doing a really great job in the role, you can get an extra step or two steps. And another tool we have is hiring to range so we can hire people off the street. Certainly, if they have a lot of experience, we can hire them into where they might be at higher pay so that they we can attract people with experience. And then another, we also have a We can do some market factor studies. So job class like nurses, even though the classification system may give them this many points for their work, in the marketplace, they demand a lot more. So if we were paying them what our pay scale said based on our classification system, we'd have a very hard time hiring and retaining any nurses. So they have what's called a market factor. So those are the types of compensation tools that we are using now and using more and more of because our system is so outdated.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So getting that other system off the front will be good.

[Wayne Laroche (Member)]: Do you now have a computerized system for supervisors, evaluations, employee evaluations, is it a computerized system that all supervisors can use now?

[Unknown member]: No. In Pennsylvania,

[Wayne Laroche (Member)]: that's what we have. Right. Evaluations.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Now one of the tools that I've seen that we're using the classification piece is there are tools, certainly tools out there where you can help you write the job descriptions. And that's- and that- yeah, I think that's pretty exciting for us to be able to have that type of- that type of tool at our fingertips. And then when you're talking about performance a little bit, we also, our performance management system, so how we evaluate individual employees, just their work performance, not their job duties. That's all a manual process as well. And that's something that we're hoping to get more automated in our new Workday system, in our new enterprise resource management system.

[Wayne Laroche (Member)]: So that's going be part of this new system to be able to do that. Yeah. So we were doing that 2016 and that's manual. Yeah. Everything was job descriptions.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: We're not. Yeah, we're definitely behind other states in where we are in that area by far. Yeah, a lot of states in the past ten years have definitely leapfrogged way ahead of us. We manage employee benefits and other insurance. Right here, one of the big cost drivers for us and state government has been a medical plan increase. In the past five years, we've had an average of 11.4% increase each year. Last year was the first year in a bit that we've been under 10% with a 9% increase for our premiums in 2026. And the drivers that you're seeing there are similar to the drivers that you're seeing in health care across the country and even more intensely in Vermont. 257,286 paychecks were processed last year.

[Wayne Laroche (Member)]: Do you have a

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: payroll company that does that? No, we don't. We do that all in house.

[Wayne Laroche (Member)]: Yes, I don't move check.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: No. Those are no. We don't sign the check. So that's that's that's good because I can have direct deposit? Everybody does not have direct deposit, but I don't know the number, but most people do. They have direct deposit.

[Wayne Laroche (Member)]: For inventories, that also. So it's in Pennsylvania, that whole system into payroll come through, and supervisors have to approve everything right online.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Yeah. That is all online. People's time sheets are online. We approve those online. Yeah, that's all online. And people can look into our current HR system that we have. And people can view their checks and they sign up for benefits online if they want to sign up for change what they're putting into their savings account, like their $457 per comp, they can change that all online. That is like seeing that piece. There's so much that goes on behind the scenes and in each little visual representation, the amount of work and complexity that's people think that just one of the biggest things this month was getting the W-2s out. People think that's really easy, but so much goes into that behind the scenes. And we have to make sure that we have so our vendor every quarter, we get quarterly tax updates. So those have to be put in the system. And then you get the last one in December. You got to make sure that's up to date, that's in there. And then filing all those W-2s, getting them all mailed out. It is kind of a Herculean effort at the same time. We're still doing our annual reporting and quarterly reporting to the federal government and all the other states that we have employees working in there. So this is like a really big time of year for that payroll team to get all this stuff done. And actually, it was even more complicated this year by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, where employees who could potentially get a tax deduction for their premium portion of their overtime. So that was something that we didn't have to report out to employees this year. We don't really have to report it till next year. But lots of our employees get overtime and would be potentially eligible for that premium, half premium over time would be potentially eligible for a tax deduction. So we wanted to do our put a good faith effort into provide employees with an amount that they could potentially use on their tax returns. So we were able to do that as well. That was a huge effort. So I'm really proud of our team for that. So yeah, I like to think of a lot of the work we do kind of being the back office of state government that people don't see. And people think a lot of the work we do is magic. And I think that some of it is because we do it so well. We do it so well, but when something doesn't go well, people are often surprised or how long it takes to get something that wasn't anticipated.

[Wayne Laroche (Member)]: Sounds like

[Unknown member]: a lot. Yeah. So,

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: paychecks.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: We do employment misconduct investigations. So that's I have six investigations positions. Our goal is to complete those within ninety days.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: How many investigations did you have last year, do you? Over 200. Is that standard, or is it going up?

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: It's gone up in the past couple of years. One of the reasons it's gone up, we believe, is because we did make supervisors in all the DHR mandatory reporters so that if you believe or think that something might be misconduct, you are required to report that to DHR. So we're getting, I think, more complaints. People are reporting more, which is good in the sense that hopefully we can catch issues earlier so they don't linger forever and so they don't linger for a long time. Supervisors have always been mandatory reporters for things like discrimination and harassment, but we added that for any kind of misconduct.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: And so what are the without breaking confidences, obviously, what are the kinds of investigations? What are the general topics that you're seeing that are being investigated?

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Anything you can think of, probably. Probably anything you could think of from what you might consider to be a minor slight to report and again reports of discrimination or harassment, reports of theft, reports of misuse of state property,

[Unknown committee member or staff]: time reporting,

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: unprofessional behavior. Which category? It's a variety. Anything that you might think someone would get fired for, we don't. We look at That's the types of things we're looking at.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Thank you.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: But it is important that we do these, that we look into the issues because our employees are not at will employees. We actually have to have the evidence that the misconduct happened before we can impose any type of discipline on any place. And then there's a lot of things that employees are cleared of any wrongdoing or that's more of an educational opportunity. So there's a whole range as well. Just because we have that many investigations doesn't mean that we're terminating that many employees for misconduct. Right.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: But it maybe gives you information on what sort of trainings or procedures or something can be done to improve and minimize this.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: We run what's called our Center for Achievement in Public Service, CAPS. It's an employee workforce development center up at the Old Vermont College campus. And so we do trainings in person there, as well as we do online trainings. And one of the courses new supervisors are required to take is called supervising in state government. And this statistic just says that 83% of the employees that took that training felt that they were better off as a result of providing the training. They were better prepared for their role as a supervisor. Have through our health. As a part of our benefits, health care benefits, we have a wellness incentive program, And 66% of state employees participated in that over the past year. Let's see, what's that one? Up in the top right. Oh, people across state government are very interested in statistics. We have our workforce report that some of you are probably familiar with, but it's online. We submit it every January 15. You can find it from the DHR website or you can find it on the legislative reports, but it has all different kinds of statistics about state government. But we responded to seven eighty one different requests for employee based data last year. Our talent acquisition team, that's a recruitment group. We've got some numbers there. We had eighteen fifty one job openings were posted. We received and thirty one thousand five hundred eight fifty nine job applications, 15,000 plus unique applications. We hired just over 1,000 new folks. Also, we had six sixty six six sixty six promotions, internal promotions as well. Interesting thing in the talent acquisition front, we're seeing increase in the number of job applicants per job. So we're actually seeing an increase. December is usually a slow month. We had a record month for job applicants in December, and that trend is continuing to January. So that's good news for our hiring managers who are hopefully getting really strong slates of candidates.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: But it's taking two and a half months to fill positions. Is that a standard kind of thing? Is that trending up or down?

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: It has trended up in the past couple of years. And I think that trending is because of you having to post that job longer. We have I don't know how

[Wayne Laroche (Member)]: to say

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Is there a rule about having to post the job? The

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: job has to be posted for at least ten business days. So it's a two week job posting. That's the minimum. And it takes some time before to get it ready to post. You have to make sure the job description's there. And then once you get it, you get it ready to post. And then you look at what you have for applicants. If you don't have enough applicants, you may extend that posting out. So some of that we may post for another week or another two Or you get through the process, and you didn't end up after first interviews with any viable candidates, so then you have to repost. So that's part of that number being so high. But it does take longer in state government probably to hire them in the

[Unknown member]: spike. There

[Unknown member]: are some larger companies that have criteria that they have to get at least three applicants before they'll hire. Do we have that kind of limitation?

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: No, no. If you had one applicant for a job and that candidate has meets the qualifications and they've had their interview and we think that they're a good person for the job, we can hire them. We have a leave management unit that's managing specifically employee cases where a leave is subject to either a federal or a state entitlement. So it's really more of a tracking situation to make sure that we're allowing employees to use their leave in compliance with those laws. So that's kind of the different units. So if you have questions on any of those other pieces, I'm happy to answer those. And then on page 14 is really our executive summary. And I've talked about some of the things, the two big projects that are a part of our executive summary there, which is the enterprise resource planning project as well as our classification modernization project. In addition, last year, we did a big upgrade to the current VTHR system to make it more user friendly and also so we could be in compliance with all the latest tax updates. And as well as I think one of the things that we were able to do is one enhancement was we only had an option of two genders in the system. So now we have a third gender option. So that's much more palatable for our employee population. So we can report on that now. Employees have the option to not choose either male or female. So we were happy to be able to finally have that at least in our system. So that's really an executive summary and then some of the other accomplishments that we had over the year. You can kind of list through if you

[Unknown committee member or staff]: want to walk through those.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: We were asked about vacancy rates. The way I don't know if other departments have been talking about vacancy rates, but these are calculated differently. In the workforce report, what you see for vacancy rates, see. It's a point in time, rate so it's that the end of the fiscal year, what the vacancy rate is for the departments. What we're showing here on page 15 is that vacancy rate, the average vacancy rate. Average monthly vacancy rate, so it's more specific, so to kind of what we look at budgetary wise. So it's not a point in time, it's kind of a more rolling average of what's happening over time. And our vacancy rate has been relatively low. But as you can see in '26, we've got a couple of jobs to fill in even more now. We've got plenty of job openings in VTHR, in DHR. So if folks are HR professionals and want to come work for the state, check it out online, you should apply. Okay.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Dave, you have a question.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Yes, thank you. Is there a rule upon which vacant positions go into the pool?

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Typically, if a position has been unused for six months, that's where the secretary of administration is to make that position available for the best use across state government, especially in the past many years, when we've I mean, while job applications are coming in, our vacancy rate has gotten lower. It's still higher than it was pre pandemic. So in many cases, the reason the position is vacant is because we're struggling to hire. So we wouldn't, we don't typically take a position that department is actually actively really trying to recruit for and put it into the pool to reuse it. So six months is kind of a barrier, but we've been probably more looking at a year.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Thank you. Robin, may I ask another question?

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Go right ahead,

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Dave. Different area, but does your department have any performance data specifically, I think in Diva where the benefit workers are, they I don't know what their caseloads are and what their error rates are. But with federal changes requiring many people to have to apply twice a year or once every six months for benefits, their workload will increase. And I wondered what's an acceptable, ratio of a worker to so many different benefit applications, or would that be information better acquired at the department level?

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Yeah, that would be information at the department level. We don't have, we have, the statistics we have are really about, we have employee data more on how much money they make, how many people there, what their job is, their pay history, but we don't have specific information like, you should, for every thousand applications you get per year, you should have three people that are gonna manage those applications. That's just something more that the department would have.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Appreciate that. Can you tell us if you have it, what percent of our workforce are in management positions?

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Yes.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: And and what and what typically is the span of supervision for supervisors kind of in the same area here?

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: I have I know I don't have this I don't believe the statistics on the span for supervisors in here, and it really varies. It really varies by department.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Function and sure.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Yeah. But it's if you look overall, it's a pretty low supervisor to employee ratio. But then again, some of some some agencies and departments where you have a lot of employees doing similar work, they're they're typically higher. But I'm gonna look up for you while I'm talking still. I'm gonna look up that stat for you because I it's a it's a easy one. It should be an easy one to find.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Yep. If it's in the January 15 report, can get it?

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: It is in there.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Oh, okay. Well, thank you.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: 100 pages long. I just I just checked out the report not to think about it. It'll require something.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: It's a great report. I know that. Yeah. Do we have while you're looking, and if I can just keep on

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Go ahead, Dave.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Do we have, the the report, I think, provides the percentage of employees by department eligible to retire.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Yes.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Doesn't mean doesn't mean they will, but they are eligible. Are there any particular areas where we have concerns or is it fairly evenly distributed?

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Oh, no. Yeah, it's not evenly distributed. And we do break that down by department. We have seen in the past three years lower than kind of a lower than historical average number of retirements from people who are eligible. We've seen that most recently increase. So we've the past six months, we've seen that increase a bit to a more, I would say, of normal level, but we have seen it increase more recently, but that's after like a three year, I would say, low. On page 21 of that workforce report, you'll see the management profile. And managers are 5.4% of the classified workforce, supervisors 16.1%, and non management 78.5%. So we have four thirty one designated managers.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Appreciate that. Did the remote work policy change spur a number of retirements?

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: So with respect to the remote work policy, we are currently under litigation there. So I really don't want to talk about that. But what I can say anything related to that, I know Secretary Clark was in here back in December, I believe, and with both appropriations committees, and she did indicate that all the information about that in the policy and the questions are available on the DHR website. So if you went to the DHR homepage and there's a tile right up at the beginning,

[Unknown committee member or staff]: you can look at statistics there.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Thank you so much. I appreciate it, Beth. Yep.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Forgotten that you were still under litigation. Yep. Okay. Great. Thanks, Dave. Yep. Let's continue. Other things you would like us to know?

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Oh, I just opened up the workforce report. So now there's lots of stuff. It's an amazing report. One of the things that I think people are interested in is vacancy rates, and it's vacancy rates by department by fiscal year. You can see that on page 28, and there's lots of information about vacancies there. And then vacancies on what's the most, what are the job titles which have the biggest vacancies. And I know that it's not your committee, but correctional officer one have a very high vacancy rate still. They still have high vacancy rates, so we're still very actively recruiting for our correctional officer ones, mental health specialists, licensed nursing assistants. So any any almost the positions that work in those 20 fourseven facilities are still the hardest for us. Still hardest for us to fill. We've seen some good success also in the past year, I would say, especially in our ability to fill nursing positions. We've seen some really strong numbers there.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Well, natural resources has seen either the workforce has shrunk or there are fewer vacancies. It was 33% in 2021. It's 7% now.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Yeah.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: But that could be also due to eliminating positions that have been vacant. Yes, I mean, for any one of them, is that true?

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: That could be, but I don't think that's the case. Okay. So that natural resources, that is the agency of natural resources. It's not the departments under that. So it's a pretty sometimes with a smaller

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Oh, so you're saying that's like their equivalent of a central

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: office. That's their central office. So that number you might see spike a lot where like so that I don't know how big that agency is.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: That's true, because I'm looking at you have environmental conservation of fish and wildlife, etcetera, etcetera. Okay. Yes, I know percentages can be funny, but there's only a few.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Right. So I don't know how big that.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I thought that was the whole agency.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: No, it's not the whole agency. I feel better. I was like, wow. Okay. And we also have some really nice views on employee churn and historical turnover and separations and why people separate from state government. So, for example, on. Starting like table thirty two and thirty three, we've got a number of separations by fiscal year and the highest number still are voluntary separation. So in 2025, we had nine fifty people leave state government, six twenty seven of those are voluntary with retirement down to two zero four and then involuntary terminations, 111. So that's kind of the breakdown.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: When people voluntarily separate, it means they usually go to another job or something if they're not retiring. What or you do exit interviews, yes?

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Best practices to do exit interviews. We track them in a system. I don't have any

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So you don't have any sense of trends for those 900 people that left?

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: No. But one of the things that we do say is how much service they have. So people, they're more apt to leave in their first week and then their first month and then their first six months. So they are more apt to leave if they've been in place for less period of time.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Right. I remember talking about that with you several years ago, and it was something like forty percent of people were leaving in the first year. I can't remember. I think it was a pretty high number. And I'm wondering what you're doing to bring that down. Maybe it's already gone down, what you're what's because if you can keep people to a certain at a certain point, then they're likely to stay for quite a while. So what's been happening to kind of reduce that?

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: The longer you keep them, the longer they'll stay. And, and it's been, we have seen a little, a slight decrease, I would say in the voluntary turnover. So, which has been positive. So we've seen the biggest was in 2022 with about that went up to 15.3% was voluntary turnover. I mean, overall turnover with 10% voluntary turnover. And now last year, it was 7.87.9% this year. So it has decreased a little bit, but there is definitely still work to do. I think that the workforce is different than it was. The workforce has changed, and people aren't necessarily apt to stay at one place of employment their whole career. So I think employees are moving around more. So we have to

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: That makes sense. But when you've spent a lot of money to hire them and you have turnover in the first year, that's a very expensive It is.

[Wayne Laroche (Member)]: Wayne, go ahead. Some people come in and they don't know what the job's all about, and they find out they just don't like it. That happens in the first year.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: You know, and it can be about your coworkers, it can be about the workplace culture, so your coworkers and the supervisor. That's why we do try to provide, we do have a lot of training available. There's the mandatory training for supervisors, but there's also a lot of leadership training that we provide. And that is available for employees that they can take because that is a reason that employees leave jobs. And the work might not be what they were expecting.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: The things you want to highlight, at least

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: we don't have the report in front of us. Yeah. No, I think that's really There are reasons for separation. By fiscal year, we've got separation by employee demographics. So, we have that information by sex, racial and ethnic group, and also by length of service. So that's the one where if you have less than five years of service, voluntary terminations are 80% of the terminations of the voluntary or less than less than five years of service. So that's the statistics kind of bear that out. And then we also have statistics by generation. And the millennials have surpassed the generation exers, I think. As far as workforce, the number of people in workforce, they've kind of made that that switch over. Well, close to. Yeah. I think that's it. I don't have really anything else for you if you

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Your budget is pretty standard. It's like from the ups and downs, I'm looking at that quickly.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Yeah, wasn't, yeah, know if I get to the other question. Do

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: you have specific projects or things you are going to be working on, IT aside, because that's obviously a lot, but to support workers and state employees? Do you have any other projects or trainings or big things that you're working on for staff? We are doing

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: one of the things that we do is we create digital trainings from just to help people understand what's happening in state government. So in the past couple of years, we created like a retirement 101 online training. So you don't have to go and take the you can kind of take that on demand anytime you wanted to. Or they're just developed AI basic training for artificial intelligence, so employees can take that. And we are also doing We are working on some other things for supervisors, and I can't remember exactly what it is, but I can follow-up with you on there. But we do have we really are trying to promote the trainings, all the electives that people can take. Oh, yes. Performance management. So so for people how to how to write performance evaluations. It's performance management class and how to deliver the performance management and prepare for the employee annual reviews. But then also, employees can sign up for an optional workshop on how to write, specifically in practice writing notes. So just even that nitty gritty stuff and having to talk to your employees in those types of meetings, I think, are helpful for people to understand. Because I think

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: You do some training, skills training for people to become supervisors, like how to build a team, how to give feedback effectively and things like that that people need.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: We do. We have a lot of what we call optional elective courses through our Center for Achievement of Public Service. And we have this series called LEAD. It's LEAD and it's kind of a leadership series. But there's effective communications, leading with empathy. And I know all the names of We have lots of various classes that are topical. And it doesn't have to be a supervisor. Employees are management people. They're available for employees at all levels. And we offer a couple of those at least every month. And those are mostly those are in person, pretty much in person trainings. But the required one is the supervising. Right. Everybody has to take the supervising state government.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Okay. 100,000.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: That wants to be as And that covers a

[Unknown committee member or staff]: lot of the basics that are

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Yeah. Performance management. Yeah. So it starts with I don't know if you've heard of the Gallup assessment, but we did Gallup strength assessment. So I'll take that in class, so they kind of learn where their what kind of their strengths are as leaders. And they have a whole section on that. And then they have a whole day on collective bargaining agreements. And then they have a whole day on just various human resources topics. So we have a DEI piece of that. We also have separate training, and new employees are also required to take sexual harassment prevention training, as well as a class called civility and unconscious bias.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Anything else, Tom? Mean, this is your budget, right, Tom? Okay. Anything to want to tell us? It's almost like

[Unknown committee member or staff]: we're going print out the work before we get It

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: It looks like a pretty standard budget.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: Yeah.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: That sounds good. Well, maybe if we have questions, we'll go through Tom. And thank you very much for your time. We appreciate it. We will see you around the building.

[Beth Fastigi (Commissioner, Department of Human Resources)]: That's right. Thank you. So

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: committee, we'll take a quick break before we have the Department of Corrections is going to be here at 02:00. So