Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member)]: Not saving it for tomorrow.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Good morning. This is the House Appropriations Committee. It is Wednesday, 04/22/2026. It's, just after 10AM, and we are going to hear a little bit more about a topic that has interested us for a while, but we couldn't spend a lot of time on it during the budget. And that's the workforce rapport and reclassification project. Well, two topics, actually. It's in the Department of Human Resources. If you want to join us at the table, that would be great. And you've got friends with you, I think, here and So if everybody wants to introduce themselves, then let's get started. Thanks.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: I am Beth Fastigi. I am the Human Resources Commissioner. And online is Doug Pine, and he is a director in our human resources department spanning a wide range of important pieces, HR pieces. Great. Yeah. So I do have paper copy of the workforce report. Okay. If somebody wants, I can pass that one around for you guys. And I thought that if it's Okay with the committee, would start with the classification compensation filed out.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Then You

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: move over to the workforce report and talk about the state of our workforce. And I believe the committee should have PowerPoints of both.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yes, these are on our website,

[Unidentified Committee Member]: and some of us have So we

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: are calling our classification compensation project our modernization, a clear architecture and pay project, our map project. A lot of this project involves mapping to jobs with certain classifications. So it's an app acronym for the project. And as I said, Doug Pine is our project sponsor, so he will be able to answer more detailed questions than I would be able to answer. But we got funding for this, and I 27 last year, big bill, a one time appropriation of $1,575,000 in the general fund. The time, we had already put the project out to bid, so we were off and running July 1. As soon as the appropriation became available, we started working with our vendor, Mercer, on the project. And we are nine months into the project, which is expected to be about twenty four months. And we're meeting our project milestones and have expended approximately 20% of the funding.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: You could back up just a minute, how many classifications did we have? I was looking through, I'm not sure I saw an original number. About

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: 2,000 now. About 2,000 now.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: What are you thinking you're going to end up with? Probably under 1,000. Under 1,000.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: Doug may want to yep, we've got our target is under 1,000. So I think that we'll be able to do it.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Okay.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yeah.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: So then just slide three, I guess. Our project overview. Our goal is to modernize the state of Vermont's classification and compensation system to support the recruitment, management and retention of a well qualified and diverse workforce. We want to organize our jobs into logical job architecture, reducing the number of job classes from 2,000 to around a thousand. This will help facilitate career advancement. It promotes internal consistency and equity and simplifies our administration. We want to implement a modern approach to work measurement to act, to accurately assess the job roles. We're developing a comprehensive compensation framework. It includes a philosophy, pay structures and administrative guidelines. We're both looking at internal equity and external market competitiveness, and then to train and educate managers, employees on the new system to build understanding, consistency, and trust.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So how does this work? You've you've had a lot of RFRs, request for classification, over the years. And I can imagine that having so many different job classifications makes it more susceptible to those things happening. And would this project reduce the number of those, make it clear what slotting people into the right place the first time? How do you see those working?

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: I mean, goal is to is definitely to reduce job classifications. We have a lot of single job classifications or classifications that are unique to departments, but they're really let's let's say they're like administrative assistant one, two, and three. I mean, I think the human resources administrator one, two, and three are probably more important than any other department, but I think other departments think that same way. So balancing that administrative work and looking at it more across agencies, we really can reduce the number. So that's one of the things that this project does. And Doug, did you have one more jump in on that? I'm not sure I answered all

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: the budget reserves.

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: No. The whole idea is to reduce the number, by creating a a logical, meaningful organization of the jobs. And then instead of 2,000 jobs floating around there without any kind of organization, then it's easier for us to identify jobs that would fit into an existing class rather than creating new ones constantly. The system's in flux every single day, and we're over 2,000 classes right now. Without that organization, it's really difficult to stop and say, Well, wait a minute. We already have one of those, so let's put it in that class. Yeah. So that's part of the process rather than looking at an RFR in isolation, and potentially creating a new class.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yeah. So it seems like it will be a lot more efficient too.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: We are hopeful that that's the direction we will go in.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member)]: I got the question, Wayne. Yeah. So there's like down there. There's how are gonna deal with so, like, in some like, the science panel, fish and wildlife, some of the places where you're hiring, maybe PhDs that have some specialization, should be able to make a class. I would think they would be able to address that. But sometimes it has felt as if you have difficulty recruiting people because classifications are that match up properly. Are you going to be cognizant of that and try to do a good survey of all the agencies to make sure you find those things that

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: might be All of the all of the departments and agencies will be involved in in validating our mapping, and, we're hopeful to reduce by 40 or 50% the number of job classes. So there'll be plenty of unique job classes that have those kind of specialized qualifications or specialized roles. So we're not we're not looking at bringing it down to 200 or some some number like that. We we recognize that there will be unique roles in state government, but there we already can see that there's a tremendous amount of overlap, And that's that's what we're looking at tackling.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member)]: That's good. Don't know. Is there any thinking about I worked out in Pennsylvania for three and a half years, and we had a whole computerized personnel system so that everything was right there. And if if I I need to do a job evaluation, need evaluation for care. You need a new position, do job descriptions, everything's online, training, everything online. Are we heading in that direction?

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: We are heading in that direction, yes.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yep, Dave, did you have a question?

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member)]: Well, I'm just trying to using a PhD, Wayne mentioned that I think. I'm highly, I have lots and lots of content expertise, right? I'm a PhD, but I have no budgetary authority. I have no supervisory responsibilities. I don't have any decision making, though I recommend. Isn't that gonna categorize me low in comparison to what my academic background is and make it hard to recruit. So unless those fundamental budget supervisory decisions, I think those are the three, there could be more, I could be wrong, are are changed, isn't it? Aren't we in a difficult situation?

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: So I think those are the pieces that go into job evaluation systems. And so this new one, so our current system was implemented in 1984. That's a long time ago. I think thinking has changed about how to do that since then, and there might be more considerations. But that's really why we do need a new system because there is basically The system we have is unlike by basically everybody for various reasons. So for the PhD Fish and Wildlife Scientist, doesn't necessarily agree with a person that has a lot of managerial responsibility but might not have the technical expertise. So there's always that kind of struggle, I think. But what the system is, what we have now is very complicated and people really don't understand it. So that's one of our goals is to lay out something that people really do understand better. That's what you know, it's leveling across. Okay. This is how this compares to this department and this department and also in internal equity within the departments as well. So those are all the things that are will be coming into our new system. And this is for classified employees. It doesn't it's not for exempt employees. And when I say exempt employees, it means exempt from the classified service, not exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act like you might think about in the private sector. So that's kind of what we're doing and why we're doing it. We're relying on Willis, the old tool, which is outdated, hard to understand and use, as Representative Yacovone points out, and has no technical support available. Employees don't have a predictable quality of their career and their salary trajectory. Our budgetary impacts, as this committee knows, are unpredictable. In fiscal year twenty twenty five, the estimated annual cost of classification reviews is over $8,200,000. We're managing an inefficient, unwieldy number of job classes over 2,000. And as I mentioned, there's many employee centered department specific and redundant job classes, which lead to inconsistencies in pay grade and assignments within across departments for a compatible work. The stakeholders, including our Vermont State Employees Association, generally dislike the PERC current system and process. So I have a little map in here of where we are on a timeline. We're finished with phase one. We've basically looked at the current system. Our vendor has done stakeholder interviews with almost every agency and department. They also met with legislative, judiciary, and they've been spreading wide and figuring out what's kind of so we could help determine our scope and approach. And we're in phase two, which is a huge phase as far as establishing the new system. So it's the job architecture, developing a career leveling guide. We're mapping our existing job classes into the architecture, developing new job descriptions for each unique unique title. And then we'll be conducting work sessions with stakeholders across state government to validate the job structure and the mapping and the job descriptions. Yeah.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Go

[Rep. Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson (Member)]: ahead. Is there across the board buy in

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: from state agencies? Right now, there's buy in that they don't like what they have. We've talked about they don't like, what the issues are. We haven't presented the new plan yet, so that's our next step. So once we have the architecture designed, then we we go out and and get the feedback, and here's what we have. And and and I so far, I mean, the people who have seen it so far internally at HR are extremely excited about it. Doug, don't know

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member)]: if you

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: have anything else you want to add about that right now.

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: Well, we had a whole group stakeholders who were involved with us and the consultant to come up with the initial design of the architecture. We had representatives from all the agencies all across state government that participated in a full day workshop to do that initial design of the architecture. So there we've already involved departments in that first step. The next step will be validating and and the the the mapping that's already been done.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: Right now, we're kind of internally mapping validate. Yes. So we're doing the internal validation before we expand that out to or or I can see Checking the consultants work before we

[Rep. Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson (Member)]: Yeah, my question really is it was in response to the comment that you made about there are a lot of other classifications are kind of agency specific or department specific, and there are rationales for that. And I can imagine that you would just run into resistance. And

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: I am confident I am not gonna love everything that they've come up for for DHR. Like, I'll be like, oh oh, know, like, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Alright. You know? Like but, you know, I I think there's a lot of ownership in departments of this thing. And, yes, people are you know, this job is unique. This job is special, but and they are, like people are unique and people have our employees have very specialized talents, but that doesn't mean from a classification perspective that the skills and abilities to do the work and that you can't have them in the same job classification, even if the jobs are not the same actual work. So, yeah, I mean, I think people are very We know the system we have and we're comfortable with it, but it's extremely outdated. And it change management, will be a big company, that educational piece and change management piece.

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member)]: Has Mercer been told that this is a budget neutral exercise? No. It's not the purpose of what they're doing. But it's is it your intent when you're done, it will be budget neutral or will more compensation, more budgeting for higher compensation be needed?

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: We're mapping people to new pay charts and knowing that our compensation is bargained. And there will be people that probably would be mapped higher and lower, it is unlikely that it would be budget neutral as it's very difficult and probable and would be very difficult to lower somebody's salary. That would not be a very It's not a very employee centric idea.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member)]: I would have voted for that at times.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: Right, for lowering your own salary?

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member)]: No, mine got lowered voluntarily.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: Right, yeah. No, so I think that's a piece of it as well. And there be there will likely be some budgetary implications. Then if we move back to the compensation piece as well, and if we are looking at new pay charts, that's an additional full larger discussion that we can't, DHR cannot do that unilaterally. That all has to be negotiated and we have to have funding for whatever we implement. So that is a big complicated piece of the project. I mean, right now, we can get the new architecture in place, and we can slot people into new new pay grades. But we would be I don't I don't know that we could actually lower customer's compensation.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I would think you couldn't, but

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: the cost I would suspect costs are going to go up. On the other hand, you've had all these RFRs. Yeah. So presumably, those costs if costs started going up with the RFRs, so it may not go up as much as it would have if you hadn't had those. I'm guessing. And then, John and then Wayne.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: That's why you're the chair. That was an excellent answer.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I also managed 500 employees in my life and did payroll and all that stuff. One of the things, if you're going to make

[Unidentified Committee Member]: a spy more efficient and it's just easier to manage, would there be any resulting combination of jobs or merging of jobs or things that might actually be better? Your architecture would be different than what it is now. So what would be would there be maybe savings isn't the right word, but would we be

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: I think there will be efficiencies in changing work. Like, for example, thinking of our my department, I have three employees that do primarily job reclassifications, that the new they would be able to spend more time, like, doing, like, in-depth work and also maybe moving more into compensation than they would actually have to do on on each individual job, and we expect the volume to be likely to be less. So they will be able to spend time doing other things that would be more We hope, yes. Doug, do you have anything to add there?

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: No, that is the hope, to be able to right now, the volume is such that they're always behind. They're always trying to catch up, and so they do quality work, but it's under a lot of pressure, again, things are always behind, so we would like to have a system that's more controlled, more better managed, where we can understand the costs better than we do now, because that $8,000,000 the commissioner mentioned in fiscal 'twenty five was unanticipated and unbudgeted, so we'd like to get that under control.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: I guess they're kind of getting into the, like, the extreme of how our current system works and how inefficient it is. So we have our classification analysts. So we have three. We've had some turnover there. So we just have a new person on board that's going to take that person some time to train another person that's been there six months. So they're they're great. But you know, it takes a long time to be able to do it do that work quickly. So by the time they do the work and the way our cons our comp our labor contract works, if that classification goes up, the employee is owed back pay from the time it is submitted to human resource. So let's say it takes us two months to do that reclassification, then we have to do two months of back pay, but we also have to get that in the queue for back pay, which takes a long time as well, because that's more complicated than a simple transaction of just changing someone's salary going forward. So because it's more complicated, that gets pushed behind the back of the pile. So we tell somebody after two months that, hey, you're going to a new pay grade and you're getting a raise. And then maybe between cup two and six months, they'll actually get the back pay, which is very long it's process, and there's a lot of frustration throughout that whole process. Hopefully a new system will minimize those issues as well.

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member)]: Do you

[Unidentified Committee Member]: want to let you

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah, just real quick. I'll move real quick here. But I would suspect here too, you know, it's kind of get through these phases here and things begin to be implemented here officially here, and have some benefit here in the hiring process. So people that are applying for a position, whatever it might be, know, you'll let them know what the classification is, the compensation, the benefits, all of that kind of stuff here aside from in perhaps, you know, even they're going to be hired under the same position description, or maybe it has to flex a little bit because we have someone in agency that is doing something more specialized based on what their agency or departments being passed to now do us.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: Yeah. And like with our current pay charts, you know, it's twenty about twenty four and a half years to get to from your step one to step 15. So it's a the first couple of years you get or six years, you get a step every year, then it's every other year, then it's every three years. And so for advertising jobs, now we just advertise the base pay, the starting pay. We have to advertise the starting pay and the top pay, which is in the range, but it would be highly unusual if ever to hire somebody at the top of the range. We're really mostly looking at the bottom range. So when someone's saying, I'm gonna get this job and it's $20 an hour, but I could get $40 an hour, but I might not get $40 an hour for twenty years. That's like that's not like that motivating and thinking about, oh, I wanna work for that employer. Right? That's so that's so that's I I mean, I think I oversimplified it, but having a more modern salary structure as well and pay progression and anticipated pay progression makes more sense as well. And that is all, again, something that we need to bargain with our labor partners and something that we need to have money to pay for.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: And we've just heard a couple of times here. Mean, a couple of

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: times in

[Unidentified Committee Member]: the past couple of years that, you know, things don't really, can't really hire someone until July 1, but it takes time to kind of put all that together.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yeah.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: And, you know, bring someone in after that fiscal year sometimes or the calendar year.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Did you get your question, Wayne?

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Wayne and

[Unidentified Committee Member]: then with

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member)]: So I could imagine that if when you start consolidating some of these into single ones that somebody's going to be higher paid in one of them than they had to merge in. And if you force them to pump everybody up to the highest level every time, then that's gonna have increased costs statewide in terms of the overall personnel budget. So have you done any modeling? Have you thought about maybe too big to model the whole thing, but you could model an agency or or somewhere you have the scheme that you're gonna have and have the existing scheme now and say, if we merge these and how much would the cost difference be so that you could estimate across state government how much, what proportion we might have to pay extra for personnel. You thought about that?

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: That's for Doug. I don't know if we've done any modeling yet. I probably not because I don't think we're that point.

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: That's coming. So first, to answer your question, first we need to do the mapping, at least the preliminary mapping, and the tools that Mercer is bringing to the table are really quite sophisticated, and we'll be able to see where there are commonalities, where there are opportunities to consolidate job titles. And at least initially, what the plan is to do a crosswalk to our current pay charts. Okay, because the compensation phases of the project, as the commissioner says, one, they need to be bargained, and two, we haven't done them yet, so that's a later phase. What Mercer will be doing is market analysis for up to seven fifty job titles. We will have benchmarks to give us an idea of what kind of financial impact there would be to adjust these jobs to market, however we determine that is, and they'll make recommendations. That's where we need to to talk to our labor partners and and to you all, in terms of what that impact is. On the the smaller scale, as we identify so we probably have at least two dozen data analyst job classes. They're they have all their different names, department specific names. We're hoping to consolidate that into a much smaller number. And so what we'll be doing is aligning those jobs, and they have a very clever way of seeing how, they level. Okay? So what professional level it is within that particular job family, and we can see whether there are people who are above or below. And that's where we'll we'll be able to do what you're saying, but on a statewide basis. We had thought about maybe doing some pilots, but given the contract and the nature of the project, Mercer feels that we can look at the whole enterprise and then take that proposal and say, this is what we would need to do to do that initial adjustment. It's not unlike what's happening right now. As I said, last year, we're over 1,300 RFRs, so we are constantly adjusting. There are constant costs as people move up or mainly up, mostly up. It remains to be seen, the magnitude. And we're looking, I'm anxiously looking to to see what that magnitude is going to

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: be. Thanks.

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: That's great. Fortunately, Mercer has some really wonderful tools that will be not only help us visualize that, but quantify it. And so, but first, we've got to get through this whole mapping part to better understand where everything would go.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yeah, thank you.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: When you say you have to give the stroke of the total payment, you might start at, say, 20 an hour and

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: then it goes to $40 an

[Unidentified Committee Member]: hour after twenty years over. In this committee, we've heard that there's a lot of churn, lot of times when you hire someone, like nine months later they leave.

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: I don't know if they're

[Unidentified Committee Member]: going to another better paying job or they're leaving state government, but retaining people is a real problem. People don't look at something that they're going to work in a job for twenty years anymore. It just doesn't happen. And then there's this problem of pay compression. What happens? How do you deal with those deepens? Or how is this going to work with that? Is it going

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: to make it more predictable, less predictable, whatever? Well, think that the classification piece, mapping will be more predictable. If you do look at the workforce report, and we'll get into that a little bit. Doug's gonna jump right into that. But there's a section, page 58, that actually kind of shows some it shows an example of pay compression. So we have all of the job classes and how many there were, like, in 2001, and not how many there were, but how many employees in each job class, you can see that creeping up over time, which is definitely compressing between the bottom and the top. We had in so pay grade 32 was our highest pay grade. And in 2001, we had 49 employees in pay grade 32. And now in 2025, we have 84 employees in pay grade 32. So you can just see kinda what's and then by it was that number of job classes? No. That's number of employees. And then also job classes in pay grade 32, there are 27 job classes. And now there's 43 job classes in pay grade, you know, 27 job classes to 43 job classes in pay grade 32. So we do see that, that kind of that creeping up of the charts happening over the years. So it's we have some illustration of of that compression.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So maybe this is a good way to segue into your other plans.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: And I'm just going to have Doug jump right in our first slide, knowing that we were talking about classic engagement, about the classic class reviews there.

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: Alright. I think I've shared that.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: There

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: we go. For the record, my name is Douglas Pine. I'm a HR director in the Department of Human Resources, and I oversee, the talent acquisition division, classification and compensation. And I've been producing the workforce report for quite a number of years. So I enjoy talking about this. So, the first slide I threw in here just because it fits in with what we've been talking about with the class comp modernization project, and so this just illustrates, this was in there and I pulled out last year's, but this illustrates the volume, not only the volume, but the impact of classification reviews. In fiscal twenty five, we received RFRs for almost 400 of our job classes. That's about 20% of all of our job classes, and this is consistent year to year, and it impacted over 1,300 employees. That's a lot, and that constant churn, this is year after year, that constant churn, that demand has kept us from really being able to manage the system better. Many states will not take RFRs constantly, but they will pledge that they will review every single job x number of years. So every x number of years, every single job would would be evaluated rather than constantly being reactive. We can't be actively managing these jobs because they're dealing with the constant flow in. Last year, the budget estimated annualized cost was over $8,000,000 and that's consistent year to year, anywhere from

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: That's five not an increase of 8,000,000. Yeah. Salaries increased $8,000,000 because of job reclassification? Yes,

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: yes ma'am.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: Right. On page you can see on the table 50 on page page 60 of the workforce report. Yeah. It's the historical cost over the past since 2,001. So 2001, it was 2,100,000, 2,002, 6,200,000, 2 thousand and three, 7,100,000, 2,004, 5,400,000, this year, 8,200,000.

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: Yeah. The desire is to

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: put that I'm sorry. I'm just sort of pausing and gasping here internally. That's that's We

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: appreciate the 1,175,000 to help us try to tackle the budgetary impacts there. It's cheap, So will there be other? Yeah, so I think that Okay. Okay.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yeah. Just sort of taking a deep breath here. Okay.

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: Yeah. That usually stops people right there. Again, not only the volume. Again, each year, we're looking at approximately a fifth of our job classes, over and over again. And

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So have we been underpaying or you know, I mean, I I think about, what does this mean? Have we been underpaying And all these then what happens when you have a 3% budget increase and this covers a whole lot of budget increase because you have to do it?

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: Because our classification system and our pay system are basically one in the same. And that's what's created this problem of the consistent, the constant reclassifications where really we have the pay should be in a separate bucket. You should be looking at a lot of different factors when you're looking at pay. You should also be looking at, you know, how like, different components to a whole classification compensation system, and we've got everything all tied up into this one little classification bucket where it should be spread out so that, you know, even if the work level is the same, you would think you would think like if if, you know, if it's the exact same work level that everybody should be paid the same. However, the job there's job demands. So when you're looking at medical professionals, for example, nurses or doctors, like those have what we call market factors. So we go to the regular pay chart, but then we bump them up because we can't recruit. If the job is classified, we wouldn't be able to recruit a nurse to work at the psychiatric care hospital.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: And that goes back to having the old system.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: Right. So instead of having that all into, Okay, they're special, have a different if there's a way to and there is a way to look at the market within the as part of the system as well, and how we incorporate that is is part of the project in different different states to that different ways.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Unless

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: there are other questions on this, let me move on to the

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Let's move on.

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: Okay. So I looked at last year's report, and I and I have to say some of this is old news. So we're coming up to a year. But in the 2025 workforce report, found really five top themes. And I'm gonna update you with some recent numbers on some of these themes. One of the themes that we've seen is, and it's a natural part of any organization, but our demographics are changing. And so what we saw last year is the millennial demographic has officially become the largest generation in our state workforce, accounting for about 41%, and conversely, baby boomers, are rapidly declining, even more so in the last year, so about 40% drop from '21, to 25, As you might expect, the younger demographic, so called generation Z, is the fastest growing group right now. I can show you, this is the graph that was in the work in 2025. You can see that our generation Z, the younger demographic, is exponentially increasing, and the baby boomers are coming down real fast. I had predicted that this would cross at some point soon. And we also crossed with the slightly older generation X demographic with the millennial, and so they're clearly the ones in charge now. So I just ran this the other day, and so we have indeed crossed. So baby boomers are now we've lost about 19% of our baby boomers thus far in this fiscal year, They make under less than 10% of our workforce now. The younger demographic is increasing. Again, we're starting to see a gap here as the oldest of the generation X demographic is hitting about 61 years old, and so they're starting to retire also. So this is all very interesting, and, you know, again, it's natural as an organization that these demographics change over time, but we indeed have crossed, and we still have one person left in state government in the so called silent generation, which is, I think, 81 years or older. So anyway, we'll continue to watch that and the implications in terms of benefits and how we manage and so on. Oh, vacancy rates. You might be interested in vacancy rates. So Yes. We've been walking and watching those very closely for for the last, number of fiscal years. And so in 2025, our vacancy rate dropped significantly. We dropped down to 9.5, which is pretty good, down from 11.3 the previous year, we peaked in 2022 at almost 13% vacancy rate, which is historically really high. We had been running historically maybe 7% would be a decent, you know, expected vacancy rate, and so we haven't gotten quite down to that. The nine or so might be the new normal. I just ran this this week or just took a look at our dashboard on this, and it stands at 9.5. So we haven't moved it much lower or it hasn't gone any higher than the end of the last fiscal year, but we certainly brought it down considerably from those peak years, post pandemic peak years.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: We have a question here.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: Yeah, am

[Rep. Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson (Member)]: wondering if the report includes a breakdown of where are

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: the vacancy rates the highest,

[Rep. Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson (Member)]: and have they been kind of chronically high in those different departments?

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: Yeah, table 21A, page 28, is a vacancy rate by department by the fiscal year. Goes back to 2021. So that is, we do have that data.

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: Yep. So there'll be vacancy rates both by department, and I did the top 25 or so most populous job classes, our largest job class is the vacancy rates and also the vacancy rates, the highest vacancy rates for various jobs. I don't have a slide for that, but it is in the report on table 21 b. Most of our classes have settled down into that more or less normal range, and where we still continue to see high vacancy rates are primarily in the 20 fourseven facilities, whether they be nurses, correctional officers, licensed nursing assistants, and so on. Those are, and historically, have always been places where we've had higher vacancy rates because they're tough jobs, and so there's a higher level of turnover. But overall most departments are doing pretty well in terms of their vacancy rates right now.

[Rep. Eileen “Lynn” Dickinson (Member)]: Thanks for pointing out where that is.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member)]: You're welcome.

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: Moving on from vacancy rates, turnover. So we track turnover closely. In the end of fiscal twenty five, it was relatively flat. It was just a slight up from the previous year, so we ended the year with an overall turnover rate of 12%. What was really interesting was for the third consecutive fiscal year, we had historically low rates of retirement, very low rates of retirement, around 2.6%. It it was only around 200 employees, and at one year, actually less than two, fewer than 200 employees. For us, we generally run around, historically, run around two fifty to 300, perhaps, retirements per year. So when we were under 200, that was very low, and we ran that way for three years. What I can tell you is that it's changed a little bit, and so I did do a projection for you. Just based on our 21 pay period so far this year, we're we're trending up turnover, but not dramatically. So so right now, just based on 21 pay periods, we're looking at something around 12.6, you know, 12 to 13%. We've got we've got another five pay periods to go, so, you know, we'll see how solid the number that is. But what is interesting is we have had the the increase has primarily been driven by that increase in retirements. And so this year, we're already at more retirements than we've seen in several years since 2022, and we could approach 300. We'll see maybe a little bit less. We have seen in that, that feeds into that demographic change also that a lot of the older demographic has made the decision to retire. And so the baby boomer, that demographic has gone down. So I suppose one of the stories in the next workforce report will be the increase in retirements this fiscal year.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So I want to go back to turnover for a minute. Interesting that you're seeing overall turnover. I'm also interested in turnover in the first thirty days, in the first six months, in the first year, however you track those things, because that tells, that's a different kind of turnover people retiring.

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: Yes. Oh, I track all sorts of stuff in there. I don't have the slides here for you today.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: The workforce reports.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: Yeah, table 30, you're gonna find that on table 35, turnover rate and type of separation by employee demographics, and then by length of service. So less than five years, there's a much higher rate of, you know, percent of people, it looks like, have voluntary terminations in their first five years, where when you get to people of 35 or more, their term their where they leave is because they're retiring. And then there's, I think you also have, table 36 is the length of service before voluntary termination. And in year one

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: That's a big that's 41.6% leave Yes. In the first year that they're hired. So that, to me, is the worrisome number, not the 12.5% over, which maybe speaks to onboarding or hiring the right people in the first place. I don't know.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: I don't know. How do you

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: look at that? And how do you think about reducing it?

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: And if you even look at the, that you're talking about the onboarding, you look at the chart below that, which talks about zero to thirty days and then zero to sixty days. So if you can keep employee one more day, you have a better chance of keeping them So it's those first, that onboarding piece, the first day of the first week, pre boarding, all that is really critical and also setting the job expectations as well. So do you

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: look at this by agency or departments? I mean, to look at trends in a little more granular detail than what you would necessarily show us.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: I think the departments that have kind of the highest rates of turnover are looking are looking at it more closely. What would you say, Doug, there?

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: I'm sorry, commissioner. What was the question?

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: So the question is related to looking at how to try to keep employees, like newer employees, especially in departments that have high turnover, thinking about like department of corrections. Right? They have a high turnover rate.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: But I'm sure they're not being correct.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: Well,

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: talent acquisition, we like to say it starts with a hire. So, you know, it's whether or not you made the right hire, and that's going to be right up to the chute. That's going to be something that's gonna impact whether somebody stays. Then proper onboarding and expectation setting, you know, did they have the the proper understanding of what they were getting into in the first place, so there's that kind of realistic job preview aspect. There's a lot of things that go into that. Corrections has done a great deal of work and very good work in terms of trying to do better hiring and better orientation and better training to keep people, because they know that if they can keep them for a year or two, they've done really well, and they take the longer term employees or they promote into other jobs, which is fine.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Corrections is always the one that we come back to, but they're not the only one. And so I'm wondering how DHR sort of supports managers to support their employees to reduce churn if people aren't meeting in the first thirty, sixty, ninety days? Sort of things because you must be looking at them beyond corrections and seeing what the trends are. If another department has consistently, or maybe they weren't so good, and now three years later, they're doing really well, what are they doing right? So wondering how you look at all that.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: Gonna I know you were waiting for me.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Doug, yeah.

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: There's no one thing that we can look at, and so our workforce development division does work with departments training around everything from performance management to culture to the onboarding experience and so on. There's not one thing that we can do. We use this data to try to identify where we have issues, and there's a table in there that talks about the level of voluntary and involuntary retirements and so on. Column that's voluntary turnover or voluntary separations is, you know, that's the red flag, and that's the one that we're looking at. Those departments, you know, sometimes can be fluctuations based on small numbers, but other times it's a consistent, thing, and, that's where we attempt both, not only centrally, but the departments are concerned with that too because it affects their bottom line and their ability to meet their goals. A department like mental health or veterans home, I know we've been working with them like crazy to help them bring down their turnover rates, and involves, it's a whole basket of kind of solutions that can be used to address those things, from compensation you know, to, again, the onboarding, properly managing those folks, having your managers be well trained as managers. It's a whole basket of things to try to address those, but we have the numbers. We do our best to push those out to leadership to act on those. Every department is different in their situation and not there's not one tool or solution for for for for each department.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yeah. Okay. Show him.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member)]: Like, and wildlife, we didn't have a problem with retaining people. Problem was when you had a problem person being able to deal with a person with an attitude problem.

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: Fish and wildlife is a department with extremely low turnover rate. Historically, they've always been among the lowest rates of turnover. Yeah.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yeah, I guess be outside and do something. Working in healthcare as it seems like that are, that are pretty stressful in different ways.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Science things

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: like working at- Yeah, Marty, that's

[Unidentified Committee Member]: a question.

[Rep. Martha “Marty” Feltus (Vice Chair)]: Regarding that, I would think obviously recruitment is important. Need to make the right hire to start with, as you mentioned. And I see your advertisements in the seven days and then my local newspaper and places like that. You to be, have you looked at other channels for talent acquisition, for recruitment in order to maybe widen your pool of who might be interested in these jobs? Any jobs?

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: We'll get to that in just a minute, but yes ma'am, we absolutely have. We rely on everything from social media networks. We push out our jobs through various sites such as Indeed. In the last at least five years, we've gone to direct sourcing, that is going to these databases and identifying people who might be good applicants and inviting them, saying, Hey, have you seen this job? We're extremely active in our outreach of potentially great candidates for departments to consider, as you'll see a little bit, right now we are overwhelmed with applicants when I get to that part.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Okay, we'll look forward to that page.

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: Well, I did want to, one of the other themes that we saw is we had record high diversity representation at the end of the fiscal year, and so we ended up the year with a 7.6% of our classified workforce, and that has increased 70% since fiscal twenty one. Again, I just ran, excuse me, it was 7.1 at the end of '25, it's 7.6 currently, so we will see where we end the fiscal year, but we've also done an excellent job of attracting a diverse candidate pool for departments to consider, and so that has been working really well.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: What is that in terms of numbers of employees? What is 7.6% equal? Oh, god. You got me there. I

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: got the number, it's in there. It's, Commissioner may beat me.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: Hold on a second. Yeah. Let me just I think I flipped over. I already see that page. Go to table 60, page 70.

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: 600. I was going to say 600. It is close to 600. It's around 600 right now out of about 8,000.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Okay. Great. Thank you.

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: That's in table 61.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: 61, okay.

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: Let's see. Okay, here's our changing labor market. So that's really been, I think that's going be a huge theme for the next workforce report, but we were seeing it even last fiscal year. So we actually saw a decrease in fiscal twenty five in the number of applications. So you can see on the chart here that we, you know, the number was still higher than some of these years, but we had been increasing, large part because we had that high vacancy rate that we were trying to bring down, so we had a lot of job openings. Applicant volume has just gone through the ceiling this fiscal year. We probably will end the year. Right now, we've exceeded the number of applications submitted in the last, easily, the last five fiscal years. We'll probably will be close to, if not greater than 40,000 applications this fiscal year, which we have not seen since pre pandemic times, in 2018 or yeah. 2018, 2019. We used to run 40 to 50,000 applications a year and maybe 16,000 to 18,000 applicants. So our volume is up significantly, and I was going to illustrate this another way. You know, we were going on for quite some time where we had sixty, seventy plus, sometimes 80% of our job openings had fewer than five applicants. Right now, we're running on average almost five applicants per opening, which means other openings have far more than that, but the difference in the number of applications per opening is pretty astonishing when you compare even last fiscal year to current. Part of what that is, is there's, obviously everybody knows there's been a lot of layoffs at the federal level and in the private sector, and state government is seen as a relatively safe employer, and so there's a flight to that safety. We are seeing just an influx of applicants, and so right now the problem really isn't attracting folks. It's sorting through all of those very fine applications. I tell you that we have been able to hire some outstanding folks who have been laid off otherwise under the threat of layoff from the federal government, just outstanding candidates that we've been able to pick up. Right now, applicants, it's not a great market, but for employers, it's great because we've got a lot of applicants for our openings to consider.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member)]: Wayne? So the unemployment rate tracking the same

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: in parallel

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member)]: or versed and versed thinking is what you're seeing?

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: Well, a lot of the writing I've seen is it's kind of a tale of two markets, kind of the so called white collar jobs. There's is a lot of people that are looking for work. Skilled trades, entry level jobs, things like cooks and mechanics are very hard to find because they are really in demand, whereas the layoffs that we've seen are primarily the white collar type jobs. Now, that's where we're seeing the greatest number of folks coming in.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Dave and then Lynn.

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member)]: Does the applicant determine whether they meet the minimums or is there some type of review process in HR that says Dave is eligible for these five jobs? We

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: put eyes on every single application. We don't use AI to do any of that screening. They don't

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member)]: determine that. We do. We we review every single application. Okay.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Thank you.

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member)]: AI

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: You know,

[Unidentified Committee Member]: During the pandemic and post pandemic, we had people who decided that they wanted to change careers. They retired. I mean, it was hard to get people to go and even apply for a job. It was like really, really I mean, I'm sure you have that same record here before the Are we just going back to normal now where we're going to have people who actually do need to have a job and decided that they can't wing it like they did there for a while?

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: This is my own, no evidence behind this whatsoever. But I think that some of the increased applications, as well as what's happening with the white collar jobs, is that we do have really great health care benefits. And then with the higher cost on individual in the individual plans on the exchange, some people are looking more looking for a job that does have health care benefits. So I think that's helped us quite a bit. So that might be somebody who, as you're saying, I think I'm gonna do my own thing, be self employed, but then realizing maybe one person in the household or I I need to find something. It was fine as long as I could as long as I could look for my health care, but now they're looking for something that maybe they can look for health care. So I think that's benefited us as an employer.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Do you see an increase in

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: part time job applicants? We don't have that many part time jobs. I think that if we had them, there would be. But we don't have the. One of the reasons we don't is our benefit shows are really expensive. So if you brought two people on, like, for a job share, then you'd be paying benefits for two people, and that's, like, 40% of I mean, that's our benefits are including retirement, everything. It's a big a big

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Is it, like, at 46% or something?

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: Yeah. It's a lot. It's a lot and continues to go up. So I think that's one piece of it why we don't and also because we have our position cap. I can't just take I couldn't take one job and make it two part time jobs with that salary. It would have to be a job share, and that's the exact same job, kind of the way it works. So if I if I you know, if if Doug decided he wanted to go halftime and get it, and I could get a job share, that would work out. But it would be hard to find somebody that can do exactly the same job as Doug, and I couldn't take half of his job and do something else and create another job cause that would certainly affect his pay grade. So so there's there's a lot of complexity in there when you're looking at more part time work in state government. I don't know, Doug, if you have any other so, yeah, we just don't we don't have as many. In our department, I would I have we have about 105 people. I have three employees that I consider part time. One is 80% employee in a limited service role instead of 100%. And then I have one then I have two employees and a job share.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah, I'm asking because I know an organization that advertised a full time job, part time job, and they got, like, three applications for the full time job, but they have, 130 applications for the part time job. This was post pandemic, but not now. It was a few years ago. And they're trying to figure out why they had so many. And I think one of the reasons was that you don't need to have a full time job to get health benefits. You can go to Health Connect. You could do your own thing with that. But they really wanted to have that time. The time is important to them. Previous to that, if you were part time, you wouldn't have been able to have a benefit. Yeah. Yeah, think benefits are

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: People come for the benefits.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: Well, it's a big It's something that's very great about employment, and that's one of the ways our salaries aren't known to be the best. They're pretty good, but they're not the best, but our benefits are typically seen as the best, like some of the best. And I think that there's a lot of folks that are attracted to that. And then there's people that aren't as attracted to that, especially when you're starting out from your career, if you're in the entry level jobs. So what we've seen at like the custodial level, and even at the corrections officer level, they're looking when they want to start, they're looking at, okay, dollars 20 an hour here or $15 an hour here, they're going to take the $20 an hour job. So that's a, you know, it's a pro and a con. We can't offer as high salaries because our benefits are so great. And so Doug's had to do some market factor type adjustments. So for our custodial job classes, we don't typically hire them at step one. We're going to bring them in at a higher level step so that we're competitive with the other people that are hiring entry level custodial staff.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah, and certain of those living in pre level jobs are the younger people who really aren't concerned about the benefits so much they want to buy the new truck down the road. Right. Yeah. They're looking at the $20 an hour

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: versus moving to their own apartment.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: This report has lots of good data in it, though. It's really helpful. You do this every other year? Every year. And

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: as Doug also mentioned, we do have a dashboard. Right? And we do have in our our online leads. Some of those are updated more frequently. So you can see the the trends at some of the high level as we get further out from this is obviously the fiscal year '25 data.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Right. And this comes out when in the fall?

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: No, January 15. January 15. When all the reports were dated.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yeah, exactly. Great. And I just see Ref Nigro joined us. I don't know if you've heard about any of this, Mike, but if you have any questions now that we're about done, you're welcome to.

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: Watch it on YouTube.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah. Dave, you have a question? I just wanted to

[Rep. David Yacovone (Member)]: pay recognition to Doug for his great career in state government many, many years ago when was active, people spoke of Doug as though he was a legend then.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: He is a legend.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Thank you.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: Doctor. Pine is a legend and yeah, we appreciate him and all his analytical abilities in our department. Yeah. And we're doing whatever we can to retain him, to stay, to not be one of those 200 plus retirees.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: No. Thank you, Ben.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: That's right. We're waiting for Doug to be in Matt,

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: the very last bit of

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: the baby boomers. Thank you.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Well, thank you both for coming in. I really appreciate it. It's just been really helpful to hear kind of how it's going and how you think about it. And we'll look forward next year to hearing how the reclassification, getting an update on that because you're supposed to finish by the December '27 or fiscal year twenty seven.

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: Yeah. We'll be well into we'll have a like, in the next six months is where, like, a lot of the heavy work is happening. Yeah. Great.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So we'll hear more about that next year. Well, good luck with all that. A pretty important project. Thank you both for coming in. We appreciate it. Yep.

[Douglas Pine, HR Director (VT Dept. of Human Resources)]: Thank you.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So, committee, that was this morning's activity. That will be on the floor this afternoon. The floor shouldn't be too long. After the floor, we're going to come back. And Ted Barnett from Joint Fiscal Office will have an issued brief on demographics. He's giving that as we speak in the Housewives and Means right now. So he's going come in and talk to us about that. And on the floor, we're going to get a bill today. So we'll review that tomorrow. A vogue rehab bill. I think there may be a pricking ones. I haven't really had a chance to look at it yet. That's the only bill I know of. There's some others that are coming to us, but have to go to ways and means version of them. So we'll be getting a sprinkling of bills, but I don't see a major influx like we have at Crossover. And the budget should be voted out of Senate Finance Thursday, and then it'll be on the floor next week. And we'll get it at the end of next week here at the committee to decide what we'll do there. That's

[Beth Fastigi, Commissioner of Human Resources]: everything

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I know about bills for the moment.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member)]: Nothing the Ed Nothing on the Ed bill.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: No, they just got it. I mean, started working, and I think they're having a joint I talked to the I talked to somebody. They're having a joint hearing with Senate Ed and Senate Finance. That might be tomorrow. I'm not sure. This Okay. So that they can hear all of it. But it's pretty clearly delineated who's got what. And that was part of the reason ways and means didn't do a strike call. They did an amendment so that all the amendments could go to finance. And so it's kind of clear what jurisdiction over what maybe less arguing about that. So no, no news on that. We can start watching their testimony at some point if they are so inclined.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member)]: So we should be able

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: to timely manner this spring? May 15. That's the

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So good news.

[Rep. Thomas Stevens (Member)]: This is Tom. And the

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: idea was, Tom, what did do?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Have you

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: done the German for? My April 15. Yeah.