Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Good morning. This is the House Appropriations Committee. It is Wednesday, 02/11/2026. It's just after 9AM, and we are continuing our walk through the FY27 budget. And this morning, we're delighted to have folks from the Public Utility Commission here with us to go over their budget. So welcome. If you would please introduce yourselves for the record and tell us what you got.

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: Great, thank you. Ed McNamara, Chair for the PUC.

[Anne Bishop (Operations Director, Public Utility Commission)]: I'm Anne Bishop. I'm the Public Utility Commission's Operations Director.

[Bryn Hare (Director and Chief Counsel, Legislative Counsel)]: Karen Hutchinson, I'm the business manager.

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: Great, thanks. So let me just provide a quick overview of who we are and what we do. Obviously, talked about the budget. So I believe that there are slides passed out. Slide two is just an overview. We generally regulate the retail side for electric and gas, gas utilities, in addition to some portions of telecommunications and cable and water as well. There is a total of 27 positions currently at the commission, although three of those positions are vacant at the moment. Slide three, the FY 'twenty seven budget summary. It's important to recognize we get zero general funds. About three years ago, we did receive around $800,000 for the development of clean heat standard. Those funds are gone at this point. So FY '27, we

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: are 100% special funded,

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: and 96% of our funding comes from the gross receipts tax that regulated utilities pay. Application fees make up the remaining 4%, roughly.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So are these application fees for various certificates, for solar, for wind, for I don't know what. So

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: the majority of our work involves regulated utilities. So if, for example, Green Mountain Power or Velco comes in to propose a line, they're paying to upgrade a transmission line, for example. They pay gross receipts tax, so they're funding us and we don't charge them anything for our review. What we call merchant solar, these are sort of unregulated private for profit solar developers, they don't pay anything in gross receipts tax. They pay applications to cover the review under section two forty eight for. So our f y twenty seven proposed budget is roughly 5,300,000.0, which is an increase of a little bit less than 3% above the f y twenty six approved budget. So salaries and benefits make up over 87% of the commission's budget. And our FY twenty seven projected revenues are $4,350,000 So reserves are being spent down to cover the difference.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Is that because what's happening with grocery seed staff? Is there any change in what revenue that you're getting from them? Is there any change in

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: the rate? It's all happening. So the rate has not changed since 2019. Grocery seed stacks, the bulk of it is from the electric utilities, a significant portion also from gas. Grocer seed stacks or sorry, the overall revenue for a utility will change depending on the weather. So every year, it's sort of up and down. We have typically looked at gross receipts tax over the last five years and looked at the trend. It's generally been about 2.5% increase. 2.5% increase in revenues is below what we have seen in our expenditures when you just think of health care and retirement in particular, especially with an organization like us that are very heavy on the salaries of Health health

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: care comes in coverage, right?

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member)]: Yep. What do you have for reserves?

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: For reserves, it is $3,500,000 roughly. Reserves were built up over the course of, I think, fifteen years or so. And typically, use that to draw down because we're special funded, we get the money from gross receipts tax. Is it end of the fiscal year? So we're carrying our own budget, and the reserves help that. The reserves will dip down towards the end of the fiscal year and then essentially get reimbursed.

[Rep. Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: So you don't see any trends that might jeopardize your reserves? Might jeopardize

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: the reserve in

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: terms of Oh, no, there's definitely jeopardy there, because we have not put money into the reserves in a while. And so we're continuing to draw down. It's about $900,000 drawdown this year. And we project that it'll be about three years before we do not have sufficient reserves anymore. What do you do? We're working on something right now. Mean, the options are either, obviously, you increase revenues or you decrease service. So some of the things might be an examination of what is it that the commission does, or are there certain things that we should not be doing, or that are more appropriate located somewhere else. So those are not easy things. Neither one of those, particularly at the moment, are easy, especially recognizing what's happening across the board for everybody's budget. It's difficult to come in and ask for an increase. So we're not asking for any increases this year, recognition of things are tough all over, and we want to make sure we're very precise and targeted with what we're asking and potentially look at some combination of increase in revenues, decrease in work. So you said rates have an increase since 2019. Prior to 2019, how often were rates increased? Very rarely. I think about ten years over ten

[Anne Bishop (Operations Director, Public Utility Commission)]: years No, they changed in decades, many decades. 2019 was the first time the rates changed in forty years.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: A very long time. Okay. And so you also talked about a little bit of volatility, which is weather dependent. I would imagine this year, had a lot of really cold days, so I'm guessing you're going to have a lot more revenue.

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: This year, we do expect more revenue, but it also depends on the sun as well, in terms of how much solar is deployed, how that's a significant impact on the utilities, the electric utilities. It reduces the revenues. And so it will be interesting to see at the end of the year, I fully agree, the last six weeks with the cold, significantly more gas usage, really significant increase in electric costs. Right now, would probably predict that overall gross receipts tax would go up, but you could have absolutely beautiful days late April through August, and that might make up for it.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yeah, well, and then if it's too hot over the summer, we end up with The solar's good, but also then there's the weight on

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: the grid. The air conditioning load.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yeah, I have a Tesla Powerwall and they draw down on it when it gets really hot to support the grid. It's not hot, so there are ways. For GMP at least.

[Rep. Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: Yes. So are you doing any modeling? Because you've got you know how these different factors impact you. It seems like something that would be amenable to modeling to give you an idea, at least some range in terms of predict when you might get in trouble and what you might have

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: to do about it, or what drivers are causing the problem.

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: Yeah, so I should have also mentioned early on, the Department of Public Service is also funded primarily through gross receipts tax. And they're actually the ones who collect it. They're the ones who typically project it. We work with them as if we think those projections are reasonable. They have started recently looking at what are the policy impacts of, for example, advocating for electric vehicles and heat pumps. We had, for the longest time, expected to see an increase in revenues associated with that increased kilowatt hour sales from EVs and from heat pumps. It's not happening as quickly as we thought, but we're still diving into that in terms of, is it going to be a linear? Is it going to be more of a U shape? When will that appear? And this is all forecasting, modeling, and again, one cold winter could throw everything off. But we're definitely looking at it and working with the department on that as well.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: And you're forecasting human behavior, so it sounds interesting.

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: Forecasting human behavior and also some of the significant changes that we're seeing with, for example, the tax credit for EVs. That going away, it's not clear what that looks like now. We don't have a full year of data to understand how many less EVs are being sold. That was the primary driver of kilowatt hour sale increased kilowatt hour sales.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Heat pumps. These are, I guess in Vermont a lot of times they're a lot for summer air conditioning. And then you can also use them for heat. So instead of having an oil bill or a natural gas bill, you have an electric bill that goes up. And so you say you don't see any it seems to me that that's with the gross receipts impact upwards.

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: It should be a gross receipts impact upwards, and it's not happening as quickly as we thought. And I think it is being offset by

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: the solar, by the increase. A lot

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: of people have both. I'm one of them. But our electric bill has gone up quite a bit. Can tell you the switch really. And the solar, in the winter, the solar, you don't get as much solar use power to break daylight.

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: Yeah, and your EV battery usage is nowhere near as efficient in the wintertime.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Right, exactly.

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: But there is generally I'm interested in terms of if there's a correlation between if you have a net metering system on your roof, it's more economically advantageous for you to do electric vehicles and to do heat pumps. That might be part of it, is the people putting heat pumps in EVs at the moment are actually not really contributing much to the kill, or not as much many proline aortic sales

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: as I would have expected. Well,

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: and I'm sure there's some seasonality, but if they're doing some modeling over it through PSL, it'll be interesting to hear what they're talking Okay, we got to page three.

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: Great. So there's a couple of slides just to give you a context for what we're doing. Slide four, Commission's workload. This is 2025. So more than 2,200 new cases were filed with the commission. More than 12,300 filings were made in our online filing and case management system. So somebody is looking at pretty much all of those filings. That's not number of pages. That's just number of filings. More than 100 hearings and workshops, more than 1,200 orders, certificates of public goods. Certificates of public good are typically for generation, new generation. That's the majority of those, and about 1,800 net metering CPGs.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Is that trending down, those certificates of public good and net metering registration, or are they?

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: They're trending down to some degree. I don't have year over year. Yes,

[Anne Bishop (Operations Director, Public Utility Commission)]: the net metering registrations are trending down. I would say it's down maybe 20% from its peak, which was a couple of years ago. The larger net metering projects, we are also seeing fewer of those in part as a result of some statutory changes. So those are trending down as well, but those were always a much smaller number.

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: So slide five, we do track the timeframes for resolving cases. I've got the information right there. It's essentially we break it out into percentage of cases. We break out net metering registration cases and then also public inquiries as well. How quickly we respond. We are generally doing very well with those. The outliers tend to be Obviously, we occasionally make mistakes like every other agency, but a lot of times it is a miscommunication, not understanding some of our rules, some of the other aspects. And in some of the cases, quite honestly, somebody starts off strong and then runs into their own problems and keeps asking for delays. It's a little mix of a little everything.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: When are your established time frames? We can all make them up and make it look really good. What do your customers say?

[Anne Bishop (Operations Director, Public Utility Commission)]: So they vary by the type of case, and are, in each type of case, we recognize that there are simple, medium, and complex cases. And this approach is modeled after something that's used by the Vermont judiciary, that is used by the, comes from the National Center for State Courts, where they look at what are reasonable timeframes for the different kinds of cases. And yes, we do kind of, we have historical data on how long it takes us to process cases now that we have EPUC. And so just last year, we reevaluated our time frames to make sure that they were still appropriate. Because when we had originally set the time frames, they were before we had a database to be able to do this, and we just sort of were kind of ballparking it. So when we did make some adjustments, some went up, some went down based on how long is reasonable. As for what can make a case complex, a lot of that has to do with how many parties are in the case, how many issues are they raising, in other words, how contested is the matter before us. And we want to make sure that we give everybody the process that they need to fully explain their positions. And sometimes doing that means we're going to miss our time standard, eating for a complex case. And in those situations, we prioritize making sure everyone has the time that they need to present their case rather than artificially publishing. What's the general timeframe for a simple case versus a complex case? Just how about So a net metering registration case, it's fifteen days. A complex, large, 20 megawatt solar project, a year and a half would be the other end. And different types of cases fall

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So you assign when the case comes in, you will sign a time frame?

[Anne Bishop (Operations Director, Public Utility Commission)]: Not exactly. We don't know when a case is first filed, how complex it's going to be yet, because we don't know how many people are going to want to participate in the case and how many issues they're going to raise. So we know what type of case it is. So yes, it's assigned to that type of case. But which bucket, simple, medium, complex, we don't know yet until we're further into Just the

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: to provide a little bit more context for that, just as an example, recently, we approved the 20 megawatt solar project in Fairhaven, 100 acres. Not a single party moved to intervene. Town supported it. I don't think there was even an evidentiary hearing. Nobody requested it. Meanwhile, you can get these relatively small solar projects that are an acre or two, and one neighbor can walk them considerably. Right.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: I'm picking up from the customer's perspective, your applicant's perspective, are there any cases in which either the applicants or you have been very disappointed in not meeting the timeframe? Something that you thought was gonna be a reasonable amount of time and something turned out not to be. So you as the regulator were disappointed in how that turned out or on the other side, are there the cases in which the applicant was very disappointed in how things turned out? Not the result, but the time frame of something done.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Would say Have there been notable examples?

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: There was one solar project that took considerably longer, in part because of some staffing changes. Somebody had left the commission. The handoff was not as great as it should have been. So there were some delays in our process in the case. That's one example that I can think of as the most obvious one. I would say there's a lot of developers who do not think we process cases as quickly as we should. And to the point that Anne made earlier, however, Vermonters are entitled to due process. If there's a project being proposed next to them, they should have the ability to ask questions of the developer and file testimony if they won't. And as soon as that happens, the case slowed down considerably.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Okay, we've asked you lots of questions and we have limited time, so you make sure you let us know what you want us to know.

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: I'll just jump to the next slide. It's slide six, major cases in 2025. You couldn't read most of this here. It mentions 20 megawatt solar project, Fairhaven, for example. But what I wanna draw your attention to is the first four bullets all relate to legislative either reports or legislative direction. And this is one that as our budget gets tighter, as we're relying more on our reserves, I am being more vocal of saying we don't have the resources to do that. And so I just want to say that here, that we are taking steps. One of the things that's going to be one of our potential proactive actions is to not volunteer to take on work. Ten years ago, it was much easier to do that. If somebody wanted a report, we tend to be the more independent of the administration. People want to quote more objective report. They usually look at us. Now I'm saying we don't have the resources anymore. So if you're hearing that elsewhere, that's what

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: that means.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Okay, so you already presented in House Energy?

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: I did, and I

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I'm sure you probably mentioned that in that. Yeah, okay. How would you have been so far in this session?

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: I agree.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Should I do something? Well, nothing's come here.

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: Nothing's come. Some of the bills already have a couple reports.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yeah, and not every bill gets taken to no. I'm sure you're taking

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: a bill has passed yet. All right. Yes. So slide seven, known cases for 2026. This is just a preview of what we're doing. Green Mountain Power has a multi year regulation plan. It's basically, I can't believe I was about to blank this four year look at over the course of four years, what is a predictable path for Green Mountain Power's electric rates? What are their capital costs gonna be? And what are the base rates gonna be? So that's gonna spend we're gonna spend a considerable amount of time on that. We also have Hyde Park Electric Department. I'm sure folks have heard about that. So looking at is the regulation of some of the small BMEs, in particular Hyde Park. Is it appropriate? Department of Public Service is also doing considerable work on that. And then the last I just want to mention briefly is we have three energy efficiency utilities. They're on a three year cycle where we look at the budgets, what we expect of them, how many savings or how much savings they're going to get in different programs, what are those programs going to look like. So that's a considerable policy lift as well. And then we have, depending on the sunset of section two forty eight a in title 30, we've typically done a fair amount of wireless telecommunication towers. We expect that to continue and also net metering cases as well. All right, given the limited time, I'm just going to jump

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: on the budget and the funding sources. So

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: I'm just going to I mentioned the budget challenges. This slide kind

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: of talked about this a little bit.

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: Talked about the reserve. Why don't I just jump right to slide 12, which is ups and downs? And mostly what is actually happening here so in Act 18 from 2023, essentially the clean heat standard, in addition to the roughly 800,000 we received, we also received three positions, or one limited service to full time. And so at the end of last year, after the legislature adjourned and there was no movement on the clean heat standard, we said to the administration, we have three positions, but we have no funding for them. So we asked them to take those positions online because bluntly, if we do need to do anything on the clean heat standard, we're going to need an appropriation, we'd come back and talk about positions again. So that is actually mostly what's going on. Generally, there's been some increase in personal services, primarily health care and retirement, a little bit on salaries as well. Most of the numbers that we're seeing on here are actually the clean heat, the three clean heat positions being removed out of our budget. And that's the change for most of those in addition to vacancy savings because we did have those, at least two of those positions vacant. So vacancy savings went up because we actually got rid of the positions. And then at the very bottom of that chart, operating expenses, we're seeing increases, as everybody else is, fee for space, ADS. So generally what we're seeing.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Any questions from let's see. Passed you a lot today. It's been always illuminating with you, and I really enjoy that. Well, I just

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: I was poised, ready to hear you talk about budget challenges on slide 10. And then you quickly went to the ups and downs. And I'm just wondering, is

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: there anything

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: you want us to know from that slide in terms of what the challenges are?

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: Yeah, I can just talk very briefly on it.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: We got that message.

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: I'd already talked about it at a high level. This is a little bit more granular in terms of what we're seeing for a gap. Gross receipts tax, again, is about 96% of our funding. Historically, that was 100% of our work. It wasn't until probably 2015 or so that merchant generation this is whether it's net metering, whether it's Encore, for example, another developer that shows up a lot folks building solar projects that aren't the electric utility. So in 2019, it is when we started receiving application fees. Application fees are not covering the amount of work associated with reviewing the merchant generation. We pointed that out. That's mostly what's in the slide. And that is one of the things that we need to talk about or we need to, when we come back with a more formal presentation or a formal solution is, for example, is an increase in application fees and gross receipts tax, just application fees. We take two forty eight for merchant generation off the table and have it go to Act two fifty, which is what the vast majority of other states in the country do. So. So those are the different aspects. This slide is simply noting that the largest gap between our funding and the work that we do shows up mostly around application fees and merchant generation. Okay, thanks.

[Rep. John Kascenska (Member)]: John, last question. Yeah, last question. So we can catch up online offline if we need to. I can get back to the video on this, but kind of the range of application fees per project must vary here because some are small projects, some are much larger in nature. Why are four?

[Anne Bishop (Operations Director, Public Utility Commission)]: Sure. So for net metering registrations, it's a $100 fee that is split between us and the department. So we get $40 for an amendment to one of those, which we have an increasing number of them are amendments to existing systems, the fee is $25 which means the commission gets $10 which doesn't begin to cover our costs. For a large project, it is based on the size of the project, a per KW fee. So for example, the 20 megawatt projects that you see here, they paid $100,000 and the commission received 40,000.

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: Remember going through all this

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: a few years ago, figuring that all out, so yeah.

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: I will just reemphasize that this is, what we're doing here, the $40,000 for Fairhaven Solar, where there was there was no intervention. It was very quick. It was vastly different than another 20 megawatt solar project with significant intervention, long hearings, everything else. So it's a very imprecise art that we're doing. Right.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Well, you for all the work you are, Julie. We appreciate you coming in today. And yep, John will be in

[Anne Bishop (Operations Director, Public Utility Commission)]: touch as we have questions.

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: Thank you

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: very much. Take care. So we're

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: going to switch from the Public Utility Commission to the Legislative Budget. Thanks for your patience.

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: I'll send you a note. Finish up there.

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: I appreciate it.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I have our friends from the joint fiscal office here. You're going to sit over there. Okay, Scott, good morning, Rand. Welcome all people in the legislative world. Always good to see you here. And Scott, if you want to introduce yourself for the record, get ready.

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: Good day, Scott Moore, Vice City Finance Manager for the joint fiscal office.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So we have a handout, and it's on your screen. I don't know if you

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: want to share a screen

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: or you just want to talk us through a little bit. I thought we can just

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: talk through.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Okay, that sounds great. Just orient us to where you're going. So

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: before we get too much into the packet, a lot of you have had me before you've seen this presentation, but I felt this hasn't, so I wanted to back up a little bit and talk about our process. As you sure have heard from many, many people that come in and talk about the budget, at the August or so, the budget instructions are presented to different agencies. Those budget instructions include: when you develop the budget, try to have only a 3% increase. When the budget instructions came out, they also mentioned that there's an estimated 5% increase in healthcare. We have to incorporate any activities from the PADD, which was a 5.4% increase in salaries. And they were suggesting only a 3% increase in internal service fund costs. So with that in mind, we developed the budgets. I went to all of the department heads, and we sat down and went bottom up as we do every year. In the process, I really had two questions in my mind. One of which is, do they have the resources that they need to serve the General Assembly to the best of their ability? The second question is, is there anything we can cut? Is there anything we can trim? Is there anything we can tighten up to make sure we have that? Once we have that budget created for each of the different business units, we do the same thing that other agencies do. We meet with financing management and talk about what our estimated budgets are going to be. They did mention to us that the final numbers for internal service fund costs come out in mid to late December. The one thing that we do that other agencies don't do is we then meet with the joint legislative management committee, present the budget, and get their input and get their approval. So what you see in this packet is memos that were presented to the JLMC about the budget, as well as updates after the final numbers came in for internal service loan costs. So with that, I would like to turn you to the third page of the document, which is at the top, number one. The first page is the cover, then the table of contents, and then number one. This is our presentation for what the total cost would be. We can see here that we're estimating $25,685,794 which is a $1,100,000 increase over the FY '26 budget. I will call your attention to the title, the FY '26 adjusted appropriation. What does that mean? What's going on there? If you were to go look at statute from last year, the actual acts that were passed, and add up all the different five business units, you'd find out that the legislative general assembly budget across the entire legislature was $26,044,703, I believe it was. Well, this says $24,544,703 There's a $1,500,000 difference there. If you recall, at the end of this session, we presented the budget, then we added $1,500,000 to the general assembly budget for a couple of reasons. One, we had cost of the mezzanine, which we estimated at the time to be $1,100,000 I think the total number is about $1,200,000 when we're all said and done. Honestly, you all are expensive, so about $300,000 a week. So going later in the session, we had, I believe, three weeks of additional costs, about $300,000

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: It's even more than three weeks that we threw in, because we didn't know what was going to happen with

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: the federal government, if we had

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: to be called back in the special session, things like that. We budgeted an extra 1,000,000 point dollars in the event that we had to. So we did talk about that last year. So we did end up needing it.

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: My quick, back down a little math, I think the cost could have potentially done as much as $2,500,000 if you add in the additional weeks plus some mezzanine and that kind of stuff. But I think we didn't need all that money, but of course, 1,500,000.0 was added to the budget. Now, it kind of acted a little bit like a one time appropriation, even though it was added to the base, if you will. But we didn't want to build that 3% increase on the budget with that extra $1,500,000 because that's not really fair if you get it. We could have just added that and said, Great, we have an extra $1,500,000 Wonderful. Then we can use But that's not transparent, that's not fair across the organization. The $1,500,000 could be used for two programs. So we backed out the $1,500,000 from the FY '26 appropriation, just so you can compare apples to apples.

[Anne Bishop (Operations Director, Public Utility Commission)]: That's due in fiscal year 2027. Not

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: a problem.

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: So that's why we see these numbers here comparing apples to apples. Now, the second thing I'd point out to your attention is if you look in the column that is change in percentage and change in dollar amount, it does look a little odd that the legislature is negative 2.5%, the Legislature is 20% increase, the JFO is 8% increase. Knowing that that does look kind of odd, I'd like to point out that one of the things we have done with the legislature, the general assembly budget, is we've taken the Office of Legislative Operations and we've divided up the duties and therefore the cost to the Joint Fiscal Office and to Legislative Essentially, anything legislatively, support staff, committee assistance, all of that stuff went over to Legg Council. Anything fiscal, expense related, salary related, making sure you guys are taken care of, over to JFO. The process of moving the positions and the dollar amount for those positions, that's why you see these increases and decreases the way they were. Effectively, we took out about $900,000 from the General Assembly budget and divide that up amongst JFO and Leggans.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: And we did a lot of language, or rather, Bryn did a lot of language, so for us in the budget adjustment, we had 10 pages of making this happen. Now we're seeing how it looks in the FY 'twenty six.

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: So then that brings us to the bottom line here of 4.5% increase overall from FY '26. I would like to also point out the FY '27 reversion. As part of my portfolio of things, take care of the capital bill. In the capital bill, we have a process, the repo committee, as they call it. We go and claw back old money from one time appropriations. Looking back at the legislative budget, anything that we have that's two years older for one time appropriations for studies or leftover money that hadn't been spent, we're going go look and bring it back and revert it back to capital bill. Not capital, but budget. Do that in capital bill, So there's $17,000 in case you're curious, 17,000 was a basic needs technical advisory committee, leftover money there, and the $65 was for a renewable energy study, happened to leftover subsidized and little bit rotten, hot dollar amount. Any questions on that first page before we get into the next bits and pieces of things? Going to the next page, which is page two. This is the memorandum that was sent to the JLMC. You might say to me, Mr. Moore, I'm looking at this number here and this $25,000,000 number is not exactly the same. You just told me that the increase is $1,100,000 but this one I said is $174,000 What's going on there? If you recall, I did mention that when finance management gave us the budget instructions, they said these were going to be estimated cost increases. And then what happens is that mid to late December, they have final numbers for the internal service fund fees, or fund costs as well as any health care increases or anything else. So it's about $166,000 differential between what I presented to JLMC and what's happening now. I presented to JLMC December 12, I think the numbers came out December 17. So if we waited one more week, you would have seen But this goes into a little bit more detail as to why there's increases. We can see in this paragraph here the growth. Approximately 88% of the overall budget growth is associated with the cost of the recent pay act, increases in health plans, corresponding percentages, like all of the FICA and the retirement is built off of salary. So if you increase the salary, lots of other things increase because they're built upon the percentages. Then the remaining 12% or so has increased in some IT operating expenses where we're just looking at other contracts where we have to have increases. Staff professional development where we have increased a little bit. And we did have contracts that had multiple year contract rates. So when we contract with different third party vendors, we try to lock in a rate for two, three, four years. Of course, each corresponding year might have a slight increase in the total cost. So essentially, it's 88 percent of our overall increase is people, and 12% is stuff. As we go through on to page three, we can talk about compensation and benefits changes. The staff had a 5.4% increase in their salary, which does, like I mentioned, talk about increases all across the board. At the time, it was projected to be 5% increase in healthcare. I think it's about the same, maybe 5.2%. I'd have to look at the numbers again. And then the increased internal service funds. We did increase the total budget I mentioned by $166,000 About $127,000 of that was due to increased internal service fund costs. One thing we did want to point out was site of the environment we'd like to have one additional position for a head tour guide. This position would be not benefited. Would be part time year round, unbenefited position. That would cost about $25,000 total, just so you have an idea about that. It's not a huge effect on the overall budget increase, but it is there.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So that's in the budget?

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: In the budget. Okay.

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: Then we can see here this legislative branch budgets by department, as I mentioned, about $900,000 wiggle wobble from the legislature to JFO and Met Council. And then, we'll jump to the appendix in a minute so you can see what happens. But then at the bottom of this memo are these proposed motions that JLMC has when they did their meeting. Jump to page four, we can see these are the appendices. I wanted to really just point this out that, right, well, this is before the BAA, so these numbers we didn't meet here to talk about moving money back and forth within the BAA. But when we look at this, if we didn't have any legislative operations staffing changes and we kept all the committee systems where they were, we kept all the operations coordinator where they were, and didn't make any changes whatsoever, this is what you would see. We have about 4% increase in legislature, 3.36% in legislative council, 3.71% in JFO, as opposed to the 1920% we saw on the previous page. I wanted you to see what that looks like as if nothing had ever changed. And then we can see the bottom section, this is really when things change. So we're moving the money, so we increase positions in one group versus the other, and we increase the money to pay for those positions. And the number stays the same. The total number stays the same: 3.97%. Now these numbers are $166,000 short from the very first page because we have the increased Internal Service Fund costs, as I mentioned before. And then, because we did have increased costs, one of the motions was to present to the chair of the JLMC and the vice chair, here are what the costs would be. If we had increased costs that were needing review, they could call another meeting of the JLMC to go through them. Dollars 166,000 versus $16,000,000 If there's that much of an increase, we want to meet again. So this budget memo was given to them just saying, Here's what happened. There's a slight increase. We can see here $129,000 in internal service fees and $37,000 in increased healthcare rates from before. And then, starting on page seven, we have nitty gritty, every single line item for every single budget. If you really want to know, wear the pens and pencils and celebratory birthday cakes and whatever else.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Excellent. Now that Marie is not there at morning, some other people have to do the baking, or buy baking, so it might be a big increase.

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: And I'm happy to go through my line if anybody has questions as to what changed or didn't change, but no.

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: I think we do

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: have questions. Just a quick question, and this may be something that the Sergeant Barnes would need to respond to, but I'm just wondering, given the work to create single point entry in the building, are there costs in here associated with that purchase of equipment, etcetera?

[Sergeant at Arms Barnes]: Exactly, we're starting arms, the equipment, we are equipped. That's been made for our previous budgets. The piece in our current budget that's already improved is for any overtime or actually shares that we need to hire to help us with our single point of entry on the days that we're doing it. But I would, I think, turn it over to Scott to address any future expenses associated with continuing that project. We do have an estimate on which it would be, and I can't remember where we landed on how we would request that money.

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: So when we look at that, if you were, I'm going to try to be delicate to not broadcast too many security detailsbut the associated cost depends a little bit on a number of factors.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: A number of

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: factors?

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: Factors. Do

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: we hire someone to be here all day, every day, outside, a consultant to come in during the session? Do we increase the current Capitol Police officers over time to be able to man the door versus having somebody else come in. So some of those things in play. With that said, we did look at the total, what we think estimated costs might be. That total is not in this part of the budget. One of the things we also talked about was other potential security measures for the General Assembly members themselves. That is in this budget. But at a single point of entry, we haven't increased this, partly because trying to figure out what the total cost would be, going through joint rules and legislative management committee to see if this is approved or not approved. That has not yet been baked into this.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So we might see something in budget adjustment next year if we decide to do something for next legislative session that's different

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: than what we're doing now? Right.

[Rep. Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: Okay. Some of it would be in the capital budget?

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: This would be mostly operating costs, you think.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: We had the equipment.

[Rep. Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: But we're doing any other physical changes to the

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: I don't believe we're going to be doing any other physical changes to the building for single point of entry. It's really just a matter of having personal staff to run Ecuadorian machine that comes.

[Sergeant at Arms Barnes]: You got it. You're 100% correct, Scott. Don't need any more investments for the infrastructure. We have the equipment. It would really be people cost.

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: And I don't want to get into worms, but if there are seahouse capital expansion plans in the next ten, twenty years, of course, that would get a whole different set of security stuff. That's

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I part of have to be in the capital bill. Not here, not right now.

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: You. In the future plans.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I'm glad you're doing the random days of single point of entry.

[Sergeant at Arms Barnes]: Appreciate that. Are pretty clear in our recommendation that we should be doing it every day, so we're working on that. Yeah.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Great, well we appreciate that you're doing all that. Any other questions for Scott or for, we have other heads of all the legislative offices here. It's great to see you all. Dave?

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member)]: Is there any way to do any comparative costs with other legislatures? For what other legislators spend for their overall budget? I'm happy to

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: go run some numbers and see what I can see.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Well, don't want to

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member)]: make you chase things, but if I take the control cost of the budget and divide the number of legislators, quite a figure to support this enterprise, which supports us. It's true.

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: There are about 100 or so legislative staff, 180 of you, so I want to keep

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member)]: in mind two eighty versus 180 when you do math. You're right. When I was doing that, I forgot to

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: sign it. That was a lot. But the staff are supporting us, so that is a cost. So I understand how you would divide it by the number of legislators because all of you are here in large part to support all of us, for which we're very grateful. That is part of the cost of making this.

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: I just 100 because committee assistants are about 20. So I usually just use So 100 as

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: a nice round figure for the lunch the transition of legislative operations, the split, has been going on for a little while now. Has that been going all right? Feels like it's okay?

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: Everything feels fine on my end. I know legislative counsel does have the creative assistants and she has more people to manage. But as far I as have actually less duties this session than last session, so I'm excited.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: You're happy. How about Maria?

[Bryn Hare (Director and Chief Counsel, Legislative Counsel)]: So for the record, we're in here Director and Chief Counsel of Legislative Counsel. And from my perspective, yes, it's going quite well. The attorney general committees often work together, and there is sort of a natural partnership there that is fostered through having all of the staff coming up in the lungs, so it's achieving some efficiencies.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Well, I'm glad that's working out.

[Bryn Hare (Director and Chief Counsel, Legislative Counsel)]: I'm

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: just feeling a little emotional seeing all of you I mean, sitting you've created a very special environment, and I think we're all really grateful for the work that you do, the care that you put into this work, and protecting us, terms of personal safety and staff meetings. Anyway, I'm grateful for all of you and I know that that's widely shared. Yes. Thank you.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Thank you all. Think you've done a great job designing it, and I don't think we have any more questions, but gratitude for thanks.

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: You know how to find me if you need anything?

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: You always do. Thanks, God. Thanks, God. Yes.

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: My budget, I've been very good about reaching out if we

[Scott Moore (Fiscal Manager, Joint Fiscal Office)]: have budgets. Doesn't sound like it's completely complicated.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: We chat to Tom and the members so great thank you all so much.

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: Thank Scott.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So we I think it's

[Ed McNamara (Chair, Public Utility Commission)]: a break time. It's a break You're breaking? Not really here. It's coming. I know. In the

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: summer. Okay, we have a break until 10:10.