Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Good morning, everyone. This is the Vermont House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development. It is Friday, 01/09/2026 at 10:20 in the morning. We're back from the floor, and now we're here to continue to start discussions on H512, which is an act relating to the regulation of the event ticketing market. So this morning, we have with me Susan Evans McClure, the fact that director of the World and Arts Council. Susan, welcome.

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: Thank you

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: for joining us.

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: Juan, thanks for having me. Welcome back. I think you can still say that in the first week. Right? I'm Susan Evans McClure. I'm the executive director of the Vermont Arts Council. I think we have had the opportunity to talk last year. The Arts Council is the state's arts funding agency. We receive support from the state of Vermont, from the National Endowment from the Arts, and from private donors that allow us to support the arts and culture statewide. Our focus as the state arts agency is really on making sure that creativity is at the heart of all of our communities, that we're using creativity to drive our economy, and that everyone has access to the arts. So today, we're gonna be talking specifically about people's access to the arts through buying tickets to shows they wanna see. I'm gonna start with a brief story. So to set the scene, the year was 2024. A woman in her early forties learned that the Indigo Girls were playing at the Flynn. Of course, she was very excited. And on the day that ticket sales opened, she, a busy working mom, was walking down the street right here in Montpelier, popped on her phone and googled Indigo Girls Flynn Burlington on her cell phone to buy the tickets before they sold out. She clicked on the first link that came up and also saw that the ticket's starting price was $250 So she may love the Indigo Girls folks, but she also loves buying groceries and paying her mortgage. So two fifty dollars tickets were just not on the table. She closed her phone, never saw the show with her good friend. Ladies and gentlemen, that woman was me. And, you know, it turns out that, in fact, the hardest to learn really was the least complicated. Because when I asked the executive director of The Flint about this a few weeks later, he softly told me, Susan, that was a fake website, and you got tricked. And I realized that if I, the director of the Vermont Arts Council, didn't realize I was being faked by a fake website, who else was being harmed by this? What other people were deciding not to buy tickets, not to support our local arts organizations? Who was actually spending their hard earned money in our state so that an anonymous out of state third party could make money off of the hard work of our local arts organizations. And obviously, this is not about me not seeing the Indigo Girls. I've seen them before. I will see them again. But this is really about how we, as a state, are supporting our performing arts organizations and the businesses that drive our local economies and bring our communities together. It's how it's about how we're protecting Vermonters and consumers and fans across the state. So a group of performing arts organizations has been meeting regularly to share information on this topic over the past few years. A few common issues have been identified, some of which you heard about last year from folks. They include deceptive websites that use the logos of Vermont organizations to sell tickets, hugely inflated prices for resale tickets, tickets that are actually purchased with fake credit cards and then resold online to consumers, tickets that are sold for performances where tickets aren't even available yet. So it's clear that the modern resale ticket market has gone way beyond a guy standing outside holding up two fingers. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about coordinated predatory online behavior. So you're going to hear today from Kevin Sweeney from The Flynn, their marketing director, who's right over here. I'll share a few other examples of things I found just with a quick Google this week. Tickets to Siva Band Mo at Higher Ground on sale for $48 from Higher Ground being sold for $88 on Vivid seats and $167 on StubHub. Tickets to see the UVM men's hockey team on January 23 play against UMass on sale from UVM for $28.75. The exact same section tickets on sale on GO tickets for $52 I could go on and on with examples. I mean, we could all I thought about asking you all to pull out your phones and look for that. But it would almost be too easy because it's everywhere. So we have also been working with national partners to understand what's happening nationally. This is not just a Vermont problem. And while national legislation would certainly be helpful, it's been made very clear that this is not something Congress is gonna move forward on at this point. And as you will hear from Kevin, these protections really need to be put in place now because the situation is getting dramatically worse in a really rapid fashion. So since H512 was introduced last spring, the council has been working with the attorney general's office to identify the real key issues that would have a meaningful impact for Vermonters. We did a real deep dive on bills that were passed in other states around the country. There have been many in the past years. And What we focused on was specifically pulling out the issues that are impacting Vermonters. We want to keep this bill tightly focused on addressing the issues that will really make a difference. It is not our intent to make things harder for Vermont's performing arts venues. It's also not actually our intent to outlaw ticket reselling or squash competition. We've all had bought tickets to things and things happen, right? You got sick, other plans come up. No one should be punished for not being able to use the ticket they purchased. But our focus with this is really on implementing common sense guardrails that will protect consumers and small businesses in our economy. So there's a few key areas that we would love to see in H512. I'll talk about those now, and then you'll kind of see them in practice from what Kevin's going to share. The first is a 10% cap on secondary ticket exchange. Currently there is no limit on what tickets can be sold for. I just did some kind of inflated examples. Another example beyond my $250 Indigo Girls tickets. The final the unfortunate final game of the UVM men's soccer season, those tickets sold for $18 if you bought them from UVM. The next day, they were being sold online for $300 And I Yes. And they could go on and on. So really what price caps do, they're a measure that disincentivizes resellers from selling tickets at tremendous markups. Price caps don't set the original ticket price. Performance venues in Vermont should have the independence to set the ticket price that is right for them. Price caps regulate the abusive resale ticket market, and that market now has no relationship to real demand. Often you'll see examples online saying, sold out, few tickets left. The tickets are not sold out. That's not a demand issue. Predatory resale is not actually competition. It's manipulation, and it's extracting money from fans and draining revenue from local venues. So that price cap is really a key measure that we think will disincentivize this bad behavior. We also want to see a ban on deceptive URLs and improper use of intellectual property. Deceptive websites are out there. They're entrapping Vermont consumers. And we all know, and I'm sure you've heard about in other issues related to this, enforcement of deceptive marketing online can be very difficult to enforce. But what we have heard from other states will happen when we do this is when we ban deceptive URLs at the state level, that allows them to go to the search engines, Yelp, Google, and tell them, hey. You guys are directing people to elite websites that are illegal in the state of Vermont. So that's really important to us. Right now, you'll see this with Kim's examples, they're using Vermont logos, Vermont identity to sell tickets through companies, organizations, people that are not based in Vermont. We also feel that it's important to have reseller registration and reporting requirements. Vermont consumers really need, deserve to know if they're buying from the primary seller in the venue, or if they're selling through the resell market. One of the many challenges we're experiencing right now is not only do you not know if it's a resell site, there's also no way to contact the reseller. So if that reseller has incorrect information up there, the venues want to correct that. I mean, their primary thing, even through all of this, all of our venues are really focused on fans and consumers. And they want them to have a good experience no matter where they're buying their tickets. But right now, they can't even get in touch with them. We also have heard from other states the importance of not allowing people to sell tickets before they exist. The tickets need to be real before you can resell them, so that's another piece of it. We also want to engage in a consumer education campaign. We know that legislation is only one lever to improve the situation. Consumers really need to know more about the legal requirements and the channels they have for contesting any issues. We know that consumer education alone will not solve this. Regulation will not solve it. It's in combination that we're going make the biggest difference. And we've heard from folks, especially in the Consumer Protection Bureau, around how people's behavior changes when it's illegal. Right now, I mean, I outed myself and I told all of you that I got tricked. I'm a certain kind of person. Nobody wants to do that, right? You feel like an idiot. But if you are told, Hey, this was illegal, it's not your fault, you're actually more likely to report that as well, which will also increase the number of times we can see that this is happening. And of course, for any of this to work, we need to have teeth and be enforceable. When I spoke to colleagues in Minnesota and Maine about their legislation, they both said that enforcement is a real key piece of this, and our attorney general's office needs to be empowered to enforce this law, so we're asking for this to be, that the bill should treat violations as unfair practice under existing Vermont law. So Vermont's independent live entertainment industry is a crucial part of our economy. The overall creative economy in our state produces $1,200,000,000 of our state's GSP every year. Independent performance venues alone are producing almost $100,000,000 of our state's economy. That 92,600,000.0 from a study that was conducted last year. So H512 is a really crucial step in protecting those small businesses and protecting consumers and protecting our communities. I think we all need more opportunities now to gather with our neighbors and performances and public events are really the best way to do that. Where else are you gonna be sitting next to someone who maybe you've never met or you have nothing in common with besides that you are both desperate Indigo Girls fans? So I'm not sure if you want me to take questions now or hear from Kevin, but happy to do either, whatever works for the committee.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: See if there's any questions to the floor.

[Rep. Abbey Duke (Member)]: Abbey? Oh, yeah, quick question. Well, to start with, as someone who came evaped in 1988, high praise for the lyrics.

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: For noticing. I was wondering. I actually couldn't stop thinking about this.

[Rep. Abbey Duke (Member)]: So a question about so when you say the enforcement of violations would just go into regular consumer protection, it would be based on the current consumer protection law.

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: Got it. Yes. And we are asking that enforcement have penalties of up to $10,000 per violation, which is standard with some of the other states. You're gonna hear shortly from Todd Dallas in the attorney general's office, and he'll probably have more specifics on how that would work in their office. And he's heading over here now. Oh, good. He's coming. Yeah, he's coming right after us.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Super. Thank you. So StubHub is When I think of getting tickets, I feel like StubHub would be a place that I could go and trust. But weirdly. Mean

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: There are Step Up is actually one of many examples that their business model is based on not having regulations around the amount that you can resell the tickets for. They have a fee associated with that that's linked with the cost of the ticket. Ticketmaster is complicated in its own way. There are some platforms that Ticketmaster, you can resell your tickets through Ticketmaster. And they have their So if you go, I was trying to buy Celtics tickets for March. And they're sold on Ticketmaster, and you can go in and you can choose to buy resold tickets on there, but you can clearly see how the price compares to the original price tickets. That's not the model for the other resell organizations, resell companies, I mean.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: And you mentioned that if we were to just pan

[Kevin Sweeney, Marketing Director, The Flynn]: Bimic sites,

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Google would shut that down or other search engines would shut that down. Has that happened in other states?

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: I mean, ideally they would shut that down, right? It'll be a bit of a manual process. I think it's an important piece of the puzzle. Can't do any one of these Any one of these things would be helpful, but they kind of all Because the problem is so multifaceted and involves issues around not only search engines, but the search engine kind of add functions and what gets promoted first and all of those things, that it is an important piece of it because it gives us just a little more leverage to say, Hey, what promoting is not legal in Vermont.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Questions for Susan? It was interesting when I was driving in this morning and listening to Vermont Public. And they had a story on Ticketmaster and there's a class action suit in Quebec and how Port of Montreal has allowed that to go forward on the protection law. And it's dealing with the amount of revenue that they're generating over and above the ticket cost.

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: Yeah, and there was in the Before 2025, there was a federal I don't know if you want to talk more about that. There was some attempt to do a federal court case against Ticketmaster. It's stalled along the way. And there are other federal laws that already are attempting to protect some of these things, right? So there's what we call the BOTS Act that does already make it illegal to use bots for ticket purchases, which means that that's if you have a software system that basically you can say, Buy all the tickets to the Indigo Girls at the Blinn. And they will, and then they can resell all those tickets on another site. So that's already illegal. So we also worked closely to identify what's already outlawed federally or in our state, and what the things that are still broken in this system that we need to add on a little more to fix? I just wanna say I appreciate the clear recommendations.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Incredibly helpful. Agreed. So I'm

[Unidentified Committee Member]: just curious. I'm under the impression that sometimes an event will enter an agreement with a reseller, and I'm wondering how this fits in with that, with the idea of an authorized reseller. Whether or not that's true, not even if I suppose you don't know, but what if they do have an actual agreement?

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: So the legislation in Maine addressed that, And they said basically, if you already have a contract with an authorized reseller and sometimes venues will choose to do that. And that is not uncommon at all. If you're a venue, you might say, oh, direct people to resell at another site. The main law is that if you already have that contract, that's fine. And if it's already happening, it's already happening. So what we're really looking at are these kind of more anonymous third parties that you don't know where they came from, you don't know who they are, they're selling paid tickets. Again, what we're really not looking to do is make things harder for venues for organizations for people who are already selling tickets. If that is working for you, great. Especially because it's more upfront, right? And I believe in the consumers, right? If you go to a venue and you're buying a ticket and they are recommending, hey, buy from this, buy a resale, we're sold out, but buy a resale ticket here, and those resale tickets are $1,000 that's going to look pretty bad for that original venue, and that's going to impact consumers too. So venues really don't have a reason to send people to be paying ten, fifteen, 100 times more than they would have for the original ticket.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Did you all look into the process on the back end of essentially selling tickets on spec?

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: Yes. And so that is one of the things actually. It's not in the recommendations that you see in the one pager, but in the conversations over the past week, something's really come up among other states and hearing from other folks more in Vermont, that the main law and a lot of the others have banned speculative ticket sales. Because what happens is And actually, I think Kevin might share an example of that. They're selling tickets that are not even on sale yet. I'm thinking about that in the real world, right? That would be like me walking up to someone and being like, I have a cake to sell you. No one has baked the cake. You cannot see the cake. The cake doesn't exist, but I'm going to tell you how much it is and you're going to buy it. That's just not how it works in the world. Yes, banning the speculative ticket sales is something that we've talked about and actually is something that I talked about with a colleague in Maine yesterday, she was really advocating. She actually runs the State Theater in Maine, which is co owned by the owners of Higher Ground in Vermont. They also own a venue in Portland, Maine. And she was talking about really the importance of banning speculative ticket sales. So that just came up yesterday after I sent in my information. We're going to send some updates, recommended updates around speculative ticket sales too.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I have one little nuance thing, I don't know if it falls into exactly the same thing, but I have had the experience of purchasing a ticket that the event had been released, the tickets were on sale, but the reseller did not have the tickets in their possession and they were selling them online.

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: Yes, that is a lot of the other state legislation has covered that and has said that that should be outlawed as well, that you have to have the ticket before you can sell it. Is that different than speculative tickets? It's the same thing. It's usually it's like speculative tickets and tickets in hand. It's usually listed as the same thing.

[Rep. Anthony "Tony" Micklus (Member)]: I just want more of a comment. I really want to enunciate that the education piece of this is key. When you are dealing with the Internet, it's an arms race. And with the advancement of AI, it's only going to get worse. If Facebook can tell me, give me a vacuum cleaner ad, when I just talked to my wife about it an hour ago, I'm sure we can use that, so when people go on the internet, do Google searches for ticket sales, some sort of PSA from the state saying, hey, maybe you should take a look at this. Are you really buying from a legitimate site? But I think the education piece of this is very, very important. The only way this is really going to be solved is if we teach people how to find it, teach people how to recognize that this is a that this may be fake and and do something about it. Because they'll always be we can make all the laws in the world. It's not gonna matter. Someone is always gonna beat us out.

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: And having the same language for all of the venues across the state in coordination with the Consumer Protection Bureau is also really important. To have state regulations that back that up is also like really closes that link. Again, as we talked about consumer behavior, right? You're more likely to report that. If you think that it's not you, it's illegal. Like, you didn't do anything wrong. This is not allowed. And then you're more likely to report it, leading to those consumer behavior changes in the future that we really need to.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: And then the 10% proposed and other states put those price caps on as well?

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: Yes, that was one of the things from the Maine bill. I can get you a whole list of who's done price cap. And 10% is standard in those other states too. Really, why I started with that and why that's really key to us is if you disincentivize people from marking up as much as they want, a lot of these other problems also diminish. You're less likely to build a fake website if you know that you can only sell it for 10% above the price that was paid for it.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Do you know how long the other states have had their laws in place?

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: Most of them have come into existence in the past two to three years. The main law just passed last year, and I was again speaking with someone from the state theater yesterday, and she said that they have seen a dramatic decrease in issues since then. If you're interested, she said she would be willing to come and talk to you all about that experience and what she's seen in Maine. I mean, they track this closely. You'll see when you hear from Kevin, everyone's tracking this because it's such a problem. And they saw it just really drop off after the bill. And there's still, exactly as you're saying, there's still challenges, but it was a dramatic decrease.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Have there been any challenges to these laws restricting commerce or any sort of basis that some of these scammers might be mobbed?

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: Yeah, as far as I've seen so far, again, are new. When they have passed, they're still being enacted. I have not heard that. I'm not going to say that there aren't because they are happening. There's bills all over the country. So I can definitely look into that to see and report back about that too. But who are still in price caps and legal pushback?

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: You could you could send contact information for the person I've met. Sure. They they don't have to come here. I mean, if they

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: I offered.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Talk to us,

[Unidentified Committee Member]: they to have them

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: come, but if they can do it remotely as well.

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: Yeah. She did mention that going going to Augusta, which is the state capital of Maine, was a bit of a schlep from Portland, so it's probably not gonna come in not getting her. No. It's fun. It's cool. I know. That's she can have a meeting with a higher crowd.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: They can

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: all get to it. They can

[Unidentified Committee Member]: sample out for us.

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: Exactly. You could also be bringing visitors to the visitor economy in Vermont through this process.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: There'll be something good at the flunar.

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: Exactly. Relationships. And I did want to also thank the committee members for folks who have signed on to this bill and people who originated it from this committee, that it is really very gratifying. I mean, people in our sector have been so happy to know that the legislature is talking about this because it also gives that these organizations are really busy. Some of are operating on a shoestring. To know that the legislature is even thinking about this is really validating for them too. We've heard that from folks as well. So thank you for doing that. I remember the first time we took this up quite a few years ago, talking about the same issue. But it was just this stuff was just emerging and really taken off. Yeah. And unfortunately, as you'll hear from Kevin, in the past, since you heard from him last spring, there's been dramatic increases in how the negative impact that's having.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Thank you.

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: Okay. So I'm gonna share Kevin's presentation, actually, from the beginning. Oh, no. You're getting a sneak peek. There you go. It should be able to just click through. Yep. Thank

[Kevin Sweeney, Marketing Director, The Flynn]: you, Susan Hood. I'm Kevin Sweeney. And I brought with me Jill Severin, who is our heart specialist here for the FLIN. So we have someone working, as I mentioned last time, at least twenty hours a week, every week, just on addressing and identifying these. Before I get into the entire piece, I just wanna address something that came up regarding StubHub. And you all realize StubHub, Ticketmaster, and Live Nation are all one company. Live Nation is a presenter, a producer. They go around and book venues. They put a lot of pressure on the venues to sell tickets through Ticketmaster. And when I was working at a Ticketmaster venue prior to coming to Vermont, I've been doing, theater marketing now for over fifteen years. That venue, actually, we would see a huge sell out of a show. Like, Dave Chappelle is a great example, sold out in a few hours. Within within minutes of the sellout, resale tickets started showing up on our site, and they were all step up. Wow. And it was a Ticketmaster website. So just so you understand that business model, they are making money hands over fist. I just wanna go Susan, meant it's scalping then and now. My brother got busted for reselling, socks tickets back in the day out in front of Fenway Park. People don't sell them in front of the venue. As a matter of fact, I would say today, it's like these resellers have built a huge wall between the venue and the consumer that they have to get through the resale first. So the suggestion of doing heavy, promotion, make sure people are buying from valid sites will be an expensive one because the amount of money they spend on Google Ad Search and Bing search. So we don't sell to sub hub. We don't sell to ticketsales.com. We don't sell to any of those. We sell to individuals. So there's actually two parties making additional revenue on this. The person who buys the tickets and the resale site. So I think that's important to note. Someone who purchases tickets will frequently not only put them on one site, they'll do multiple sites and put them on different prices and and do whatever they can to maximize their return on investment. And then resale sites, they invest a lot of money in Google AdWords. We cannot the Flynn cannot compete at that level. But I also want to note that the Flynn forces people who purchase tickets, whether by phone, we read them a statement, if by phone, but online, they have to click a box. And that's just one I've circled. Says they know the date and the daytime price. They agree to the policies that I'm not buying these tickets for resale. I'm also not gonna provide fraudulent information. Now I bring that up because one of the things that Jill discovered in, work was that there was actually a street address in LA that was using multiple different names by and multiple different tick, credit cards buying tickets for resale. So this has become a major business on both sides. And also note, this is regardless. As Susan mentioned, before we even put them on sale, this day show up. So it's not like it was back at Fenway when you go, like, well, I'm not gonna spend $50 to that because I can go over the window here and there's still tickets available. They do it regardless if it's sold out or not. Yes. With the

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: checkbox that you have on your Yes. Agreements. Number one, be like, you found people that have gone against that? Every day. And then number two, how do you deal

[Kevin Sweeney, Marketing Director, The Flynn]: with that? What we I'll jump into it. What we do actually is we reach out to them. When we identify, when we can identify, and we are probably estimating identifying maybe half. When we identify, we send them an email saying, We suspect you purchased these for resale. Please reach out to us confirming that the person named on this will be utilizing these tickets. You have one week, two weeks. They don't get back to us. The next one is, We are refunding your tickets. We are going back and refunding. And one thing to keep in mind here, that's revenue the state and local municipalities lose out on because we also have to refund the taxes. We started keeping the fees, so you get that money because that's one of the things we attest. But all the time, most very rarely will they come out and go, Okay, usually they'll fight us on it. They'll come back saying you can't do that. And that just adds the amount of staff labor that goes in in addressing these.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: So if this were if this law well, if this bill comes to fruition and gets passed, governor signed it, there's something else that you put on that little checkbox that's been prosecuted to the fullest. Absolutely.

[Kevin Sweeney, Marketing Director, The Flynn]: I think that's that's the key aspect of it that we can actually fall back on the state's regulation stating about here's the rules and requirements. And in that situation, like, if there is, like, a 10% cap on markup, we would probably sit back and even remove the reselling because that's not the profit that we're concerned about. Like, we have people contact us all the time and saying, I'm sick. I can't make it. And in those situations, we don't give them their money back. I mean, obviously but we do say, well, you can resell them on front porch forum. You can resell them on, other sites, local sites, but we request that you sell them for the amount of money that you paid. Of course, we can't enforce that, but we don't restrict. We sell 100%. We allow it for people who can't make events. But this as Susan noted, like, we've subscriptions for the music man we started selling. This is one of the worst sites. Let's see what one I have in my notes. Game time. That's out there the way they advertise, but they have sick I don't know if you can see it. $798 on prices for tickets to see the music man. Subscribers no subscriber paid more than a $100 for that ticket. So that gives you an idea of the margins. We brought up, StubHub. Here's a great example. Book of Mormon tickets. This was up. This has been up frequently, but they were up literally within a week of us of putting tickets on sale. StuffHub was up heavy, heavy, heavy promotion to buy tickets. So they're actually by doing this, they're incentivizing that guy sitting on his computer to buy tickets and put them up on the website. This I found very interesting, though, local arena techs. I don't know. This is so here's somebody who says, hey. This is a big business. I wanna get into it. So he's an aggregator basically going, hey. You come to me. You place one one set of tickets, and we'll put them on all your sites for you. Wait to see how many sites there are. So that's here's an idea of just what we have for these sales sites. There's several more than the last time I came.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Oh my goodness. Yeah.

[Kevin Sweeney, Marketing Director, The Flynn]: That's so much money can be made. There's over 50. And 20 of these did not exist last spring. At least I didn't find them last spring. So there's people trying to maximize their profits, and they're still adding. That's what they and more. But the yeah. The book tickets Book of Mormon one specifically, I went right to the the producers and go, guys, can they do this? And they're going, yeah, there's nothing we can do to stop that. So just so you know, they're trying. But here, let's talk about why this is so important. They're advertising lowest or best price. They don't identify themselves as not being the primary ticket source. They will use things like limited availability. Buy now, we only have two tickets remaining. And as Susan mentioned, they advertise tickets not on sale yet. They do I'll have a great example here of someone using our marquee right on the top of their page to make it look like it's the Flynn, and the stolen credit cards. And that's another huge issue for us because, well, I'll tell you when talk. But selling the same tickets multiple times, and we've seen that too. Somebody comes in, they check into the venue, and the next person who has those same tickets comes in and goes, I'm sorry. You're already checked in. And in those situations, this is a money loss I don't have putting on that. The Flynn will replace those tickets free to those those people. Because, again, consumers are you know, our our audiences are what keep us going. So we do our best to take away their bad experience. But I did this little social media, Facebook clip. Sorry for the that this person actually says, hey. It's the cheapest price I've seen, and we have it on our social media post. And I'm saying, yeah. But it's the right price because of the search engine question. Mhmm. Here's a great example. SeekGeek, experience live with the best prices on seats for Nico Case. So I went to their site. They had tickets at $1.00 2, including the fees in Row W. Those tickets in Row W are actually, where's my note? $60 and with fees less than 76. It's blatantly false. But then they can get into the argument. What does best mean? Well, we're the best price on resellers. Right? So this is where language has to be so specific. I'm sorry. Missed questions?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Do you report those to Facebook, Renee? Not that Facebook really cares that much about

[Kevin Sweeney, Marketing Director, The Flynn]: This is coming in through Google Oh. Analytics and search. So I have a search for the Flynn. I get these every single day, and it really irritates me when I see one for sure. We just announced the day before tickets haven't gone on sale yet. There's really nothing we can report them on right now because, you know, Meta is gonna take their advertising revenue. Here's another example, Patty Griffin tickets on Gametime that one I showed you at Music Man. They do say lowest price guaranteed. There's tickets for this are free anywhere from 377 on up. Our highest ticket price with all our fees was under $90. So another example of and as you're going through, look how you don't know they don't note that they were reseller. This one does note they were reseller if you look

[Unidentified Committee Member]: at very top of the page. Are you really

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: Right here. Oh, there it is.

[Kevin Sweeney, Marketing Director, The Flynn]: Oh, yeah. So Susan's point, there was that on the page. Pardon? It's so small. In my opinion, and I think what to be effective, they should be mandated even their advertising to note they were to get reseller. So, again, just they have everything lined up at box office ticket sales that we have scheduled coming up for the rest of our season. Book of Mormon tickets on a site called Hello Tickets. There's nothing noted about them being a resale site. Also, Vivint seats, doesn't know they're on a resale site. So legislation isn't specific that every single page on your site must note that you're a resale site. They might put it on a homepage and then direct link you to pages like this to buy the tickets.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Sorry to bother again.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Is it possible to man well, I guess anything is possible, right, to mandate that as they're paying for it, it says you are paying this much more as a convenience fee, 100, 200, $300.

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: Well, if we limit it to 10% more, then they won't have to pay that much. Yeah.

[Kevin Sweeney, Marketing Director, The Flynn]: And just another one with not noting your resale site. So it's our major concern. Venue brand. We don't know how many people go through what Susan experienced with tickets for the Indigo girls. First time buyers are gonna be very unlikely to go right from a website. They are gonna Google as Susan did. So we don't know how much how much business we're actually losing as a result of this. And it also gives us I've been on social media discussing it in comments with people who say, oh, you're just for the rich people. You're just for the wealthy. We can never afford the and it's like, as a previous, post noted, they're seeing these exceptionally high prices, and they think we're the ones driving us. By the way, it's usually the producers who set the price anyway. All we're trying to do is cover our expenses as a not for profit. And then the perception of value is too expensive and the venue investment to address reselling, and I'll touch on that. But since we I've been at the Flynn for three years, so I'm going over our last three years. When I came, noticed what a problem it was. We identified that year 140,000 in ticket resales, 33,000 we were re that we refunded back. So you see, I think it's not only growing, but we're also getting better at detecting, you know, to Jill's credit. So fiscal twenty four, January, caught 131, last year, February '38, and we caught one seventy two. This has really helped, especially especially we get to it in advance because, typically, with the credit card money that we're losing out on, that happens after show settlement, which we pay the producer. Now we're typically we're hoping 10% of total sales is what we recouped, to 15, to come back, cover our venue expenses. We lose all that money. That's 100% loss for us.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Well, that drives your ticket prices up. Right? You gotta recoup it suddenly. You can't you can't keep going and losing money all the time. You gotta be able to cover your expenses. It is. You have to

[Kevin Sweeney, Marketing Director, The Flynn]: We're upping our we have to up our fees. We've been upping our fees for it. But here's our credit card loss. And you see last year how much more grew. And this is our fiscal year, which runs from July through June. So that's of June. The $15.08 37 was as of this past June. Our cost, in addition to chill, obviously, I spend time on it. Our box our patron services manager spends time on it. Our house staff spends time on it. We estimate, and I think it is very conservative, to the low extent, 50,000 a minimum a year that we are spending to address this. We don't have 50,000 to spend on that. That's a full time person we could bring in to do programming that we really wanna do. I think as I stated last time I was here, one of the key elements for the Flynn and our long term goals are to make theater is to make all the arts more accessible. We did the the piece down in Montpelier, here at Cuba last fall. These that was a $200,000 investment for us. We wanna continue to bring arts to people, make it affordable, but we need to maintain the foundation, that drives our revenue, which is our building and our presented and produced shows. So any questions from me and Jill? She's the she's by far the person in the weeds who's the expert on all this.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Anything you can do as far as the issue with credit cards, stolen cards?

[Kevin Sweeney, Marketing Director, The Flynn]: We are, we are going through right now a a CRM upgrade. So it's our ticketing thing. It's our ticketing system under that. And there are a couple of new options that we're looking at. Unfortunately, the options that we look at means there's going to be additional clicks for people to purchase tickets. So that's also yeah. We can take those actions. It would be a lot easier for us to protect it. We also are using some new verification systems that we're hoping minimizes that.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Questions, Kevin? Thanks. Good

[Todd Daloz, Vermont Attorney General's Office]: morning.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Good morning. How are

[Todd Daloz, Vermont Attorney General's Office]: all doing? Good. Good to see you. Todd Delos from the attorney general's office. I just am pausing for a moment after that presentation, which I think carries home the entire point. This was an issue that was on the radar for the AG's office, something we'd looked at, especially as you can imagine, this committee knows this as well as any one of those fraudulent sites, those misstatements, those deceptive advertisements. Clearly, something within the existing consumer protection act. But the Arts Council's leadership on this, representative Harrison's leadership, sort of crystallized it for us, and we are very much in support of the direction that five twelve hopefully is taking within this committee. I don't wanna eat up a lot of your time. I don't think I have a lot more to say except on the one hand, we see these most of these violations as clear violations in the CPA as it exists, but that doesn't mean there's a place to provide additional regulation, additional protection, additional oversight in this rapidly changing marketplace that has a tremendous impact on Vermont businesses, on Vermont consumers, and on the arts as they're available in Vermont, all of which, you know, we obviously support. So I could go into a little more detail. The language that's proposed in the Arts Council's sheet is what you all are very familiar with. It's a simple call out to the existing protections in chapter 63 of title nine that just bring us into the fold.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: And you've seen proposal that that Susan has brought to us today.

[Todd Daloz, Vermont Attorney General's Office]: Is that what you sent me yesterday? Yes. Happy to I I don't have any direct edits on it now, but

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: We'll have to run it through the council as well. But, Susan, you're gonna send this.

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: I'll send you an update on Monday because the speculative ticket provision, and we'll talk about that before we send it over.

[Rep. Anthony "Tony" Micklus (Member)]: I just wanna make sure, with legislation, we going to you feel you're gonna be able to collect enough funds to cover your costs?

[Todd Daloz, Vermont Attorney General's Office]: It's a great question, and I think it's one that we're gonna be talking about here and down the hall and upstairs. It's a real challenge in the current moment. There's a lot of pressure on our office. And not to step in front of the budget that'll be coming this way, but we're trying to recognize the moment we're in as a state and keep our requests pretty narrow. But we also know, especially I don't mean to jump into next week, but the advancements in big tech, we see the pressures that are on from our consumers. We see even beyond consumers, the use of that data. And with the AG in a position of primary enforcement authority, you're totally right that that there's a real pressure there. And one of the challenges with the websites, for example, those are really hard to track down.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: You know this.

[Todd Daloz, Vermont Attorney General's Office]: Right? Like, they're really hard to track down and carry that investigation out to fruition. It's hard to find a corporate entity or a responsible party. The bigger players, I think, we will be able to work with, and I think, you know, for the most part, the regulated industries are good partners, for lack of a better term, when we have a meaningful case to bring to them. The bigger challenges are the the fly by night scammers. And I think that's why your point about education is like

[Rep. Anthony "Tony" Micklus (Member)]: Yeah.

[Todd Daloz, Vermont Attorney General's Office]: I I I think we see that partnership. You know, CAP is a great organ for that, the consumer assistance program. And and I think working with secretary of state's office as well would be really valuable, but I can't promise it. We'd love to be able. It's a double edged sword. Right? We'd love to not have to enforce because we're seeing compliance. And and, hopefully, with increasing limitation on the the profit margin, we'll see a a decrease in in the desire to scam. But we all we know. It's always gonna be out there for people, and I think we will it'll take some time to figure out how to put these cases together and and how meaningful the relief we're able to get for Vermont businesses, from what consumers actually is. We'll talk more about this. Sorry.

[Rep. Anthony "Tony" Micklus (Member)]: Yeah. No. The reason I bring it up is because if we have any sort of control over fine recommendations, wanna make sure we get your input and make sure we can cover it with fines. Because I don't what I'm hearing, it doesn't sound like it's gonna be a too too big of a problem finding a lot of people that are breaking the law.

[Todd Daloz, Vermont Attorney General's Office]: Yeah. That's a great point, rep, Micklus. And I think that I don't think we would ask for deviation from the 10,000 per violation. I mean, if you imagine a site, any any number of those, every we we could and would, in certain instances, consider every offer of sale a violation. So I can't remember how many seats are in the plan. Right? So I'm not gonna do public math. That's alright. Let's fly that by 10,000. Maybe the show's got a six show run. So I I I think there's ample opportunity. And, again, it'll I think the regulated entities by and large will follow the law because it's in their best business interest. And then the ones that don't, that's the role of the AG to come in potentially and and come out. But I appreciate those questions because I do think they're germane to other topics that this committee and the body as a whole be addressing.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Back in my earlier days here, we were looking at fraud. It was something that that we had done for your customer. Mhmm. And so if Google is still allowing these sites to be put up in Vermont when there's a law against it, need to know their customer. And if they have the information that they're selling against for law, then they have an obligation to do something about it. If we can't get to the site, the people that own the site, then we can get to Google or the search whatever search engine we can use. Right?

[Todd Daloz, Vermont Attorney General's Office]: Yeah. I I don't know how section two thirty plays into that. I can imagine without I'm not gonna provide them any legal defense that they aren't already well aware of, but I think there are some concerns around whether those kind of aggregation sites would say this is this is just they're using our platform. We're not

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: saying this. It's typical what we typically hear. But

[Todd Daloz, Vermont Attorney General's Office]: I mean, I think it's a good angle to look at. And and I think we with a little bit more reflection, I I imagine we can come up with some models elsewhere in the commerce regulation field that do hold platforms accountable, as I mentioned?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I think Of course. I mean, I think that it's making me think of Silk Road. Right? That it's legal, if we make it illegal and they're doing illegal activity on their platform, whether or not they're involved in the legal activity, they're still responsible for allowing it on their platform. I mean, Silk Road, Napster, I mean, we had they're certainly case law. Yeah.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: I don't know. It's a

[Unidentified Committee Member]: good worth.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Yeah. We'll we'll have let council have those discussions with you and see what we can find out, but there may be another way to skin the cat too. Is that how we

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: can this for Susan? Is that okay? Sorry, Are we directing traffic? But

[Unidentified Committee Member]: actually, would love your thoughts on this too. I guess where my head is going is if we as a state and taxpayers, so if we're funneling public dollars and then in the state choosing where to invest those and we are choosing to give money to like Vermont Arts Council and things like that, that then gets regranted or through tourism or whatever to our creative venues. It feels like we should if the creative venues are then having to spend money refunding and that kind of stuff, it feels like we need to protect the investment of public dollars that we're putting into creative venues. Mhmm. But

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: I think that's a really good point. One of the other things about this dimension is this is an issue that is uniting for profits and nonprofits. There's more profit performance venues and nonprofits. They are all facing this. When it comes to, I think a direct example of this, what we hear from nonprofits is the most meaningful thing you can do is unrestricted operating support. And we have seen that time and again, when we invest dollars in organizations because we trust them and they do great work, things happen. What we don't wanna see is an unfortunate incident when your unrestricted operating support from the state has to go to cover people who are doing something they shouldn't be doing in the first place. Exactly as you're saying, that's not what we wanna see public dollars going to. And to Kevin's point, dollars 50,000 a year that they're spending could be a staff person in their education department who is helping to close the gap in arts education across the state or any number of other amazing things that they could be putting that money towards.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I just wanna, you guys are pretty large. The floor is a pretty large venue. Opera House is pretty small. I had actually reached out to Dan Casey, and he said they're struggling with this as well. So it's not just the large venues, it's the smaller ones.

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: Yeah, that is very true. Asked having teared today specifically because I knew their numbers were so this is something we may have been really tracking. Jill exists as a person who's focused on this. We have a coalition of arts organizations across the state of all sizes who are experiencing this. The Chemical. Yeah, I could name all of them, right? Of the Catamount, Barry Opera House. You named a public sale of a ticket, we can give you an example of where this is happening. And the Flynn does, you know, does have staff to do this. There's organizations that absolutely do not and are getting pulled in the wrong direction with their limited staff time too.

[Kevin Sweeney, Marketing Director, The Flynn]: Like I know the Paramount, they're quite like friend. We had staff in thirties full time. Paramount, I think they have six, seven. So and they're getting hit with us as well. We all are. And I mean, silly events even are getting hit up on these types of things, little local family type of things.

[Susan Evans McClure, Executive Director, Vermont Arts Council]: I will share one story that was shared with me from Eric Millett at the Paramount that was so heartbreaking. He walked through the lobby one day and he saw that there was someone in the lobby talking to the box office. She was a grandmother who had bought tickets to The Nutcracker to see her granddaughter, and she got them online from a different site, an exorbitant amount of money, learned that they were fake, came to the Opera House and said, I bought these fake tickets, they said there's absolutely nothing we can do. The show is sold out, and we can't refund your money, and we're really sorry. And she rightly, with the only people to get outreach at are the people you're talking to. These websites are completely anonymous. You have no idea who's doing this. So she was really I mean, she gives your granddaughter the nutcracker. Like, what is more heartbreaking than that? And she was really mad. Of course, not only was she upset in that moment, missed an incredible opportunity, but also she's never buying a ticket of Paramount again because that's the only face that she has for this negative interaction. So I think that's one example of hundreds and hundreds that we could date back on stage.

[Kevin Sweeney, Marketing Director, The Flynn]: Susan, so Paramount also the venue that was doing free movies and found those tickets for sale online.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So what happened? Just to give

[Kevin Sweeney, Marketing Director, The Flynn]: you an idea, this this is very aggressive profiteering.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Yeah.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So picking up on the cost of enforcement kind of issue, And I believe under the Consumer Protection Act, you have the ability to recoup coupons after you the violation has been found, and so you can pick up on that. Do you have I don't know if you do have any ability to if you're starting an investigation, you have good reason to conduct that investigation. Do you have any mechanism to build back the cost of that investigation, help with your cash flow, that kind of thing?

[Todd Daloz, Vermont Attorney General's Office]: I'm just trying to remember the statutory citation on essentially, under the law, our authority is via court order to recoup costs, which include attorney's fees and beyond. We use that when we're negotiating a settlement, but there is no authority independent of that end product. And so when we're negotiating with an opposing party, it's in lieu of litigation that could result in a much higher cost structure. So there is no build back structure.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah. I'm just sort

[Todd Daloz, Vermont Attorney General's Office]: In yeah. I think in the sense that you mean where it's pre litigation and, in fact, may have a lower threshold than us proving a violation or convincing a closing party that there's violation.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: And and, you know, you might have information showing that a particular practice might be common to a number of different resellers, perhaps. And so it's not you you're not you're not thinking about specific litigation about the issue, but you're looking for a practice and that you think, you know, you finally belong. I know the other regulatory agencies have that authority. It's not a big help. Appreciate it.

[Rep. Anthony "Tony" Micklus (Member)]: This this is on my mind. I mean, realtor, there's a law that says that whenever we put a property up for sale, we have to conspicuously demonstrate that it is we have to conspicuously put our broker's name. And I know a lot of people have gotten violations. So just I just wanted to throw that out there as an idea. I think that's a great starting point for us to make it that same law of if you're going to be a reseller site, you need to conspicuously say, I am a reseller site.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: It's conspicuously defined.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Or you

[Rep. Anthony "Tony" Micklus (Member)]: can you can I mean, it's defined in real estate statutes?

[Todd Daloz, Vermont Attorney General's Office]: It's a problem with font

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: you want it to be.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah. Was, like, yeah, in the size the size.

[Rep. Anthony "Tony" Micklus (Member)]: Yeah. I mean, I think in real estate, it's pretty it it just says conspicuous. I mean, I don't I haven't I've never I've always been a good boy. So

[Unidentified Committee Member]: quite We've

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: a few things where we specified the font size. Yeah.

[Todd Daloz, Vermont Attorney General's Office]: Or said not less than does XYZ font.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Be bold and bold print.

[Todd Daloz, Vermont Attorney General's Office]: And we have some of our regulations under the Consumer Protection Act have specific what clear and conspicuous for various different. So that's a great additional idea.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Any other questions for any of our presenters? Okay. Great. So Susan will look forward to getting the revised version. We'll get that to Ledge Council. We'll talk to Ledge Council, have them work with you, Todd. And, yeah, I think, you know, what I was referring to before on the, you know, know know your customer, I think it was the telephone companies.

[Todd Daloz, Vermont Attorney General's Office]: Yeah. I'll I'll follow-up on that.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Right. Also, different banking? Banking already has. Yes. But but that's not but in the consumer protection realm, you know, they had some telephone scams going on, there was like some in Montreal or whatever, and telling telephone companies, you need to know your customer. And if they couldn't get the money out of the scammer, then they get it out of the telephone company.

[Todd Daloz, Vermont Attorney General's Office]: It's probably worth us looking into.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Yeah. Okay. I think we were planning on having a hearing on privacy on the twenty first, so that's got moved to the fourth. So I think we'll dedicate that morning of the twenty first to this bill, and we'll some language done and we'll take more, certainly take more testimony, any of the businesses that are providing these resale resale outlet. I would textify the more than welcome to come in as well. Basically, what we can come up with. But