Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Speaker 0]: This is the House Appropriations Committee again. It's Thursday, 03/19/2026. We're back to talk about the FY 'twenty seven budget. And first, I really want to thank the Joint Fiscal Staff for helping me put together the proposed ideas for for the budget for FY 'twenty eight, taking into consideration everything you heard from everybody and all

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: of

[Speaker 0]: you. But before we get into that, I think the first conversation we need to have is sort of a backup and higher level thing. And I alluded to it last night before we left and in my email to you all last night. And that is we first, I think, need to think about 'twenty seven and 'twenty eight and beyond and how we want to make the decisions going forward. Because if we decide to go in one direction, we spend money one way. If we decide to go in other directions, we spend money. We choose to spend money different. So rather than going through this first, that's the conversation level I'd like to talk about first. In talking with JFO, you'll see on here that there's about $20,000,000 of both base and one time that we were able to find from. Assuming we pass the miscellaneous tax bill, there's money that helps us there. If we use the interest in the IT modernization fund from ADS. That's where we get most of the one time funds. We have some reversions from other areas and a very slight increase in direct apps from AHS that gets us to the number. So that's at the top of your page. So that's where we're looking at getting the money from. But as I said last night, we know that FY 'twenty eight is going to be a very different animal than FY 'twenty seven. The provider tax reduction is going to play. That's $18,500,000 We won't have this $20,000,000 So one could argue that we're $38,500,000 in the whole because we won't have these funds. And we won't have the provider tax. And I don't know what else we're not going to have. But those are some of the knowns that we have now. Am I missing anything on those areas, Emily? Those are kind of the things that we're thinking about in terms of what we know we won't have. There may be some other Medicare things, don't know, Nolan, that are going into effect for FY '28 that aren't in effect now, or is it just the provider tax is the big one?

[Nolan (Joint Fiscal Office analyst)]: Well, I mean, a lot of other moving pieces. The eligibility issue is going to have more administrative costs. That's in the budget.

[Speaker 0]: So those are kind of

[Rep. John Kascenska (Member)]: the big

[Speaker 0]: So we know we're going to have those issues. And as I said, we have a lot of global uncertainty right now. Don't know revenues are not they're not going like this anymore. So that's where we are. And that's go ahead, Mike.

[Rep. Michael Nigro (Member)]: Mean, relating to a little bit about long term budgetary effects that will move forward. As we work through this process, are we and I can't remember what we did last year, but are we going to have any sort of comparison between positions conceived in our draft and versus positions in the gov rec?

[Speaker 0]: Oh, what are new so new positions. Positions. Yeah. So the governor had no new positions. There's a lot of converting of positions. Right,

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: so we should be looking

[Speaker 0]: at where are the positions. I don't know if James, we were keeping some track about where there are new positions or any of you, James. Gives me track. But can talk about that as we look at this. Yes, new positions and base. Base is different, but we also know that if we had to cut base in future years, where are we going to pull from? So I'm not advocating for any one direction to go. You all like what I'm doing, we'll just work on the language and get this going in the budget and have an easy time of it. And that's fine, too. If we don't want to do any of it, we want to do something else, that's why we're going to

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: have this conversation. So Wayne? I have heard that, obviously, in the tech mod fund, things will come in the pipeline there. The issue just is that they're not this year, and we'd have to fund a nonagenic fund in the coming year or years.

[Speaker 0]: Well, or other places. And I will say that when Adam came over to talk about things, this was not one of the things he talked to me about.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: Right, so it's not

[Speaker 0]: And he comes and talks to me when he doesn't like things we do. Hi, Adam.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: I'm not suggesting that. We've got a lot of good things in here that we're trying to do. So I'm not suggesting that at all. Just a

[Rep. Michael Nigro (Member)]: place marker there. That's right.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: Pay now or pay later, pick now.

[Speaker 0]: That's true with everything we're doing. And the advocates who are all here heard me talk about this all yesterday, and they're going to keep hearing us talk about this. So the money that we have, even the small amount we have now, is not what we're going to have next year. So people who are used to relying on the state need to be planning for what happens if they can't rely on the state in the same ways that they've been able to. Yeah. It

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: concerns me concerns me that that we're not socking some money away for what we know is going to be a very harsh year and yet I'm telling you kind of my thought process as I look at all these things that is just there's I think some of these things are providing an off ramp in that until things change, unless something at the federal level changes, I'm not quite sure, I mean, I guess I'm just emphasizing what you were saying, Robin, that it's depressing to me. We all have different opinions about the property tax relief issue. And it is concerning that that 50,000,000 is only 38,000,000. And is, know, an 18,000,000 from that next year would swallow up a lot, right? So I am really concerned about the coming year. And I also, however, I don't look at any of the things on this list as frivolous or unessential, inessential. Non essential. Non essential. One of those essential. Yeah. And, you know, the question is then, where can we make investments that are really critical now? You know, I really appreciate the work

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: that you did with this

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: distillation of conversations we've had and our choices. That probably was totally unhelpful.

[Speaker 0]: This is for us to just talk. If it's sort of, how do we plan for now and we plan for the future and how much do we do for each one? So, Marty, do you want

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: I just have to comment that I initially certainly did not like the idea of taking the interest funds out of the technology modernization fund because it was put there for a purpose. And the idea was that that interest would add to that fund and we would just help us with future IT projects and everybody knows and departments are complaining you know they don't have adequate services and all of that kind of stuff and the money has to come to something we're going to have to do it sometime. I understand that that's probably our only source of funds this year for doing a lot of one time stuff. And I think a lot of the one time stuff is necessary. So as much as I don't like public funds and pulling interest away that could be sitting there and helping us in the future when I we're gonna need have to concede we probably should do

[Speaker 0]: it, But I don't like it. It's different when you actually see it laid out, right? It's hard. I agree with you. Liz? Yeah. Think

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: it's very cold. Marty was here when started the ERP And the problem that's the Workday project. Yes. And the problem with these ERPs is that they take, I know that they take several years to do a modular at a time. And one of the biggest concerns with ERPs is that you have to go and help people who are doing the actual work day to day, so that while you're also converting. And that's a different group of people usually. And so that's one of the places where people ignore the needs and finances of that. Because if you don't work, if you don't do the regular stuff and start training the regular people, and they're trying to do both, it falls apart.

[Speaker 0]: There's some redundancy that happens during the transition. Yeah, yeah. And that's why

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: we phase it in. So I don't know how many years this is supposed to be transitioning and five years or something as they do each group. But the point is that if you shortchange that, the thing won't work and you'd be nothing but I mean, it's so easy for it to fail. Any these computer things that we've had over the years have mostly failed. But one thing you want to do is make sure you don't allow this big ERP to go that way.

[Speaker 0]: And so we have $11,800,000 in money for the ERP that has not been spent yet for that project. So there's not no money. There's plenty of big money.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: Well, there's money for that, there are other projects in that big fund as well that we said we're going to eventually need these things put in those placeholders. Right.

[Speaker 0]: And so there's money for those projects.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: They could probably be more expensive.

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: If your ERP doesn't properly continue you know it's so easy to say we're going to do it we're going to do it and then three years down the road it's like well never mind and you know it's and you're setting yourself up. Well

[Speaker 0]: presumably the administration is planning for that.

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: Yeah, I just want to make sure we have enough money to do it.

[Speaker 0]: Is what we've got from the administration thus far and maybe we have almost 12,000,000 in reserves for the project. We do as well as other projects.

[Rep. Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: Just my point is the idea was to let that fund grow to help new projects that would be coming along

[Speaker 0]: by And there will still be money in the

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: fund. Yes, yes, I understand.

[Speaker 0]: I'm just letting everybody know. Right, right. Okay, Tom.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member)]: To get back to the conversation about this year, next year, whatever, I'm probably, this will probably prove that I'm really unfit to be on this committee. Every Because as much money as we're spending on we're talking about, you know, the the homelessness program. I mean, I'm not gonna say we're not spending money on people who need it. It's not But I am going to say that the idea of holding idea of holding money back this year, we have a federal government that is actively destroying the safety net of poor people in this state, and not just poor people, but middle class people all the way up to except for the very top where tax benefits have been skewed in their favor for probably more than ten years. And so there is and we are sitting on an austerity style budget which says we only have this much money, therefore whatever the need is has to suffer. Rather than approaching this, we were approaching this at increasing the revenues and increasing them from people who can afford it. When I look at what this budget that came first from the governor's office, from the executive branch, and then came down to us. When I see the political conversation reduced to I'm for affordability at a time when the federal government has cut health care tax benefits for people who need to qualify for the ACA. They are cutting services across the board. Our health insurance plans are changing and getting more expensive. The services that we need are being pressured by what's going on across the hall, which is an overuse. We're taking $170,000,000,000 federally away from projects that would that would help people that we're trying to help here. And again, I don't want to dismiss or diminish the work that we've done or the work that that's even in the budget to to address some of those. But what this is missing to me is the amount of chaos. I mean, because quite frankly, I don't care about ERP. I don't care about how we're spending money because we've spent it poorly. ABS has spent money poorly if we're $25,000,000,000 in the hole. So I'm just gonna keep advocating for making a judicious use of that money, but not it's not about not saving for next year, but this reliance and this insistence that we've had and it's not just on you because this is amazing work, but I've heard this for the whole time I've been in this building, we have to worry about next year and I get it. But there are people who are going to suffer even more greatly in the next eight months before we're back here again in BAA to see how much they've suffered, whether they can't get food, farmers can't get relief, whether there's people who are not getting We're going to contemplate a massive change to eviction proceedings today in a place that in a way that is so rushed and it's going to create so many more evictions of people who won't have representation and a voice in court, and we're going to take voices away from that, which will make a difference on services that we provide across the board. So like I said, that may make me unfit for deciding how to spend the money today or tomorrow. But I cannot, I just cannot be silent about the lack of that this exercise has forced us into a lack of empathy for people whose we don't control what happens in the federal government, but this process had shown that we're not reacting in a way I don't think that is encompassing all of the chaos that's been created so far. And I'm in to using our state tax dollars, especially ones that are considered surplus to helping humans get through the next year. As long as this federal administration is in place, it is going to be chaotic. $1,000,000,000 a day to go to war, that affects us here. And so when there's organizations that aren't going to get 50,000, 100,000, $200,000,

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: That just is painful. Yeah thank you for listening.

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: Thank you. Are there comments Dave?

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member)]: I could easily join the ranks of the under. But

[Speaker 0]: I'll try not to. But

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member)]: I won't repeat what he said, but I it it does resonate with me. But I wanna remind the committee, and I'm not advocating spending it, depending how you count it, we have well over 300,000,000 in reserves. And if you add the money that we set aside last year, it's upwards approaching 400,000,000. That's a good thing. So so while, I'm inclined not to try to take more from those who, in my opinion, have little this year. I, it makes me feel good that we have at least some capacity, which I know, you know, if there's an economic downturn, we can chew through that quickly, but it is there.

[Speaker 0]: Yeah.

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member)]: It's not like we're sitting with nothing.

[Speaker 0]: Right. So that can be our sort of reserve for the future kind of

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member)]: Yes. That's the way I look at it, and I hope we don't have to tap it, but I'm grateful those who've come before us, including some of us on this committee, have salted away. And I often think how we work in such earnest to have reserves and have good balance sheets. But I fear often it comes at the expense of the Vermont population. You know, they drive with their cars on roads that take a beating on them. Right. And they, all the other healthcare out of pocket that they pay and the electric, all these things that, because we can't do things, it comes at their expense. Yes. And that doesn't set well with me.

[Speaker 0]: But I'm very grateful for

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member)]: all the work you've done. I wanna be honest, I've been vacillating on whether I could support this budget. This is one of those days when I feel I can, but I'm back and forth saying, you know, I'm thinking, oh my Lord, when I look at primary care and we all know why the numbers, you know, it's not there, but it scares me. Imagine what's unraveling on our watch. Yes. Thank you.

[Speaker 0]: Thanks. People wanna have comments, John and then Wayne.

[Rep. John Kascenska (Member)]: Thanks for doing this. We were talking yesterday afternoon about what do we do with all the requests that we've had here, with all the committees sitting behind us here, you know, and here advocating for, you know, trying to provide resources for this group or that group or for this purpose right here. I think it's when

[Rep. Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: we left. When we left each other last night, got this whatever

[Rep. John Kascenska (Member)]: time it was.

[Speaker 0]: 09:30. Nine

[Rep. John Kascenska (Member)]: I was just trying to think about all the different categories of the needs that we have here, and to make sure we're not leaving the category out of those needs, knowing that we can't fund everything at whole. Some things we can, because the requests were relatively small. Right. And those tend to kind of be easy things we can only check off, as we did last year here. It's bigger things that David and I have talked here quite a bit if I can share our brief conversation we've had here about, you know, are we funding areas here that will be helpful here, but it's not really kind of move them forward. I don't wanna think about a return on investment thing here, but a service here. Or do we not fund some of those smaller things and pay attention to the larger things that matter the most? That make sense? Yeah. Because if don't provide enough in certain areas, we might fall behind exponentially, given what Tom said. I agree with you. A lot of chaotic stuff going on in Washington, D. C, which I don't agree with here whatsoever. You and I talked about that here, to some degree,

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: here a little bit.

[Rep. John Kascenska (Member)]: Not to put myself on the spot here in the committee here, live, but we have, because we have to. And we have a list here on two sides of the paper, and we may have to rethink a few things here to make sure enough we're getting a lot of the bigger picture. Wherever the money comes from, and I do recognize we've put money away for modernization of IT kinds of things here, but there's a point in time we have to kind of sort of just tap into those larger kinds of things here, if nothing else here, to kind of force our rethinking about some of the things wanna put on the aside for year after year, and we see these big amounts in here, whatever it is, it's tens of millions of dollars, or it's something less, and all the special fun things that we seem to add to over time. Some of you have been here way along, well, all of you did, but want to take a look at those special funds to fund a special thing that we can never really

[Rep. Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: tap into. Yeah. To some degree, we

[Rep. John Kascenska (Member)]: have to I think we really have to kind of go back next year, rethink all take a look at all those special funds. Yeah. And are they really providing what they were meant to be providing, or whatever it might be, whether it's IT kinds of things here, or if it's services, or if it's paying to help, you know, shore up transportation kinds of things. I was looking at the transportation bill, which is right here.

[Speaker 0]: You passed that yesterday afternoon?

[Rep. John Kascenska (Member)]: Yesterday, Matt Walker and I met for a lengthy period of time, kinda chatting a little bit about this here. No one knew about some of the details, we're gonna be through it here. But we have some big things we've got to rethink how we're gonna provide the funding for, and think about, we kind of talked about this last year, we followed towards the end, we were kind of talking about how do we, you know, what are the core functions of government, and how do we fund those core functions to the best of our ability? You know? And are there some things maybe we just need to I don't mean to be so blunt about this, but there might be some things we just need to stop doing. Yeah. Because perhaps when we passed the legislation, I don't know, four, five, six, seven, eight years ago, we chatted about that a little bit Yeah. Last year, I think at the beginning of this year here, do we do each each of the committees, policy committees, need to spend time to do a couple of things. One, go back and take a look at what has kind of passed through their committees here, and successfully so through the house and the senate that had monies attached to it. And have we done the job? Have we done what we were supposed to do? Right. And some things you just need to kind of keep funding in perpetuity here, long as we're all here. I understand that here, but maybe some things have been addressed in the best way, and maybe you just don't need to continue fighting it in that same way.

[Speaker 0]: Right. That

[Rep. John Kascenska (Member)]: makes sense.

[Speaker 0]: Yeah. And that's the hard part.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: That's one of the many

[Speaker 0]: hard things.

[Rep. John Kascenska (Member)]: Well, is because we spend What

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: do we do in our class? Right.

[Rep. John Kascenska (Member)]: Passionate year for us, and we all have things for the country. Almost everything, nearly everything we voted on last year, all agreed on.

[Rep. Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: Yeah. There was no dissenting up to hearing this. Caledonia had

[Rep. John Kascenska (Member)]: a great year on the floor too, because it made

[Rep. Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: me think you'd that.

[Rep. John Kascenska (Member)]: But you gotta be serious about that. And I think for next year here too, even though we kind

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: of give some a little

[Rep. John Kascenska (Member)]: bit of a heads up to our policy committees that be mindful of what you're wanting to pass for additional legislation that does the bill itself may not have money in it, but it does consume time and resources from all the departments and agencies that need to now do that work. Yeah. And I think sometimes that has not been always It's not a It's just an unintended consequence, or undo the right thing here, it adds to everything across the board, including the Tissue Health. It's never gonna go away. Yeah. It really isn't. My Jeep is gone, so That's the news of the day. I have to invest in infrastructure and Emotional time. Wayne?

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: Super job. Thank you.

[Rep. John Kascenska (Member)]: And thank you.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: Concur. Doctor. John says, now I could nitpick on a few things that I might not like, then those things in there that I like, and we all could nitpick on something.

[Speaker 0]: That's right. I tried to yeah. Something that everybody and not everything that everybody wants, because we don't have that. Very briefly, just picking up

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: on what John said, I think it's really hard for policy committees, in the context of doing the work that they're doing in a session to actually dig in the way that you talked about. And I don't know what the answer is. Is it a task force? It's really looking at how we're structured and what needs we aren't meeting or where we're really not. I just think we keep talking about effectiveness and where have some things become almost obsolete in their utility? And I don't know what those things are. I don't know how any policy committee, and certainly not this committee, can dig into that in the time that we have in a session. So I am wondering if this is kind of a bigger issue that we know we are going to be facing hard times, and do we want to propose spending the time of some people to really dig into that? Right, and when they

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: have

[Rep. John Kascenska (Member)]: time to do that. I wasn't suggesting they dig into everything that's gone through here, but maybe one

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member)]: thing that they go back Well, to go back

[Speaker 0]: so for example, Rep Donahue in human services has really been digging into the secure residential, youth residential, which is a rabbit hole of enormous proportions. And she and Tiff, to some extent as well, you've been It's helping just amazing what you'd find when you start to look under the hood. And there are many of those programs. And we'll have some time in April once we get this budget out. Are there some things that we want to dig into? We don't have the same knowledge and experience that the policy committees have. But if there's something that we want to take a look at more, then perhaps that could be something that we can do. But otherwise, most people are busy during the whole session. And it's hard to get that time, which means it's then going to be off session. And practically speaking, some people have jobs, some people have otherwise. They're not getting paid for it. And committee chairs do a bunch of work and some individuals do a bunch of work on certain things off session. It's not a requirement. So we haven't set ourselves up in a way to make it easy to do exactly what we're talking about here. Go ahead, Blake.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: From my experience, back in the 2000s we're talking twenty, twenty five years ago human services, for example, and education, both of them, were growing. They continued to grow at an exponential rate. Essentially, they're cannibalizing the other agencies. We're putting all the money into those and it's cannibalizing what could be debt like transportation. A lot of other agencies that do specific things are not being funded at a level that would be probably give us a greater return on investment in those agencies. It's all going into human services. And that's the elephant that was looked at since 2000. They sent someone over to try to straighten it out and try it and it didn't. But it's huge, and it's within that agency. There's got to be a whole bunch of things that And

[Speaker 0]: there may be. And it's not just those areas. Previous legislators made pension decisions. And if we had paid this $7,000,000 back in the '90s or whatever the amount was, we'd be paying $300,000,000 or whatever extra a year. So everything we do has consequences down the road. And we can't anticipate Puerto Rico, but this is where we are.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: Is that my fishing level? When I was there, we created these, know, if you're older than 62 or 65, 65, then you have the lifetime licenses that were put in place. We looked at that at that time. We didn't believe that that was going to be a sustaining model, that it wasn't going to raise enough funds to pay for the public costs. But politics, the public, everybody wants a free giveaway. So the demand for that free giveaway is jeopardizing the revenue stream. Decisions we make, the legislators made in

[Speaker 0]: the past affect us, here's where we are today. So there's a lot of that, and we can acknowledge that, and we can't relitigate the decisions that have already been made. We can change how we do things going forward. Mike, go ahead.

[Rep. Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: Thanks. I want to start by thanking you and the way you've helped us, kept us on track. Especially right now, I don't think enough people are looking at the near and a little bit ahead into the future, because there's a lot of clouds lining up on the horizon that don't look good. Nationally, we are a country that's taking in $5,000,000,000,000 a year and spending $7,000,000,000,000 a year, and our national debt has doubled in just the last ten years.

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: And

[Rep. Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: at some point, we're gonna choke out the ability to borrow more money. I think it's important because we're letting a lot go, just in this state, we haven't even talked about nine of our 14 hospitals are losing money. We haven't invested in schools in about fifteen years. There's a lot of need that's building up our roads and bridges or not getting what we need. So I think it's important to raise the idea that we're not gonna be rolling in dough next year, for the next couple of years, as long as the leadership at the top keeps us on this path of, you said, a billion dollars a day on bombs for tax breaks. That's where that $2,000,000,000,000 gap is from between military and tax breaks. So that leadership is not gonna change things at least for a few years. So we're gonna have to do what we can here with what we have. I

[Speaker 0]: wanna say there's other people who haven't spoken yet, and Mike and Trevor haven't said anything, want to give you a chance if you have anything you want to say.

[Rep. Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: If I may.

[Rep. Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: Yes. I'm not going to add to the sentiment that's been expressed, but I agree with the sentiment that's been expressed here, and I think as a group, we've produced a good document here, even with its limitations. I think we've done a good job of supporting groups that are non agencies, departments in particular, that do good work, we all recognize that they do. Even though we can't fully fund their work, I think we've done a reasonable job supporting that growth. I think about the conversation around policy committees and drilling down into things, I think it certainly would be useful for all of us, all legislators, to really think hard about all the bills we've been writing, and asking committees to take on this work, and trying to cover all the bases, instead of maybe whittling that down, foaming that down, and really paying attention to those things that have the highest priority, that you can do the work that we're talking about, you're gonna drill down and figure out what's going on. We talk about this a lot, I don't see it changing, unfortunately,

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: but that's something that concerns me.

[Rep. Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: And the other thing too is that I've been on this committee for a while,

[Rep. John Kascenska (Member)]: with a few of you,

[Rep. Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: and there is money out there to be found in these agencies and departments that has not been properly used, officially used, or used at all, because they've got some plan in some future date. I worked with Mike Nigro, and we worked on some other kinds of things and found some money to support, and we're allocating that to help support other kinds of programming. I would submit that it's just not in those couple of places where we have to identify. Think it's across all state governments, and going into a subsequent year where it's even probably more on us to take that time to really analyze all the budgets we have, the carry forwards and the reversions, and the programming that is there, if it probably doesn't work as well as it should be working, to think about, you don't need to have this program anymore. Now, before we started this budget cycle issue, I went to all my folks who were in my budget portfolio and said, think about a program that you do have that maybe you can do with them. Didn't get too many responses I to

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member)]: didn't either.

[Rep. Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: And to me, that's part of the problem, part of the concern, and maybe we need to rededicate ourselves to that part of the process too, we've worked with our departments and agencies. Even when we found money, and if we had a legitimate reason for saying, No, we're gonna reuse that, we still got a lot of defense on the other side that they still wanted to hold it, even though it wasn't a rational argument. So we're always gonna have that. But anyway, my 2¢.

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: Thank you,

[Speaker 0]: and I will say that in April might be also a time for us to just go through the budgets that were presented for this year in your portfolios and read the it's not Vantage anymore, but whatever, but sort of look through those and start to ask some questions. Too late for this year's budget, but that we can be aware of for future, to just put people on alert for that. I'm going to give Mike a chance before we have second rounds. Yeah. Well, I'm

[Rep. Michael Nigro (Member)]: not going rehash what's been said. I really appreciate the work here. For the folks on the committee that have been speaking and the needs here and now, I really, really appreciate that. And but also have a genuine belief that, like, all the all the decisions we're talking about about preparing for future years is how we build the capacity to keep helping Vermonters. So I I think sometimes it's hard to connect how the work of ADS affects a Vermonter. But the money we spend there does, and, you know, the needs we create in the future does, in the end, affect our capacity to help providers. So I appreciate the balance that I feel like this committee has been trying to bring to this. Yeah, great.

[Speaker 0]: Okay, I think I saw Wayne and Tom both with hands up.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: And you know, the thing is, if we do have a hard time, might not be here, but if anybody who is here is just reminded, those hard times are the times when you have the opportunity to make those crucial changes affected both. All that pushback, everybody is my potato, I'm keeping it, right? Nobody wants to give up to anything. But the conversation becomes different in a time when everything tanks. You have to take advantage of that opportunity when it comes because it's fleeting because everything goes up and down. The next thing you know, you're right back where you were. You haven't fixed anything.

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: There's a

[Speaker 0]: saying that I heard once, maybe it was in the 2008 time, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. So it is, it is. So I have Tom and then Just

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member)]: quickly on what Trevor was saying, it's that trap of what we should be looking for. I think we started, we ended last year with, well, we're going to get really good at accountability. And again, we don't have the time, even the documents we're getting from the administration, the ups and downs don't really, and none of us are skilled enough to get through the big book and read it, or some of us are unfit for that. But the, I almost think, and JFO is not the right organization to do that because we have a congressional budget office that supposedly scours budgets for in DC, I mean at least in theory, exactly what Trevor was asking for. And it's like we don't have that because it's because for all the reasons we don't have it, you know. And but I just it just yes, we should all be able to scour deeper into what's there. I can understand from a policy committee, once upon a time there was actually an idea floated that every policy committee could, be given a certain amount of money to fund small projects that were and of course that brings up a whole bunch of other king making and all that other stuff. But the idea that, to say again, I said this a couple weeks ago to say to a policy committee that we don't have any money, therefore whatever you're doing requires no money is a really difficult thing to tell a policy committee because the other 139 people in this building, then what is it they're doing? You know, they're responding to Vermonters. They're the ones on the weave, like, the house is the one with the ears to the ground. Think I know that's pretty houses of us. But here we are. But here we are. So I just want to I keep When I do get up at 03:00 in the morning and can't get back to sleep, you know, it's not bad sleep, it's waking up to this. Right. And just understanding that is it impossible to do the things that we're asked to do, to even stop and look at the things? Again, turf wars, this is our money. We gave this money five years ago and all that stuff. It's just really, you know, it's I still come back to, and again I want to reiterate the work that we've done, the work that you've done guiding us to this point is really

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: important. Yeah.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member)]: And we've known since day one that today and tomorrow are going to suck and everything building up to that. Yeah. But and I do appreciate, I want to make clear that I really appreciate experiencing it even though I feel a lot of it. But the idea of saying of getting to that point, I don't know what we can identify what we want to do, but structurally how do we get there is another question that I don't know how you answer it in this system. I don't know who institutes that kind of review. So I just, you know, so I'm back here to think here now and what is it that we can do today that's going to help? It's not about, I mean, not necessarily making more or we can't stop the gas prices from going up. But we can provide some kind of help to the people who

[Rep. Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: can't afford that. I don't know what that is.

[Speaker 0]: I want to just go back to one other thing when Trevor talked about a lot of bills. We're going to have almost a thousand bills over this biennium. And that's a lot of work for our joint fiscal office, for our legislative council, for the policy committees. And so I have the statistics from the state house, from Betsy, the clerk's office. How many bills do you think get passed into law? What percentage of bills that we do in a biennial get passed into law? It's between 1617% of all bills that come through. So if we have 1,000 bills, there might be 160

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: bills. Short for yeah,

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: or limitation of

[Speaker 0]: something. Well, there's a lot. And so one of the things that was done to protect Legislature Council a few years ago was to put those deadlines of when you can draft legislation. I mean, we had a legislator one year who put in 94 bill requests. And I thought about, why don't we limit the number of bill requests one person could have? Mean, committee bills are different. Anyway, so I just want to give that in context. When we have so many, it puts a lot of people, a lot of work for a lot

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: of people that maybe we could

[Speaker 0]: be doing other things instead of doing that work. So I've got Mike first and then Wayne and Wayne, okay?

[Rep. Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: I just wanna share a quick anecdote about how some of what we do helps. And in a small way, the youth council was something that I coach Christie and Diane made for five years. And the sticking point was a $40,000 appropriation because we wanted to give these students a stipend, participate. Last year I met with the youth council at Brattleboro High School, and I asked about how it was going and these kids are just so into it. And one kid said, the stipends really help. I had a friend who said, do you wanna make some money selling drugs? And I said, I don't need it because I'm getting the stipend. That's a good investment.

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: Yeah. Thank you, Mike. Windham? I would also like to agree with Tom that this is depressing. Yes.

[Speaker 0]: I think we can all agree on that. Yes.

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: And I sit here, I mean, I'm going through my step and I see things and I try to do the research and all that. But we had, I think her name was Jill Campbell. And I've been involved in education for over forty five years, in some capacity in my K-twelve, of course, now I'm in higher education. But I worked in higher education before I got here. The plan of it is, is I see education as the great equalizer, the great opportunity. You want to go and become a more stable person. You want to improve the life of your family. Something is out there in education that can help you do it. Is like bottom, it's the first thing to work with. I don't care where you're at, it'll meet you where you are and it'll help you. It provides support services for other people who have a difficult time. I mean, our schools do everything. And I listened to, we've got all this money we're putting in education, and we've had battles for the past two years over masks. And I listened to Jill Briggs talk about it, and my experience, my lived experience as a school board member, active in the school, in the community, as a parent, whatever. I sat and listened. I mean, I know we have had at least two or three statutes that have had Try to get our accounting system so it's standardized for a population of six and forty thousand people. We had a school that had maybe one hundred and ten one hundred and twenty people. We now have 80,000 or 73,000, whatever it is. It has never been enforced, has never been cooperated. We still have a whole slew of things. We had graduation requirements briefly under the foundation plan for Madeline Kuhnen. I'm not sure they're there anymore. The superintendent that I know tells me, We don't have any graduation requirements. They're grading groups. I mean, there is nothing that can be formed. There is no accountability. I remember Mary Hubert complaining when this committee a couple of years ago, why can't they all do the same thing? You're comparing apples to oranges to grapefruit to light. This is the most basic accountability, and nobody knows what they're doing. And they duplicate things, and then on top of it, we throw in all the social services, which are helpful and needed, but we don't have any It's just like, that's what we should be talking about in education instead of maps. We waste money. Nobody knows where the money goes. And there's a little bit around the edges, but it's like, that's what we should be talking about. Because we're not serving our students, we're not serving our communities and the taxpayers, we're not serving our teachers or their administrators. They're all

[Speaker 0]: the fact is getting left out

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: of the equation. And it's not in here because we don't do it. But Chisholm Crow, we should be doing that. That would actually I mean, that's $2,300,000,000 That's 25% of our budget. And it's like, if

[Speaker 0]: we all worked on that?

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: We could do that. And we're not doing it. Yeah.

[Speaker 0]: Right. And that, you know, anytime we get into education, boy, you know, could spend hours and the whole It's a lose It's a lose lose.

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: And if we had the backbone to do it, we could have a win win.

[Speaker 0]: Yeah. Well, and there are We can't even get 11 people in a room to agree on anything. This is how tough that nut is to crack because And that's a microcosm of

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: the state

[Speaker 0]: of Vermont. Yes, and it's all politics. And it's no different It's all about where my school district is and how it's going to be affected. And so we don't have enough looking at the whole state. So that's I guess we could be glad we're not on the education committee and we're on

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: your publications.

[Speaker 0]: And there are I don't know maybe you'd like to be there instead. 25%

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: of our budget.

[Speaker 0]: It's a huge amount of our budget yes and act one seventy three or one seventy three? Act 73. I mean, the part of the timeline is universal graduation requirements, universal calendar, or some of those things Calendar, the calendar. Oh my gosh, yeah. Oh, exactly. So we could all go on and on about that, but that's beyond here. So what I'm hearing from this committee, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that we're going to use these sources of funds that we've identified. That was the question we had before. And then we're going to this is a proposal on how we want to do it. So now that we've agreed on that part, what I'm going to do is we're going to take a break. And if there are certain things that you feel strongly about one way or the other, we're now starting from the same page because that was a question we

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: had to answer. We'd answered that question. So I

[Speaker 0]: want you to all to have some time to think about that. And I can chat with some of you, and we can just see where we are. And then we'll come back, and we'll have a more public conversation about how we want to go about with what I've presented as a draft proposal. And so we'll have a little bit of time now to do that. And then Martin's coming in at 11:15. He's going to talk about his part of the landlord timing bill, age seven seventy two, we're not voting. But they've made some significant changes. And so he's going to fill us in on the judiciary part. We also had some things to say about the youth, the bill we heard yesterday, five sixty seven. It's not just about unaccompanied homeless youth. It's more than that, but that's the bill. There's some judiciary pieces on that that he's going fill us in on as well. So we'll have more time to be getting together, chatting amongst ourselves and getting together. It would be fabulous if we can agree on the numbers today. I don't know if we can. But the more we can get through today, then we can work on the language and get the other bills passed and finalize it as much as we can, then it'll be a little bit easier tomorrow. And if we can't do that today, we can't

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: do that today. But it would

[Speaker 0]: be great if we can. I don't know how different, how far off base we all are with one another on this year. So I'll be checking into something about that. Okay? Any last thoughts before we go up live?

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: Maybe some training. Some new people come in that they might advise that 50 bills just because it feels good, oh, they're not necessarily a good thing to do.

[Rep. Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: So part of new member training. Yeah. Don't need

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: to have every rep. Actually, some years ago there was a bill put in by Mark Kascensley that said you can only put five bills in a And in some places they only make the bills available the first year. Can't put any in the second half of biennium. There are ways to dream to make this shorter. Absolutely. We're not

[Speaker 0]: going to sell that in this committee today or tomorrow, but it's a key point.

[Rep. Eileen Dickinson (Member)]: All right.

[Speaker 0]: Let's go offline.