Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Good morning, this is the House Appropriations Committee. It's Tuesday, 01/20/2026. It's just after 09:30 a. M. And we are going to have committee discussion about the FY27 budget, and then also if we have a little bit of time, do some markup and see if we have more things to cross off or deal with in the Budget Adjustment Act. Then we'll take a break and we're going have the Department of Health come in at 10:30 to talk to us about the recovery centers. You may recall when Chair Wood was here from Human Services last week, there's been a request for more money because the agency, the Department of Health did not distribute the money in a way that the recovery centers actually needed it to be distributed. So we're going to to And then this afternoon, we'll leave deposits, and then the meeting, and then the Governor's Budget address is at right at 01:00, and at 02:30, Commissioner Gresham for Finance and Management of Planning and Search to keep this budget. Then we will go back to adjust again to more flexibility.

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: Madam Chair, did you say

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: we were going talk about the FY 'twenty budget this morning or just the PDAM? Both. This morning. So the report we're going to talk about this morning is the budget memo that we sent to agencies and then how to talk to committees to questions. So this was things that Marty and I talked to at a meeting last week, the chairs and vice chairs of all the committees. And we kind of did a little training session with them about it and had a good conversation about questions to ask and getting them thinking about it. They're going to be talking to their committees about that. Some of you may be asked to come into their committees to talk about what we're doing. So I thought it would probably be that we actually had a conversation too. So that's where we're going to start. And then if there's time after that and before our break, then we'll talk about the AA markup. So we're just going to be kind of clear about that. So the memo that we sent to agencies went out we did talk about this in December, too, but now it's actually upon us went out October 23. It's on our committee page from the Senate and Senate Committee on Appropriations. So we've asked them to come with a couple of options for presentation formats, and Joint Fiscal gave them examples of good formats that have been used. I think I mentioned before, one of them is the Agency of Education, where Bill Talbot in the 1990s put together a really complete budget book. And they were smart enough to say, Oh, this is good. We'll keep using it. So they don't have a lot to change on their end other than updating whatever else they need to do. But they've got the concept and the template already made On the other hand, DCF, the Department of Children and Failmates, has not done anything like this. And they also have a gazillion programs. And so we are not expecting them to give us something that's perfect this year. This is going be a multi year process for them to get through. So I know they've talked to JFO, and what we're hoping for is good progress. And maybe they pick their three biggest programs, for example, and go do a deep dive on that, and then they'd add more in future years. So I want to be sure we adjust and set our expectations appropriately, depending upon what people are. And as I said, the committee chairs that I've asked them, please, we expect there to be progress, not perfection, but if they come in with just the usual last year's ups and downs, I ask them that they would please stop the conversation and say, this is what we're looking for. We'd like you to come in in two days or three days, whatever. Not say, when can you come in, but say, we'd like you to come in Interesting. Exactly. Whatever the reasonable amount of time is. So, yes.

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: So I guess more than several years ago, we as a body adopted results based accountability, which this seems this has some relationship to that without it being in the same format with the three simple

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: simple but hard

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: to

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: answer.

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: How much are we spending? Who are we helping? Did we really help? And that's the pair of brakes of what the movement is. Is that what we're striving? Are we trying to get them to say what their results are, justifying their base. We've had this conversation about where ups and downs is shallow conversation as opposed to if you're already spending $10 why should we turn it up to $11 if what you're doing is not succeeding.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Right, and so there's more of that kind of program evaluation. So we aren't doing RBA, results based accountability that we did, and I was on that government accountability committee, GAC, what's happening, that's great names, my first term. And it worked well in departments or agencies where they had a champion. And then they had all kinds of website stuff and green arrows and red arrows. I mean, it got really complicated. So we're not doing that extreme, but we have been wanting to get back to a better oversight and accountability and understanding of what the programs are. A lot of you are asking those questions already, but now we are going have expectations. We're ratcheting up the expectations for what we hear from the agencies. And so we want to understand that, set our expectations appropriately, and then we need to ask good questions to help the whole thing along. So it's not the same kind of scorecard that our VA was.

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: Right, but it's just an injunction policy committee. So are they expected to ask the same questions so that if the health care committee says, oh, heard this testimony on this particular because for us to go through the line and go, we don't want that without the policy committee.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: That's right. The policy committees are doing which is why we had the chairs and vice chairs, and they're going be training their committees. So everybody has the questions. Everybody has the budget letter. The agencies all know it, too, so they know that this is the expectation, and these are the kinds of questions we're going to be asking. And again, I think we want progress on our end as well, and not we won't have perfection, but we want to make progress on our end too. If we pay attention to something, then it's more likely to get done than not. And if we don't pay attention to it, then people say, Why does? I think part of

[Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: the concern has been that sometimes some policy committees don't really pay too much attention to the budget that comes into them. They look at, oh yeah, you want another $3,000,000 for this. So yeah, that's a good idea. I'm just trying to go further. But what we are asking the committee to do is, why do you want another $3,000,000 and this is a process already working? Is it doing a good job? Is it not doing a good job? Maybe is there a different way to attack the same problem? It's more into a policy issue, but they think there's a better way to attack the problem if that affects our budget.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Or maybe the problem's already been solved. As Emily Byrne said, maybe all the turtles already got saved and we're still putting money into the program to save the turtles. Right, I mean, those kinds of things. So we need to understand.

[Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: Or it's on a maintenance diet and it just plugs right along, then we don't need to really pay an awful lot of attention to that because the process is already there.

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: But the attention could also be partisan or political because somebody might be saying, I never really liked this program, and I don't think it's working well. Our smell meter has to be pretty high, or the committee of jurisdiction's smell meter has to be pretty high in order to identify somebody saying that it's not the question whether it's I mean, you can say any program's not working if you can't believe in it, which is what we're seeing, which I took from representative Wood's testimony, that the Zambia administration was choosing to not follow legislative intent in certain cases.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So that's why we're having them commit so we can understand that better. And I think administrations of all parties and stripes, when they don't want to do something, people find ways not to do it. So they say, this little thing is now going to cost $10,000,000 I mean, there was a time when there was a whole thing about letting incarcerated people have access to their files, and DOC didn't want to do it. And they came to LCAR before you were on LCAR and said, it's my first year, said, it's going be $10,000,000 to do that. Well, it wasn't going to be $10,000,000 to do that, but

[Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson (Member)]: they didn't want to do this.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So, I mean, But that's what happens. So yes, we need to have our antenna up around things as well. And that's where asking good questions can be helpful. See what we can use. Lynne?

[Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson (Member)]: So when we had an RBA training years ago, I was on commerce. The first group that came in was somebody that had, I don't know, it was They were doing something with something. Anyway, I can't remember the topic. But the first thing they told was they sat down and they told us that they got 500 phone calls, and this year they got 600 phone calls. They had really great response to whatever it was they were doing. Although the members of the committee said yes, but what was the effect of that? Because that was the whole

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Right, it's not the quality.

[Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson (Member)]: Not what you get, it's not what you put in, it's what happens after, did you make it any better? And he kind of sort of went,

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: That's right, right. And so that's what we want to do is understand. So it's great that you've got 1,100 phone calls over two years, but what was the impact? Is anybody better off?

[Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson (Member)]: Did anyone get better, whatever it was like?

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Did their problem get solved? And the problem that we're trying to solve? Is this actually a problem?

[Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson (Member)]: Keeping people busy is fucking count. The other thing we've had in farmers is we decided before we wrote another workforce or jobs bill, we wanted to know everybody and their brother had workforce and we wanted to get a process that we wanted to find a list of

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: all the workforce programs. Remember when you did that.

[Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson (Member)]: So we could go and decide where's the gaps, what do we have to do? And we asked all the agencies to come in, and they all because everybody's got them, everybody. And they came in, and at the end Well, you came in, actually, as the deputy Secretary for Human Services, David, you and Deb Racine.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Oh, we do, okay.

[Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson (Member)]: At the end of their presentation, I don't think everybody got what we were looking for. You know, what do you have? Does it work? Who served? You know, where are the gaps? At the end, you turned to us, and you said, can you give us $2,000,000 more? And everybody was like, Oh.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Well, I seem to recall that they stopped counting at either 120 or 180 different workforce programs, because trying to get a handle on the workforce programs in this state is just about impossible. That's the one thing you learned from that.

[Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson (Member)]: But we didn't do it. Mean, Bachsort was trying to get so forth.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: It's a great idea, really sad that we can't. Dave, did you have a response to this? Question, just a comment if I may.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: I try to find out if a program needs 10 slices of bread and they only have eight, how do they decide who gets the eight, And what are the fiscal budget consequences of the two that are not getting a slice to kind of come back and bite us in a big way or or immediately? It's hard, now that sounds easy, but commissioners, the last thing they wanna do is, oh, this administration isn't doing this. You wanna stay out of that if you can. So I try to talk to the people they're serving, understanding full well that

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: some want perfection,

[David Yacovone (Member)]: but usually I can get a pretty good feel that if I talk to whatever, whether it's area agencies on aging, the designated agency, whoever, primary care people, I can begin to get at some of the issues that is awkward for a commissioner to put on the table themselves.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Well, but we can also ask them those questions. One of the things that one of the committee chairs said in the meeting last week was I ask a question of what's decreasing, because that isn't always talked about. Where are you decreasing your funds or your programming? And that's how some surprises were caught. And that's not on this list. But this isn't the be all and end all of all the questions to ask or ways to think about it. And that's another great way to think about it. If you had 80% of your budget or of whatever, what would not happen?

[Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: Would And be the impact if that Exactly. Would not You're going to end up prioritizing some things because you only got 80%. So, you're going to drop off these two things. Is that okay? Is the whole world going to fall apart because you dropped these last two things or can they get massaged a little bit and get folded into something Are they really that critical? Like you've looked at the list and said, those two can go.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: And I also find myself getting frustrated when a department says, I'd like to explain the different divisions because in my mind they're eating up the clock.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: That's right.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: With kind of like, I can read that later. I don't need that. It's interesting in some cases, in the second year of a biennium,

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I

[David Yacovone (Member)]: don't know

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: if we need to hear it. And it may be in the budget book, but we can say we can skip the introduction and skip all that, and we want to get to the meat of the issue. Yes, absolutely. Don't people, any of us can be good at time wasters, that we don't have to talk about the real thing, right? I had

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: some other methods too. Do we

[Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: know what the administrative director has been to the agencies in terms of having their budgets prepared and ready to be presented? I mean, I know they have to let

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: you know the governor presents the budget. Well, they all got a copy of the budget letter that we sent to the agencies, and so I don't know, I haven't seen anything that say Adam sent to the agencies telling us, but we told them what we wanted when they come, so I assume that they're going to work, and I have been pretty clear publicly that if they come with the old thing we're going say thank you very much come back in three days

[Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: or whatever. My question is timing though. Are they supposed to have everything prepared?

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: They should be ready to come to us.

[Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: If I request the budget from NES, they in theory have it all prepared.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Once the government has made his decision. I'd ask Adam that question when he comes in this afternoon. Because he's gonna come in and talk about the budget and do an overview. Presumably they've pretty much finished it all by now. Yeah, I think many people would

[Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: like to review that before they sit down and talk to them.

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: Yeah, have it all done in September or October because they had to present that to

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: the governor Right, but then they made some adjustments. So their budgets were due to Adam October 14. We gave them time to recover and make changes, and we sent this out October 23. They also had to have budget adjustment requests by October 20 to ADAMS. And I know that JFO has worked with some agencies to talk to them

[Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: about this.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So yes, none of this should be a surprise. We're doing this months ahead of time and trying to support them as much as we can. And so I don't know what Adam has told us, but we can find Yeah, that'd be a good question. So the questions that we put together here were some of these are really for the committees to do. They should be checking out websites and learning what other topics do. That's not our job so much. But if we on page three of the questions are really some of the things that we want to think about in this committee. And we won't ask all these questions all the time, but their ideas for things. Agencies, people, not just agencies, often like to jump straight to solutions, but we want to back up and understand the underlying problem, how it arose, then they said, what happens if nothing is done? So, that's a little bit of Dave's slices of bread, and a good question. And what are the consequences of action or inaction? Again, use your own words. These are ideas. Not everybody needs to hear all of these questions. But again, what's the problem being addressed? Are there negative outcomes? Is the federal government involved? Looking at the solution, how will budget change improve the situation? What happens if the status quo is maintained or there's a decrease? Can you use existing resources? Do you have to add new positions if contracted work? I also added, how do you define success? Because I want to know that. To me, that's a really important question. It's failure. So, how do you know you're actually being successful? What does that look like if it's successful? Not, we got 1,100 phone calls, but people now don't have to pay as much in taxes or they something. They got this problem solved. And then, again, this may be more for other committees as opposed to us because we're not the policy experts. Are there other solutions? Are there lower cost options? And then understanding the impact, who benefits, gets harmed if no changes are made. Is it a targeted thing to certain populations? Is it statewide? Are certain people disproportionately affected? So those are just the general kinds of questions that we're thinking about.

[Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: Yes, well, I'm really grateful for this. I think it will help committees. I think it will help us, and we should probably, along the way, take note of questions that this committee asks that we want to make sure we ask again and again.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Some questions turn out to be really good. Yeah, just as kind of

[Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: standard questions. But I think that the budgets that Yacovone and I have are also, I mean, involve, there's a lot that is impacted by federal action. And one of the things that I would want to know really is how are we preparing? How are we anticipating what may be down the line? Or what we know is already down? Because, you know, this looks at what is already, what we're doing and have done. And what are new programs? Right, but it might not be new programs, it may be, I guess sensing the vulnerability of some of the government architecture to these federal, because I do believe that we could be leveraging the strengths in our communities to help the state meet its goals.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: And anyway, I just think that

[Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: I'm talking out loud right now to kind of formulate in my own head of, well, what are the questions that I would ask that relate to that?

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: About the federal, our response to Right, the

[Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: and how we are, you know, playing things out and not just waiting. Right, so I

[Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: think part of that is, have you thought about what might happen if

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: you just lose, you know, happy part of the mindset.

[Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: And they might say, well, one option is, well, the general one needs to act like, or are there other ways to tackle that problem and part of it is maybe okay go to the local areas and see if they've got some resources that can help out in each county or something along those So just some preparatory creative thinking about how Jane might attack that problem if they end up losing resources.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Right, and they started thinking about it last year because things started going crazy and programs were getting cut.

[Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: And we sent money aside. Well, and

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: we also had a lot of the agencies come in last year into this committee and talk about what are your programs, if the federal funds go away, how is that impacted? So they have been doing some of that thinking, and now we have almost a year under our belt of this, so hopefully they've spent some more time thinking about that.

[Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: Well, I'm just thinking about the loss of provider tax income and that revenue, I mean what we heard about $87,000,000 a year by year five, that's just staggering. How are we planning for that? I know it's beyond this year, but there are steps that we have to take this year to set

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: us up for Yeah, I

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: mean one of the issues here, questions, I'm grateful for these questions and to try to create an outline. And unfortunately, it makes me think even more, so my head's hurting. The idea here is that when I was on a policy committee and we were trying to do things, oh, I don't know, let's just say raise the minimum wage or do take family leave. And you get that question of, oh my God, that's going to cost so much money to try, all those defense moving responses. One of them overall was businesses, whether it was mom and pops or not, want stability of their government. They want to know what's going to happen, they want to know how they can get help doing it, and they don't want this back and forth. If we focus on something like AHS or tips and babes areas at the Department of Agriculture as well, where Vermonters want stability too. And people who receive benefits from the state, too often the image that I have is the money got cut, we don't have the services, people get laid off, And then when somebody makes a phone call to the state, we heard this from the Human Rights Commission, where I need help with this eviction and legal aid can't help me anymore because their federal thing got cut. And we can't help you because our federal thing got cut. And so Vermonters who rely on us, rely on the bureaucracy, don't have that same stability and don't have the opportunity to say that's what I really want is the stability to know that someone's going to be there to

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: pick up the phone.

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: And know those And that goes hand in hand with this, sorry, further thought of like we're judging,

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: our budget

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: process judges and the budget process starting with the administration, every program on an annual basis. And it's one thing to throw money at a problem, see success, and then have to go to the maintenance phase where things are more normal because you've established what the problem is and then yes it diminishes maybe all the turtles can say. We don't view our budgeting process doesn't seem to if we by simply going ups and downs we're defaulting to we need the program.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: That's right, that's why I don't want to do that. That's exactly right.

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: But at the same time, it could take five years to build a program, a workforce program. Look what happens in high schools or look what happens in your communities when some 12 or 13 year olds go, I want a skate park and the last skate park that was built ten years ago is now decrepit and dangerous and so the parents of those 12 or 13 year olds, they raise money, they do can drive, they build a mountain skate park and everybody's really happy and then those kids age out. Know, your high school students age out and there's a whole group of new people. That's what we do, but we don't build, our system isn't built and then we leave, we turn over, bureaucracy turns over and so all of the original concepts of what that business was supposed to be are lost. And I'm just, you know, how do we even build into this when again, it's an almost like an annual review of whether, you know, was this program of success? Maybe this year it wasn't, maybe your football coach had a losing year, maybe your football team had a losing year, you'd fire them? This year, yes.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: For nine losing seasons, maybe you do fire the coach.

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: But I appreciate and this is all to say, I'm sorry I'm taking so much time, but this is all to say I appreciate that's the conversation I want to have with the people who come in because it's too easy to not acknowledge something's not working and it's not always easy to not to appreciate that it is working even if the success rate might be lower this year. Does that mean your budget gets cut?

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Right, like maintenance is better. And then, yeah, because we have to kind of look short term and long term at these things. That is really what we're doing. And so there may be some programs that over the arc of its full time, they've really done a lot of good work and they are on maintenance mode and they'll just stay that way. But others, yeah, the turtle's all about saving, it's time to move on to a different program. There will always be people

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: who need our service. There will always be people graduating into poverty and graduating out of poverty and homelessness and joblessness. So it's just really, it's really touchy sometimes because you you gotta make choices that say we always make choices, we're not supposed to say yeah they don't need a $100,000, know, well what does that mean?

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Well and now we hope we'll have a better sense of that and obviously we're not going to know all the programs. I mean, people in the agencies don't know all the programs. I think it's very difficult. But yeah, Lynn.

[Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson (Member)]: Yeah, Tom hits on a really important issue. My experience on a school board over a period of time in two different times, two different sets of times, Is that if you weren't there when something was done or created or tried, it didn't happen. And everybody comes in and they want to do this. It's like it's cyclical. Oh no, why don't we do this?

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Here we go again.

[Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson (Member)]: We did that eight years ago and this is the result. And they kind of go, well, yeah, you're right. You leave and the new people come in. One of the issues with RBA was that you should use your brain to try to use something that doesn't cost a lot of money, that actually can be done, as maybe Marty's talking, locally or some other way that it doesn't have to cost money. It doesn't solve the problem. It's just a matter of how do you go and do something that's got more practical application that makes it happen and makes it work. And I think that all the people who come into us, everybody, wants more money for everything. And that's a question where we have to sit down and decide what exactly does the money get you, What does it produce? And is there some other way? Have you really looked at all your options? And you're right, everybody looks to the solution first. They don't look at all the

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Exactly. We need to be asking those, and the committees seem to be asking those questions. They have to make the case. They have to make the case. So I think there are a lot of good questions between the, you need 10 slices and you only get eight, what happens? And can I have $2,000,000 David showed both sides of that? And the other thing, think, as you were saying, really struck home for me when you said it, and then you added the other part of it. We do always talk about businesses want predictability and stability, but so do people. It's not just the businesses that want that, it's all of us.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: What I'm rattling with in my mind a little bit is, every committee that comes to the floor of the House to present a bill, regardless what it is, has to do some explaining and lay out why they wanna do what they do. So when appropriations comes up and we want the bill to pass, It seems like a basic, here are the increases the governor recommended and we agree. I was do the ups, I think. Some of them are easy, they're the, well, it's the mandatory ups go through. And here reduction. Are I could stop there and be safe and hopefully follow it, but there's a desire to wanna say either at the beginning of that explanation or at the end, by the way, here's some things going on that we're struggling with as a state and we need to be mindful of. If I do that, I could open up, there's a number of people on the floor who might say, well, let's spend more to dodge, you know what I mean? I could lose support amongst the caucus. How do I deal with that Robin? Or is it not a concern?

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I think that's a really interesting question that I don't have an immediate answer to. But I think it's also fair to say that we're struggling with things, but that doesn't mean we have an answer right away either. It means that we're gonna pay attention and see if there's more that can be done or seek to understand it better going forward. But I don't think a single budget answers all our questions. And if we're struggling with it, a budget isn't gonna solve it all. One budget isn't going to.

[Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: Or you recognize the problem and we're not sure what to do but we think the transition is this way and we're starting small with something step one today and we hope we're suggesting step two, three and four that can be done over the next years.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Well, and we may not know, maybe we're experimenting, right? I mean, lot of, and seeing if this is helping with the struggle and maybe we have to pivot next year and do something completely different. I'm not sure that answers your question on that. Don't think you always said the answers right away.

[Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: It's part of the, I mean, I think constant conversation with the policy committees helps, Because as our thinking develops, can test it against, say okay, here's where we seem to be landing and this is not what you recommended, but it gets us this far. I think that can help.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So, John? Well,

[John Kascenska (Member)]: you just said a couple of interesting things or tips comments here in terms of, you know, do we have to go all in to get something started, if it's something new? Sometimes yes, because things just simply are gonna cost this much here, you know, people kinds of costs, all kinds of things here too. But I think sometimes as we're taking a look at my new program, things we're thinking about the whole, the number of eggs in the basket here, okay, this is what really needs to be here, but for us, are we ready to make that decision? I mean, we need to have, in the last year, there was a few things at the end, right? Yeah. It's like 10:30 at night, but like, how long are we gonna be here? We're trying to figure out some last things to kind of get something going here. Right. Bring some funding kind of start the process. And so this year, when we meet with those groups again here, so how far did that get you? Did it actually, was that really all you really needed here? Yeah. Because at the end of the day, I think the budget for the year is what it's an estimate. Can we have groups that come in there trying to estimate the best they can, as far as objective information they might have here to kind of figure out what the cost might be here. And I think that's what's really important here for us both in the short term and the long term. What are those measurable kinds of goals, objectives, how those things kind of measure here? You know, how often we have to kind of check-in, let's say coming up with a strategic plan, have all these like things on a strategic plan, all those things Some are of those things are quite objective, some things maybe not so much. Maybe a little bit more subjective or a mix of those things. Yeah. And you know, to what degree, you know, might something new be here for us, what is the lifespan of that going to be? Is it forever? Is it, you know, check this out here for a couple of budgetary years and then make a decision, do we continue on with it? Right. Or was that the intended lifespan of this?

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Right, it was a five year thing and then, we know how it is.

[John Kascenska (Member)]: And we just can't go from like full speed ahead to zero here either. Yeah. So, you know, a couple of budgetary areas I have, there's some things that can go full speed ahead for your time, and some things may likely go to zero here for most students.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yeah. These are questions that we need to

[John Kascenska (Member)]: And be there's more questions that we're kind of waiting Right.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Have we dropped, What programs have you dropped this year? Have you dropped any programs? Right. We've just added new ones. I mean, that would be a

[Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson (Member)]: question I'd want to know. Yeah. I read somewhere just recently the comment about how homeowners are very compassionate and very helpful to each other. And we dig at each other in snowstorms and we do things for our neighbors, which I think is, that's what makes us Vermonters. That's true. But I pointed out that opening up another food shelf because there's a need for people who are hungry is a sign of compassion, but it's not a solution. You have to get to the root of what's really going on there. You have to find the solution. And sometimes that's a lot harder.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: It is, it's a lot easier to slap on a band aid than

[Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson (Member)]: That's a really good point. I think that, you know, we do a lot of, I think we do a lot of things out of compassion, well placed compassion, but it may not necessarily solve the problem.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: And yet nobody's offering other solutions.

[Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson (Member)]: And they're not looking at the others, or they don't want to look at the other, you know, that goes to the political stuff. Well, one group thinks they should do this, and other groups think they should do that. And so we end up without a real compromise.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Perfect solution, Tom.

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: Back to something that Marty was saying. For years, the federal government has cut back funding in almost every program at some point. And it essentially falls back to the states that have to make a decision then how they're

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: going to pay them yet.

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: That's happened not at a slow drip, but depending on housing is one issue, housing in Well, the going back to the 80s, way the government chose to cut funding almost 90% to HUD forced agencies like the Vermont Housing Conservation Board to be formed. And a little bit earlier, the community action agencies because the government wasn't And we can argue or it's arguable whether those programs were being run correctly or not. But the need didn't change. The funding mechanism had to change. So our local taxes went up. And I think we're seeing that now with the cuts that have been proposed and put into place. Not only the cuts and needing, I mean, have form here from legal aid about where they were cut. We heard from the Human Rights Commission about where they were cut. And if we want them to provide the same certain level of services of justice or legal representation, which is a constitutional right, we have to pick up that and on top of it our own local expenses, the tariffs cost me more money, the groceries cost me more money, insurance costs me more money. So our private pockets are being really tightened out and tightened up. At the same time, the federal government is demanding that we pick up. Nowhere in this conversation, because it's political third rail, do we talk about raising revenue. And because when we've talked about raising revenue over the last ten years to pay for education, to pay for this, to soak the rich, to do this, it's like we hear from our tax people, our JFO how limited that can be. And yet here we are being asked to say we're not going to raise revenue up to a certain point. And now we've got to fit all these things underneath. And so of course something has to be cut. If you only have a dollar to spend for a dollar 50 worth of mead, who get you know if somebody's kind of expecting a dime and they only get a nickel sometimes that's worse than getting nothing. So this is part of, I mean this is where I suspect the revenue committee is having a similar conversation about where can we, there's no one will admit that there's a painless, that there's not a painless tax increase or revenue enhancement, whatever you want to call it. But how do we then do our work in a fixed box? Because we can look at these programs new or not and decide they need to continue or they should be funded and then in the world of politics, can't spend that money. We're saving that for something else. I mean all that down the line. But it is curious, you know, it's just, it's a painfully curious of our work to say, but really how do we say yes first to someone who needs it, even if we know the answer may be no at the end? And how do we say no and kill people's hopes and dreams at the beginning of a conversation without hearing what possible solutions could be.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: It's not going to be an easy year.

[Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson (Member)]: Yeah, I'm going to make a political statement. And I'm not sure that we're really as this committee is really has the power to do something about this. But we have, you talk about what people are going to do with their taxpayers going to respond. A lot of these taxes are hidden. There is one tax that everybody sees right up close, and it's gone up 40% in the past four or five years, and that is the property tax. We have an open ended self correcting ed fund, and it's grown to $2,300,000,000 for increasingly fewer students. If you think about how you could go and reduce that spend, which is why we've got this program on the table that we're probably not going to have a lot of say in, but the point is that what could you use just the 0 point dollars that's 299,000 plus of millions of dollars that we could actually use for other things? Or if you took just $1,000,000,000 out of it, what could you use with that? That's a decision making issue that the legislature has to face. And it won't always be popular because there will be people who will be against it and there will be losses and they will lose their little score, whatever it is, it's not always going to be popular. But those are the kinds of things when you slice up the pie, why are we giving so much here when we could

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Like what could we do if we had $100,000,000 to That's spend somewhere right. And those are the kinds of things that we, as a body, not just thinking all of those things as we go into it. And, you know, the status quo is inertia, and inertia is really hard to change. So, so people want their taxes to change, but they don't want to change anything else that they just want the taxes to go down. And that's not realistic either. So it's going to that's just going to add to the interesting part of the year.

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: You can toss health insurance on top.

[Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson (Member)]: Yes, you could do any number, but that's another example. Oh

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: yeah, we've gone to 10,000,000,000 in health care costs when it was $2,000,000,000 ten years ago or something.

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: And $100,000,000 last year alone, it increased premiums for what we paid for premiums, you know, or education through the education tax. So it, you know, and then the other piece is the fixing the pensions that we allowed sometime in the late 90s and early 2000s to get out of control. And it's like, I look at that and I go $203,100,000,000 dollars a year just to fix it, not to keep

[David Yacovone (Member)]: it going, but just to

[Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson (Member)]: fix for another ten years plus. So it's easier to have done it the first time than to go and get it out of control now cause that affects everything else.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: And so here we are, we hope we've learned something and won't make those same mistakes again. I'm sure we'll make new mistakes, but I hope we won't make the same mistakes that we've made. But it gives us all a lot to think about for this year. So how we go into this. So that's why, again, it's going back to this just getting to understand as much as we can and hoping the administration can give us some answers about how they're thinking about these things. That's where we are at that.

[John Kascenska (Member)]: Rick, I just recognize one thing, just from my thought. It was interesting we were going through this here this morning because I ran into a couple of people that had questions about, you know, what information would the community be getting here from us here? And I said, well, it looks like we're having conversation about that, but good questions to ask here to kind of, you know, to a best decision committee wise and what I can support, you know, over time, right, with their letters supporting this or that kind of thing here. As they said, what they've seen on our website here, who's responsible for what areas of budget area kinds of things here. What they want a little bit more of is what if they could have, if they could receive something that would be helpful. Maybe it's a spreadsheet, maybe it's a graph or something here, or just kind of a list of like, for example, like, transportation, I think kind of understands what kinds of things are gonna kind of be getting here, like government operations may be a little bit different here in terms of what budgetary areas would come under their jurisdiction. By committee? By committee here. Because I did show them this morning, I said, we'll take a look at this and they like that. So you kind of see the spread of who's responsible for what. And last year they had a email about budget buddy kinds of things here too to make sure.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yeah. Well, if individuals members of the body want to know what other committees do, they could go to the committee page and see what the authority is. Right.

[John Kascenska (Member)]: I did say that too, follow what's in your work committee and what you're responsible for, but they also know some things have changed over the last couple of sessions.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yeah. They can look at the other people's I mean, we're not gonna set up for other people how what other committees' purviews are. That's Right. That's somebody else's job. We're gonna have another little shard about that we had back when Marty and I were in those together in twenty one-twenty two, that has a little bit more than what we currently have in addition to, so. But if they want to know what a committee is responsible for, then they need to go do their research on that.

[John Kascenska (Member)]: They're okay with that, but that's like, you know, come with questions you can have short. Yeah,

[Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: yeah. This is just a housekeeping question. I will be getting then a spreadsheet that looks at the requests that we heard

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: from and okay, great. Yes, like I put together last year and then Maria took and James is in charge of it this year and I'll still be doing mine and we'll compare notes. So yes, we will have our spreadsheet of that kind of information. We keep track of specific request outside Yeah, of the so from the two public hearings, there may be written testimony. I answered emails to three different organizations over the weekend who wanted to come and provide testimony in our committee about the budget. And we take testimony from the agencies, and there's a public hearing for everybody else to do their thing. So I explained all that and how that could work. So we will Senator Perichlick and I will figure out a couple of dates for that. But that's usually in February. I looked last year, it was kind of towards the February when we were a little further along. So that'll be widely publicized once we come back. So opportunities for people to do that. And this here, if you're able to go sit in on your committees, when they are doing your budgets in those policy committees, that might be helpful also because you'll hear how the policy committees are thinking about it.

[Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: Which is interesting because I got a request from energy and digital infrastructure to come see them on such and such day and I said yeah, I'll come see you. I think they assume that as an example, the ABS budget will be available and that they will have looked at it or that I will have looked at it. I need

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: to clarify with them what they really want when

[Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: they come. I said provided the budget is available, yeah, I'll

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: be glad to, but it's not available,

[Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: what's the point?

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Maybe they just have questions about how the budget gets developed. ADS will be coming to presenting their budget in that policy committee as well as presenting it to us.

[Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: Exactly, but I think they're, but that was my question of will I have a chance to see the budget before they get to see Well,

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I don't have a preference on whether an agency sees us first or the policy committee first. To me that doesn't matter. Doesn't mean you couldn't have access to the budget before that comes to us. Because if they're ready to present to them, then the budget's ready and you can take a look at it. We don't need to hold everybody up because we have to see interest and it just doesn't make sense. And as Tiff said, if so her her human services wants to go to human services first before they come here and you sit in, you'll hear about the policy committee's thinking, which will help inform the questions you'd want to ask in this committee. So there could be a benefit to doing that as well. So however it works out is fine. I don't need to have us see it first. Great, well thank you for the conversation. Why don't we take a little break because we have Department of Health