Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Speaker 0]: Good afternoon, everyone. This is the Vermont House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development. It is Thursday, 01/08/2026 at 01:02 in the afternoon. So we're here to begin our afternoon. The end of the last session, we had asked Chris Delia from the Bankers Association to put together a group and actually discussions on non compete clauses and contracts, employment contracts in Vermont. And, Chris, thank you for doing that. I certainly appreciate you putting that together and appreciate everybody that you worked with as well. I know Representative Olson sat in. Appreciate your your work with us as well. So Chris has sent a letter of report to us. I think it's posted to our webpage. And we wanted to go over that with us, but that's how we should do it.

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: Don't do it. Mister chairman, I'll digress. I think this is what you've been looking for. I got it right here. No. This is mine. This is the one that actually works. And you need this too. So this I'm not giving you. This is an inside joke with the chairman and myself. I had surgery last summer for some implants in my brain to control a tremor that I have. And this is the device that the chair would like to get his hands on to control me. And I will never share that with you. I've got you could wreak havoc with me.

[Subbana Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: It would

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: be fun, but it would not. It'd be fun for you, not for me. But I'm really pretty excited. So Thank you, mister chairman and committee members. Good to see you. Hope you all had a great off season. Responding to the chairman, we did receive a letter to Frontier and the vice chair to look at this issue and to see whether we could come back and with any thoughts and recommendations. I wanna acknowledge representative Olson for his participation in the work that we did in the committee meetings that we had. I thought what I would do is just go through a summary of the report and kind of highlight some areas that you folks may or may not look at. I think it does in part complement what you heard on Tuesday from the folks at DFR. They looked at the franchise component. We looked at the employer employee component. I think as they alluded to, data is questionable out there in the marketplace because as I will go through, you can find some cases that haven't gone to court because they don't have the wherewithal to do it. So it's very incomplete. And briefly on the FTC, and I think I echo what DFR told you the other day regarding one is just to give you a sense of who participated. This was based on the recommendations from the chair and vice chair. And then as you can imagine, when discussions begin, people come out of the woodwork and say, hey, I'd like to participate. But this was the group of people that was present for the discussions. I think they all brought legitimate comments and questions and concerns to the conversations that we had and were very productive. So I'm appreciative of these folks who participated. And then the other participants included obviously, Herb Olson, Matt Musgrave, who just listened in on one meeting and then Neil Groberg, who's with Groberg Mediation. I'll just highlight Neil because he was an author of a report several years ago from the Vermont Bar Association. So this was for him deja vu all over again. And I I kinda chuckle, and he and I chuckle, but we seem to have ended up in the same place they did. Identify the issues, but really don't have a a a lot of solutions for you. But let's go through how we went about this process. Our group met on three occasions via Zoom, September 3, October. Representative Olson joined us for the meeting on the sixth and he and I communicated in between meetings. We started with what's the current case law on the enforceability and non competes in Vermont. And I'm thankful for what the Bar Association had done and also acknowledge the folks at Downs Franklin Martin because they also did a study, if you will, on non competes. And what we've highlighted for you in this section is basically how courts have dealt with cases that have been presented to them. And that is created, I think by default, some guidelines and guardrails on non compete agreements in Vermont because of the court rules on geographic boundary for a non compete agreement, that's knowledge that others take into the next discussions that they have. So we looked at or basically discussed briefly what was included in their reports as far as the court cases that are out there. We did not do a deep dive on these court cases. We did not pull documents out to look at agreements, But we did feel confident that there is a body of common law that's been developed over the years related to non compete agreements. I think it's also fair to say that as you move forward, if you address non compete agreements, that many in the group would hope that you use some of this as the basis for how you craft a bill. The rationale behind that is these are items that have already been litigated and have already set some standards out there in the market. You come up with a whole new approach to non compete agreements, The general feeling is we're gonna litigate those for however many years until we figure out what the courts are ultimately saying. So we felt this might be an opportunity for you. Should also say this is not updated. These documents I think are 2021 and '22. We did not have access to legal services that could look at court cases that have occurred from those time periods to now. And that's something that maybe the committee wants to look at just to be further informed on what exists out there. But clearly, there have been cases that have gone to court and we have no idea how many cases didn't show up in court because it just wasn't feasible. The letter then asked us to look at current and proposed federal regulation for non compete agreements. I think if we were having this discussion a year ago, it would be a very different discussion because of a different administration down in DC and different regulators within the regulatory agencies. That is not the case today. So we'll just give you a little bit of history. You heard on Tuesday from DFR, Department of Financial Regulation, the FTC and the work that they had done on this leading up to 2025, in a change in administration. And basically the FTC created a body of rules guidance that would address the landscape of non compete agreements across the country. Those were issued and those were immediately challenged in court. And the parties who challenged the court case was ongoing and was not concluded at the time of the changes of administration in DC. New administration comes in and basically my words has decided to pull the plug on those guidance regulations. The FTC is going to deal with issues on a case by case basis, but they've taken everything that was developed under the previous administration. And those are no longer affecting whole cloth. They may look at some bits and pieces of it, but it's gonna be on a case by case basis. And what I've provided here is the following provisions just so you know what the FTC was looking at in their guidance. And also, we gave you a link to that information as well. The next thing that we were tasked with was summarizing how other states have dealt with non competes. And I want to preface my comments with we highlight two websites here. This is not an endorsement of those websites or those organizations, but we did find them to be useful because they categorize either in lists or in map form where you can scroll over the map and click on the states, what the states have done across the country. And many of them have bits and pieces of statute or rules in place that address non competes. I think Florida is the only state that doesn't have anything on non compete agreements. They look at Vermont and in the context of Vermont, they look at what the case law has been. They acknowledge there's no statutory rules or legislation that's out there, but they do look at the common law that's been developed, and I think that's the basis for how Vermont is categorized. Many of them refer to reasonableness standards, but they don't define what reasonableness is. Your reasonableness is going to be different than mine. And therefore you go and look at case law and how that's developed to see how the courts have dealt with that. But I wanted to give you, for example, how the states have dealt with this. And this is as of July 2025. You've got states like, have enacted bans on non compete agreements, California, Montana, Minnesota, Oklahoma, North Dakota has except for sale of business, and Wyoming has limitations, exceptions for trade secrets or executive management. Again, Florida is the only state with no restrictions on non competes. And then you look, I wanted to give you an example of what a reasonableness standard might be. And you folks have had these conversations here, related to what a salary requirement might be for in statute on a non compete. And you can get a sense of the wide range of salary figures that are in state statutes when it comes to non compete agreements. We did discuss this at length and I'm gonna touch upon it later on when we looked at H two zero five, because just setting a salary requirement for folks, many folks who were in this working group is not the sole driving factor of whether a non compete agreement should exist or not. I should also step back and say, of the folks who were part of these discussions, McEmburg can correct me if I'm wrong, think there were two participants who started with an outright ban altogether. Others were know there is a place for non compete agreements depending on what those statute how the statute develops. And then over time as we dug into it, there's a level of comfort if you can address the concerns that maybe it is okay for non compete agreements to go forward. An outright ban yeah. We can not have an outright ban if we do certain things. And you'll hear I'm sure from the parties, on those issues. So we gave you, the two sites to look at. Again, we found them to be informative. They're not the end all be all. We're not endorsing them, but it was helpful to understand how other states have addressed it. You then asked us to look at identifying hardships that may have endured, that Vermonters may have endured because of non compete agreements. And when you're looking at the existing case law, you're able to understand some of the impacts and how they were litigated. So hardships for those people who never go to court, we will never know. But as you've discussed here over the years, a hardship could be my ability to earn a livelihood for myself or my family. And again, you can look at how the courts have dealt with that in some instances. So this is where we go back to, there's an information gap as to how deep a problem this is and how deep the hardships are for individuals. And I'm just, less representative Olson has more information from the courts. I'm not sure how you ultimately get to that aside from witnesses who will sit in the chair who represent groups or individuals that could share anecdotal stories with you. But, it's certainly legitimate question, just tough to get the answers to it. And then areas where non compete agreements are appropriate. This is where I'll start to do a little bit of more of a deep dive. So again, some folks who would say, you know, we would support a ban, an outright ban on non competes, others who would say we would support non compete agreements being used in the marketplace. What are the reasonableness standards that go along with that? What's the language that we might look at under contract law? You obviously have H two zero five that identifies a number of areas that we ultimately talked about. Again, as we move through our conversations, I think it's fair to say depending on what you do, there can be a level of comfort for non compete agreements continuing to exist in Vermont. Depending on what you do, you may have folks who say absolutely feel strongly about banning non compete agreements in Vermont because the debate that you're having on the bill doesn't go far enough to address the concerns that we have. So I think ultimately you need to figure it out from a public policy point of view. I don't remember anybody saying they would object to a bill that puts reasonable guardrails in place on non compete agreements. Everybody's gonna have their own perspective of what should be in, what should be out, and we can have those debates with you as we move forward. The next thing is what what information was relevant to your conversations that you might have with your bill, any other bill that comes before you. And this is where the remaining four or five pages deal with the meat of h two zero five and what we discussed under two zero five. So I'll start with should non competes be allowed. Again, I've highlighted some of the group discussions that occurred. I wanna use one industry as an example of some of the challenges that you can run into when you have these discussions. I'll actually use two industries. I'll start with the easy one, my own industry. You will never have me or a banker or an institution say that we should have non compete agreements for tellers. That makes no sense whatsoever. Should we have non competes for senior officers, folks who are in wealth management divisions, etcetera? We would say yes, we would want non compete agreements there and I can explain at a later date why.

[Representative Herb Olson (Member)]: Healthcare, Jessa

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: Barnard was great in bringing information to the group that highlights, here's a broader policy discussion around healthcare, non competes as a component of it. For example, if you have traveling nurses that are under non compete agreements, many of our hospitals and providers use traveling nurses to fill in the gaps and the nursing shortage that we have. If a non compete agreement is prohibiting that from occurring and you're not getting as strong an access to healthcare that you would like, that's a bigger policy discussion. The next example was you have a healthcare provider that's part of a larger group, if you will, under an ownership structure, but that healthcare provider wants to peel off and create their own entity, their own business. That healthcare provider may or may not be under a non compete, may probably be under a non solicitation, so they can't solicit the consumers of that previous employer. However, what if I'm a consumer and I wanna go with my healthcare provider? All would agree that the consumer should be able to voluntarily go with whoever they want. H two zero five has some language in there that says or transact, which means if I go voluntarily and I transact with my health care provider, is that health care provider in violation of what you currently have in two zero five? We'd have to nuance the language and figure out how to resolve those issues. I guess long story short, healthcare is a bigger policy discussion. Is it appropriate to include it here? Probably in some way, shape and form. I will also say part of healthcare, but also much broader in many other businesses, this concept of stay or pay. You are hired to work for my company and I now educate you, I pay for your courses, I pay for whatever over the course of a year or whatever the education program is. If you immediately up and leave, should I as the employer have the ability to recoup the costs that I just put out there for you to get educated only to go somewhere else? What does that look like two or three or four years down the road if you stay with me? Is there a decreasing number if you will? Stay or pay is a big nut to look at. And I think people are gonna feel strongly on the fact that if I'm investing and you're walking out the door as an employer, should I have the right to recover those costs? You've got the benefit, you're taking that benefit somewhere else. So that's a big policy discussion that you folks are probably gonna have. So I just wanna use healthcare, use the banking industry. You know, again, David brought to the table non compete agreements when you're dealing with sub shops. Is it the franchise? Is it the employer employee? Why would we have a non compete agreement on somebody who's making a sub? There's only so many ways to put ham and cheese or whatever on a sandwich. That doesn't make sense. A non compete for somebody who's not dealing with proprietary information, critical information is at a certain wage level, doesn't make sense. Those are again policy issues you're going to have to kind of grapple with. And again, everybody in agreement, there's a right time and a wrong time for non compete agreements. Appropriate use for non compete agreements. Think we start some folks started from the point that they are being used judiciously in Vermont, they're not taken lightly. I think the court cases in the volume of court cases perhaps demonstrate that. Again, I caveat it with how many people don't go to court, but it doesn't get sense that they're just willy nilly being thrown out there in the marketplace and being used in a non appropriate way. When you think about the information that individuals can have access to, and I think your bill in two zero five addresses some of this, you know, when you're dealing with trade secrets, proprietary information, client lists, intellectual property, strategic initiatives, many would say those are reasonable to be protected. Because if I learn all of that and then I walk down the road to the competitor, that is not fair from the previous employer perspective. So how do you address that? The challenge is, I'll go back to the wage threshold that I mentioned earlier and what some states have done. We had a conversation about a 100,000, 150,000 higher, lower, whatever. You all know that we've got a number of small tech companies in Vermont, startups, that I as an employee may have access to all of that critical information that I just alluded to, But we're not making money. I'm not getting a salary of $100,000 I may not be getting a salary of $60,000 I may be under a contract for stock options or equity at some future point in time. If you base it solely on income, you're gonna have so many employer employee situations out there that aren't covered that perhaps legitimately should be covered because of the work of the employee, not what salary they're getting. We had a very interesting discussion about proprietary recipes and bakers, etcetera, that may not be making a lot of money, but I have access to that proprietary recipe. And I should also say, to our knowledge, these have not been litigated yet. So how do you address those? And is it two part test where you have salary and then something else depending on work of the employee? Again, that gets to the next 1C wage threshold, two part test, where do we go? I think we've captured what folks were presenting in the study as to the various wage thresholds. And again, highlighting what the FTC had looked at. So safe to say we didn't agree on the number. We kicked the can to you policymakers as to figure out whether it's important to have a wage threshold. If so, what that is, but also keep in mind, there are some who would like that two part test to deal with this. We then looked at, the definition of trade secrets and what's covered under Uniform Trade Secrets Act in Vermont. We did not open up existing statutes to see whether your reference to five is compatible with the Uniform Trade Secrets Act. Is it sufficient to protect the broad scope of proprietary information? We don't know. Legis Council can obviously help with that. We didn't look at the federal regulations dealing with trade secrets. There was, I think, agreement that it would be interesting to know. But if we start to deviate and open up those statutes, it may or may not be problematic for some of the folks in the working group. So I guess a cautionary tale there. Disclosure of the agreements and timing, I think there's general consensus that if you're going to have a non compete agreement in the employer employee relationship, It is appropriate that there's full disclosure. It is appropriate that there is time for the parties involved in particular the employee to have time to review that agreement and consider it. There was, I raised this with the group, there is a section of the bill that would prohibit an employer from pulling that agreement back until a third three day period has elapsed. I did present to the group and I'll leave it with you for further conversation. I can envision where we as a financial institution, go ahead and put an offer on the table for an employee. We are still doing our due diligence. So for example, Mike Marcotte, I put an offer on the table Monday morning for him, it includes a non compete agreement. That afternoon, we're continuing in our due diligence and we pull a criminal report, criminal history on Mike, and we find that there's something in there that makes him ineligible for the job. We question why you need to wait three days to pull that back when there's a new piece of information that's come to light to say, Mike is no longer eligible for the position. So again, it's a public policy discussion for you folks to have. It's not pulling it back because we don't wanna have the party. It's pulling it back because there's a new piece of information that's come to light. So again, I leave that for you folks to wrestle with. The length of the time of the agreement, again, I guess we would suggest to look at case law, common law to see how courts have opined on this. I think many people in their mind are thinking one year seems reasonable. I didn't go through the case law to see if others went beyond one year. But certainly time period is something for you to discuss. I think the more interesting one was geographic. Is geographic within the county? Is geographic within the state? Is it as one of our participants said, there's 10 people in The US that are in my line of business. Therefore, the whole US is my geographic territory. I don't know how the courts would rule on something like that. Talking with my folks in the hypotheticals, if you're working in Bennington and you move to Chittenden County, you're so far removed from your customer base and your work down in Bennington. Geographic doesn't make sense. But if you're moving from Bennington to Manchester, that's a different conversation. So I think geographic is a more challenging one than a time period that you're gonna have to look at. It depends on the industry, really. Yeah. And how do you craft a bill that's going to deal with every unique industry that's out there? The non solicitations, I think, again, many would agree that's a valid way for an employer to for some period of time, protect what they have developed for a customer base. It may be and I'll use an example of that conversations in my world. You may have wealth managers that go out and cultivate a client relationship, but you have a bunch of people behind the scenes that are supporting that individual and doing work behind the scenes to support that individual. So some of my folks would say they shouldn't be able to solicit that person for a defined period of time. Again, I'll go back to, but if I voluntarily as the consumer want to go with that individual, that's my choice as a consumer to be able to do that and to protect that right for the consumer. This gets into the section of the bill that deals with or transact, and I think it's a legitimate concern. You can't solicit, but if I voluntarily go, there is going to be a transaction. Am going to pay my provider for a level of service. That's a transaction. The bill would create a problem for that individual. So I think you need to address that. Look at it. You then have exclusions, the definition of non competes, you've got non solicitations. I think one of the areas that not all, but some of us would highlight for you is agreements that might have a non competitive component, but also have a compensation component to that agreement. For example, if I go to work for a financial services entity, and I'm working with individual clients, and I enter into a severance agreement that defers compensation to some future point, and that deferment is based on my not soliciting their customers, not taking with me their proprietary information, Is that covered under two zero five or not? We've had conversations about, was it Greenleaf compensation or something years ago. The thought is parties going into it. I'm being compensated under this agreement. If I break that agreement, I'm going to lose the compensation. I know that going into it. There, I had one example explained to me where I have that compensation agreement. I decide I wanna go work for somebody else. An example that was given to me was that entity that I was now going to compensates the previous employer for that compensation package, if you will. Or let me rephrase that, I'm sorry, that's not correct. It compensates me as the employee for that compensation package that I would have gotten from my old employer. So there are other agreements out there that may have a non compete component, and there is a concern as to how they get wrapped up in these discussions when you have again compensation associated with it. And I've given you a couple of examples of non qualified deferred compensations, etcetera

[Unidentified Committee Member]: here.

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: What else? Avoiding all existing non compete agreements. I think everybody was unanimous that from our perspective needs to be taken off the table. You are reaching into existing contracts, opening up contract law, you're going to have lawsuits on your hands, you'll have legal counsel come in and talk to you about whether you can or cannot do this. We feel that the bill should be prospective going forward, not retrospective and looking at all existing non compete agreements and throwing them all out. Again, I think the feeling is that's gonna put the state into existing contracts and that's gonna be challenged in court. And we would strongly suggest you stay away from that. Stay or pay provisions, I'll conclude with this. That's the next big thing you've got to deal with. As that tech company, if I'm educating you, is it right for the employer to pull it back? If I'm hiring you as a nurse and I'm paying for ongoing education, should I be able to claw that back if there's a certain time period associated with my staying with that entity? I think that's a big policy discussion that many people are gonna feel very strongly about. And the downside is if you don't allow that to go forward, I think what you could have as an outcome is companies that are no longer going to invest in their employees with that education. And where are those individuals going to get it to further develop the skills they need for that job or their career. So there is a downside if you don't address stay or pay effectively. So ultimately that our, that was was the group's discussions. I think in the end, you still have an overarching question of how big a problem is this out there beyond the court cases that already exist? You might never know, But this is what we have provided to you. I'm happy to give you the reports from the Bar Association, from Downshark and Martin. And I'm happy to share with you the minutes from the meetings that we had. All of our members had a chance to look at those minutes and make any corrections to them or or comment on them. So I'm happy to give those to you. And and I'll stop there, and I'll defer to representative Olson to offer his thoughts on this whole craziness of the process. You

[Representative Herb Olson (Member)]: want me to start up? We need to be identified for the record, Herb Olson, member of the committee, and the chair and vice chair asked me to participate in Chris's work group. I'd like to just say that the work group was great. They were really into it. They had a lot of expertise, and they worked really, really hard. And Chris did a great job organizing the whole thing. You see the product of that in his report, which is great. I'm not going to repeat everything. But maybe I'll try to put it in a sort of broader sort of public policy context about why we're dealing with this at all. Then maybe talk about a few specific issues as well. I've been involved in a lot of regulatory world, as well as being in the legislature. You deal with public policy, so why are you doing anything like this? And a lot of the industries that I've dealt with over the years, I mean, it's really interesting. I think that our society is founded on something that's really important, some really fundamental core principles around the freedom to work, the freedom to do business, new contract. And these are all just core things in our republic that have really made a difference over the years. But even way back when, know, tennis is and whatever, there's always been situations where we've thought that, well, you know, we need to define this a little better or clarify it, and maybe even a limitation of some sort or another in order to achieve some sort of public good. And that's where we're at, I think, with this particular topic. It's interesting the way the courts approach these kinds of cases, and they sort of recognize that. They talk about restraint of competitiveness, things like that. And so they're really cautious about dipping into enforcing a contract that at least on a Facebook, right? Might prevent someone from doing business, doing working for somebody else. They're really cautious about that unless there's something clearly defined in the situation or circumstances that you could say, hey, this is reasonable. And so we'll enforce that particular agreement. But again, it starts out from that sort of core principle of, it's a restraint. We like our freedoms. And it's done us well, it served us very well, I think over the years in terms of our economy, and how we do that. Heretofore, these kinds of situations have been dealt with in the courts. And group looked at a lot of cases. It's a fairly well developed body

[Unidentified Committee Member]: of court law.

[Representative Herb Olson (Member)]: But as one of the key takeaways that I had from participating in the group is, I mean, it's a question of, do you need to do anything in statute? You gotta have a reason to enact a statute. My sense of this group is that they were in general agreement that yes, statutory language around this subject is a good idea. So that's a big deal, think. Because you need to have some reason to do something like this, which would impose some limitations on what folks would otherwise do. I think the reasons for that are a couple. One is that you might have, how many people have the wherewithal to litigate a case, right? Even if you're a business, or maybe you're an employee that's affected by something like this. It's expensive. It takes time. So you never really see what the whole landscape is if you just look at the court cases. I will say that I did finally get in touch with the court administrator's office. The working group had asked for, what information do you have on how many cases come up in this field? They just don't categorize it. They don't catalog their court filings like that. So they really looked hard, but they just didn't see other than pointing to individual objects of the filings, they just didn't have the capacity to do that. Kind of funny thing, I saw Addison and said, wow. You know? Why don't we do a survey here? And, you know, god bless me. Right? I thought that would be a great idea. What they were saying. Well, it could be not particularly well received.

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: He wants the problem child.

[Representative Herb Olson (Member)]: So we don't have really good information because we never cataloged it that way, we never surveyed it or whatever. So it's pretty difficult to say. I fall back on that general takeaway that I had, that notwithstanding that we can't identify numbers, how prevalent things are in particular sectors, particular kinds of employment, that the group as a whole who are experienced in this area, even though they said it wasn't prevalent, they thought it was beneficial. They supported the idea of putting something statutory in effect. So that helped me in terms of getting over that particular hump of why you want to do this at all. So that's sort of general. I think Chris did a good job of identifying a bunch of issues that we need to consider when we take up, if we take up any particular pill. I'll touch on a couple of things. I was a great participant in working group. I missed one of the meetings where I think they talked about the healthcare issue in particular. And came away, and sorry, I apologize, I didn't have the benefit of that kind of discussion. I took sort of a bit of a different view in that it's really an important topic for health care. From both sides, from the business or the hospital, whatever in that individual practitioner and for the consumer in terms of, I want to follow my doc or whatever, when they move. And so, the idea of saying, okay, healthcare, that's kind of unique, and we're gonna separate it somewhere else. To me, it's a critical issue in terms of healthcare and costs and access. Even though the issues are kind of magnified with healthcare, to me, the same kind of it raises the same kind of issues of an employee, say, or therapist or something. Know, are they gonna have the freedom to, you know, go out of business on their own, and bring their, you know, and have their former client, you know, patients come with them on the network or former practice side, you know, there's some issues for them. Not to mention the say a pay company, they might have put a lot of training to that individual. But just the idea of, okay, I'm going to start my own practice. And generally speaking, that's probably

[Speaker 0]: a good thing.

[Representative Herb Olson (Member)]: But then there's these issues of, I mean, we heard that non competes per se, not all that prevalent in the healthcare industry. But non solicitation agreements were. And I think my sense is that non solicitation agreement can have the same effect as a non compete. And the bill by now deals with And Chris touched on this. He touched on the non disclosure, the pay of stay staff, and the non solicitation. They really dealt with kind of in a somewhat rudimentary fashion in the bill, as opposed to a lot more detail when you're talking about severance and non competes and that kind of thing. And one of my takeaways is that, which would be an end to it, those specific things that are carved out as exceptions in the bill. But they've done so in a pretty bare bones kind of way, might need to get into them a little bit to make sure that the same issues, both from the current business side and the new employee, they're adequately dealt with in a way that it's okay with the claim. I think that's about it. In terms of witnesses, these working groups, I think was a great place to start in terms of getting some input to the entire committee. I think the issue list that Chris developed before the working group developed, is a good roadmap for us to follow. And I'm going to have time not participating in every day there.

[Speaker 0]: The

[Unidentified Committee Member]: comment of whether or not we take it up, I'm struggling with the idea because it you willingly go into the contracts, and I understand I've signed a company plus, you know, twenty years ago for no reason for no

[Representative Herb Olson (Member)]: repair plus.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: But nevertheless, I signed it, but it was a choice that I made. And I'm just You said that you got over that, right? Yeah. And I don't I would like to know how, because I'm struggling to And how many states already regulate?

[Representative Herb Olson (Member)]: Well, a lot I think most states have a body of court law. Okay. Of the states that actually have statutes What was another criticism?

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: There's only one state that doesn't regulate it in some way, and that's Florida.

[Representative Herb Olson (Member)]: The rest the That's either in courts judicially or by statute. Did you have a number of states actually have a statute, Chris?

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: Let me see if I can

[Representative Herb Olson (Member)]: pull up. It's not no matter. You know, it's a subset, I would think, of long. I think the justification of regulating contracts comes down to a couple of factors. Why do we regulate insurance? We regulate insurance for a lot of different reasons, but it's not as if the individual policy holder really has any ability to negotiate that. If you want to get their home covered, car covered, there's a policy and you can't negotiate in that. When we're talking about, as Chris mentioned, some of the higher earners, folks who are in management positions, that kind of stuff, they probably have the ability to negotiate that. But the person who is a little bit lower on the totem pole wouldn't have that ability. And sometimes, we look to regulatory agencies to pick up the slack when a consumer doesn't have the wherewithal to truly bargain. And this wouldn't be that. It would be merely some standards to further define really what's reasonable. So, you take the court structure, the judicial decision making structure around non competes and then you codify it. So that it's hopefully a little more clear and is satisfied with what you both think or the public opinion.

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: Phone a friend says four outright ban and 34 regulated with statute. With statute? Okay. Now we got it. That's why

[Representative Abbey Duke (Member)]: Are we sharing what we think? Are we asking questions? You can ask questions. You think? Or I can say what I think. So I'll just say, generally, this is very helpful. Thank you for all this work. Just very generally speaking, I think non compete should be used very rarely. And so I would support something that regulates based on I'm less concerned about dollar and much more concerned about what they're doing and what their responsibilities are. But a typical company to me should have very few employees that would now, non solicitation is different. Protecting trade secrets, that's different. But a non compete, I think, does a number of things. Too many non competes can stifle an employee's ability to find a better job and reward not as good employment practices because it's like, well, they're stuck with you. And it also can encourage employees to change industries. They've got to non compete for a year. The job is untenable. They need to leave. And they don't have an opportunity to stay in that profession because of a non compete. So I understand that there are situations where non competes are Okay. But to me, it's the exception and not the norm of where that line would be. Back to the, was it? Stay to play? Play to stay?

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: Stay or pay.

[Representative Abbey Duke (Member)]: Stay or pay. I get that. And I think that it is appropriate that there would be an agreement, especially if a company is putting somebody through a program that I think a stay or pay that makes sense to me. The ability for a company to say, Listen, we're going do all this training. But it would have to be upfront, so the employee understands, Okay, if I leave, this is the situation. Yeah, it's interesting. If I

[Representative Herb Olson (Member)]: could just respond just briefly. Stay a bit. That successor language isn't in 02/2005, it is in a different bill that's in another committee, it's H433, I think, and they took some testimony, we find out who's a taxing.

[Representative Monique Priestley (Clerk)]: Just to kind of piggyback on what Abbey was saying, have a couple of questions about particularly the trade secrets thing, which I understand on a larger level, you don't necessarily want your competitor to know your inputs into your product, but I worry that sometimes the trade secret can get excused down to a retail worker, for instance, or a fast food worker. And then we're getting into that conversation about power imbalance and if we're in situations where non competes are being used to block folks from being able to advance in their careers, I think that's a big problem for me. And then with the stay in play situation, the one thing that comes up to me there, because I think on sort of a disreasonableness, it's reasonable out very clear. If you do decide to leave, somebody should get compensated. I've heard this a number of times from plumbers in my area where they'll hire somebody on, they'll train them, then immediately they're scooting off and starting their own thing. There does need to be some level of protection. But the thing for me that I worry about is what if relationships sour? What if the working environment is actually not good and that person can't state it? I know somebody currently who's in a situation where it's not working out and he does need to leave,

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: but he can't. So

[Representative Monique Priestley (Clerk)]: how do we work that system so it doesn't end up being kind of an indentured system? And that's where I go right.

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: That's why you're in your chair and I'm in my chair. I do want to go back to your first comment. I think all of the people participating would agree there is no way somebody who's, as you described in those job categories, should be up in a non compete agreement. I think the starting point for that is to look at what we have on Vermont statute from a trade secret perspective

[Representative Herb Olson (Member)]: Mhmm.

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: And see if that helps inform the conversation so that it isn't, my word, dumbed down to a point where it's impacting people in positions that they should not be under non compete agreements. I mean, I'll use my own industry. There's no reason for a teller to be under a non compete agreement. There's nothing really dietary that they're dealing with from taking deposits or, you know, putting money out the door or whatever. But it's different in their if they're in a strategic area of the bank. Let's say they're in an area where they're developing new technology for the bank. You're gonna wanna protect that for sure. So, we gotta figure out what does that trade secret language look like currently, and

[Representative Herb Olson (Member)]: we did not do that.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah, I'd also start building off what Abbey said. Think, I mean, my sense is that when you're talking about trade secrets, you're talking about a certain level of administration where corporate information that's proprietary, those kind of things, that, yeah, that I think no competes make absolute sense. But talk, but your example of tellers or those kind of level, I get that sense that, to me, that feels like there's a broader spectrum of probably really small companies that don't really understand what could be purchasing non solicitation clauses. And I wonder if they're putting what they really need is a non solicitation clause, but just saying, well, I'm just going to dump this big thing on them. And that will fix the problem. So specific is legislation or laws or anything you know about any kind of ground non solicitation? Is that something we should better define and separate out from non compete? Great question. We did not go into a dive in that area at all. We acknowledge that you've got it in the

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: bill. We acknowledge that it needs to be discussed, but we didn't look at what other states have done for non solicitation.

[Representative Monique Priestley (Clerk)]: I've talked multiple times, so Oh, well, I was just wondering on that point about the non solicitation and speaking about small business support, is that something that's being talked about in training? Because I don't know that actually non solicitation is really being quoted or talked about, especially for small startup businesses. I'm sorry, in training of who? For startup CEOs or small businesses that are coming online. Are these distinctions really talked about? You're in this

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: My observation is not the group. You're in this middle area of we often think of business to business transactions as sophisticated individuals, legal counsel, guidance, etcetera. Sometimes that's true, sometimes that's not. You're now in a situation where you're dealing with an employer business and an employee, and they're they're on two different planes. So who knows if, you know,

[Speaker 0]: I could think of a

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: group like the small business development center. Is it part of their bailiwick to say, hey, when you're starting your business and you're thinking about employees, do you know about non solicitation agreements or non compete agreements? I I guess it's like, no, if I am hiring legal counsel to help me start my business, Do you have that conversation? Perhaps. Maybe they're just focusing on the legal structure of the business and setting it up. That's also true too. Yeah.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: We've got to wrap up real quick. I'm just thinking, you know, the maybe piggybacking not from current labor law, exempt versus nonexempt. And if I can it makes no sense. Right? For if you can't If you can't put somebody on salary, why are you giving them a no compete clause? But if you've got somebody on salary, then that makes a little more sense in my mind, and certainly that's a thought.

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: Yeah. I mean, that could be another another way to approach the the whole discussion of salary versus what your function is in the business versus exempt or nonexempt. I'm sure there'd be a robust discussion about what those two mean. There is no definition of an employee. We had one individual raise the question of what what if I hire a a not an employee, but a third party contractor to do the work that I might have done by an employee. There's no definition as to how you deal with employees in the bills. I'm not sure you wanna open up that can of worms, but, yeah, exempt, nonexempt may be another way that you can look at this.

[Speaker 0]: Do you want to keep working on? Yeah. I think we should really take a dive into case law. Okay. And what do we need to do to codify what is already case law? And, you know, maybe we need to bring in the judiciary to have that discussion with them as well. And then move from there and get their thoughts also on, you know, the whole issue of non competes and the things that we've talked about, not solicitation and just to get an idea of what judges are thinking about.

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: Think that helps the landscape moving forward because you're starting from a known point rather than throwing all of that out and starting with something new because talking with a few lawyers, if you will, in this world, if you do that, we're just gonna be setting up a whole system of court cases all over again that they're gonna relitigate some of what's been dealt with already. Doesn't doesn't settle the landscape at all for us. I think we can get a hold of Carrie and

[Speaker 0]: maybe Jen's own people, if wanted to come in and chat with us, maybe they can work with Rick to put together what case law we have and how we can draft something that would use that as a basis.

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: And I would just add, if you do decide to go down this road and the conversations, this is separate from your franchise folks. Maybe there's some overlap, but trying to pull them into this and apply similar standards.

[Speaker 0]: It's two different things. Very

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: different, yeah.

[Representative Herb Olson (Member)]: Sophie might be the counsel that is more into this, I think. At least that's my sense when I talk to some of the folks. She she and she knows.

[Speaker 0]: Start that conversation. Sure. Do I believe you wanna work with Herb? Sure.

[Representative Herb Olson (Member)]: That'd be super.

[Speaker 0]: That's brilliant. Chris, thank you. Sure. Appreciate your work.

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: Thank you. No problem. Thank you.

[Representative Abbey Duke (Member)]: A new place for top

[Unidentified Committee Member]: of our arms through the window.

[Representative Abbey Duke (Member)]: I mean, it's not it's just a matter of getting my house there. Yeah. I can take

[Subbana Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: If if I need to let go.

[Representative Abbey Duke (Member)]: I just couldn't get there.

[Speaker 0]: I just yesterday. Yeah. And

[Representative Herb Olson (Member)]: Actually, you get this left behind.

[Speaker 0]: On the floor at three so we

[Representative Herb Olson (Member)]: can keep it on like 02:55. Yeah.

[Speaker 0]: Subbana, welcome.

[Subbana Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: Thank you. We're ready to go?

[Speaker 0]: Ready to go.

[Subbana Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: Okay, cool. Hello, everyone. For the record, I'm Subbana Haskell, and I'm the Executive Director of the Office of Workforce Strategy and Development. Our testimony today is on the legislative study of data management models, as you know. And when we go through the testimony, I'll begin. Josiah will come in second and talk about ADS's role in the report and also what they're doing statewide. And Drake will then walk through, walk you through different considerations and opportunities for the data management. Excuse me. Sorry.

[Representative Herb Olson (Member)]: Okay.

[Subbana Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: Are you Sheena? Yeah, sorry about Yeah, yeah. All my stuff is annoying. So as you all know, the legislative study on data management models was part of Act one hundred forty six of twenty twenty four, and, it directed the office to collaborate with ADS and the executive committee of the board to, look at, develop a report looking at the different opportunities and models that could be incorporated into collecting the data that will help inform our workforce development strategies. That's two years ago, 2024. Can I phrase it? It's a year and a half, really, right? Anyway, data comes up in every conversation all the time professionally and personally in our lives. We all want data. We want to know, you know, well, how much does it cost? And all that type of stuff. And how does that compare to this? And so it's obvious that making decisions based on data is an important thing for us professionally and personally, as I just said. And when we're looking at trying to figure out how to get workforce data developed for the state, a data trust, a standalone data trust, some people call it a repository, a central repository. I think they're synonymous. Right? Yep. And there's a lot of work that goes to that with sharing the data across agencies, across out of state government, employers, community organizations, etcetera. And so there the tool, it'll be interesting to see how it goes, but a tool that tool could strengthen our decision making and our accountability. So here's my big but. But we need to move. We need more people. We need more housing. We need more businesses. We need more opportunities to build a robust future. And we want to move as quickly as we possibly can. And data trusts that are formulated along the Model three and the SOCWED report take a little bit longer. So just to think about that. So the current situation and I thought I had this one. Sorry. The current situation with workforce data is that, as you all know, pretty much everybody's collecting data. It's just not centralized. And we're all data experts at each of the organizations, the agencies, the departments are using it to make their decisions and strengthen programs and outcomes through the monitors. But we don't have this standalone tool like we were talking about to collect all of it and be able to make it work together. So right now, I just was going to share a couple of examples of the workforce data that and these are just a few. There's many, many more. But at Department of Labor, we're doing WIOA participant outcomes. You all are familiar with labor market information, LMI, registered apprenticeship data. At AOE, they're collecting data on CTE, adult education and literacy outcomes. ACCD, as you know, has the Vermont training program and there's a lot of tracking of data there. AHS as I can, and I'm going to return to you again.

[Drake Turner (Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: Individual Career Advancement Network, the SNAP and post training program.

[Subbana Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: Health care, and then they have their health care workforce data center. And the chief performance office also puts out an annual report about all the different data that's coming out of all the different departments and agencies as well, and looking about whether it's it's affecting outcomes, if we've gone up or gone down, that kind of thing. So moving forward, a data trust or repository will require a significant amount of investment, both human and financial. It's going to take a number of years. It's going to take a lot of money. And the other part of it that will be important is the governance of the MOUs and how we're going to share data, how we're going to keep it private, how we collaborate on data, all that, but also keep it private and safe. And meanwhile, there are alternative partnerships available, which Drake will get into in a few minutes. These multistate collaboratives, And Representative Marcotte, you've seen the presentation on PSEO, and we'll get into all of that. They're pretty cool, and we could kind of go. We'll get So Drake will walk us through that. And honestly, I wanted to pass the baton to Josiah now and let him talk about what ADS has been doing, which is quite a bit, with creating data, different data lake houses. I like that expression. And so I'm going to let you take it from here.

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Vermont Agency of Digital Services)]: All right. Thank you. So for the record, Josiah Eresh, it's nice to

[Speaker 0]: be back with you all again.

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Vermont Agency of Digital Services)]: I'm the chief data and AI officer at the state of New Orleans.

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: And I brought Jake Durell, who will not be testifying today,

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Vermont Agency of Digital Services)]: but he is our new director of data privacy. I know we've had a lot of I've gotten to talk with you several times about data privacy and wanted to highlight his role. This was a new role we created in January, really to focus on how do we accomplish data sharing while preserving privacy of Vermonter's information so that we can drive outcomes like the ones we're trying to get to here while still making sure that we're we're preserving Vermonter's So that's that's his job. So he's more than happy to come back and talk about that in in any level of detail you're interested in in a future session. So what ADS has been working on, and if you wanna go deeper on any of what I'm gonna talk about, I presented to JITOC back in early December, and so that was just about this. So but kinda wanted to do high level what we've been working on. So in December, we rolled out the foundational infrastructure for our next generation data platform. And what this consists of is two kind of sets of capabilities. The first one is called a data lake. And data lake, you can bring in data kind of very quickly and start to do analysis. And it's much faster than traditional ways of doing data management because you bring in data as it exists in the source system, and you can just start working with it right away. So kind of covers the if you think about good, fast, and cheap, it covers fast and cheap. Data lakes are really good at fast and cheap. And then the data warehouse is for those more complicated things where you wanna bring data together across systems or across agencies and and do more complex analysis or build models or things like that. And that does the the good side of things in a in the good, fast, and cheap structure. So by combining those, we get what's called the data lake house, which sounds like a wonderful place to live. And it it includes loading the data very quickly into the lake and beginning to get some value out of it, but still offering those more complex possibilities if that's if that's what we wanna do. So we got the foundational infrastructure built. And then since December, which has been a whole week, we're spinning up with Department of Health. We're talking with Agency of Education, Green Mountain Care Board, and of course, Department of Labor about bringing workloads on quite quickly into that environment and being able to start looking across those once we get proper data sharing agreements and clicks. That was a speed run through a lot of tech. Any questions on that before I talk about the process side of things?

[Speaker 0]: Okay. If you have questions,

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Vermont Agency of Digital Services)]: we can come back to

[Speaker 0]: it.

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Vermont Agency of Digital Services)]: So the other big effort we've been working on is data governance. And as I mentioned last year, we brought on Jake, who was doing a lot of this work. And data governance can often be very academic or nebulous. We're taking a much more pragmatic approach within ADS, and we're really trying to balance the goal of maximizing the value of the data we already have. Goals like reducing the amount of times we ask for monitors for the same information is a great example of that. Or allowing better collaboration between Department of Labor and Agency of Education on outcomes and tracking throughout someone's career and training. So we're balancing that, maximizing the value of what we already have with protecting privacy and preserving the integrity of our processes and systems. So we are I'm working with the Agency of Human Services on a governance pilot. We're working with Pre Mountain Care Board, and we're we're using those places as pilots to develop a statewide governance model with the goal that over time, a statewide data governance council would manage the prioritization of what new data sources we bring into the data lake and how we are combining data to answer policy questions and to provide information. Another big part of data governance is collecting the information about the data that's there. So we're we're working on a data catalog, which would allow folks who have access to different data and the like, or even just to be able to see what's available so that when you're working with ledge counsel or with analysts in our agencies, that they'll be able to say, oh, yeah, we have this and this over here and these over here, and we can put these together data, a more complete viewer to answer a policy.

[Speaker 0]: So those are some of

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Vermont Agency of Digital Services)]: the big initiatives on the data governance side. Any questions on that?

[Speaker 0]: How do you vet the data that's coming in, making sure that it's accurate?

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Vermont Agency of Digital Services)]: Yeah. That's a great question. So the way that we approach that is making sure that the data is useful for the purpose that we're we're what we're trying to accomplish. So I like to use the example of the data the Secretary of State's office collects. They collect business filings, and they are a source of truth for Vermont business data. But most of the business filings they collect, they take whatever was told to them and they file it. And that is that's it. Right? That's that's their responsibility in statute and how all secretary of states around the country work. What that means though is that unless they've got a good reason to question the data, they don't go validate that, like, you didn't fat finger an address or, you know, things like that. So when we go to do analytics or or draw inferences out of that data, that's the kind of thing I would, you know, put an asterisk next to it and be like, hey. We know that there are some data quality issues here. We think they're about this big. And so any work that you're doing with this data, the analysts need to take that into account.

[Speaker 0]: Does that help? It does, but when we're gathering data, I mean, we the agencies or departments or even not, don't put out a lot of grant dollars, a lot of state dollars to different organizations. So, I think we bring in that we ask for that data coming back on how effective those dollars were, you know, what it's doing for Vermonters. And so, that's the data that we rely on. I felt that

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Vermont Agency of Digital Services)]: we do here, You know, we're talking about workforce and education and stuff. One of the things that's on our work plan for this year is working with Susanne Davis, the director of racial equity in her office, develop a standard set of demographics that we would like programs to collect. And there's like, it's pretty easy to say, you know, we wanna know all this stuff. Right? Like, race, gender, ethnicity, like, the usual things to ask. What's more complicated is, in some cases, asking for that information can actually make people less likely to interact with the service or can people will be hesitant to give that information in some cases? So what we're working on with her office is how do we approach that in a good way that gives us the level of information and details about outcomes that we're looking for while also preserving Vermont for privacy

[Speaker 0]: and not inadvertently having a chilling effect on program participation. Yeah, when I think Vermont training program, we're looking, I think, more for aggregated data than individual specific, you know, but in order to even get the aggregated data, you need the specific data on individuals. Exactly. And so, how do we and and I think that's what you're telling me. How do we how can that get captured in order to fulfill the the needs that we have? Because we're just looking aggregate. We're not looking at individuals. Exactly.

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Vermont Agency of Digital Services)]: So, there's plenty of work to be done. And I think you'll start to see over the next several years, more and more projects coming out agencies to bring systems and data sets into the data lake. And then what we're able to do is actually put each system they're literally called a bucket. Put each system in its own bucket that only the people who manage that system have access to. And then when there's a need, a particular use case, at that point, we create a data sharing agreement or an MOU, as Savanna mentioned, and we can then open the allow someone else to look at that subset of the data in the bucket. So we'll build them a view that lets them see what they need to do, and that's how we handle requests for, say, researchers from legislature or internal state government.

[Representative Abbey Duke (Member)]: So can you just give me some very practical examples of I mean, obviously be used for analyzing successive treatments, right? How else What do you envision the What is the vision? Five years from now, what are you hoping this will do? It's okay. No, you're going.

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Vermont Agency of Digital Services)]: Okay, I'll start. Then I think actually the PSEO stuff might be some good examples But as

[Unidentified Committee Member]: broader than

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Vermont Agency of Digital Services)]: workforce development stuff, one of the things that is a big policy question right now is around housing. And we collect data about housing in, I believe, 15 ish different systems. And being able to get a comprehensive picture of where is housing being built, where are we permitting things, where are things in the planning stages, and then how many are falling off during the planning process? Because operating just top four finances fell through, and why did those fall off? That's the kind of thing where bringing all that different data together really helps to drive policy discussions.

[Subbana Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: And I would just add that if and when the legislature chooses to move forward on a repository or all of that, you'll want to think about what are the goals you want from that. What is it that you want to measure? What do we need to measure? And that'll really get to a different level of what we need. But that will take time and energy and money too as well. Yeah.

[Speaker 0]: When we're looking at your office, and the state workforce development board, there's so many areas that we need to look at when we're talking about the workforce, because everything affects it. Health care affects it. So, what are we looking there? Housing affects it. Education affects it. So, there's so many different data points that we need to look at, and to be able then we need to understand, you know, what areas of the state are doing this and doing that, and what do we need to put money here for and more education here. There's a lot of things, a lot of data points to look at as far as the state workforce development board and your office as well.

[Subbana Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: Data points meaning decision points too. Okay, if we believe this, then we've got to make sure we've got that data. And if we want to know how this is going to affect yeah, it be a lot of time to think about it all and build it.

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Vermont Agency of Digital Services)]: Think you're really going to like what Drake's going to show, so

[Representative Herb Olson (Member)]: I should be thrilled with that. And then we can

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Vermont Agency of Digital Services)]: come back to talking about this more.

[Drake Turner (Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: For the record, Drake Turner, deputy director of the Office of Workforce Strategy and Development. Hello, everyone. This is a great conversation. I'm gonna go past this slide a little bit quickly, but the gist is building a standalone Vermont data trust around Workforce will probably take some time and cost a good amount of money. We can just continue on because I know you all have the floor coming up. But what's really exciting about what Josiah is sharing is that even if we're not in a place to invest in a standalone Vermont data trust around workforce right now, the work that ADS is doing is going to continue to inform how you all want to move forward with building really robust data sources. So I think as we move forward and we're not wasting time, I think we're actually going to have more options available, which is really great. But one thing that we've really been doing as we were preparing this report is learning more about projects that are currently underway that involve multiple states that would get us started on the path to being able to answer more questions and make more informed policy choices right now at no cost to the state. So that's really where we're recommending that we go. And it doesn't really require the legislature to do anything, but we do wanna inform you about some of the options that are available. And in particular, one option called the PSEO coalition, which is the post secondary employment outcomes. Thank you. I always want to say opportunity, which not is an exciting project run by the US Census. And that sort of came out of a desire in Texas to combine wage data with higher ed data. And currently there are 35 states participating in that coalition and encompassing over a thousand institutions. So I will share a little bit more about what it looks like, but it provides earnings and employment data by degree, major and institution from certificates up to master's and doctoral degrees. And it's utilizing data that the Department of Labor is already reporting to the federal government. So there'd be no additional time or cost to Vermont participating. What would be required is that our higher ed institutions would need to opt in to participating and share their data with census. And we have had some initial conversations with some of our higher ed partners who have expressed interest in participating. Those conversations have started and are continuing. And as you can see here, there are a lot of states that are participating in this project. So another really exciting opportunity about PSEO coalition is that it would allow us to compare how we're doing with other states, which I know is a question that I hear over and over again is how are we comparing to Massachusetts or me when it comes to retaining post secondary graduates. So there are a lot of ways this data can inform conversations and decisions. It's also open. Anyone can look on this website and see the information in an aggregated form. So there's, as I mentioned, earnings data. There's also, and I'll show in a moment, we can see how folks have moved physically through the country in a regional format. And there's a lot of different ways to kind of slice and dice the data by program, by degree type, by I think we have one, five and ten year outcomes. And the PSEO coalition is working to add more data to this tool. So in the future, they're hoping to add enhanced wage records, additional demographic data and more specificity in some of the geographic flow, they call it flows. So there's a lot that's here that we think could be of interest to you all. This is gonna look kind of wild, and we can send you a link to this tool in case folks wanna spend some time on it. This document And I'll also say we have a lot of updates from our office and the state workforce board that we'd love to share with you at some point. But one thing I did here was we used data from Maine. So this would be all partner institutions of higher ed that are participating in Maine. This is information for folks who have associate degrees. And we went through and you can select which program you want to be selected. You can select which program you'd like to select. You can select for the programs you're interested in. So I went through the state workforce board has recently passed some goals that also indicate priority sectors. So I went through and selected some of the programs that are encompassed by those sectors. And you can see how the breakdown of folks by degree program, by industry, and this is five years post grad, and then by geographically where they go. So in this graph or chart, we're seeing that 78% of folks who received an associate's degree in these programs were working in Maine five years post grad. So there's some information that I think we haven't really been able to see as a state in a comprehensive way that could be available here. And the other way And I'm not a data expert. I'm sure Matt Berowicz would probably be cringing at how I'm representing this. But the two main ways the data is available is that flow chart. And then this also represents earnings data. And this combines the three bars here for one, five and ten year post grad data, earnings data by those different degree programs. So a lot of potential here, not a heavy lift, especially for the state. There would be some initial work that would have to go into higher ed institutions getting their data into the form to be able to send it. But then our understanding is that it would be simpler after that first data share and could get us some fairly robust information pretty quickly. So we're happy to talk about it more, to close out, the path forward that we recommend is that Vermont participate in one of these multistate collaboratives. There is support at the Department of Labor to participate in PSEO, and we've received some interest from the higher ed institutions we've been in discussions with, as I mentioned. That work will continue. And then especially in the case that we we are successful in joining one of those groups, evaluate the success of that as well as the progress of the work that Josiah and his team are doing to identify any gaps. Do all the questions that you have, are we able to answer them? Is there more that we need to do? And then address any gaps in data that remain. So really, I guess the conclusion is we don't have a request for you at this point, but this is what we recommend in the work that we've done. Happy to answer any questions you don't have, and appreciate you taking the time.

[Representative Abbey Duke (Member)]: If

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: you

[Speaker 0]: need us to have conversations with any of our higher ed institutions about joining on, we'd be happy to have discussion with them as well. I'm hoping that they would all be willing to join into this. Yeah.

[Drake Turner (Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: And then the nice thing is we don't have to wait until everyone's on board to join at the same time. So if there's one institution that just may be a little bit further along or has more capacity, you can start with one and then continue to iterate. Just roll. Yeah.

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Vermont Agency of Digital Services)]: Mean, if you'll pardon the phrase, I think it's a no brainer. Can't see any reason why we wouldn't want to do this. Agreed.

[Speaker 0]: That's great. We don't have to do any.

[Representative Herb Olson (Member)]: Yeah. That's

[Subbana Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: great. You don't have to spend any money. Right. And it's and we we can find out that you know, how many Vermont students went to Arkansas, and did they come home or not? That kind of thing.

[Representative Herb Olson (Member)]: That is a So question for

[Drake Turner (Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: for the institutions, would they have

[Representative Monique Priestley (Clerk)]: to be any kind of host to join? No. No? Okay.

[Subbana Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: No. It's just, I think the hardest thing would be is putting the data in the format that can be read by PSEO. And the way Matt explained it to us was the first time will be really hard. It'll take two or three hours, and next time it's just hitting switch. You'll have to learn how to do it.

[Drake Turner (Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: So there's no membership fee for higher ed institutions? Time is a cost.

[Representative Monique Priestley (Clerk)]: An administrative price, but it's also not It's a couple hours. Right.

[Subbana Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: And yes, it's part of a job function, if you will, yes, as opposed to $1,000 a month for storing the data, which is another problem with the data trust, is the storage costs.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Is this just being considered for new data going forward? Or is there an idea of going back and doing some retro capture or stuff

[Speaker 0]: that can

[Drake Turner (Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: That's be done with the a good question. I don't know exactly how it works. I think the data that the Department of Labor is sending to census, I'm sure that could be easily backdated because it's something that's already happening. But I don't know how it would work for the post secondary institutions. But that's a great question. Maybe

[Subbana Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: a few years, but not like fifty or something. No. We Yeah. Keep trading that way back then. Sorry. But that's a good question. We'll find out.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Questions?

[Speaker 0]: Anything else to add? All good?

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

[Speaker 0]: You did a great job.

[Representative Abbey Duke (Member)]: Yeah. Thank you very much.

[Subbana Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: Minutes. Good stuff. You. Very

[Representative Abbey Duke (Member)]: much. Yes. Happy to come back

[Subbana Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: anytime you want to hear more.

[Speaker 0]: Great.

[Subbana Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: Yeah. We'll keep you posted on how it's going. Yeah.

[Speaker 0]: Maybe that would be a wrap for today, we're on the floor at three. Dive in here for tomorrow. I don't think we're gonna start our don't

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: How do you move the intern?

[Speaker 0]: Nine on the pool. You're do

[Subbana Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: Park Mitchell? Is that

[Speaker 0]: next week? Tomorrow? I think I already have we gonna have it? I come yet. Okay. 09:00 tomorrow, we'll have our interns today. We have two. Okay. From Norwich, one from UDM. Great. Great. Thank you. So we'll just have committee discussions. Everybody's still familiar with the committees that they're shadowing?

[Subbana Haskell (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: Oh, right. Yeah. Take

[Speaker 0]: a look just to see what's come out and nexus for us and all the bills that have been coming out. So, like, debt forgiveness and stuff. What's that?

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: Debt forgiveness. It was an item that

[Representative Herb Olson (Member)]: was good. One of the committees last you.

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: Anna Grace will send us all a list of what we

[Speaker 0]: you heard it?

[Representative Herb Olson (Member)]: No, I have a Oh, okay. I was just chiding myself. It's something people I said.

[Speaker 0]: Okay. So we'll see everybody at nine to ten.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I missed the time, and I was Yes.

[Speaker 0]: Then we're on the floor at 09:30, then we're back in here to have continued discussions on H512, which is the regulation of event marketing and In the afternoon, we have one to three, we have a hearing with General and House Ways and Means on Chittenden. With Ways and Means, who's going to join? Yeah. Good. Yeah. So we'll be in Room 11, but it's gonna three house committees together. It'd be interesting. Because And Grace can pull it off, I'm sure.

[Christopher D'Elia (President, Vermont Bankers Association)]: I'm running it. You can have the two. Yeah.

[Speaker 0]: Any questions? Everybody good?