Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Good afternoon. This is the House Appropriations Committee. It's Thursday, 02/05/2026, about 02:15 in the afternoon, and we are continuing with the FY27 budget, and we're delighted to have the folks from the Secretary of State's office, who I imagine have been a little bit busy. So it's great to see you and you've met all of us. So if you want to introduce yourselves and take it away.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: Wonderful. Thank you, Madam Chair. I am Sarah Copeland Hansis, your Secretary of State.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: And I'm Lauren Hibbert, your Deputy Secretary of State. Thank you so much

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: for having us. And I see that you all have a handy dandy paper copy to follow along with our testimony. So we will dive right in. The first slide has a rundown of the major divisions and duties of our office, but very important for us to point out that our office is focused across divisions on promoting the public trust, enabling good governance and protecting the public.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: I'll start us off on Business Services Division. This is our division that funds one full half of our office. So when we talk about funding structure, all the fees and renewals come into that fund. What we do there is all filings related to all businesses, all business types in the state of Vermont. So that's UCC, limited liability, nonprofits, any business. We register, renew. And if there's any related requiring filings, we receive those filings. In fiscal year 2025, this is a six person division. We processed 130,000 total filings. Good news is there's almost 15,000 new business formations. That's a very strong number for Vermont. And we received one year. Yeah, that's a great indication of the health of Vermont. We received over 68,000 business reports and over 16,000 UCC filings. Our total revenue in FY 'twenty five was $11,200,000 Our next We're going in alphabetical order. Our next division Oh,

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: I thought it was our favorite division first. Well, business services is our favorite division. No. Your highest revenue generating division. They do get the prize for that.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: They do, by a lot.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: Our Elections and Campaign Finance division oversees, obviously, state federal elections in collaboration with local election officials. We also oversee lobbyist disclosure laws. We promote voter registration and participation. And we provide significant support to local election officials in local elections. Our next division is the Office of Professional Regulation.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: That's a professional regulation. It protects the public through the effective regulation of 53 different profession types and over 80,000 licensees across the state. Some highlights of 2025 were eight fifty three complaints that were received. We executed two sixty two inspections of regulated facilities, including pharmacies and funeral homes. We do a lot of work throughout the year to ensure that our licensing standards are current and that we are promoting safe and effective practice. We also focus on reducing barriers so that people can more seamlessly get from their training to their profession. And we are focused right now, in particular, on streamlining the mental health professions. This has been an ongoing multi year project of bringing a little bit of regularity to all of the various different mental health professions to make it clearer for people who are entering the professions and also to make the work of regulating those professions smoother for our office. The next section is our civics. Before you

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: get to the civics, ask, of the eight fifty three complaints, were there certain areas that were predominant? Or is it across every

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: profession equally? I think you have to look at the number of licensees in a particular profession. And I think the nursing professions tend to be our highest volume of complaints. But we get complaints from most, regarding most professions. But certainly, nurses and some of the mental health professionals tend to be pretty high volume.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: If you are asking on a per capita, like per licensee, our highest are massage and home contractors. Yeah, number of

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: I was wondering about the contractors because we heard from the attorney general's office that they get all these complaints relating to contractors seem to be one of their top ones.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: This is going to be an ongoing conversation between our office and the policy committees, because the structure that we have in residential contractors really isn't working. It's not working for the homeowners. It's not working as well as we'd like it to for the professions. So, yeah, we'll be continuing to work on this.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: Yes.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens, Member]: Is it not working because it's not right, or is it because you're not getting the responses from the people you're expecting to register?

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: Yes and yes.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens, Member]: Or moving to licensure?

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: No. Well, we don't think that we should move to licensure at this time. But we are not having an uptick, meaning we're under enrolled. We really strongly believe that more people should be registering with our office. And then whether or not we move to licensure or not, I think, is a long term policy conversation. I mean, it was quite, as you know, quite a struggle to get to registration. I think most probably the next step would be a certification for contractors who want to signify that they are qualified. And if we did that, then we would be able to look at not only fraud, but also quality of work. But whether or not the Office of Professional Regulation has the skill set and bandwidth to manage quality of work complaints is, I think, something that really needs to be discussed. And so we'll see what the next year to ten years takes us. But if we were going straight to licensure, I think it would be too fast at this time. We really need to have some more conversations about that.

[Rep. John Kascenska, Member]: Yeah. Yeah, I'm just

[Rep. Thomas Stevens, Member]: It's sad to hear, considering the amount of hours that we spent in trying to make it right, and also fighting against certain categories of the people who opposed it

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: were

[Rep. Thomas Stevens, Member]: effective for quite a long time. But it was anticipated that there would be an increase in the need, which that was right. But I'm just and you know I'm not we'll talk offline, just mean not that I'm on the policy committee to work with you on it, it is frustrating to hear that in fact human nature kicked in and people decided that they could just ignore the requirements put in front of themselves.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: Yeah, I'd love to sit down and talk to you about it. I know the secretary does too. This is a program that we both care a lot about and have spent a substantial amount of time with OPR trying to figure out how to broaden our outreach, how to communicate the requirements as effectively as possible. We've done significant outreach in front porch forum. The secretary has been on radio ads. We have really been at the outer limits of what is within our scope, and we need to have a broader conversation. So there is a bill moving that will create a task force that we support. We testified about it this morning, some adjustments that we'd like to do, but on this topic in particular. Wayne has a question.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: I have a question, though, just a comment on this topic. I was concerned about this whole thing from the beginning. And if you ratchet down enough, if it doesn't grow them, you ratchet it down enough, you're going to exasperate that. My question is, thousand people just probably is there any specific area that surprises you in terms of what professions are you facing? Just across the board, any flat, or is it something notable?

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: I don't know that I could

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: categorize the trends. There's a lot of entrepreneurship out there in this state, and people are following their passions to create a business entity. But I can't say one sector over another. Yeah, that's something We would like more information, but the filings don't require businesses to tell us exactly what sector they're in and what they're doing.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: They don't have the SIC number or anything like that.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: We do have that NIST number, and we could probably dig into that if you're really interested in it. It's not something

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: I just wondered if you're seeing some trend that would show us interesting in terms of where we're going in the state in terms of business.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: Well, I'll see whether we can dig into that a little bit and get back

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: to you. With our new business filing system, we may have a little more flexibility in sorting that data differently. So we'll check into that. Civics. So the second half of slide number four is our civics program. We've had a lot of really fun wins and advances in the civics program. We will, this year, produce a printed voter guide for the general election, which will be mailed to each household. We'll get into some more details about that. You'll recall that two years ago, we did one that was available only online, which, of course, is a barrier to people who may only access the internet through their mobile device. And so a printed householded copy is the best way so that when you receive your ballot, you also receive your voter guide and can spend several weeks thinking about who you'd like to vote for. We launched the Kid Governor program this year, and that was a smashing success. We aimed for trying to find at least one fifth grade classroom in each county so that we had some geographic diversity. We ended up with over one thousand fifth graders across the state participating in the kid governor program. I believe the only county that we didn't get a classroom in was Essex County, and that's because they have only one fifth grade classroom.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So we

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: need Yes, we need to try to encourage that teacher to join us. But it's a really great program. It's a curriculum that is really plug and play. The teacher can spend as much time or as little time as they have or want. And it's a curriculum that comes ready made to help kids understand not only how voting works, but how putting together a platform and fixing a problem works. And, of course, what we want everyone to understand is that that's the point of government, is to come together to fix a problem that you see in your community.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: It was very exciting. And I heard all about your that Monday that you did the swearing in ceremony in the cabinet and walking through with the sergeant at arms. It just felt like a million bucks.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: They felt like rock stars. Was really fun. And the governor welcomed us in the Governor's Office here in the State House and spent some time with the kids, talking to them about their platforms and about why they chose what they chose. And so it's really fun, and I'm looking forward to the remainder of the year where our office will support them in enacting not only some of the parts of the Kid Governor's platform, which was ending homelessness in Vermont, but also taking in as much bits and pieces of the six cabinet members' platforms, which range from issues around healthy school lunches to access to mental health to bullying prevention. So there's just so much good work that we can help these kids do. I think it's great. And it's from Wayne's area, right? It's high gate years?

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: High gate.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: My husband got to meet the governor elect before she was elected. He did a school program in her fifth grade class. Oh, I love that. She's just been elected.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: Setting

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: up everything.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: Well, she's pretty fabulous.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: I'm so glad you're doing that. Thank you. You. It has been a point of joy and happiness throughout what otherwise has been a relatively challenging year. And we're, of course, continuing our other civics work, developing projects in response to the findings of our Civic Health Index and always looking for ways that we can provide more resources to K-twelve teachers for use in the classrooms. Slide five talks a little bit more detail about the voter guide. We have been hard at work trying to find the most efficient way to do this project, because we believe that getting information in front of voters was very effective in 2024 in seeing not only record participation in the general election, but a record number of same day voter registrations. So that is people who maybe hadn't voted before or had recently moved, who knew that the election was coming, knew that they passionately wanted to vote and were able to take, advantage of same day voter registration and that voter guide in order to, make their choices. So we will mail a ballot specific voter guide to every household. That means you and your spouse will have to share. But that is an important way for us to save on the cost of printing and mailing. And so we've been hard at work putting all of those details together, and we look forward to all of you all as candidates submitting your profile so that your voters know who you are.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Speaking of candidates, I know there are new financial disclosures that are gonna be required of candidates for the next election. Is that you guys?

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: I am so thankful to say that the financial disclosures are not, there are campaign finance disclosures that come to our office. But your ethics commission is the keeper of the other financial disclosures.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Okay. What's the one that's supposed to change this year? The ethics commission one? It's the same as it was? Well,

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: we have a new system, so it will look different. And the threshold has changed. Now every candidate will need to register, whether you raise funds or expend funds. That was an intentional ask by our office so that people have to affirmatively attest that they have not raised funds every period.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Instead of the $500

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: limit. Instead of the $500 limit. Makes sense. And that we will also be able to understand who has not registered, who has not filed, etcetera. But the financial disclosure forms are with the Ethics Commission, and I do believe they have changed the format of that. If you have specific questions, I'm happy to try and track I down the thought the one from

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: the Ethics Commission, once you get elected, you have to sign that one, but you had a different one. Maybe I'm mixing those two up. Oh, maybe that's our conflict of interest thing with what boards

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: we're on. The boards

[Britney Wilson, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Public Service]: you're on and where you

[Unidentified Committee Member]: get significant income in certain

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: places is on that ethics one.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: Right. And that's all housed in the Ethics Commission. Ours is only campaign finance, what you've raised and what you've expended during

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: your No other parts of that. Okay.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: There have been conversations about whether we should have pieces of that with the Ethics Commission, but we think us just handling the campaign finance is simpler. But we do point the public to the Ethics Commission for

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: I had to turn in a form about where my income came from when I filled out my candidate form. You

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: did, and that goes to the ethics commission.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: Okay, so

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: I turned it into the town hall, because that goes to

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: the ethics Exactly. Oh, okay, that's why I'm the clerk sent you. Correct. Okay.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: I don't believe our office ever touches that But it is Because they were together, I thought. Yes. That makes total rational sense. I know. Yes.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Which is why it isn't happening. Okay.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: Thank you.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: Any other questions about Voter Guide? All right.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: All right, our Vermont State Archives and Records Administration, we affectionately call it VESARA, promotes, preserves, protects, provides accurate, authentic, and reliable records and information through our team of staff and our partnerships with Vermont government and communities. We have three major programs within BASARA. One is statewide records and information management. That's for state and local government. That's policies around retention, how to maintain the life cycle of documents, and how to dispose public records. We provide a lot of information to both agencies and municipalities on how information governance could be framed, the standards, and also the best practices. We provide assistance to public officials and employees on creating internal records management programs. And then that core division manages the state records and state archives and our digital archives. As we're becoming more digital, more of our documents are digital. You'll see on the bottom of page six, that is a picture from our Records Center. If you haven't had the opportunity to go there, I highly encourage it. It's pretty amazing. But those boxes of paper are reducing, and we're getting more digital records, which is a good thing. But still, there's a cost in maintaining digital records. Then we have our administrative and statutory services. That's the APA clerk. We issue vital records in partnership with the Department of Health. We have a legislative clerk, which is publisher for acts and resolves, and the legislative directory manages municipal and school district formations and the state boards and commissions registrar. And then we also have the Vermont Historical Records Program, which is one of our federal grants for statewide archival services and provides assistance to municipalities, but also to nonprofit Vermont Historical Societies and record repositories. Then we have our Municipal Assistance Program. This provides information and education to local officials and members of the public regarding open government and municipal matters. This is really a place where we get a lot of inquiries. Usually, it's about 125 per month. And this is from members of the public, from people who serve on select boards as well, and town clerks. But primarily, it's members of the public. The city and town folks, they have the league, the town clerks, they have the town clerk association and our elections division. The public really doesn't have a resource to call outside of our municipal assistance program. And we answer questions on everything from dog licensing to burying people to public records, open meeting law. We have basically any question that someone has about municipal government, we try and find the answer to. This is I just want to give a word of appreciation. This is the division where you, in conjunction with your Senate partners, added a position to our office last year. We are asking that that position become a permanent position. That was one of the ones that was limited service. We need that position to be permanent. The person who we hired was a member of your body. She's excellent. And she's bringing substantial knowledge, but also capacity to this division. It probably does not surprise you that our office receives extensive public records requests. We just released one that was over 7,000 pages. It a substantial drain on our office and important transparency. But the way that we're able to process these really large requests, particularly around elections, is because we have a team of people that are helping us do that. So just a really strong ask to make that a permanent position, if at all possible. Any other questions?

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: So it was public records request. I understand it might be a bill around allow the capture of the actual value of time put into those records. What's your position on that?

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: We haven't seen the language yet. We've been monitoring the conversation. We haven't been asked to testify about it yet. I am looking forward to seeing the language. I think for us, the push pull is we want to make sure that obviously the work is compensated, but that it's not a barrier. That transparency should not be curtailed if you don't have money to pay.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: And you see in the cases where you think that the records request a weaponization rather than a

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: But that's a difficult balance, and it can be a subjective balance. So we have been wanting to see the language of the bill to see how they've navigated that. And as far as I know, the language hasn't been released yet.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: We have another question from Thomas.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens, Member]: Speaking of burials, it's one of my favorite documents of all time, The Digging Deep, because it's a compilation of all the cemetery laws. It's very big in house general, Many, many over many different things. And I noticed that it hasn't been updated since 2017. I'm just curious if you're thinking it will be, and that's because of natural burials, composting.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: Yes.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: Well, interestingly, the one person in our office who would be responsible for updating that document is also the person who's processing those 1,500 municipal inquiries and hundreds and hundreds of records requests as well. So part of hiring on a second person was to stabilize that division so that it can do its core functions and put out the fires that need to be put out, but also so that we can think about putting some of those resources on a more regular schedule of update.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens, Member]: That's great. I mean, it's really obscure to a lot of people, but it's really a great resource.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: Digging Deep is one of our most used publications. We can see how many times someone is clicking and downloading, and it's a very popular one. I think mainly because it's a funny title. No, because it has a lot of interesting information in it. But it's a very it's high on the list of revisions. I hear you have a

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: good humorist in the committee. Perhaps we could get a recommendation on what the next iteration should be titled.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens, Member]: Iterations from Secretary Markowitz had a very Halloween themed.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Time limited.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens, Member]: Well, yes, it moved on from that,

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: but it

[Rep. Thomas Stevens, Member]: was, I think, the first time it was done.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: We do really want to provide valuable resources and up to date resources. One of the biggest ones that we have been working on and really doing a lot of work on is open meeting, because that open meeting law has changed quite a bit. So we've done training videos. Now it's a requirement for many municipal officials. And so we've done now our second iteration of a video about open meeting law, just because that's such an important topic if you're serving on a public body, but also if you're a member of the public. It is brilliant. Our Safe at Home program currently serves two zero four individuals who are survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, human trafficking, or are providers of legally protected health care or patients of legally protected health care. This is our address confidentiality program. It provides these individuals with a substitute mailing address, which can be used publicly out in the world, including with state and local agencies. We are a founding member of NACAP, and our team has been attending that conference annually. Most recently, I had the pleasure to go with our team to the conference in Lexington, Kentucky. And the most exciting thing outside of the fact that we're currently helping over 200 people is that we modernized our IT system. We were doing this all on an Excel spreadsheet. We now are able to engage with folks completely online. People are able to sign up online instead of providing a paper form to us. We can communicate with our participants through the online portal. Our administrator sends them a message. They're able to receive it in their email. Then they receive an email that they have a message, and then they can log on to the portal. So this is a much more secure way for these participants to communicate with our office. It's really streamlined a massive amount of stuff. And significantly, it's helping us with our mailing process, because she is able to indicate who needs to receive mail, and labels can be printed directly out of the system as opposed to through a very complicated mail merge process that took half a day every day. So this is a huge system improvement. Our Temporary Efficient Program is the program that allows us to authorize people to marry. It's a really fun part of our office. And in fiscal year 'twenty five, we collected just over 193,000 in fees.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Lots of marriages out. My kids did that when they got married.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: It worked very well. Vermont is a beautiful destination for

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: It is.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: So moving on to slide eight, the Secretary of State funding sources. We have two special funds. One is our Secretary of State Service Fund, which is comprised mainly of the revenues of the business services division. It pays 100% of the salary and benefits for that division, as well as our six elections positions and 22 positions in Vassara, as well as our executive and administrative staff. Some of the budget pressures that we are anticipating here for 2027 include the contractual increases in salary and benefits, election materials that we provide to our town and city clerks, and, of course, the continued investment in that infrastructure of our election management system, which we rebuilt and recently launched, and we're continuing to make those improvements. Our other special fund is the OPR fund. This fund is comprised of licensure fees, and it cannot be used for costs outside of professional licensing. It funds the 42 employees in our OPR division and all of those related activities of public protection that we do within the Office of Professional Regulation. Some

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: of

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: the budget pressures that we are looking at, of course, are the same salary and benefit pressures. Our IT system, which we rely on to quickly and smoothly process licenses, is needing upgrade and modernization. And so you will hear me talking now and into the future about the importance of this concept of having a capital fund for IT infrastructure, because we process people's licenses because they came to our building and sat down and filled out a form. We process licenses and registrations in our business services division and much of our election management system through these online systems. And the lifespan of those is predictably limited, and we should be thinking about how we replace them gradually over time instead of the sticker shock of something that we're trying to do in one year. Other budget pressures are around implementation of new professions, but most importantly, the impact of interstate compacts on the licensing revenue within the office professional regulation. Compacts are really good policy because it allows us to fill gaps that we have in certain professions. And it allows our professionals to move back and forth smoothly between practicing here and practicing in other compact states. But it does have a significant budgetary impact on the Office of Professional Regulation.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: Turning to our election funds. These are grants that have been from the federal government, AHAVA EAC grants. At this moment, we're unsure about the reauthorization and stability of this. We've already seen a significant hit, which I'll talk about a little bit more, and Sarah will really get into finer detail. But I guess the take home is we can't rely on the federal government to support election work anymore, or certainly not in the way that they have in the past. So we have in our security grant 4,900,000.0 grant funds remaining. That includes the interest that has been earned. Our original grant was $9,000,000 This has funded our post election audit, and we'll continue to fund that in 2026. We use this for penetration testing, which is IT system testing. Very important to the state. And also, just a note here, one of the things that has also occurred under this administration is really the disillusionment of what we used to rely on in CISA. They used to have an election specific division. This is the Cyber Internet Security Administration within the Department of Homeland Security. They provided a lot of state support around election integrity and security. That support has essentially entirely disappeared. We have been working with our agency of digital services, which has been a very healthy partnership to do work around security of our election system, but we also need to pay other people to do testing. It's best to know about the problems before they become a problem. We also use this money to implement a more secure two factor authentication, including the use of YubiKeys, which are physical keys that get plugged into the computer for clerks to be able to log on to our election management system. Really state of the art security, very important. We a question.

[Rep. John Kascenska, Member]: Just real quick. What are the match requirements for all these grants that I'm listing?

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: It varies per grant. I believe it's usually 20%. The above.

[Rep. John Kascenska, Member]: Above it, man.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: Right, I

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: saw that. At this point, yeah.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: So depending on the grant changes.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: So

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: are you sure, at what point in time will you be sure these federal money will not come? That's one question. The other question is, so did you have any findings that did they tell you why they were stopping the the answer was all states being stopped the same way?

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: Is complete elimination of the program for every state in the nation. And we have heard that there will be more funds coming. There were more funds that came this year. And the secretary will go into this a little bit more, as will I. But where we used to receive $1,000,000 a year, now we are receiving $2.72. So it is a dramatic decrease. I think we can anticipate that that type of increase will continue going forward based on the conversations that we're hearing and the communications we're having with other secretaries of state. But it's a dramatic reduction. And, of course, it's very dependent on the federal process, which can get kind of gummed up right now.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: Homeland Security is part of the gummed up fight.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: That is correct. So we use that security grant also for training of town clerks and BCAs. And we also have been doing election day dry runs, which is very important.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: So I'm gonna point you for a second because Mike, who's budgetary this is, on the screen. Thank you, Mike, who has question.

[Rep. Michael Mrowicki, Member]: Thank you. Just to backtrack a little. In the news lately, the current president and his speaker of the house have been making without evidence continued claims of massive voter fraud, and, specifically, they've been talking about mail in ballot fraud. In your work in Vermont and with other secretaries of state, is there evidence of massive voter fraud as the president claims?

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: The short answer to that is no, there is not. And, you know, there are many, many ways and many, many layers that we could go into for me to help describe this to you. But, you know, the most important thing to remember is that in Vermont, we have two forty seven duly sworn town and city clerks for a population about the size of Boston. And these men and women serve their communities and and keep track of their voter registration lists in their communities. They remove people from the voter registration rolls when they've moved, when they've passed away, or when when people say, yes, please take me off the voter registration rolls. We also have investments in our voter portal within the new election management system that allows you to track your ballot on its way to you, and also see when your ballot was received and returned. And all of this is giving transparency into the election processes so that if there is an indication that something might be amiss, we have the ability to track that down. I hear stories from town and city clerks all the time that, you know, that might fit a narrative of voter fraud if you didn't listen to the whole story. So, you know, miss little missus Jones shows up on election day and says, I'm here. I you know, give me my ballot. The clerk says, well, you know, missus Jones, I see that you already voted. I did not, and I demand that I have my ballot. And it turns out that missus Jones did vote, and the clerk was able to pick her her ballot envelope with her signature on it out from the bin and show it to her. And she was aghast. She did not intentionally try to vote twice, but the clerk was on top of it. The clerk was not going to just hand another ballot to this person. These are all many, many examples that I could give you of times where our clerks have facilitated elections to make sure that Mrs. Jones indeed can cast a ballot, but that she's not being offered more than one ballot.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: Okay. The other two grants, the Title II Section two fifty one grant and the DoD Electronic Absentee Ballot Systems for Election grant, both of those are here just for awareness, but we no longer have any grant funds remaining in those grants. We have used all of those monies. So again, just to reemphasize the warning about election related federal funds, the federal government has historically funded about 60% of our election related efforts. The funds have been reduced significantly. We historically have received about $1,000,000 per year. This was reduced to $272,000 in 2025. We are not expecting to receive funds. And this is a revenue gap of 7 and 28,000 And those other two grants, again, have not been funded in some time. We don't expect funding to come through those grants in the near future. With that, I'm going to

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: turn it over to the secretary. So if you're following along, we are now on slide 11. We created this slide just this morning, because I wanted to be able to really paint a picture for you to see not only the decline in funding for election infrastructure, but the important contributions of general fund that support the work of our office in conducting elections with our town and city clerks. So the blue bars that you'll see are that HAVA Security Grant. You'll see back in 2018 and 2020, that was about $3,000,000 Starting in 'twenty two, 'twenty three, and 'twenty four, that was reduced to $1,000,000 As the deputy said, it's $272,000 in 2025, and we have a question mark there about what 2026 and beyond looks like. And so you will see that we are asking for general fund election support that is consistent with the General Fund ask from, you know, historically for the legislature to support the conducting of elections. We are requesting 1,100,000.0, which is comprised of 450,000 of that ongoing general fund historical annual support. And also, we are requesting 650,000 to help backfill that gap in the HAVA EAC grant, which that was a shortfall, as the deputy said, of 728,000. We are hoping that you all can help us with 650,000 of that. Is the 450,000 already in the budget? It should be, yes. Is 450,000

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: is already there, and the new money request is 650,000.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: Okay. Yeah.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I'm just looking at this and I find this really scary. Me both. And I'm just kind of trying to imagine what's down the road, right?

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: How,

[Unidentified Committee Member]: say, two years from now, when there's no carry forward money from any of the grants that you have, if in fact this money from the federal government dries up, what will the general fund need to kick in? And is there technical assistance and or expertise of some kind that is tied to this federal, being connected to this federal money in the past, but that you no longer benefit from? Are you on your own? I guess, is kind of what I'm saying. Are we on our own?

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: It appears that we are on our own for now. And, you know, this federal administration has been very focused on elections and talking a lot about elections. So we certainly hope that at some point, know, calmer heads prevail, and it occurs to them that because states conduct state and federal elections, there should be some federal money sent to the states to support that work. We are unclear of when they will come around to that conclusion. But that has historically been the reason why this money has been appropriated to the states, because the federal government has put requirements for federal elections on the states and has helped to fund it. If I

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: could just say something, because I think it's important to think about. The attacks on our system are the same as the attacks on California's system. We have the same foreign actors trying to get into our election system as California. California already because, I mean, we're very grateful for the small state minimum. That's been historically very helpful for us. But California receives a lot more money from the federal government than the state of Vermont does. But the costs of protecting our systems are the same. So this is a space where we really suffer from having a small population when we're receiving money from the federal government. If we don't receive money from the federal government, we still have the same burden to Vermonters to protect our systems from foreign actors. And we know and see that that is happening now, and it's going to uptick as we get towards the election. That's a given. And so we need to make sure that we have all of the systems in place, all the checks and balances, to make sure that that doesn't happen. And then we also have and I just want to give the secretary a lot of credit. She goes around the state talking to pretty much any group that asks her to talk about election integrity and how important our elections are. I think the burden on this office to instill trust in elections right now is heavier than it has ever been. There's a lot of work that we need to do to help Vermonters feel like their elections are as secure as they actually are. And so that takes a lot of intention and ultimately money. I

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: have John and then Wayne.

[Rep. John Kascenska, Member]: So at the end of the day, we've done everything we can do within what we know here, that these match requirements here, we don't know what we're going to get, if anything, to kind of fill the match.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: You can't speak up, I'm sorry.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: Is this a little loud? Right beside you. So

[Rep. John Kascenska, Member]: at the end of the day, we've done everything we can do here to make sure our match requirements are met here. There's a gap here. We don't know if we're gonna get anything to fill that here, and you really have no indication at this stage of the game when you might be notified of what we may get, if anything whatsoever.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: Yes. Yes. Congress has been having some budget battles throughout this past

[Rep. John Kascenska, Member]: year. So our great hope is to continue to move ahead with what we can with what we have currently here, try to fill the gap as it comes about, but we

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: don't really know when we're gonna find this out.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: Was there

[Rep. John Kascenska, Member]: any kind of target date whatsoever to let states know?

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: They were negotiating it the last several months, and I think it's now very much tied up in this budget discussion. And I'm not clear what will come out

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: of that. We haven't heard an update that provides clarity yet. As the member from Burlington rightly pointed out, we're holding our own right now. But if we get two years down the road, and the status quo continues the way it is now, then we're going to have some tough conversations that we will need to have with the legislature on how we provide that continuous funding for the election security infrastructure, for the staff people who help train our town and city clerks and maintain our systems.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: I have a question. So I'm a little confused. 2022, so I had about two thirds drop in the total number of years, Tahoe. That was a previous administration. Did anybody agree with what that driver was at that time?

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: Terms of the grant shifted. You'll see in 2018 and 2020, we received 3,000,000. And that was the initial portion of that grant. And then it stopped being $3,000,000 every two years and started being 1,000,000 every year. The terms changed and the amount changed. And that was done at the federal level, not within any decision of the Vermont Secretary of State.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: I understand. I just wondered if they gave you any guidance or any indication as to why they chose to do that back in 'twenty two.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: Maybe they did. I don't know. We weren't in our current positions back then, so I couldn't say for sure. But I suspect it has to do with front loading some of these programs with a big tranche of money to begin with and then tapering to a more consistent level ongoing. The Help America Vote ads It's is

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: created some systems so that initial money would be $3,000,000 a year. Once those are billed, they're dropped to down to 1,000,000.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: The source of the grant, the Help America Vote Act, had a lot of requirements for states that we needed to get up to speed to do. Vermont included accessible voting machines and a centralized election management system, quite a few elements. And so there was a large amount of money spent just on that work. And then we sort of moved into maintenance phase. But for us, maintenance phase is that small state minimum, that $1,000,000 And that is what has dramatically changed.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: Have those discussions with the

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: Yes. I mean, as

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: much as we can have those discussions with the feds, that is true.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: We certainly let our congressional delegation know the importance of this, particularly that small state minimum.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Sure that you are not letting this rest. What happens if if you don't get the $650,000

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: Well, then that two year timeframe that your colleague from Burlington alluded to might become a shorter time period. I mean, we have ongoing annual expense that needs to be met in order to

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: So what wouldn't you be able to do?

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: There isn't much within the spending of our elections division that is discretionary. We have to do all of those functions. We have to equip and train our town and city clerks. We have to prepare ballots. We have to take in candidate filings. We have to maintain the election management system, which is our voter registration system, our online voter portal, and all of the associated systems within that.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: It's helpful for us to know what the risk is. That's why I'm asking the question. Yeah. Seems to me, had existed

[Britney Wilson, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Public Service]: I think it's 2,000. And we got money, the $3,000,000 level all the way through the 2000s until that went into all those requirements, improvements.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: I'm using my phone, a friend, to talk with our budget staff, and she's nodding that, yes, it was consistent funding for many, many years. Yes. And that helped a lot. Yes.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Was almost one time money, but it extended over a large period of time. And then the small state is sort of just your maintenance. Major

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: systems, major upgrades in Vermont occurred during that time.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Initially, it was for everybody.

[Britney Wilson, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Public Service]: It was for several plus. Yes.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: Turning away from election requests, I'm going to speak about VAN's general fund allocation request. We have been very fortunate to have the VAN grant housed within our office, administered by us. And the goal really is to help community media centers meet the needs and interests of all corners of the state. VAM, I hope you hear from them. They have an amazing mission. But they really are trying to promote and advance public educational and government access television. So a lot of the core function of democracy is to know what your governmental bodies are doing, what your educational groups are doing. My son just won an orchestra contest, and he composed a piece, was there and recorded it. If there's a public meeting on something, Van is usually there recording it. So these are things that are really important to civic health and to government transparency. They operate more than 80 local cable channels and through 24 centers. So I hope you hear from them. We support their request for an increase. Last year, they received 1.35. This year, we're supporting the 1.8. But they have a long term goal of a more sustainable grant level. And the important thing to remember here is a lot of this work, when we all paid for cable, was paid through cable fees, and that is disappeared. That is the thing

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: The gas tax.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Go ahead. I just I mean, my perception is that there is no other, I mean, this kind transparent window into local

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: politics and policy making, select boards, school board, all of that, there isn't a replacement for this. It's not going to get in I mean, there isn't anybody else doing this, Brad. That's correct. The closest replacement are the next two slides, which are also asks for us to support. But yeah, there's a triad of media people who provide this sort of access to government and transparency to government. Without those three groups, no, there's not coverage of what happens at the select board. And that puts Vermonters at a strong disadvantage, Because a lot of the decisions that are made at the local level are the decisions that are most impactful to Vermonters every day. And as we're talking about increasing trust in democracy and increasing trust in government, Vermonters trust local government more than they trust state government and a heck of a lot more than they trust the federal government. So building that trust at the local level is important. The next request is the community radio request, which they have come in partnership with VAN. These are 10 community radio stations that last year, they did receive money. Oh, no, this is a new request, totally new. And they're requesting 90,000 to support community radio. The community radio stations are here. And you'll see that they're pretty well distributed across the state. These are the radios that a lot of folks have on in the background all the time. And again, they cover topics that are not covered on VPR. Even though VPR is our local public radio, they don't get into as deeper topics as these community radio folks do.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: See, conservative uncanny puts drift.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: We'd like to start one.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: You have one in Richmond.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: Richmond's not affected. The

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: next one is our local civic journalism awards. There was a press conference on this yesterday. We were very proud to host that program. This is a partnership that was done with the Vermont Community Foundation. The legislature awarded $50,000 and they matched it, the Vermont Community Foundation. And then there was an independent panel convened by UVM's Center for Community News, and 16 recipients were awarded money yesterday. And the press conference was really quite powerful because the use of the funds, even though some folks are receiving only $4,000 they spoke really of what high value that was for them. The printing costs have gone up. The mailing costs have gone up. Gas has gone up. All of these things add up, and $4,000 is a game changer for many of these organizations. It was really quite endearing.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: So slide 15 is just a distillation of all that we talked about, and we wanted to put this together on one slide under the category of democracy media grants. These are grants that really just passed through our office that we are honored to be able to help facilitate, and they are really truly investments in making sure that Vermonters can stay civically engaged in their communities, know what government is doing on their behalf. And so I also wanted to put in another picture from that press conference, because the Barton Chronicle not only showed up to celebrate their award, but they brought us print newspapers, too. So two issues to catch up

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: on for the Barton Chronic.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: There are four position requests out of our office this year. One is for records information management specialist, the RIM specialist. That would be someone within the state records and archives administration that really would be focused on helping statewide efforts, records, record efforts around the state. Again, how state agencies manage their records is critically important. And probably most important at this moment in time is the building of IT systems, how IT systems are contemplated, how they're built, how records get stored in them, how records get taken out of them. That's critical importance. And this position would help us focus in on that and help with state IT builds. So we are really excited about the possibility of this position and really need that in order to get engaged in this level of work. The next is another position that we're hoping will be put in the big bill. This would be for another business services administrator. Again, this is a team of six. We have a director and five business services administrators. That team is stretched beyond capacity right now. We have a new system. The new system has taken and streamlined a great amount of work. But we are at the limit of what a system can do. And we need another human to help answer calls, to be able to help people understand what the differences are between business registrations, to be able to problem solve with people. I mean, it's almost like a therapy session sometimes on these calls. If you're a small business, you started a small business, you have 1,000 questions. We can answer maybe five of them, but we hear all 1,000. And we try and get people to the right places. So this position is really critical for us. Our director answered the phone for two hours earlier this week, and he handled over 30 calls in two hours. So the volume is really, really high. We also have some records management work that we need to do in this division. We used to receive only paper that needs to be digitalized and put into our system. We're seeing this position as a really key part of that work and choosing to do that with a person that is on our team as opposed to hiring a contractor. The other two positions are in S206. This is the early childhood educator bill. This was a topic that was talked about last session. It's currently on the Senate side. We'll see. Hopefully, it makes progress over to the House side. This is a really important initiative of our office introducing licensure to early childhood educators. We did a sunrise and found that it was necessary to protect the youngest Vermonters in the state.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: So do we somewhere have

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: a list of all of the requests in one spot? Or is it all the way through? It's just the things

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: We will do that, but

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: Oh, we didn't. So if you fast forward through all of the spreadsheets that will help you with your late night reading list, you can go to slide 26 and see that this is a list of the differences between the governor's recommend and our current ask.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Two

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: categories. One is those democracy media grants for journalism, radio, and the Vermont Access Network. And then, of course, the election support, which is that 450,000 for ongoing support and backfilling some of the shortfall from the decrease in the federal grants. Okay. So two things.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: I thought when I asked about the $4.50, you said it was in the budget already, that $4.50 is not in the governor's budget.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: That's a really good question. It was. It was removed.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: The Zoom top results?

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: What was it? It wasn't attached to people, it was work that needed to be What was the $4.50 for?

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: That is the ongoing level of support. Does that mean people, or does that mean

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: I'm trying to figure out what's attached to the

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: four fifty for doing all the We have historically received that level of support from the general assembly, and we have been using that. It hasn't ever been dedicated to, like, you use this money for this purpose from the general assembly to Okay. Help with whole

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: All right. So then there's that.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: And then the other thing is this doesn't include the four positions that you just talked about.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: The two positions that we're asking for in the big bill, we believe we can absorb into our Secretary of State Fund budget. The other two positions, the early childhood S-two Okay. The S-two six, there is a general fund allocation there In that bill. In that bill, and it's moving on the Senate side.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: Okay. So is the ban in the Governor's recommendation?

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: The ban is the 1.35 but not the increase.

[Rep. John Kascenska, Member]: All

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: of these things on the back page are not in the Governor's recommendation.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: And I'm sorry I Yes. And I'm sorry I gave you the wrong information about the $4.50. It was when we submitted it to the governor, so that was my misunderstanding.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: We're all

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: confused, so that's okay. Now maybe we're not.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: Perhaps we'll get clarity. The full clarity.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: That's very helpful. So I just want to also point out that we've provided you with a little bit of ray of sunshine here. These are the fifth graders, the seven fifth graders who and also on the front of our packet here, who were finalists in the kid governor program and are serving currently as kid governor and her cabinet. So it was a wonderful fall, and it's going to be a wonderful winter and spring helping these kids do good things in their communities.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: It's very exciting. And we have a woman kid governor. I know.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: A young woman kid governor.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: Interestingly, all of the states who participated in kid governor this year, so it's Oklahoma, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Vermont, and Oregon, maybe? All five states, the kid governors are girls. Amazing. You know? Yeah. Mean, alright. Never know.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: Give us hope.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Maybe they'll solve all our problems for us, wouldn't that be nice? Okay, thank you both very much. I appreciate you coming in, thanks for all the good work you're doing. Really glad you're there. Thank you. We're not going to take a break, We're running late.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: I'm going to go up. You go to your seat.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens, Member]: I didn't meet you,

[Rep. John Kascenska, Member]: Dave. Thanks so much.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: The burial bell, and I let them know it was grave discussion. There was a lot of coughing. I'll do my best to represent the meeting.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Want to meet you, Dave. So we'll have Wendy join us from New Brunswick Lakers, and we just back up the last one by fifteen minutes. And Windham, so appreciate your people. Course, will be brief.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: How's that? That's

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: impossible. I will admit that I am a morning person, and I would be probably much better at 05:30 in the morning doing this, 03:30 in the afternoon. But I will try to rally. Unlike the Secretary of State, I have no slide deck with photos. I have a bunch of numbers and my voice. Oh, have a pie chart, yes, but no photos.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Is there a pie chart? Yeah, on this Sunday. Up here it is. You might like charts too.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: When you're ready, introduce yourself. Okay, I'm sorry you're waiting for me. I just want to see if the finance director is online. Oh, great. Good, good. Tracy Badeau is our new finance director. Do you want to wave to the Tracy, Wendy,

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: introduce yourself for the record?

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: Yes, I will. Wendy Knight, the Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery. So I am going to run through the budget. If I can't answer anything that I think Tracy might help, I will

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: ask

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: her

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: to And so most people here, like, the highlights and accomplishments and new initiatives and all those things.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: Should I start there, than the

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Yeah, we don't need to start with the numbers.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: I provided an overview, which is just really what we've been doing what the department does. So you all know that we manage two enterprise funds, we run two businesses, and we're the regulatory agency for sports wagering, tobacco, liquor and lottery. We have a public law enforcement team, and they do our compliance and our enforcement. We run eight zero two spirits agencies. We have 84. The new initiatives there are, what we did last year, we implemented that, if you remember, the B2B website, and that was the online ordering process for our on premise licensees. Instead of walking into a store or faxing or calling and placing an order, which is quite antiquated, we set up what we're calling eight zero two Spirits Connect, and that was the B2B website for those licensees. So we were able to launch that in the fall, and that's working quite well. And we have a whole strategy with ProVee, who is the vendor that we selected, to what we call go to market, so to encourage more of the on premise licensees to use that and to educate the agents. So that's proceeding in a nice fashion. The other initiative that we have been doing over the last couple of years is opening up additional Kiosk stores. So kiosk store is a smaller eight zero two Spirits store. It tends to carry mostly Vermont products and then top 50 products, and it is not selling to on premise licensees. So it's meant for walk in customers. We have been putting these in places where we've identified coverage gaps and in places where we have traffic from tourists, primarily. So we had one in West Addison we opened up. We have one in Puichi that we're looking at. And our newest initiative is to open some of these near ski resorts and the welcome centers, because we know we have a very robust tourist economy in Vermont, and so we want to take advantage of them coming up and not stopping by other states and bringing their alcohol when they're coming up here for a weekend or a week. We want them to shop at an eight zero Spirits store.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: And

[Rep. Thomas Stevens, Member]: are those fully licensed, or are they still run by independent businesses, or are these state owned?

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: So, our model in Vermont, all the eight zero two Spirit stores are locally independent owned. We do not own and run any of the eight zero two Spirit stores, unlike New Hampshire, for example, or Pennsylvania. They have big warehouse stores that are owned and operated by the state. We don't do that. We contract I want to make a distinction between when you say license. So an eight zero two Spirit store is a second class license, meaning a retail store. So they receive a second class license. If you want to be an eight zero two Spirit store, it's done through a competitive bid process, and then we have a contractual relationship with the eight zero two Spirit store.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: So, second class license, that always used to be beer and wine.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: Second class license is anything that sells alcohol, right? So, if you're an eight zero two Spirit store, you also are selling beer, wine, and distilled spirits.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: Yeah, now, in the old age places.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: Yeah, so I'm just explaining how it is. How did that change? Yeah, I have no idea. So a second class license allows you to sell at a retail store any kind of alcohol beverage. The way the eight zero two Spirits is, it's a contract to just sell the spirit. There is no eight zero two Spirits store as a standalone entity. There's no eight zero two Spirits store that just sells spirits, is what I'm getting at. They're also selling you know, they can be convenience stores, they can be grocery stores. So, they're also selling other types of alcohol and other types of consumer products.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: And they also use your electronic system.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: An eight zero two Spirits store is the only one that has our point of sale system. That's why when you go into a convenience store or a wine store that sells beer, wine, cider, RTDs, and spirits, you have one payment point of sale hardware for the spirits, and then you have to go to the other for your wine or beer or cider. Yeah. So those initiatives are going well. I'm hoping that when I'm here next year, we can talk about how much how well they did, because we're just rolling out the eight zero two Spirits kiosk stores. We had some additional lottery vending machines, and so we're putting those in some of those tourist areas, as I mentioned as well, again, to take advantage of the tourists that are coming in. On the eight zero two Spirits front, because we want people to shop at eight zero two Spirits stores, and we don't want them to load up in other states on their way here, or have Vermonters, God forbid, cross state lines and go somewhere else and buy alcohol. We want to talk about the advantages of buying your spirits from an eight zero two spirit store and what that does. It benefits general fund, it benefits that local business. A lot of these are family run businesses, and it benefits the community. So we have an advertising brand campaign that we've launched this year that's new to sort of encourage people to shop local and what shopping at an eight zero two Spirits does for the state. Online sports wagering, we are on track to meet our FY '26 projection. We're continually monitoring that. And the key budget issues, I think, is that we've been talking about this for three years. Lottery sales are down nationally. Liquor sales are down nationally. And we're seeing that reflected here in Vermont as well.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: Move it down. Yes.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Correct. Any questions? Yeah, any?

[Britney Wilson, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Public Service]: Will, before I go through

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: the ups and downs, because I just talked about projections, if I can, let me just talk about the FY 'twenty six transfer projections. Would that be helpful to you to understand?

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: I

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: have twenty sixth.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: At the end of the year?

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: At the end of FY20.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Okay. That's some information and it's a separate document. Oh, this? How much the revenue ends up coming back? Correct.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: Right. So we talked about this last year, too, remember? We talked about how starting back in 2018, there was a change in the GASB standards, and we ended up running a deficit. And so prior to me So what we did 2025 is we zeroed out that deficit. And so I'm gonna start with 2025, right?

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: So we put, like, 9,000,000 or 7,000,000 Yes. To the fund to make

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: only transferred on the liquor control fund. We transferred $9,500,000 And what we zeroed out is the $6.953 So we took $6,900,000 and instead of that being also transferred to the general fund, that was used to zero at the deficit. So if you add those two, if you're looking for comparisons of year over year, that would have been really 16,500,000.0, not 9, you You see know, obviously you see the trend that Starting from, let's look at 2023, right, we had a gross revenue of $104,900,000 almost $105,000,000 That was a 2% increase from the previous year.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: This is on the liquor side, for a Correct,

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: I'm not on the liquor column. And then you start to see that the next year, 2024, it goes down 2%. And then this year, of course, we zeroed that out. And so if you're looking at comparisons, see that it was basically flat. So the revenue in 2024 was $102,000,000 and 2025 was 101,000,000 So a little flat there. The amounts that were transferred in 'twenty three and statute in the bill that allowed the RTDs to go to the private sector. And that was a negotiation point. RTD meaning

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: ready to I'm

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: sorry, ready to drink. Yeah, the low ABV, ready to drink cocktails. Not in

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: a convenience store. Correct.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: Now you can buy them, they're not sold in a native to spirit store exclusively, they're sold in convenience stores, etc. So when we look at the lottery fund, we see that in 2023, dollars 159,000,000 in revenue, I'm rounding, obviously, from ticket sales. That was a 5% increase from the prior year. Then you jump to 2024 and you see a 6% increase, almost 169,000,000. And then 2025, it declined 8%. And that's reflective of what we're seeing nationally, is there's inflation. We had lower jackpots in 2025. So if there's lower jackpots, people tend not to buy those Powerball jackpot tickets. Sports wagering, obviously, just have the last two years. The gross revenue for FY 'twenty four consisted of the revenue share we earned in those six month period, dollars 3,500,000.0, plus the operator fees. There's $1,650,000 in operator fees. We collect 550,000 from each operator once every three years.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Okay. And the $3,200,000 what happened

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: to That's transferred to the general fund. Sports wagering is transferred to the general fund. Madam Chair, you have a

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Go ahead, Bennington.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: Did choose to change the jackpot numbers instead of marketing things, or was that somehow

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: We don't control the jackpot numbers.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Mega Millions just they didn't win.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: Powerball, Mega Millions. So, if they don't have a winner, the jackpot, jackpot rose.

[Rep. Michael Nigro, Member]: Okay. So, that there wasn't a choice of of because I think it in some of them, choose to pay out this, right?

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: There has to be. Vermont Lottery doesn't choose the jackpots or the prizes. They just sell the tickets.

[Rep. Michael Nigro, Member]: I understand. I was thinking of the other things you do for the children. A lot of chickens and other things like that. And it's controlled by the way.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: Controlled in what way? Like you're saying the price structure?

[Rep. Michael Nigro, Member]: Yeah, price structure. I mean, it's a marketing thing. I'm talking marketing. Do you manipulate any of the pay for marketing purposes?

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: We don't manipulate anything. Do you adjust things?

[Rep. Michael Nigro, Member]: Or do you No, I don't.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: I'm sorry, sir. I don't understand.

[Rep. Michael Nigro, Member]: Yeah, so if you get a product, you get a scratch up to get you You pay out a certain amount if you win that scratch up. You ever change those values for any purpose, for marketing purposes. This ticket's gonna pay out $1,000 This ticket's going to pay out $20

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: So do we market those differently? There's different kinds of scratch

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: tickets. And you must buy them from like a third party vendor.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: Yes. Yes. Yes. We have a vendor that we buy the tickets from. We're not involved in any way in the creation of the tickets. For the odds or the jackpot.

[Rep. John Kascenska, Member]: I think that answers your question.

[Rep. Michael Nigro, Member]: Yes. And

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: we don't manipulate you. I

[Rep. Michael Nigro, Member]: wasn't suggesting that. It's too clear. Thank you, Bill.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: You're welcome. I'm glad. Thank you for helping me understand understand the the gentleman's question. Alright. Now I've gotten sidetracked. We're on sports wagering. So that was the first year. In FY '25, the revenue was, you'll see the gross revenue was $6,300,000 This was the first year that we started to collect the registration for fantasy sports. The bill had called for a transfer from the Secretary of State's office to the department and the sports wagering bill. So that 6,300,000.0 includes 80,000 from fantasy sports registration. Okay, so you were asking, Marty, what are we projected And I'm gonna ask straight, what are we projecting for FY 'twenty seven transfers? Or 'twenty six?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: No, I don't think I was

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: even asking

[Unidentified Committee Member]: that.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: I just thought

[Unidentified Committee Member]: the committee would want to know the history of the MCS.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: Yes, more revenues-

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yes, yes. The education fund and to the-

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: Thank you. So- The law can ask that. The June FY 'twenty six, obviously, we're in that now. I'm just gonna let you know that we're projected to transfer 16,800,000.0 into the liquor fund, from the liquor fund to the general fund. We're projected to transfer from the lottery fund to the education fund, 32,700,000.0. And we're projected for to transfer, from sports wagering to the general fund at 6,680,000.00. And Lisa, sorry, Tracy has the FY 'twenty seven projections, I believe. Yes, Tracy?

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: I don't have them up right this second, but I can

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: That's fine.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: It's all right. You know what? We're gonna follow-up on that. That's

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: I don't

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: get a language, actually. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'm sorry, I just don't have that. Any questions before I go through the ups and downs? Are you going to talk about new initiatives for year? We don't have any budget initiatives. I have no new initiatives involved.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Course, of course.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: So we have a policy initiative, which is online lottery. And so we're working with the policy committees right now, seeking specific statutory authorization for online lottery, and that's the purchase of a lottery ticket on the phone or a website. And so the way I've described it is we do a lot of things now on the internet and the phone. We traditionally would do banking at a retail, bank. And you would go in and you would What's it called? A teller. It's called a teller, right? You would interact with your teller. And now we have things called ATM machines, and then we have online banking. So if you're someone like me, I do all my banking online. Rarely do I go into a bank. The way it works now with lottery, it is a retail product. So you go into a convenience store or a lottery agent, and you can go to the clerk and you can buy the lottery tickets over the counter, you or can go to a self-service vending machine. And what we're seeking for is the authorization to The next evolution of that is the phone and the Internet. There's no budget associated with that. No budget asked. It's just an initiative.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Okay. There'll be legislative a bill?

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: There's no attached to that. No budget asks. Since we run businesses, we're always looking to innovate. We're always looking at data. We have an excellent data analyst who's looking at performance metrics, looking at how we can be more efficient. We know as revenues are going down, what we need to do is save money and be cost conscious. So we're constantly looking at containing our costs and then operating more efficiently. How do we do things so that it takes less time and we do things in a way that are streamlined and more efficient? So that's really, I would say, our priority for the next year, is really efficiency and operational excellence. Want to operate in an excellent way and efficient way. The other priority that has been my priority since I've been at the department for almost five years is to have us move into a larger, newer warehouse combined office space. We are operating right now in three locations. It makes it very difficult to operate as an integrated department. Formerly, you know, needs to be Vermont Lottery Commission, Division of Liquor Control. For the last few years, we've been really operating as an integrated department. So that continues to be a priority for me.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens, Member]: And it's been years since we've studied at getting a new warehouse. That debt is that we're just going to stay there?

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: We don't need a study.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens, Member]: If there was money put aside, years

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: the Yes, I know that. We just did another study and I went ahead and did another study with the Vermont certified public management program. So we're all set. We know what we need. We sent out an RFP a couple years ago. It was the height of the cost. It was way too expensive. We put that on pause. Now we're looking at existing warehouse spaces. So I'm just moving through that process.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens, Member]: I said it's centuries coming soon, so just how long it seems we've been talking about.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: I know, I know, I know. Sometimes things in state government don't move as quickly as we would like.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: There's somebody who worked here years ago in economic services who talked about moving at the speed of government. Yes. And

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: it is very challenging when you're trying to run businesses within the structure of state government. Welcome to my world.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: Okay. There

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: you go. You can write one and play it on your banjo, Wayne.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: Madam Chair, would you like me to move on to the ups and downs?

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Sure. Is there anything

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: new or unusual or In the ups and downs? Yeah. We're submitting a budget that's a million dollars less than last year. Because of that ADS thing, right? Yes, yes. Yeah. Well, also, we've tried to be cost conscious. Which made a bucket only asked for what we need. So, so I think that's the unusual piece The of this rest is typical salaries. Correct. Things are, you know, ADS, there's some more things that are a little more expensive at ADS and how they're renegotiating stuff. Some things went down. We have a little bit more money because we gave people promotions and reclassified their positions to pay them more. I strongly advocate to make sure the team has the compensation, the tools and the resources and the support that they need so they can continue to do excellent work for us. Yeah, I mean It's pretty straightforward. If you have any other questions I mean, there's software things we need to do in terms of technology for the education. You're required, if you have a liquor license, a seller or a server, you need to take your certification, your education. We require that. I'd mentioned we are doing some more brand awareness around eight zero two Spirits and Vermont Lottery that goes to the Ed Funds. We're doing a little bit more TV advertising than we normally do.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: That's that. Any other questions? That was a good idea, Marty, too. Thought people would, because they always ask, know, yeah, that's really helpful. And then next year, all you have to do is set another ear onto it once you've set it up. So great. Thank you. I'm not seeing any more problems. Thanks very much.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: Appreciate your

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: thoughts on the truth. We're running a little late. Okay.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: Glad you could stay with us. I always welcome a moment to sit and reflect.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: There you go. Yeah. Isn't the whole ball of sales. What is these numbers?

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: This is our So, I'm sorry, remind me your name.

[Rep. David Yacovone, Member]: I'm Dave.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: Dave, okay, Dave. Dave's asking about the pie chart.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: I was out of the room.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: That's our budget. The governor's recommended FY27 budget is $17,000,000 and change. That's the dividing it by the funds. Correct. You're welcome.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Okay, any other questions? Think

[Rep. Thomas Stevens, Member]: we're good.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: Great, thank you. Thank you very much.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Do you guys want five minutes or do you want to go straight through?

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: What's your preference? Through. Go straight through. I'm gonna get up. Okay. Please go. Okay. So do what you need to do. I gotta go. Madam chair, they didn't do my bill our bill. Yeah. They postponed it.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: They're giving you more time to tell jokes about it.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: Well, I told her. I was up all night tossing and turning and excited about the presentation.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: So they postponed it until tomorrow?

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: Yeah. Okay.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: All right. Thank you. So we have Public Service Department here? Yes.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: Great. Thank you. Now we're sort of back on the

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: old schedule, so okay. Impressive. Just never know how things are going to go. So, have you

[Britney Wilson, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Public Service]: been into our committee room before? I haven't physically been in. Last year, think it was me.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: Last year.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Yeah. Okay, great. All right. So, welcome, if you'd like to introduce

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: yourselves and, tell us about

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: your budget. Do we have handouts for this? Did you Okay. I just want to find it.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: Afternoon. You. Britney Wilson, Deputy Commissioner at the Department. I'm Patty Laroche. I'm the Financial Manager.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: Nice to see you both. Nice see

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: you all.

[Britney Wilson, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Public Service]: Thanks for having us in. All right. Do you all need a minute to pull up the presentation that we've sent along?

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Yeah, what they need to look at.

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: One sec. Oh, and Scott is you're here for this Scott.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Yes. I wasn't sure the people felt like you just come and find it restful. We have representative Campbell who also We have fans. Thank you. Exactly. So if you have any questions, just let me know. All right. Are we ready now? Everybody's set? Let's go.

[Britney Wilson, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Public Service]: You can orient us to where you're taking us. Great. So as you have in front of you, a presentation from the department here. And we'll just kick off pretty high level, talk about Department of Public Service, what we do. We represent the public interest in energy, telecom, water, and wastewater utility matters. We do that in a variety of ways, which we can talk a little bit about. And the way we do those things is structured over several divisions. We have eight divisions. So if you flip the next page, you'll see a high level

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: Slide four.

[Britney Wilson, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Public Service]: Oh, slide four, thank you. High level org chart that outlines the divisions. On slide five, there's a quick summary of each of those divisions and what they do. There's quite a few words there. I don't know that you want me to read through those and summarize, but please ask any questions if you have specific ones about any of the divisions. But we'll get into a little bit more details as we start running through the other slides.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: So if people are mad at their cable company, would call the Public Advocacy Division?

[Britney Wilson, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Public Service]: They would call the CAPI Division. CAPI. Might call the PA Division, but they would probably be referred to the CAPI Division. We have some great folks there that are on the front lines answering phone calls and emails and helping the public navigate those utility issues.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: I get questions about that. So that's good for me to know. We can find the numbers up on your website.

[Britney Wilson, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Public Service]: So if we want to get down to slide 10, because those other slides are really the narrative about what our divisions and the department do, We can take a look at the Public Service Department achievements over fiscal 'twenty six. I'll just point out a couple of things here. The Telecommunications Division, I would say one big effort was the testing, the drive tests that we do for cellular voice and data services across the state. So some of that work is done by our team and contracted out. 13,000 miles were driven to test.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: I remember the last time that happened. If we

[Britney Wilson, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Public Service]: want, can we see this map online? It is. So it's published online. You can check, I think, four different providers. So you can say, I have AT and T. Where do I have service in Vermont? And so it's a really great next slide, 12. This is the CAPI division I was just speaking about, Consumer Affairs and Public Information. This slide shows a little bit of the high level numbers that that division does for work. So the people that have contacted, many cases are closed, how many investigations happen. The next slide

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Wait, just a second there. It looks like you've gone from a high of 6,200 down to 2,600. That's great. Is this cable bills, or is this other things as well? What are the general topics of complaint that you mostly think you get?

[Britney Wilson, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Public Service]: I think it's probably well, I'd probably be guessing, but I think it's cable and then utility, yeah. Cable and then utility fuel

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: or something like that.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: Like most service problems. Yeah,

[Britney Wilson, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Public Service]: or there's an error on my bill and I can't get them to answer me about it. They range kind of all the typical questions and concerns you probably get in your email. Oh, that's a good point. So, Patty was just pointing out 2021, that high number pandemic.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Right, that's what I figured everybody was watching, paying attention.

[Britney Wilson, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Public Service]: Everybody needing more and better.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: And then you had an audit from the audit.

[Britney Wilson, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Public Service]: Yeah, next slide is the audit, the CAPI audit. You may have seen this in the news, but the state auditor's office did an audit of CAPI and the work that they do to help customers. Overall, the audit found that the department and the division in particular does a great job with resolving those issues. The areas they pointed out for improvement were around written procedure and process. So we're going to work on those. Good constructive feedback from the auditor's office on that. But overall, great news from my standpoint to know the team is really doing the work and getting it done. So we do a better job at the procedure and the metrics. Yes. But overall, we're helping people in resolving issues. That's great. Next slide, the Division of Efficiency and Energy Resources. They did a few potential studies over the past fiscal year, but then I would point to the EEU DRP proceeding, which is the Energy Efficiency Utility Demand Resource Plan process. That's a three year budget process that the department does with the energy efficient sea utilities in front of the Public Utility Commission. And at the end of the day, the PUC will set these budgets for the EUs. But that is a lengthy and important process. And so all that planning work for the next performance period was done in the prior fiscal year. So a lot of good work. The planning division, a couple of highlights. There's been some important workshops around grid resilience. There's been a lot of work at the regional level and working with ISO New England and other New England states in trying to get ISO to host an independent reviewer. And so there's also been some work done internally at the department to move forward a small data project. The department's been wanting to do for several years. And so that's just for our ability to better collect and use and analyze data. And so that's some of the good work that Vision's been doing.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: So you brought up grid resilience. I don't know if this is actually your department or not, but I've been hearing about grid issues across the country as we either have more storms or more people are going electric, whether it's electric stoves and dryers and heat pump, whatever. It's like the vehicles, it's all the other stuff. And there's worries about the capacity and the ability of the grid to handle that. I don't know if that's an issue with ISO New England or whether it's more of a national thing, but

[Britney Wilson, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Public Service]: Well, I guess I would say it's a regional thing, right? And so ISA New England is definitely the entity that's keeping the closest eye on that. And thankfully, we're not seeing the same problems in New England as we are in other regions.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: So are you kind of keeping some oversight of that, or is

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: that the PUC that's doing that? So ISO New England, but

[Britney Wilson, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Public Service]: then there's a role for the department to play and certainly feeds into our thinking and our initiatives and what we're doing in Vermont and

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: how we plan. We

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: have a couple of minutes, but I'm wondering if we can just

[Britney Wilson, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Public Service]: Want me to jump right to the

[Wendy Knight, Commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery]: Yeah, well, let's see.

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: Why don't we come back? To what? Don't have time for her. No. So either you can hang out for like twenty minutes and we'll be back and we can finish up or we can call you back another time. I'm sorry about this.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Secretary of State]: This is part of our

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: life we cannot give you. I just asked

[Rep. Wayne Laroche, Member]: a question. Well,

[Rep. Robin Scheu, Chair]: you. Think it's the thing the lawyer is a bill that Anne had an amendment on. So what's your preference? Would you like to hang out and then just finish up this afternoon? Yeah.