Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: Good afternoon. This is the House Appropriations Committee. It is Monday, February 9, and we are here right now to talk about the Department of Public Safety. So, our guests please come out and take a seat. How You many of you have a whole compliment here, I see.

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: Yes, ma'am. Good afternoon, committee. Madam Chair, we are here from commissioner of the Department of Public Safety. And I have brought with me today several of our directors. I have director Rick Hallenbeck from admin and finance, and he will be your cruise director today for most of what you need to talk about. Also with me in person is director Michael D'Rocher from the Division of Fire Safety. Thank you. Director Eric Foran from Vermont Emergency Management. And the director, colonel Matt Birmingham from the state police, and the deputy director, lieutenant colonel Sean Loan. And on the screen, director Jeffrey Wallin from the Vermont Crime Information Center is here. Director Lisa Milot from the Division of Animal Welfare is here. And Doctor. Trish Conti, who is the director of the Vermont Forensic Lab, is with us. So that is most of our divisions. Maybe we're missing one. I believe we're missing radio technology, but we can certainly field any questions that come up on that line. So with that, I'm going to let Rick drive the bus, unless you have specific things you want to jump to.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: No, I think we have your presentation electronically also, the person's have a printed copy. So I would suggest we just start right in and we obviously want to know about the highlights of the department, what has happened in the last year, and then at some point we want to talk about numbers.

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: Sure, thank you, Madam Vice Chair. I have the budget presentation that I can share, if that's alright. It looks like that worked okay. Okay. Yeah. Let me just adjust the sizing here. Okay. You're

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: gonna take a look at the crosswalks?

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: Yes, if that's If

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: you want, we can talk about the department first. It's totally up to you. I just figured you wanted to dive into the numbers.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: We are certainly considering the numbers, but I think a quick review of those initial slides of your regular presentation would be helpful. To get an overview of the department's activities and some of your accomplishments. Sure.

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: So you will see six appropriation lines for our department. There are actually eight divisions. That's something we're trying to work on for next year, which is to untie what is currently called Criminal Justice Services. That contains the radio technology shop and the Vermont Crime Information Center. Very different divisions that do very different things and spend money in different ways. So the old criminal justice services is an artifact from when we housed our own IT in house, and we just sort of lumped together a bunch of smaller divisions in that appropriation line. We are trying to make those separated. We also, as you probably know, were gifted the division of animal welfare a little over a year ago, and so there is currently no appropriation number for that division. So it is nestled into administration, which is also where all of the so it's Rick's shop for admin and finance, which is its own division. Also, animal welfare. Also, everything that you would attribute to the commissioner's office is talked to under rickshaw. So you're gonna these are sort of our infographic high level takeaways. I guess when I think about the highest level takeaways from the last year, I would say we did have flooding on July 10, but it was not nearly what it was in '24 or '23. And for that, we are eternally grateful. Go ahead, ma'am.

[Sabina Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: Have to

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: get my chair's approval.

[Sabina Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: Yes. Good question.

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Appropriations)]: On the left bar, I'm just confused, it has FY '25?

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: Because we don't know what FY 2026 total spending is. It's the only year we have total numbers for when we're making our FY Yes, '27

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Appropriations)]: of course. That would be true. Okay. Sometimes we get I

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: ask the same questions. Anyway,

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Appropriations)]: never mind. It's okay. I ask

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: the same thing every year. I say, why are we talking about '25? Nope. So we're Gotcha.

[Sabina Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: Alright.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: Those are actual numbers. Yes.

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: Those are that's the last few we have actual numbers for. And because our infographic line only can fit five lines, you can see down here in the lower left that Rick's shop administration is tucked in in the corner here. I'm hopeful that next year you're going to see eight appropriation lines over slides, so that'll give us a little more room to tell a little bit more of a graphical story about what the highlights of the year were. Do you want

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: to go to the next one?

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: So the Vermont State Police are obviously the largest division between the sworn and non sworn staff. And it's divided into three divisions, the field force division, which is exactly what you would expect. It's uniformed troopers, generally answering calls for service, responding to nine eleven calls, polling the highways and state routes, etcetera. And these are some of the major highlights of the year of the number of motor vehicle stops, calls for service, fatal crashes, etcetera. And then the division with the criminal division is broken down into the major crime division and the regular criminal division that is detectives, so to speak. And there's also the EPU, the executive protection unit, and the assignment to the office of the chief medical examiner, and a variety of other subspecialties, including our drug task forces teams. Those are all part of the criminal division. And there are some takeaways from that on this infographic. And then the Support Services division. Now, each of these divisions is headed by a major. And the support services division is everything else. It's all the non sexy side of policing. It's policy, it's budget, it's procurement and the quartermaster, it's fleet, it's running the of the ancillary offices that are tucked up under there, like recruitment and training. And so those are the three divisions of the Vermont state police. Any questions about VSP?

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: Just one quick one here. So I know you have a lot of vacancies. I'm kind of looking ahead to see how you can be in a better, more optimal place. You know, some kind of a timeline in mind for that, or Sure. Just can't create 40.

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: No, we can't. I would love to. But the great news is that in 2025, it's the first year that we have hired and put out into the field more than we have lost through attrition.

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: And

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: that's what the last six or

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: so years the downward trend was going on. So we're in a positive space, but it's gonna take years to come back to that number. In the meantime, in the last two years, we have converted 12 or 13 positions from sworn trooper positions to civilian professional staff to do things that could be done without carrying a badge and a gun. So technology investigation, that type of thing that doesn't require necessarily a law enforcement officer up until the point that you go to write an affidavit, and then you need a law enforcement officer to do it. But we've been trying to get creative to be able to keep doing the work that Vermonters expect us to do during a time of, really, across the nation, unprecedented recruitment challenges.

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: Thank you

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: so much.

[Sabina Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: But it is getting better.

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: We're hopeful.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: Okay, right.

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: Okay. No more questions about state police? Perfect. Then we'll talk about Vermont emergency management. I'm sorry, one more.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: So are you fairly happy where you are in terms of staffing, in terms of everything that you're dealing with? Or you got any challenges, like, above and beyond that you expect?

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: We're not happy with our staffing challenges. We're still leaning heavily on overtime, both in our public safety answering points and out in the field. Some of that is driven by the need to cover shifts, right? So when we don't have a full slate of troopers at any given field station, we have to rely on overtime to fill the regular shifts. But then, of course, as needs dictate, we have to fill with overtime a major crime or a major event that requires extra staffing from the usual. So no, we're not happy with our staffing. We're less sad than we were at this time last year. So we're no longer despondent. We've moved some of that into sad.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: That's good. So this question's been kind of asked, I'm just wondering, do you have a projection of how long it'll take for you to go through your happy, more

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: than happy? I think it's gonna take another four to five years for us to get to where we're out of sadness and into comfort, but we're not gonna be happy until we're at full staffing. And that could take seven or

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: eight years.

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: Assuming the trend remains, I mean, these things fluctuate dramatically as the national landscape fluctuates. So it's really impossible to say. But if we stay the course that we're on right now, I think in three to four years, we'll be getting back into a much more comfortable space. But we won't be until we're within a 10% staffing deficit.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: I've seen in the past where military operations are people getting out of the military help build up some quality staff. Do you see any trends that might be going on in the operations that are do with that?

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: Well, I can tell you that our Office of Professional Development works very closely with the military bases and military personnel around the area, not just in Vermont, but around the Northern Eastern Seaboard, to stay in touch and make ourselves an attractive potential employer for people who are leaving military service. I don't know of any trends. Don't know if the colonel knows of any specific trends related to military, separation from military service. But we do have many troopers who came to us through the military route and are very successful in their careers. So we will continue to work that pipeline, so to speak, because in many cases, it is a good fit for somebody leaving military service.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: It's just wonderful to be able pick up on this.

[Sabina Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: We do. We have a

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: lot of hooks into the military bases, like I said, for hundreds of miles around. Vermont Emergency Management is made up of five divisions, and sometimes I wish they were staring me in the face, but there's Oh, Lord. There's planning, because of course towns need help with their planning. There's a recovery section. There's the mitigation section. There is Oh, Eric, what am I missing? Operations and logistics. Operations and logistics. And engagement. So there are five sections within the Division of Vermont Emergency Management. This is the group that is working behind the scenes with our communities, our local towns, with our regional planning commissions to ensure readiness and hopefully never needing to use those plans, exercises, and drills that we assist the locals with. But these are also the folks that when there is an activation, whether that's partial or full activation of the state emergency operations center, these are the folks that are the first wave of employees that are able to staff the operations. And in most disasters, we are able to manage the staffing of the emergency operations center with key partners from the ADT Human Services, Red Cross, the usual suspects. There are times, like in the 2023 and 2024, where we had to augment our staff with other members from other divisions within DPS and sometimes from other agencies or departments across the state. But generally speaking, the state emergency operations center is run by the Division of Emergency Management with help from partners. I think the big news coming out of VEM this year is the federal government's The opaqueness of knowing when grant dollars that have been allocated will actually land. We are heavily, heavily reliant. We have 15 out of these 31 positions that are completely reliant on federal funding through the Emergency Management Planning Grant and the Homeland Security Program Grant. So that has been very trying this year. I would just think I'd like to leave that there for now.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: Is it just uncertain, or have any of these actually been cut or distinguished? Sure,

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: we haven't had any programs cut since you've last seen us, but we've had some delays in seeing the funding materialize.

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: So the funding was supposed to be released for October 1, and we have not seen a dollar of it yet. We are cobbling together our expenses by cutting out all travel, cutting out all discretionary spending, cutting down the amount of exercises and support we provide to locals. And at the same time, we are using all the residual grant money from FY 'twenty two, FY 'twenty three, and FY 'twenty four grants, and we expect that we will be completely out of money by March unless the Feds actually release those $7,200,000 in grant funding. All right. The Division of Fire Safety is much more than fire safety. In fact, you've probably seen my signature in an elevator or two. Don't ask me. I promise you I did not expect that thing. Thank you. We also license tradespeople. As you can see, there's building inspections and permitting. Another section within fire safety is the Fire Academy, where we train career and volunteer firefighters down at the campus in Pittsford. There's also the Fire and Explosion Investigation Unit, which is a cooperative effort between us, between the Fire Division and the Division of State Police. This is also home to the Hazardous Material Response Team and also home to the Urban Search and Rescue team, which is more than just Swiftwater Rescue. They are also involved in structural collapse, rope rescues, high angle rescues, shoring when there's a building that you have to get into, whether that's to rescue someone or it's to investigate a crime and it's not safe, they go in and they do some temporary shoring to make it safe for people to go in. They also do confined space rescue. There's quite a bit that goes on under the umbrella of urban search and rescue. I point that out only because the swift water rescue component of that was so hugely in the spotlight during the flooding that I didn't want people to think that that's all there is. There's a big umbrella of skill sets that fall under USAR. Any questions about fire safety? Okay, thank you. Great. The forensic lab is the only forensic lab in the state. Doctor. Conte and her team take in evidence from state, county, local, and federal partners to analyze and assist in freeing those who are innocent or helping convict those who are guilty. They also help track our drug trends and what we're seeing in the drug stream, the drug supply in Vermont so that we can be aware of trends. And they do a lot of really cool CSI type stuff over in the lab. And of course, they're very, very integral partners with the Vermont State Police. Any questions on the lab?

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: Go ahead, sir. Just wondering, have you seen any recent trends in the drug trade, or what's coming in, what's not? Yes, we have. The volume and that sort of thing?

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: We have. I can give you some wave tops. Lieutenant Colonel Lone would probably be the one for if you want to take a deeper dive. But a couple of trends that we are continually tracking are the types of adulterants that are coming in the drug supply. So you might think that you're getting fentanyl, but it's actually fentanyl with a bunch of horse tranquilizers of various different types. Right now, we've seen a resurgence in cocaine and crack cocaine, which, you know, it's hard to think that crack is back, but apparently it is. And one of the other drug trends that we're seeing is that overdoses by inhalation, by smoking drugs, has tripled as opposed to what we used to think of as injecting, etcetera. So inhalation has become, drugs of all sorts has become much more common than it was about two years ago. So if you want to know more, I can ask that.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: Overall, we haven't seen any downward trends that we would hope for.

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: No, it's always like just what's the drug of the day, and who's cooking up something in their bathtub and selling it over the interwebs, the dark web, and what's coming in from the transnational organized crime groups, what are they bringing into The US supply chain? I can tell you that mercifully, we have remained relatively safe from methamphetamine, which has been really prevalent in other parts of the country. And that is a totally separate type of animal, and it is really, really destructive. All really destructive. I don't want to minimize any one of them. I do, Sean, I do okay? Okay.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: Thank you. Okay,

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: going on to Criminal Justice Services. Again, this is where the Vermont Crime Information Center, I'll start with them. This is the home of all of the criminal justice information systems that criminal justice agencies access. Now, criminal justice agencies are not just law enforcement agencies. That includes DCF and many other partners that have permission and the ability to check criminal justice information systems. These would be FBI records, the National Crime Information Center records, the Vermont Crime Information Center, Vermont DMV records, those types of things. So they have the regular access to crime information systems section. They have the sex offender registry section, which plays an important role in accountability for sex offenders, registered sex offenders. And then, so the criminal history database is part of what we talked about. And then there's the record check and fingerprint identification section. That is where people who are required by statute do have a fingerprint supported background check submit their fingerprints to, and various records checks are done, and then they are either given a thumbs up or a thumbs down to work with vulnerable persons or in the capacity that they're in.

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: Do you handle all the fingerprinting for everyone from, you mentioned school employees?

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: Well, we don't actually take their fingerprints. The Vermont Crime Information Center receives fingerprints, either electronically or yes, still via the US Postal. So if you go to your local sheriff's department, let's say, and they roll a paper card, some places only pop things in the mail to VCIC every week or two. So those prints are going to sit where they were collected until they next send them via the US Postal to our shop. We don't So we don't actually collect all their fingerprints, but we receive them all to do the automated comparison against database.

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: Here's the reason I asked. We've gotten some requests from people in education and childcare that the time period for this to get to happen I is too think there's been a grant that's been acquired to help expedite that, but we're

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: We just I mean, that just happened. Like, literally just happened. So we've been partnering for the last six months with DCF, the Agency of Human Services, the Agency of Education, and various other partners across the government. We know that it takes too long, and there's a few things to say about that. One is there's some redundancy in the current system. There's also some built in but avoidable lag time, like I just described. If you're shipping fingerprint cards via US postal to Waterbury,

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: and

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: then we're manually mailing you results, mean, I that's, in this day and era, that's a three week delay automatically. There's also some limiting factors, which is that we have pretty old We don't have some of the fancier software that other states might have, and we have a pretty small workforce. There's 10 employees, I believe, in VCIC. So that's across all those sections that I talked about, plus a deputy director and a director. So we know that the system is too slow, and we've been working to rebuild it from the ground up. And that $1,000,000 grant is designed to do exactly that, and to hopefully reduce that turnaround to, I believe, Jeff, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's three or four weeks rather than six to twelve, depending.

[Sabina Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: Don't hear the case. Wayne?

[Jeffrey Wallin (Director, Vermont Crime Information Center)]: That's correct, Commissioner. That's the goal we're aiming for.

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: All right. Thanks, Chuck.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: So it's the sheriff's department,

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: some of those are sending them in paper rather than electronically. Is there an equipment problem that they don't have to scanning the foot on the road necessarily to do electronically? So we have put a lot of portable fingerprint capturing machines that can transmit to us. We've put a lot of those out in the field. There's just not enough out in the field. And that is also part of the work we're doing in reimagining what the fingerprint supported background check process looks like, is to be able to put more hardware out into the places where the people who need the checks can access it quickly. We could spend probably two hours and never get through all the roadblocks to making this faster. But there are ways that we already know we can make it faster, and we're working on those.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: Main question was, is there you have an idea of the magnitude of the cost for the equipment in order to have couldn't distribute across the state where it should be to drop them.

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: Director Wallin, do you know the answer? Did you hear the question, and do you know the answer?

[Jeffrey Wallin (Director, Vermont Crime Information Center)]: Yes, thank you, Commissioner. And for the record, Jeff Wallin of the Vermont Crime Information Center. We have approximately right now 65 digital live scan units across the state. But most of those are not held by state resources, they're held by local law enforcement, where most of those managements. It's up to them to determine their schedule and availability to take fingerprints. And we have just recently purchased a small number of new equipment that's held by the state, particularly DCF. Our colleagues over there are helping us out. We're also going to be requesting a handful of additional machines this year through our federal partners through a small federal grant we can access to purchase a few more of those for our high volume entities, as the commissioner said, where they're taking a fair number of physical fingerprints and sending them into us. We're looking at some, again, a small federal grant to leverage that, get to that out there so that we're not relying on the post office. And we also don't have staff taking time to type data in from one data system to another and then physically scan cards in, which does take some time. And we should have that online well before the end of the year.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: When I met with the commissioner and with deputy commissioner one day last week, we talked about this and he described many of the roadblocks that you've just described. He also said he would try to gather some information with Director Wallen in terms of a summary report of what the situation is and what some of the steps are that they're taking in order to remediate the situation. We don't need to mandate a report, he said, on their own. Would gather some information within four to six weeks, I said April, after we finished the budget, he could deliver a report to us that outline all of these difficulties and your plans for making this more streamlined. Yep, but

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: to you anytime, it's mostly put together already. Alright. Well, at any time should be fine.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: Okay. Let's concentrate on that after

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: we finish the budget. Alright. And then inside the criminal justice services is also the radio technology services division. This is the group of folks who work to keep our land mobile radio network operating across the state. Of course, that's how police officers, plow trucks, wardens, all sorts of state employees talk not just to one another, but back to their home base. And we also support the land mobile radio configuration of many local and county. Like, if our system is a highway, many local and county entities use portions of our highway for their own land mobile radio systems. They also do all the telephony in the Department of Public Safety. We're the odd duck in state government that we maintain our own telephone systems. So the radio technology services division is responsible for all our telephony, which includes the two public safety answering points that we wrap. All right, now we're on to the money part.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: Go ahead to the money part.

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: Sounds good. And for the record, Rick Caledonia, Director of Finance and Administration. And I have a there's a this is one of the busiest crosswalks that I've seen. If you need me to skip ahead, just tell me to move on and I won't happily do that.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: Well, have a half hour, so you can kind of gauge what you think you need to know and ask some questions.

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: So starting from B208 administration and looking at the general, federal, and interdepartmental salaries and benefit lines, those three are just our normal rate changes. If you look at the special fund column, the increases in the salary and benefit line items there represent the addition of our Director of Animal Welfare. Total cost of salary and benefit line items for that is 154,582. There's also some operating line items that total just over $3,800 near the bottom of the page. Skipping down a bit to the operating expenses, and if I also, if I skip something you wanted me to cover, happy to go back. Just let me know. This is our fee for space, insurance, all of our internal service fees in this area. And in looking at those, it will show a total increase, sorry, decrease of 51,000 across all funding sources. That was nice to see for a change in external service fees usually only go up.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: I would note for the rest of our committee, in this particular agency, they put all of the administrative fees for all of those six divisions that we're going to look at into the administration. So when we see the next crosswalks, they're zero because those are all tucked in.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: The big gowns and vision and

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: I asked you to talk about, is that system better? So there were some fluctuations in account codes for the agency of digital services this year. You can see the $2,000 down in $516,006.60, but then you see another one, a few down, that are up in 05/16685. Overall, I think the ADS charges went down. That may not be the case for all agencies, but for us, it went down.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: So,

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: I'll move on to the number just below that, the 26,000. Back down is a software that we were contemplating to use that money for a grant management system. We have looked at some and have not found anything state owned that work. So we're taking this out, and we're going to rely on what the Agency of Digital Services will pioneer. They have grant management system, an enterprise system, on their radar, and so we're simply going to wait for that to occur rather than continuing to try to build something on our own that would be expensive. Enterprise systems are always the better way to go there. If there's no questions on administration, I will turn the page to state police appropriation, B209. Looking at the salary and benefit lines in the So their salary, benefits and general funds are up $2,800,000 If you also include the down that you see just above the middle of the page, 2,350,000.00 in other employee benefits. So that was in there last year for the reclassification of law enforcement officers. So, if you combine that in with the ones above it, it's a $2,800,000 up. And moving down below the salary and benefits, we have overtime. We're showing a million dollars up that we calculated that based on the 25 actuals and adjusted those numbers for the trooper reclassification. We did the same for our shift differential, and you'll see a second other employee benefits line item. We separated those two so it would be less confusing between the reclassification and the actual line item increase. Questions on that section?

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: Okay.

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Appropriations)]: So,

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: looking at the operating line items for the Safe Lease, if you start in general funds, the general fund operating line items contain a lot of shifts. We always try to shift things around to meet our budget needs by using existing funding. So, with the exception of fee for space and communication equipment, which I'll get to later, it's a $198,000 op, which is about 1.5% increase over our previous general fund operating budget. So there aren't really any new line items contemplated in this. These are just across the board increases

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: and shifts for our current service level existing. Good job, 1.5%.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: That was amazing, Rick.

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: It was.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: And so I'll

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: skip down a little bit to 5 to $2.04 40. There's a $500,000 down in safety supplies and equipment that I'm sure everybody would be interested in knowing about. This is the $500,000 that we had for radios added last year and is being moved into a special fund to allow the funds to accumulate for a future communications purchase. That will allow us to bank the money and take that one bold purchase to keep all the technology the same. Moving over to the federal funds column, you'll see this $180,000 in 05/7566, and then there's a few other cuts below it. They all total down at $3,300,000,000 But don't worry, they're not cuts. This is just spending that is taking place in the federal programs and run its course. And some shifting. You'll see if you go down a few line items to this $5.01 $6.06 $9.00 staying in federal funds, we're up $2,400,000 there. 607,000 of that is our COPS technology award, which is working on the addition of 10 radio tower sites. And then $2,000,000 is the state and local cybersecurity grant program. That program spending will take place in ADS, and they will charge us back and we'll pay with the grant funds.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: President McLuhan?

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Appropriations)]: Yes, I'm just going back up to the vacancy savings. If I look back at the same speed, one of the things we look at a lot, and have there are 42 trooper vacancies, or at least there were when you put together this. And I'm just wondering why there's a zero budgeted for vacancy savings.

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: Good question. It's not actually a zero budget. We have a Zero is the delta, so we are at the same vacancy savings.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: The whole thing. Yep.

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: Great. Great. And so let me just roll to the bar, trying to get to the Oh, thank you, Commissioner. Okay, I was trying to get to these grants here, because I figured you'd stretch those. So you'll see an uptick like a little over $3,200,000 in our grant line item. The reason for that is the Homeland Security Grant Unit, previously in emergency management, has moved to state police, And so these are that program grants a significant amount out annually. So that's what this one is here. I also can see now that I missed one little piece on my notes here. The personal services, the federal, you can see the up there, which is also representative of the Homeland Security Grant Unit being moved. There's three positions in all that came from emergency management. Okay, I'll move to something like Doctor. Clerkstein. And if you look at the general and special columns for salary and benefits, you'll see that there's a lot of downs in the special and a lot of up in the general. And as you might recall from budget adjustment, we did need a budget adjustment for the criminal history record check fund. That's what's going on here, is we're moving 1,100,000 of previously budgeted items in the special fund to the general fund. And I'll move down to operating if there's no questions about that. This one is hard to explain, 1300507550. This is correcting an error from FY '26 that resulted in a negative budget line item, and I didn't think our budget system would allow that, but it did. The reason this happened is we moved $720,000 from this budget for PatRMS to administration general funds, and we should not have taken all $720,000 out of that line item. We should have moved $606,000 and then the rest from others. You can see there's a few other line items below it that are now down to compensate for that. Yeah. Okay. What's what's your funding stream for your special fund? So that's a criminal history record check fund. Are actually two special funds in this appropriation. There's also Radio Technology Services has a chargeback special fund, but that's not really Minimal. Minimal compared to what is being reflected here, the significant down and the $1,100,000 up. So the criminal history of record check fund is a $30 fee for online criminal conviction reports that anybody can do, And it's not so much that we're not bringing in the revenue. The revenue has been up and down, but also the spending has grown past what the revenue was able to afford. So that's the reason why we need to, as noted in the budget adjustment testimony, that we needed to do something a little bit more permanently to fix the construct.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: We backfilled that in the budget adjustment, and we also put some language in as we put a sustainability report on what they might be able to do with that special fund so they wouldn't genuinely have a problem.

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: I think that was all I had on CJS and if there's that's us down to fire safety. No? There we go, emergency management. That's much better. I was wondering how we got to fire safety. That's too good. So, looking at the emergency management appropriation, general funds considered normal salary and benefit changes. If we move over to federal, you see again the down reflective of those three positions that moved to state police from emergency management for the Homeland Security Grant Unit. In operating expenses, there's actually nothing significant in operating expenses. We have our grant line items. We're adjusting our grants out to the line items that we anticipate the spending to take place. Also, we're down some of the decrease here is reduced due to the emergency management, or sorry, Homeland Security moving from emergency management to state police. Put this into perspective, it's an overall decrease of $262,000 and the amount of these line items is 62,300,000 of granting out between the three line items. Questions on emergency management? Maybe this isn't taking quite as long as I thought.

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: We move to You do my show well. Thank you, sir.

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: Fire safety. In general, special and federal funds, the salary and benefits are sort of the normal rate changes, with one exception. This $252,000 here you'll see is the USAR budget that was put into this $450,000 in general funds was put into the Division of Fire Safety for Urban Search and Rescue last year, and it was put into two different placeholder line items, one of them being this other personal services. And then if you scroll to the bottom of the operating, you'll see $198,000 in other operating expenses. We don't spend out of those line items. It's not accurate if we are shifting those to the line items where we're going to spend them. So, $2.52, you'll see up in the temporary line item and in the overtime line item. And then down in the operating lines, you'll see just a variety of different line items that we spend out of. Yeah, was actually everything in peripheral services except for we had 92,000 in federal. This is some training for the urban search and rescue team, rope rescue, trench rescue, confined space training, all the kinds of things that the Commissioner mentioned that the urban search and rescue team does. And one other thing to point out is the operating in special funds. Then five thirteen-fifty four, That is for the migration of our existing fire safety database information to the new records management system. Expecting that to come online in the next budget cycle. And finally, I think the last piece here, dollars 500,000 in federal, that's the Assistance to Firefighters grant award that we received for a new ladder truck at the Vermont Fire Academy. We're attempting to

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: It's

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: a very aging truck, and so we really do need

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: We have a $500,000

[Sabina Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: grant award.

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: We don't currently have a way to match it. So we're working with a ladder truck that can't leave the campus because it can't be inspected, So we can't have local agencies take it and do evolutions at their place. So we're trying to find a way to use that grant and obtain a new truck at the fire cap.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: Say it again? It's match rate for that.

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: The match rate for that?

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: But

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: it's a fiftyfifty match, right? We have to come up with at least 500,000. We're there, 500,000.

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: We like the dance to that back

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: and play up. Do not know. We'll get back to you.

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: We will get back to you.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: So it sounds like you're gonna have to spend more than

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: Well, you know, we're exploring a lot of options, including If you buy a new firetruck right now, you're years before you take delivery, and that doesn't solve our short term problem. And we're trying to explore used apparatus, but those are in really high demand, and they frequently don't even come into the public consciousness, they get done in private deals between communities all around the country, then they're rotating out a piece of apparatus, and they're willing the town next door across the county is willing to buy it. So trying to actually locate used fire apparatus, particularly one that meets the description and functionality for what we're trying to replace, is a little bit like a needle in a haystack. But we're trying to explore the used route. We're gonna continue to be very vermont y about this and make do and figure it out, but we have an opportunity to do something to replace that piece of obsolesce, obsolete apparatus. And we're just going to keep getting creative.

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: And we're

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: all good.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: It's helpful to keep looking.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: Yes, ma'am.

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: Okay. To the last appropriation, the forensic laboratory. Salary and benefit lines are all just normal rate changes. Let's see, we have interdepartmental funds of $15,000 and rental others through up to from office supplies. Sorry, interdepartmental and federal. Operating line item true ups between these line items with an overall down of roughly $42,000 If you don't include the equipment line, the $522,350 handling that line item separately, that is an increase in grant funding that we have to replace some lab equipment. The main thing is a Metasystem auto scoop. And that is everything, unless there's something else you see that you would like me to cover.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: The other question, yes, fine.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: So total ups looks like about 5%. Sound great? Are you speaking just

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: to the general sponsor? No, I'm talking about overall budget. Overall budget up is 5.8%. Yes,

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: Ben. Couple of unrelated items. Do we require our officers to wear cameras?

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: If they're engaged in uniform patrol, don't always have, like plainclothes detectives might not always have cameras on. But the short answer to your question is yes, the folks that you anticipate being out in

[Sabina Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: the field interacting with the public, yes.

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: Do you have any sense of how often we have to replace those? What kind of

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: life do they have?

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: It depends on what you buy at the front end, right? I mean, you can buy something that might last you six, seven years, or it might not. I believe five to eight years is a reasonable replacement period, unless Matt, the director,

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: has other feedback.

[Colonel Matthew Birmingham (Director, Vermont State Police)]: I'm the director of the state police.

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: Because the technology changes faster than the parts we're at.

[Colonel Matthew Birmingham (Director, Vermont State Police)]: They were just upgraded.

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: How would you respond to someone if they asked you, Are we safe here in Vermont?

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: Wow, didn't see that one coming. I think safety is a very personal construct that depends on who you are and what you're asking them about. I, as a person who has spent my career in law enforcement and is very capable with my physical safety would have a very different answer from someone who perhaps has been a crime victim already or repeatedly, or somebody who has had negative encounters with either neighbors or law enforcement or other institutions and systems. So I think when people say, Are we safe in Vermont? That is a very personal experience as to whether or not you feel safe or are physically safe. If we were going to talk about, do our crime statistics comparatively represent a degree of safety? I would say we're a safe state. Would say we're a safe state. But need to be really clear that because data says one thing, that does not reflect how the human experiences, and we have to be really sensitive to the fact that we can be proud of our lack of violent crime, and that's one factor of feeling safe, but there's a lot of other types of safety that are not reflected in crime data.

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: Appreciate that. One final question, if I may. One of my constituents who's experienced in the disability community asked me whom he might speak with to see if there was any interest in learning de escalation techniques for the disabled in your area. You may already do that for all I know, but if there's any interest, who would I put him in touch with?

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: Sure, you can send them, you can put them in touch with me and I will push it to the right folks. We have a director of mental health programs who helps educate all of our field responders and our professional staff inside buildings around the topic of de escalation. Obviously, troopers who are out on the road get a higher level of training in de escalation. And we're always happy to learn from different communities about what the best practices are. We want to treat everyone and approach everyone in a way that gets us to a shared endpoint, which is to de escalate conflict and come to a place of common understanding as quickly as possible with as little injury or insult as possible to anyone. So we're happy to take that person's information and we can wrap it through to the training division if that's the appropriate place, or to our director of mental health program. Thank

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: you, happy to do that. Okay. Any other comments or any last minute things you'd like to share with us?

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: Just checking in with Rick on one

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: thing. Oh,

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: sure. You go right ahead and take care of that.

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: Great. Just one thing I almost forgot. In last year's big bill, there was a requirement for both a firearm replacement plan and a radio replacement plan to be submitted. So I just wanted to give you our plan verbally. So firearms are replaced every five years in accordance with the manufacturer's recommendation. Existing equipment funds will be sufficient to cover the purchase, assuming that we don't experience other line item cuts that create a budget challenge or that we or that our budget doesn't grow normally with the rate of inflation. We should be able to handle those purchases. The radio replacement plan is different. The 500 ks that's currently appropriated and any available savings that we achieve within the existing base budget, we'll continue to replace radios annually until a full refresh has occurred. And then at that point, we'll begin accruing the 500,000 annually in the new special fund that's been created for about ten years before we do the next complete refresh of the technology.

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: We're a little more than halfway through this refresh of handheld and cruiser radios, so mobiles and portables. Mobiles are in a car, portables on your hip. We had a federal grant that was going to be a good chunk of what's left, of the rest that we can't afford, and that went away under this administration. So we no longer have the money available to buy all at once. Turns out that's okay to not buy them in one shop, because our radio technology shop can only install X number a month. So stretching it over two years is okay. We don't want to go beyond that, because really want them all to be the same generation of technology. You don't want to get into maintaining different makes and models, different types of technologies with different key codes, just different things. And also, a user, as an end user, if you're under stress, it shouldn't matter what lease car you're in, they should all work the same, right? So we need to get through this first refresh, and then that accrual account will sit for ten years and accrue, and then we will do a full refresh again. But that might be eleven years from now.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: Okay, but this budget does include that first 500,000, doesn't it?

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: It does, but it's not necessarily gonna sit in an accrual account if we can't afford to finish the first refresh. That's what I'm trying to get at is when Senator Norris first brought up the issue of a replacement plan, we weren't completely in favor of it. We don't necessarily have a capital plan to work with. So we asked for an accrual account so that the funds don't get taken back because they are sitting there. I mean, after five or six years, that's a big

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: pot of

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: money. And

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: in the interim, between the time we first started this discussion with Senator Norris about this accrual account, and now, we know that we don't have the federal grant anymore to rely on, which was 2.1 or $2,000,000 It was a congressionally directed spending grant that they all That wave of grants never were released, and so we will not get those. We don't count on getting that. That would have been the amount we need to do the rest of this refresh. So So we've been using vacancy savings and literally every overage and every line item we have to buy as many units as we can, but we still have a gap to finish this refresh. Once this refresh is done, that accrual account will sit for probably ten years. Can stretch it to eleven, twelve? Yes, but you can't stretch it to twenty, which is basically how long it's been since we've replaced the radios. John, you have a question? Just a

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: quick question. You referenced the federal support overall is just not coming in here at this stage of the game here, and the monies that would help with the radio replacement program, is that just forever gone or just in that same kind of bucket of we're not sure?

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: Are we going back to despair or despondency? Or in

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: that way?

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: It is my understanding that that congressionally directed spending will not be released. It possible in the cycle this was like an FY24. I'd have to go back and look in my folder. An FY24 congressionally directed spending that did not get released after it was awarded. And so I'm happy to go make an inquiry and see if there's any possibility of it coming back. But my last communication my with Senator Sanders' office was that it was unlikely to come our way.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: You. And then we. And then we.

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Appropriations)]: I don't know. We're Well, I just, I've been looking at the narrative here, and you've identified a number of key budget issues that are pressures, and some of which involve fees that are climbing, some of which involve an increase in the workload itself. And I'm wondering, are there any that you have not discussed that we need to be aware of as we think about FY27? Sounds like you're kind of a make do kind of department. And I'm concerned about some of the issues that have been raised here.

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: Think

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: the short answer, because we're short on time, is we are a make do department. We are very clear every year about what the need is, and not everything makes the cut. So we will live within the governor's recommend. That's just the way it works in our world.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: And they will keep us surprised, I suspect, of issues as we come along, if they need our attention at a later time. Sure, we will do that, yes ma'am. Quite a good question. Good answer, you both.

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: Kinds of surprises here today.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: Theatre Blottery, Gay Mortons, Big Trans, same radios.

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: I don't know about their mobile and handheld in terms of the actual hardware that they use. There are some departments that our radio technology shop does do the programming and maintenance for, But they use our land mobile radio network, the canopy of how we when you press the button to talk, where it goes and how it gets to where it needs to go.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: I know. So my question relates to, are they upgrading at the same time? Are you going to have any communication problems with those folks if they don't? I don't mind.

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: Now everything's fine?

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: Different frequency on our network.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: You don't ever get the communicator.

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: Well, can. We have talk around channels that Right.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: So I don't happen to know what their plan is for replacing their That's why they ask, obviously, if you're doing a reset, and they're not resetting, that would be a problem. But if it's not an issue because you're doing it a different way, a new point.

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: I don't think I have enough information to tell you if it's an issue or not.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: Okay. Thank you very much for coming in. We appreciate the details. We will be in touch if we need anything. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. Thank you.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: Thank you all Thank you.

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: You. Thank

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: Thank you very much.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: Yes. Committee, we are gonna hear from the Department of Labor. Yes. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining today for the Department of Labor. Have.

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: It's Worsniak. Worsniak. The silent W.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: And you have not been in our committee yet this year, not yet. I'd like a quick review. Have you met everybody before? We'll do a real quick review. Okay.

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: Greetings, I'm David Yacovone from Morrisville. I represent the Lamoille, Washington district.

[Rep. John Kascenska (Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: Welcome. Good afternoon. John Kascenska from birth. I represent The US six ten Towns.

[Rep. Michael Nigro (Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: Good to see you. Mike Nigro, represent Bennington and Powell.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: Thomas Stevens from Waterbury, Washington. She's been what?

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: Martha Feltus from London.

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: Tiffany Bluemle from Burlington.

[Rep. Trevor Squirrell (Clerk, House Appropriations Committee)]: Trevor Squirrell, Jericho, and Londonville.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: Wayne Laroche, I gave Franklin Berkshire to Richmond.

[Rep. Michael Mrowicki (Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: Michael Mrowicki from Linden Ford District, but the dumbest.

[Rep. Eileen “Liz” Dickinson (Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: Hi, I'm Lizzie Dickinson, I represent St. Olvin's Town. And our chair is Robin Scheu, who is not here today.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: Well, good afternoon, everybody. Kendall Smith, Missionary Vermont Department of Labor, and Chaudhwar Zia, who is our Chief financial officer. Did I say it mostly correct?

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: You did. Okay.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: Are another can do agency. So just pick up there. I don't know who else you've heard from today, but I share that sentiment with the Department of Public Safety. So Rowan sent in our materials this morning. Hopefully folks have those. If not, open around what you want on your screen or if you have things on your tablet in terms of our presentation. We have a budget presentation and some ups and downs. Yeah. It looks like Rowan's logging on to on the screen. So while Rowan's doing that, I'll start off by saying and we'll go through this. Normally, I would consider our budget pretty boring compared to a lot of the other agencies that you hear from. We are currently about 50% federally funded. And this year, that is what makes things less boring for us compared to previous years. So as we go through this, there is one caveat I want to say. All the federal numbers you see in front of you are last years. We, through US Department Of Labor, we feed up to and get our funding from, was under the continuing resolution that was just voted on last week in terms of now US DOL having a formal budget for the current fiscal year that was starting this October. So I'll talk in a second with Chad about some of the changes we see in there, but we do not yet have our allocations for the current federal fiscal year, again, that started in October. I will say that the changes that we saw are not too drastic and that I don't think anything's going to be catastrophic when we do get our final allocations. Again, I'll talk about that in more detail here in a second. But I think we will be Okay, even if there are little downs in terms of being able to mostly maintain our current service levels or figure out how we can offset and rearrange ourselves. So that, as you go through this, that is kind of the first and foremost thing I want to draw your attention to. And then in terms of our general funds, we primarily just apply the 3% up across the board to all the programs, respectively. So that's kind of the, I guess, the overarching piece to keep in mind as we go through this. So Rowan, if you want to go to the next slide. And if at any point here you guys are like, we know this about you, please get your numbers. We can move a little faster. Just tell us. We have 11 regional offices in addition to our main campus down the road at Green Mountain Drive, or Montpelier. Our office in Montpelier, we don't normally take walk ins. It's more where we do our program administration, oversight. But then in our 11 regional offices around the state, we meet with job seekers, we serve employers, people can walk in, they can set up appointments. We do that in a variety of ways. We also do labor on location where we will go to where the people are if they're not coming to us and set up in libraries and other areas and then promote that. The total square feet we have across all facilities, just if you're interested in our space, is eleven ten. And those total space costs are $1,400,000 annually. We are unique in that we own two of our locations. We own our Montpelier space down the road as well as our Burlington office. And then there's also a little bit of wonkiness in that the federal government has an ownership share in those buildings as well and originally constructed them if we were ever to sell them. And then for the other regional offices, those are a mix of state buildings where we work with BGS through a fee for space arrangement. And then there's two that are leases with the private landlords. Right. I'm going keep going unless you guys want me to Next slide is our organization structure. I won't necessarily call everyone out by name. And you'll see this when we get to the slide as well. We have four divisions, workforce development, workers' comp and safety. That includes workers' comp, OSHA, Project WorkSafe, as well as Tramway. We inspect all the ski lifts in the state. It's kind of a little unknown fact about Beetle. And then we have labor market information as well as unemployment insurance. Rowan, next slide. So again, I just listed through our core programs that you'll see here, but here's where it starts to get more interesting. So again, we are about 50% federally funded that you can see on this pie chart, about 25% general fund and then 25% special fund. And you'll see that breakdown again on the chart in front of you. And again, know that federal funds number was our amount from the previous federal fiscal year, and we will be getting, hopefully, our new final allocations soon. And again, as I go through this, I'll call out where we know we're expecting ups and downs. Chad, is there anything before we move on that you would call out about just overall funding structure?

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: No. Special funds is a significant portion of our budget, roughly 25%. That's mostly workers' compensation. That is the the program that oversees the workers' comp that we don't write insurance policies in the state of Vermont. We we are the arbitrary the the referees between the the workers' compensation policies in Vermont and anybody receiving workers' compensation. We have a surcharge that is on every single insurance policy that's written in the state. We receive some money on top of that. That's how we fund the program, And that's mainly what that 25% is, as well as the tramway program that Commissioner Smith spoke about. And that is 100% funded by the ski areas that we expect.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: Next slide. This is just a 25 service snapshot. You can read it at your leisure or follow-up with questions either now or after. But just to give you a sense of how many Vermonters we interact with, we did call out if there was any differences between a calendar year or fiscal year, just in terms of how we collect our data internally. Next slide, thank you. So our Workforce Development Division has about 75 staff, currently an 8% vacancy rate, which comes out to six positions. But all of those are in various stages of recruitment. And I would say that is more or less normal churn. For this workforce development division. Again, some of those are spread out in the regional offices as well. They're not all necessarily right here in Montpelier. You will see a list of our federally funded activities versus our state funded activities. So something called the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act, or WIOA, is where we receive the majority of our federal funding that funds our workforce activities. So if you are, for example, an adult that walks into one of our job centers and says, Help

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: me

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: with my resume. I'm looking for a job. That is where our staff is going to bill that time, is to a line item that's called WIOA adult. Or if we are working with youth in various ways, that is where those regional dog center specialists are going to bill their time is to a line item called WIOA youth. So this is where we're seeing some changes in our federal funding that we are going to have to work through. In terms of what's in, again, USDOL's final budget here, there is a $10,000,000 reduction in the WIOA adult line item. I have this called out on the next slide as well, though, and if you want to go there. But $10,000,000 spread across 50 states and territories, I don't think it's going to be that big of a hit for us, and we'll definitely let you know if that changes. All the WIOLA funds are formulaic and we get what is almost equivalent to a small state minimum there. So I want to be maybe optimistic that you might see again, like the California's, the Texas, Florida is taking a bigger hit here, but we shall see again 10,000,000 spread across 50 states, territories. I think we can hope we're pretty certain they can figure it out in terms of maintaining service levels. Where we're seeing an up, though, here in terms of our workforce support activities is in a program where the acronym is RESEA, the Reemployment Service and Eligibility Assessment. What this is, is certain UI claimants through an algorithm who are deemed most at risk at exhausting their benefits before they get reemployed get basically channeled in to job counseling. And they have to do this if they want to continue to receive their UI benefits. So kind of consistent with this administration's approach in terms of trying to shift people away from benefits or change benefit structures, They're putting $80,000,000 $79,000,000 more into this program. So we will see an up there, most likely,

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: as far as we don't.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: Again, we're waiting for our allocations. Where money is flowing, though, in a really helpful way, even though it's not necessarily coming directly to departments of labor, is in the registered apprenticeship space federally. So I put a few examples of some monies that US DOL has issued in the past six months. It's going to support the expansion of registered apprenticeship opportunities. And most of those bypass, like I said, the department and go right to employers or right to organizations. So really, our goal right now is to be making sure we're promoting those opportunities for folks, that businesses are aware of these opportunities, and we're able to take advantage of them, but without us necessarily being an intermediary, which I actually think is great from a capacity perspective. That first one, just using that as an example, 3,800,000.0 for manufacturing apprentices. Manufacturing businesses right now, if they bring on a registered manufacturing apprentice, can get a $3,500 tax credit for manufacturing apprentice something higher.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: How do you do that for most people? You're not directly at all?

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: We have several different newsletters that we put out on a regular basis. We've actually been doing targeted outreach directly manufacturing employers. There's an organization called VMEC that you might be familiar with. So working with them to promote it, we've been doing webinars. We have a host of different tactics that we're using to try to get the word out. 358 for Vermont? No, no total in the funds. These are all federal. Those are total in those funds. And I'm told from our regional office that there's likely even more to come. So we'll keep trying to do what we can in terms of promoting those funds or figuring out how to get Vermont involved in them. One example is it sounds like they are going to be trying to make some changes so that small businesses will readily become registered apprenticeship sponsors, which would be huge. One point of feedback we anecdotally get a lot is I would like to be a registered apprenticeship sponsor, but I just it's a lot of paperwork. I don't have the capacity. I'm a 12 person shop. I have three openings. Like, this is nice in theory. I just can't. So if they can figure out a way that we can make it more usable for smaller businesses, that could be a real win for Vermont. So I am looking forward to seeing what they put out there.

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: All right, next slide.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: Okay, so there are some reversions. This is probably the other area of interest for you all from our workforce development programs. You'll see them here. There's a returnship program reversion of 37,000, postsecondary and New American reversion of 70,000, one that is titled workforce development, but that would add a lot of uses that you can see in the notes to help with apprenticeship training, post secondary CTE, etcetera, two seventy five, a new American labor force reversion. I'll talk about that in a second, as well as nearly a million from a work based learning and training program. So as you know, we were trying to prioritize with finance and management where is there money available to be redeployed for what the other priorities of the day may be. These were monies that were taken from us, were that one time appropriations that had not been spent and reverted back into the general fund. I want to leave just maybe even a modicum of grace in terms of being a new commissioner, in terms of piecing some of this together internally in the department of the string of events here for how much money was spent or not spent and why. I can say with the first one, the returnship program, nearly half of that money went out. It wasn't a large appropriation to begin with. The postsecondary and new American money of $70,000 We kind of, to be honest with you, have a full trail of We're able to find it in the budget, but the enabling policy legislation. And there also was some staffing turnover in the workforce development directors at the department, too, between then and now from Sarah Buxton, if folks remember Sarah, and now Jay Ramsey. The workforce development February, we have a lot of money through federal money and state money that does essentially the same thing that was utilized first. And I also want to say with those kind of first three to '4, like the pandemic was right in there. And in the department, we had all hands on deck, obviously, around unemployment insurance administration and benefits, and the pandemic disrupted a lot of programming in the state. The one that is the New American Labor Force 01/1989, that was actually a pass through from VDOL to the State Workforce Development Board. Those representatives are here today to talk about their piece of this budget, but they were not here when this money was appropriated. So the former executive director for the State Workforce Development Board put out an RFP to try to get a bidder to help stand up a stronger New American support system. They did not receive any bids. Director left. And then there was about a year in between us having a new executive director. Our new executive director is here today. Been in place for a year. So that was a little bit of a combination, again, of no bids and then a lot of turnover and, frankly, kind of a stalling while we were getting the new office launched. This last one is a lot of money, but I do want to point out that it's a little bit, maybe not misleading, but around the same time, we were also allocated $1,500,000 for work based learning and training grants, which was fully deployed. So we did get out over half of the funding that was allocated within a two year period for our work based and learning grants, but had not thought out this last million. Granted, there was $3,000 spent from it. I haven't tracked on exactly where that $3,000 went. But that's the highlights. I think I might see some questions, so I'll pause.

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: We have

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: a few questions on.

[Drake Turner (Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: I was like, was saying Just

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Appropriations)]: given what we hear about workforce needs, given the fact that WIOA money has certain restrictions, this kind of funding was more flexible and enabled people to pilot things that might not have qualified for WIOA. I mean, that's a lot of money to sweep out. But $1,000,000 isn't a whole lot for workforce development, right? And so I'm wondering, what's lost by losing that $1,000,000 Yeah,

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: I mean, what that would have gone to, again, is supporting things like internship, so stipends for participants, for example, work based learning opportunities. Some of it might have been grants to actual organizations that were providing these different types of opportunities. So it is more flexible than we owe them money, to your point. And we don't have a ton of state funding that goes into workforce, primarily federal. But that's the consequence of that sweep.

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: Wayne?

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: So was this an issue of administratively not being able to get the money out the door, or was this an instance where you didn't have applications coming in for the film?

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: I think it was closer to the first instance that you said. Again, I'm hoping for even just a modicum of grace in terms of stepping into the commissioner role for about four or five months now and trying to piece together the trail of events here on this piece. Again, dollars 1,500,000.0 was put out. They did essentially the same thing. And when this was appropriated right around the time a new workforce development director came in and he had a 25% vacancy rate at the time, and I think he prioritized filling his 25% vacancy rate. So it

[Commissioner Jennifer Morrison (Vermont Department of Public Safety)]: was just a little bit about prioritization of effort. One goes out as how large a chunk of money you have to

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: Do you have a sense of what a grant amount would

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: have Yeah, sure. There'd be varying amounts of sub awards. And they could be as little as $10,000 and as much as $75,000 $85,000

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: Either way, would take quite a bit of work more than on how administratively. That's correct. Yeah,

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: was just gonna ask a question about the new American labor force and you know the 189,000 if not a lot of money grants, you know, all that's together here, but did not receive any bids. It may be to have no idea if we're going bid it

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: or

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: not. Maybe there was some outreach on the department's part to see if anyone would be interested.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: So this was technically a pass through to the state workforce development board and that former executive director is no longer here. I could try to dig in the case files, but they my understanding is they did not get any bids on the RFP.

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: We do receive quite a bit of federal money as a pass through just for current program kinds of things, they have no bid to do that work unfortunately.

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: So these monies are reversions and they were, they are part of the proposed governor recommend FY27 vote. Correct. So these were one time monies to beat all that have now been reallocated to the bottom line to support the other initiatives that I would argue are also important. We hear all the time when I go places, when I talk to employers, it's housing. And I won't take us down the housing rabbit hole necessarily, but I am having trouble retaining people, attracting people because housing. So that is a number one workforce barrier as well.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: I just wanted to add that I do expect the Commerce Committee to give us a little more thoughts on this.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: Okay. Have there been discussions about how to reinvigorate some of

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: these programs rather than revert the monies? I think we could reinvigorate a lot of these pretty easily.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: Did you have a question?

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: No. The question's on this slide? Okay,

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: thanks. Go ahead. Labor, so comparatively, back to not much to see here land. Labor market information is 100% federally funded. They have 11 staff. They have no vacancies. You guys have probably all heard at some point in time a presentation by Matt Barowitz, who's our labor market economist who heads up this work. So they also have, again, terms of us being 100% federally funded, $9,700,000 DEM in a grant, not their only grant, that funds their work. We're waiting to see how that will be distributed again across 50 states and territories of our final allocation from that one specific grant, but we think that we will be able to make do with whatever the small down is. Workers' comp and safety. So again, there are four main activities that happen in this division. Compensation, which Chad just talked about, is where a lot of the special funds or all of the special funds that the department has rather comes from. Project WorkSafe, passenger tramway, that's the ski lift maintenance and inspection, and VOCA. So workers' comp, special funded. Chad, feel free to chime in here. Good to go. Straightforward. Straightforward. Passenger tramway, also special funded. Straightforward. Good to go. VOCA, and I'll I'll let you fill in with Project WorkSafe, Chad, is about 50% federally funded. It's a match. It's our one area of match. Is that a ninety ten or an eighty twenty?

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: VOCA is a fifty fifty. Project WorkSafe is an eighteen-eighty 2% match. Yeah. So 18%. State funds, 82%. It's a different match. It's

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: different Okay.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: We are going to potentially maybe see a down in our federal funding for OSHA. Again, the budget, what we've been able to identify so far is US DOL enforcement agencies, including OSHA. OSHA is the Vermont version of OSHA, will have a $13,000,000 reduction. I don't know how to forecast what that means. Again, spread across 50 states, territories, dollars 13,000,000 in VOCA and others, I think we'll, again, be able to make do and figure it out.

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: Yep. And just to note, the quotation here in the slide is from The US budget, the USDOL budget. It is $13,000,000 reduction in USDOL enforcement agencies, and there there are some small bit of detail, but included in that is OSHA. WorkSafe is not an enforcement agency. It's a consultation agency, so we shouldn't see any reductions in that. But we will probably see at least a small reduction in our OSHA, federal OSHA portion.

[Sabina Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: Mr. Stevens?

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: And that's a we're talking from out of $13,000,000 countrywide, we're talking less than $1,000 That's correct.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: That's why I'm saying I don't think any of these down so far that I've flagged are going to be catastrophic for us, and we'll just be able to figure it out.

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: No, that's correct. Thank

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: you. Robin? Okay, unemployment insurance. UI has about a staff of 81. I'm sorry, the vacancy rates are on all these slides if you questions. Currently, 7% vacancy rates, six positions. That is also what I would couch as regular churn, people coming and going. And UI funding, we receive administrative funding from the federal government to support, again, the admin of the program that is level funded in this current federal fiscal year, which in this atmosphere, we're going to take as a win. Any other questions or anything else you'd add? I'm going to loop back to I'm very excited about our UI modernization project and getting to the status.

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: Unemployment Insurance Division. You have here, there's a big chunk of it that looks like federal funds, general funds, special funds. My understanding is that the bulk of the money that comes in comes from employers.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: For the trust fund? Yes. Is administering the program. Yes. Paying the salaries. Actually, 100%

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: of it comes in from employers. Correct. Into the trust fund. Yes. And what is this feature of that trust fund?

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: I have actually the trust

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: fund report.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: I do, and I can submit it to the committee if anyone wants to see our annual trust fund report. We're still at the lowest contribution rate for employers. I'll let them tell you exactly how much is in it. Give me one second. It's $300,000,000 So we do this every calendar year. So at the beginning of calendar year 'twenty five, I can get you the current amount. Potentially, there was $310,000,000 in the fund, which is still less than it was going into the pandemic, but it has been steadily gaining from interest and from contributions. So we're feeling good. Yeah. Feeling fine. SPEAKER What's kind of wonky is there's no actual definition of what is a healthy UI trust fund nationally or statewide in terms of what's the right amount. But yes, we would consider it healthy.

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: Did we change any of the UI? We did legislation in one day. Well, I was here in 02/2010, when we went into the red with the Great Recession. Redesigned the entire thing too. It took us a while. But then one day, the Thursday before we closed out for COVID, we totally redid the entire thing so that we would not have employers held hostage for three held harmless for three years. Everybody would get it under all kinds of there were other things that they've done that expanded it. What has happened since then? So tell me if

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: this is what you're referring to. And if not, let me know. With some of the ARPA money, there was Well,

[Sabina Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: I don't know what There was

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: relief for employers. And then there was also a discussion of what are we going to do on the claimant side for relief as well.

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: There was a lot of suggestions, lot of things. But in one day, we totally redid. Well, I'm not sure. We did a lot of it.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: Yeah, so there was allowances for childcare, for example, if you think that was really because of child care. If you're talking about the great recession, I'm going to need to actually maybe phone a friend for chat.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: Have a clarification here, Tom.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: Yeah, recession we went into debt.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: Yes, yes.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: And we changed the employers. We reduced the amount of money we sent out to recipients of unemployment. We had to increase the amount of taxes collected over time. That went right back down to what's considered normal. At COVID, while it took a hit, was government money that went into the unemployment fund. The thing that changed was because 80,000 people were out of work immediately and many of, not many, but I'd say a small enough percentage to make it, but that made a difference were self employed, that never paid into the unemployment insurance fund. And so we created a fund for those individuals so that they wouldn't suffer even though they hadn't paid into an insurance system. And that was state money, That was not federal. It might have been federal money that we borrowed, but it was my memory is that it was state money because we couldn't use money from the unemployment fund to people who hadn't paid into it. So that should have gone away. Yes, it did. That was an emergency.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: That's why it's ringing Nobelts for me. Thank you. Yeah, the other piece where I wasn't sure if this is where you were going was there was basically a supplemental benefit put on for those that were already receiving the weekly maximum benefit of $60 Yes.

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: Was brief, too.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: Yep. So last year, we asked for a technical correction because it's supposed to move down to $25 And since we're about to launch our new UI system, which I'll talk about in a second, from the functionality piece, we wanted to wait till the new UI system went live to bump it down to $25 So that'll happen this spring. And we're supposed to pay out an additional $100,000,000 to claimants as part of the compromise for the relief that

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: we provided employers. Yes. We still have, which we had to get rid of because the Fed did not allow us to index the benefits. And then in 2009 and 'ten, we indexed the employer contribution. And then in COVID, my memory serves me that we've only ever had a crisis with public, even with all those 90,000 people. We didn't

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: go into debt. We didn't go into debt. We did not have to borrow. We had almost 500,000,000 plus. We were lucky. Not other states had to borrow.

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: Yeah, and we were supported very heavily by the federal government. So we had for example, there were the $700 that was on top of your weekly benefits as an unemployed individual, all of that was federal money that came to us. None of that was trust fund money. So we went into the pandemic very nervous about the trust fund and how fast that can go away. And the federal government actually came out and supplied all sorts of different funding streams to help us with that. So we ended the pandemic in actually halfway decent standing. So

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: how is the computer step going?

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: Oh, it's

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: going well, Rowan. Is that the next slide? If not, but we'll go there next, and we'll come back to the business office. Go to that question, Wayne.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: My mind is very fuzzy about COVID there, I thought there's a lot going on with that same period. So given that, what's your scope of fraud? What's your payment on alternative?

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: Right now, to talk about fraud, we talk a lot about our overpayment rate to people. And right now, our overpayment rate is one of the best in the nation, meaning that we have low levels of fraud and overpayments going on. It's broken out where there are actual targets, and they kind of tier you as a Department of Labor into tier three in terms of needing the most support. Tier two, we're in tier one, which is the best place to be. And actually, our UI director was recently invited to present at a US DOL conference about how well that was going for us. So when that happens, does that jeopardize any federal money? Do you have

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: to withdraw money for that or anything?

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: They Chad, I don't know. They definitely put you on a performance improvement plan. I'm not sure about the financial hammer.

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: Yeah. We were never in jeopardy because of fraud. That's hard to say, right, because fraud is fraud, and we look out for that. But during the pandemic, we didn't get to a point where the federal government was waving a stick or anything like that.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: We were We just gave you findings and then give you some ideas out of it. So

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: we are launching a new unemployment insurance system this spring, springsummer. We're not publicly saying a date yet, but we will soon. We are working with the vendor. The vendor is fast, and we've been very clear with them if we want you an extra two weeks because it needs more testing or more training. We want to make sure when this launches, we've done everything we can that it launches smoothly and it launches well. But right now, the project remains on schedule. It remains on budget with the implementation funds that were appropriated, which was about $30,000,000 We are doing testing right now. We've been engaging with Vermont Legal Aid as well as a number of other organizations and allowing them to come in and test certain slices and give us recommendations. Recently with Vermont Legal Aid, I think we were able to accept probably about 75% of the changes that they offered. So I'm feeling very optimistic. I'm feeling hopeful. The current system is 55 years old. It looks like Pac Man screen. If you ever want to come look over someone's shoulder, this will at least get us to maybe year 2010. It

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: should

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: be better. I got to look at a few of the screens the other day, and I'm like, wow, this is like a real normal system. This is great. So anyway, we will definitely let everybody know because there's going to be a cutover period where we have to turn the system off for two or three days to migrate the data, obviously when that's going to be. We also are in the middle of launching a more aggressive communication series as well with employers, eventually with claimants. Again, we're using this through testers. Claimants are a little bit harder because you never know who's going to be a UI claimant necessarily. But for those current ones to do testing, we're rebuilding both the employer side and the claimant side. So be on the lookout, whichever legislature for more webinars, more reported town halls, more written communications going out around the new system. This is really, if I can just be very direct, this is our top priority for this spring. I think this should be one of everyone's top priorities for this spring, if I'm being selfish. But hopefully, this will also reduce the amount of outreach that you all receive from your constituents, which we're very sensitive to. I can't get through on the phones. It's been a very long time. I don't understand what these written notices are. So more to come. And hopefully, by this time next year, we'll be in here saying, overall, it went well. The one thing I do want anyone who's listening to know is like with any system, we're testing, we're testing and testing, but there's going to be some case, right? Murphy's Law, you tested, you tested, you tested. And now that little thing is fine yesterday. It's not working today. So I'm trying there will be, I'm sure, some kind of rollout kinks. But we have a good team. And right now, it's a good news story. So thank you for your continued support.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: I don't think it's Murphy's Law necessarily, but it's the I've tested this 600 times. It's the first time someone helped you. So years ago, however many like really exciting iterations a few years ago, probably 2018, 2019, we were in a process of trying to have a consortium of states that were doing that. Is this the same? This is going to be our own however off the shelf made to us system. Will it be flexible? One of the issues around twenty nineteen-twenty twenty was paid family leave. One of the issues was how we couldn't work with a consortium. Is this system potentially flexible enough to be take on another insurance system just similar to employment?

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: It could. It'll take money, right? So like our vendor, Fast. So what's nice is, yes, it's customized to Vermont's UI program, but they have built UI systems in other states. Massachusetts comes to mind as one that just launched several other states. So they do have a case record and we're able to learn from those other states what worked well and what didn't. We can, with that vendor, potentially, we want to keep modernizing it, right? It doesn't work what we just did this past time of it's 55 years old and now we're never going to touch it or modernize it again. Our goal is that we will be doing that deferred maintenance continually so it doesn't get to this point. It'll cost money. So the answer is yes for a cost. We could reach out to FAST and say, can you build X, Y, Z? And the answer is going to be yes for X or B.

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: The

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: math is similar. It's an insurance program. It's completely different at the same time, but it is that same idea of mean, cobalt was useful for fifty five years.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: Still

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: you can say what you want about the UI system,

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: but it's still functioning and that we are saving payments out on COBOL. So no, I haven't talked again, for an example, for FMLI, I haven't talked to Fast to know, do you build those But types of yes, this system can be updated over time add a more cost effective scale than our current system can do,

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: which is it can't.

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: Yep, and it is customizable. So the goal is that when we run into a pandemic God forbid, we run into another pandemic. The reason one of the main reasons the system isn't working now is because we made all these changes in COBOL, nobody knows where those changes that nobody likes. So it's very difficult to understand how to undo them. You have to write code again to ignore it. So in this system, the goal is it's completely customizable. And if something like that happens, another federal funding stream comes in that is supplementing the UI program, we can write it into the code, and it will take care of it. So in theory, something like FMLA could be put into there, in theory, again, because it's customizable. Thank you. Right. Rowan, why don't we go back to the single audit page and just see if there's any questions there? So in the instructions, it did say to talk about single audits.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: I don't know if you've had other agencies or departments present on this or how much You have

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: acted upon them in

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: the report.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: Happy

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: to talk about that. So because we have the UI trust fund and because it is so much money, we undergo part of the single audit every single year. We're just lucky draw. And we sit with the independent auditors every single January, and we undergo this. Last year, we had three findings in our programs. I would call them personally, I would call them minor in that there are things like, as an example on the first one, some of the federal reports that we submitted, we couldn't provide the documentation where an official review or sign off was was done prior to submitting those to the federal government. That's a big deal to an auditor. To me, when we submit a 130 reports every month, I'm like, okay. I get it. So if you think it's a bigger deal than that, please let me know. But that's that's essentially what these three findings are are things like that. So so relatively minor things. I will and I can go into detail on all of those. I have those findings written out here, and I'm happy to provide those to the to the committee if you wish. Meeting with the independent auditors last week, we are on track to have zero findings this single audit round. We're just about done, and so far, so good. Two thumbs up, and I'm pretty happy with that.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: That's great. That's great. Volume of money

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: that people

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: do there and keeping track

[Sabina Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: of this.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: It's lot. Thank

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: you. Yep.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: So we'll we'll try to I wanna just wrap up here a little bit. So now we get into the nitty gritty here for our general funds ups and downs along with exchanges. Like I said in the chat, feel free to chime in. So we, for general funds, generally distribute 3% across all of our general fund programs, that 3% distribution equally across. There are two instances I'm looking for memory here, so jump in where you're going to see more than a 3% increase. One is in our admin subsidies and budget allowances. So that's like ADS, DHR, vision, finance and management gave everybody, I believe, a little bit more than 3% because our ADS and our DHR and our technical services fees were going up. And then the Office of Workforce Strategy and Development is here, and they can present directly or chime in. But they have a $51,000 up to close a deficit for that new office, which VITAL is pass through. It provides admin support and infrastructure support, but they are technically independent in statute. So you have Director Kasckel and Deputy Director Turner here so that if you have questions, I won't necessarily speak on their behalf, given we're partners, that they are independent.

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: There

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: any Again, I know just watching public safety, they were going really granularly through their ups and downs. I don't know. Again, it's pretty much a 3% across the board on all these general fund ones. You want us to reiterate that? Or Chad, what you would add? Or what's the committee's pleasure here with these spreadsheets?

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: Yeah, I would also add that the federal numbers that we have on this sheet are based on the continuing resolution. They were the numbers that we had at the time. And in fact, the numbers that

[Rick Hallenbeck (Director of Finance & Administration, Vermont DPS)]: we have right now, we still don't have our

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: appropriation amounts given to us for the federal fiscal year. So it's what we know at the moment.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: We actually just might be able talk.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: Right, right. I suspect you did. So you can point out to us if you think there's anything we need to see.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: I don't think there's anything that hasn't been pointed out

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: or touched on. It's pretty straightforward. Okay, great. Thanks.

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: And you'll note in the slide presentation, we have the standard ups and downs form, and then followed by another spreadsheet that we do every year. And that is every one of our programs in the department listed there and where the funding comes from in each one. Feel that that's a little more helpful than the ups and downs form, being that it's the bigger picture of more of the detail on all programs.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: Good. Yes. Perhaps I should say one other thing, which is one of my questions was just in these sections that there's both general funds and federal funds. How much of this was potentially matching, and if we don't know the number, how that could affect things down the road. Sounds like, again I mean, it doesn't sound like we are there's only one space, I think. There's only one place on here that the the funds are technically matching. And then on top of that, it just doesn't it's early, so we don't know for sure, but it doesn't sound like this, but it's we're expecting enormous.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: We're not expecting again, there's gonna be a couple of little downs, but I think that we can figure it out for the time being. And I'm just kind of chuckling because I'm like, this will all we'll have our allocations. At this point, it'll be probably March. And then the new fiscal year will start again in October. And we get to do this again in terms of where there might be additional changes to our federal funds. So as soon as we have our allocations, we will absolutely update those and give them to this committee, even if it is in the Senate, just so you have those numbers and are aware. And then hopefully, by the time the Senate takes it up, we'll have some certainty or we can flag if there's anything that went off the rails. But we will submit to this committee and we'll flag for our liaison once we have our federal allocations. And then if

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: it extends into the fall, we will be readjusting numbers in the budget to adjust the difference of reorganizing this number. Yes? Just a quick question, the reach up budget is mine at DCF and there's a line item here that I just don't know about is reach up ICANN, ask at the administration. Can you just tell me what Well,

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: have an MOU with folks. We do some administrative stuff. We use our case management system. So we bring their data over, and they use our case management for some things. And that's about what I know about it. We can certainly pull more information on that if you'd like to see it.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: It's part of our system of employment supports for people. So in terms of where is government talking and things happening well, that ICANN system is a good example where if they have a client that they think would benefit from our services or vice versa, that we are having that integration and that share. Okay, that's great, thanks.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: It's helpful that the programs are listed out this way, so are there any other questions on any of the specific programs? Yes, Dave.

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: Summer youth employment, hopefully there'll be some assistance from the federal government on that again. How are areas like Lamoille and Orange that don't have a district office presence, how are programs like summer employment administered?

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: That is a great question. May I follow-up with you on what we're doing for summer youth employment? Sure.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: No, it's a wave of ours, but-

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: Yeah, no, but that's a good question because we do have a small footprint in Morrisville. I do not believe we have regional office in Orange County as I'm visualizing the map. So we do do some on location type work. I think Orange might be covered by our Berry office. Let me just get back to you so we get more thorough response on that and what we have planned for this summer. The last slide I would point to to close us out, and then if you would like to hear from the Office of Workforce and Strategy directly, I will defer to them or to you all. We are not asking for any money this year. We do not have any big, flashy initiatives that we are pushing. Like I said, my number one priority for the coming months is that launch of the new UI system and having that go smoothly. That is our number one goal. So we are playing a supporting role in a couple of areas around education transformation. Here in the State House with our AOE counterparts and others, we do have a registered apprenticeship technical corrections request. What you'll see under JobSeeker and employer service transformation are some internal projects that we are working on. I touched on apprenticeship expansion just as an example. And then in relation to a lot of federal changes, policy wise, we're trying to support our counterparts where we can, for example, around the work requirements in SNAP and Medicaid going into effect, working with our colleagues at the Agency of Human Services, The Rural Health Transformation money, I'm sure you've heard a bit about that from AHS. There's about $30,000,000 that goes towards health care workforce specifically. So we're trying to be helpful where we can bear. Lot A of agency human services, so if you want to dig into these, you should definitely speak to them directly. I'm not meaning to represent them on any of these pieces. But there was also some federal funds to help the fingerprint supported background check system that were recently awarded as part of a larger CDBGP5 through CDD, Child Development Division grants. And WorkforceTel, if you have questions about WorkforceTel, if you've heard that term, Sabina is leading a work group on that, which is supposed to go live this summer or fall, even though the federal government's been kind of, I will say, slow to roll out some of their guidance for us in terms of how they want that constructed. So just because we don't have any legislative initiatives, I'm just trying to hopefully illustrate there's still a lot of good work going on towards many of our shared goals that we have not to keep us busy.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: So,

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Appropriations)]: we'll, and this may be for you all, is there anything left in the 1,500,000.0 that maybe used to be called the wet fund, but it's a different name now? Will you be issuing RFPs for funding to support training programs in The this coming

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: short answer is yes. In terms of the wet fund or lack thereof, Chad and I were just kind of laughing about that this morning because we all continue to get tripped up on that. And that those monies basically reverted to our base, and they're no longer called web funds. But the short answer to your question is yes, and those are monies that our workforce development division at Department of Labor administers.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: So RFPs will go out this year for initiatives. And

[Chad Wozniak (Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor)]: that is line number 38, our former NextGen.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: So with that, I would yield to my colleagues at the office if you would like them to talk about their slice of this pie. Sure. Briefly.

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: Thank you.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: Thank you. You.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: Hi, everyone.

[Sabina Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: For the record, I'm Sabina Haskell. I'm the Executive Director of the Office of Workforce Strategy and Development. My colleague, Drake Turner, who's Deputy Director of the Office. I don't know how familiar you are with the office, but we were brought into existence through Act 146 of 2024 that created this standalone office with two employees with the goal of connecting, collaborating, making sure we have one braided system of workforce development across the state, working with our sister agencies, working with outside partners, working with community organizations, working with higher edanybody that something to do with workforce development. The other part of our responsibilities is we work with the state Workforce Development Board, which every state must have if they receive WIOA funding. There was a pause of maybe a year, I'm not quite sure, where the former board was not active. It was a 63 person board. And when we came in, the board had done much, obviously. And we now have a 27 person board. And we met four times last year. The executive committee meets every month on Monday afternoons. It's been a lot of work, it's been a lot of fun, and we're ready, I think, to take off.

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: Don't you know? In

[Sabina Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: November, the full board approved four goals for its strategy and vision that we will be setting up we are setting up subcommittees, they'll start meeting later this month to fulfill the vision and the strategies for those goals. I don't have those goals with me, and I probably should have, but we can send the links to all of you. But it focuses on priority sectors. It focuses on That's one goal. Second goal is bringing adults back into the workplace and upskilling where needed. The third goal is growing and expanding our current businesses and convincing other businesses to move here. And our fourth goal is to keep and retain more young people here so that they know how wonderful the mom is. They already do know, but they should stay home, right? And so that's what we've been doing for pretty much the last year. There are a lot of specific operational things that we've been doing over the last few months. We had to update our MOU with all of our WIOA partners for the one stop system. And I'm going to pass that over to Rick in just a second. And then we are updating the state plan. We're in the middle of that. And then workforce health is going to be a biggie as well with that. But we don't have a whole lot of guidance on that yet. But it's going to be, it could be a potentially very good program if it works.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: Yeah. So structurally, I'm a little confused. Are you attached to the Department of Labor or are you attached to the Agency of Administration?

[Sabina Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: We are a standalone office that is located at the Department of Labor, and we are, I guess, appointed by the governor kind of thing that way. Think the

[Drake Turner (Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: excuse me, Frank Tremle, deputy director of the office. The functions of the office have lived in different parts of state government over the years. I think it's been in the governor's office at certain points within the Department of Labor at certain points. And there was a multi year period to really study what's the best way to coordinate and organize workforce development because workforce development lives kind of everywhere within state government. Right. So there was a group of folks, including legislative representation, state agency representation. There was a long body of work to determine what's the best way to structure that. And the conclusion, the outcome of that was to develop a standalone state office that could be nimble, work across state government, work to break down silos, knit work together, and also support the state workforce development board. So we're a standalone office. And as Sabina mentioned, we get support from the Department of Labor when comes to administrative support or budget support, those types of things. So

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: independent agency? Part of the governors under the umbrella of the governor? Of the administration.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: The administration? Yes.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: You're not in an agency?

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: Right, standalone office. It's not an agency, but it's an office.

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: I really wish you were successful. I was on Commerce from 2009 to over a bunch of years. Served there ten years over a period. We decided, chair of the Commerce Committee decided there, because workforce development is a really important piece. They never knew they were supposed to do a jobs bill. They were supposed to do something about workforce, blah, blah, blah. There were so many different places that had workforce development. They were in human services. They were in all the institutions of learning. They were in CTEs. They were in AOE. They were in ACCD, big one at the time. We had everywhere, labor, you name it, the ad of. And we tried to bring every agency in to sit down and tell us what they did so that we knew, before we created a new workforce development or job fill or whatever it was, we would know what we had, where the gaps were, and how we were going to Bill Batza was very, very organized. And he and Mike tried to manage this. And I think we finally here, I think I've explained this, we called in Agency of Human Services, and we had David there with the agency secretary at the time. And it was so many places and so many things, and they were little and they were big and they were huge and they were Yeah. And we finally gave up. So I really wish you luck because I think it's really hard to do this. And at that point, we had Next Generation, and then we had the Workforce Development Board, and we had the WIB, and they all changed letters for a few years, And the Workforce Development Board was workable, because at that time it had 35 people. 35? That was almost workable. It was an executive committee that developed the work, and that got one of our legislators very upset because she had envisioned this as a real collaborative thing. So 'sixty three, I mean, I wasn't there when they did 'sixty three, but they put everybody out, and now '27 sounds a little more reasonable. But I really hope that you can do this because there are so many places where we need to know what we're doing and where the gaps are and how employers and government and everybody can work together. So,

[Sabina Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: good luck. Thank you. You just summed up what we do very well. Yes, I know what you're trying

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member, House Appropriations Committee)]: to do.

[Drake Turner (Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: I think a lot of like a lot of the things that folks are hoping the office is going to support are issues that have plagued Vermont for a long time. Not enough information about what's happening, where, how it all relates, makes it really difficult for you all to make policy choices and investments, especially when we're entering a period of time where money will be far tighter than it once was. So we hear that over and over again. We understand what is needed. And now it's about us working smart and as quickly as we can well to work to meet that need. And, you know, Sabine and I have had many conversations with legislators, state agency leadership, community partners, and are feeling hearing a lot of the same things and a lot of energy and commitment to collaborating. So we just want to continue to have those conversations and build systems at capacity, uplift work that is already really successful and avoid duplication. So there's a lot to do, certainly. And we're feeling optimistic and ready to just continue to work and support this board, which is reorganized. Really, we are a primarily business board. We can send you more information about who sits on the board, but we're feeling really great about the direction of the state workforce development board and really are hoping that each time we come back to, we'll have more great outcomes to share.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: So do you have a website we can refer to that as information?

[Drake Turner (Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: Yeah, we can send you that. We can send you which at the website will look better in the future. I will say it's

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: just the basic information. Yes, absolutely. Your four pillars are and that sort of thing. I think you would send that information to all of the participants. Committees will have, excuse

[Sabina Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: me for updating, the committees will, when they start meeting later this month, one of the goals is that they'll start to have metrics and things that their strategies will be able to show, hey, this worked, or that kind of thing. And so we're pretty pumped about that.

[Drake Turner (Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: Yeah, and understand that a lot of what we're doing is not going to be things that we're reporting to you all on. We've presented to the House Commerce Committee and are happy to discuss any of this in greater detail. Whatever. So since we're the Appropriations Committee, is there any specific appropriation issue? You have? So as Chad mentioned, our budget for FY27 has a $51,000 up over the 3% for the department and that's for staffing costs of a totally stood out department. Yeah, we're online within the ups and downs. Yes.

[Unidentified Committee Member (mixed attributions)]: So Wayne? Seems like a good opportunity to use AI.

[Commissioner Kendall Smith (Vermont Department of Labor)]: And certainly.

[Sabina Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: We kind of do already.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: Okay. Well, thank you for that overview. I think it was very helpful. Thank you.

[Sabina Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: Thank you.

[Drake Turner (Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy & Development)]: We'll follow-up with the website. Thank

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair, House Appropriations Committee)]: you very much for coming in. Thank you.

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Appropriations)]: So, committee,