Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Good afternoon, everyone. This is the White House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development. It is 02/12/2026, at 02:05 in the afternoon, so we're back. Have a real short break. We have with us Commissioner Smith from the Department of Labor. We're here to go through their budget and so that we can give appropriations or recommendations. So, Commissioner, thank you. Thank you for bringing your crew with you today. Look forward to hearing your presentation.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. Kendall Smith, commissioner for the Vermont Department of Labor. I am joined by a few colleagues, and I'll just have introduce themselves at the top depending where the conversation takes us sitting around the room. Chad?

[Chad Worsenick, Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor]: Good afternoon. I'm Chad Worsenick. I'm the CFO for the Department of Lincoln.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Jay?

[Jay Ramsey, Director of Workforce Development, Vermont Department of Labor]: Jay Ramsey, director of workforce development.

[Drake Turner, Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development]: Drake. Drake Turner, deputy director of the office of workforce strategy and development.

[Ron Hoffman, Director, Vermont Department of Labor]: Rowan. Policy director. Barbara Blair. Ben Savannah.

[Sabrina Haskell, Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development]: I'm the Haskell, Executive Director of the Office for Flex Strategy and Growth.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Hopefully, we'll be able to answer most of your questions. Right off the top, before I dive in, I do wanna plug and pass these around the table. We'll put them online too, that Wednesday, February 25, we're doing a statewide construction job fair that is coordinated across several of our regional offices. And we are inviting construction employers to come. This is in response, at least in terms of timing, some feedback we've gotten in the past is when we do our kind of seasonal construction employment push, it's too late in the season. So we've tried to do it earlier this year and we are giving preference to employers that have accounts in Vermont JobLink, which you might have heard of in different testimonies, is our backend CRM. It's our job board, and it's what we use when people walk in and say, help us find a job where we pull our jobs from. We have made an enormous amount of contacts in a short period of time leading up to this. Jay, how many? 400 new employer relationships in the lead up?

[Jay Ramsey, Director of Workforce Development, Vermont Department of Labor]: Jobs now tagged as construction jobs in the system. And when we started, there were 35. It's a collective effort from our regional job center staff doing this outreach to construction companies and other trades, employers to get jobs in JobLink. And we have a special website that we're going to be announcing tomorrow. It's ready to announce right now, but

[Sabrina Haskell, Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development]: I won't.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Hot breaking news for me. That's exciting. It's ready to go. So the reason to, you'll see on this flyer that it's in many areas around the state. So for any of you, these are your hometowns. And I do realize it is a Wednesday, and you will unfortunately maybe hear from three to 05:30. But if you wanted to be there, just wanted you to know about it or also feel free to push this out to your constituents, again, especially if you're from one of these areas and help us promote the event.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Get up in my store.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Thank you. I hung one up on your bulletin board. I'll I will just own that and call it out. You probably will wanna move it. It's a

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: good place for it.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Okay, excellent. All right, so you all are a little bit familiar with the Department of Labor already. So we might be able to sort of gloss through the first few slides here. But if we turn actually to details of our budget for this fiscal year, there is one thing I wanna flag off the top. As we go through this PowerPoint, the numbers you will see here for federal funds are last year's federal fiscal allocations. The US Department of Labor was on the continuing resolution that just got settled now about two weeks ago. So as I walk through this, I'll flag where there has been changes, ups and downs in the overarching federal program, but we do not yet have our state allocation. So where there's cuts, that'll be distributed against 50 states and territories. Where there's ups, same thing. It is all formulaic. We are a small state, so we tend to get people then of what's a small state minimum. And I don't think where there's downs, anything is gonna be too catastrophic for us. And I'll go into more detail as we go through that. But I just, as you're looking through this, as you're following along, anywhere you see a federal number plugged in here, it is last year's federal allocation. And once we have our allocations, we will be absolutely sharing those with the governor's office and the legislature. For the budgets perhaps? Yes. Yeah, I anticipate we'll have those numbers before, so essentially May. Is that your question? Yes. Mean, feel free to jump in. Yes, we should. But I don't know if we'll have them before the budget passes the House, depending on your timeline. But we did commit to House Appropriations on Monday and to our House Appropriations Liaison. As soon as we have them, we'll revise this document and our ups downs and give them the information even if the budget is in the Senate. But I don't think anything is gonna be again, I I could be wrong. This is again I wanna just like, this is my own personal forecast, and we can talk about it more as we go through. I don't think even if we do receive a little less money in certain line items that it's going to be something catastrophic that is going to append the whole state budget and we'll be able to get through. Real I don't know. We'll get to do this all again in October because the federal fiscal year is, as you know, October through October or September 30. So we'll have our allocations for about six months, then we get to do this again. So more to come, but I think at least as it relates to federal funding, we'll be okay. So the Department of Labor, we have our office here in Montpelier, just down the road at 5 Green Mountain Drive. That is our headquarters and where we do a lot of the program oversight, administration, accounting, where our UI program resides, UI call center, but we also have 11 regional offices. You all know some of this from our other presentations. The 11 regional offices are open to job seekers to walk in for help with employment, youth. We serve employers as well in terms of understanding their needs. We offer in person and virtual services. And just in terms of what's our overall footprint in the state, we have 1,100 tens 158 square feet, and our facility and lease costs are about 1,400,000.0 a year. We do own our building here in Montpelier as well as our Burlington office. There's actually kind of a unique situation there where the federal government has a stake in those buildings and more or less paid to construct them. If we were ever to offload those facilities, it would be a different process. And it's possible the federal government would get a share of those proceeds. Then our other offices either reside in state office buildings where we work with The US on fee for space, or there are two that are private leases. All right. I'm going to keep going unless someone stops me.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: State funds that pay for these offices or the federal funds? Or is it a mixture?

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: I think it's both.

[Jay Ramsey, Director of Workforce Development, Vermont Department of Labor]: It's a mixture.

[Chad Worsenick, Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor]: It's a mixture. Primarily federal ballots, but it is a mixture.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: The next slide is our org chart, which again, I don't necessarily need to read to you. If you wanna go to the next one, Rowan. As a reminder, we have four divisions at the Department of insurance, workforce development, labor market information, and workers' compensation and safety. That includes workers' comp, VOCA, Project WorkSafe, and Tramway. One of our programs is we inspect all of the ski lifts in the state. When I say tramway, that's what I'm referring to. We have two sixty three employees currently. That is permanent temps and limited service. And our current vacancy rate 5.6%, which comes out to be at 13 positions. And I would categorize all of those right now as regular churn. There have been none that have just been sitting on the books that we're using as vacancy savings year after year. UI, you're dealing with people with feelings all day long, so there's some churn there. Workforce development, same thing in our regional offices. And I will say these 13 vacancies are all in the various stages of the recruitment and hiring process, and they are spread across the state. They're not all just in Montpelier or just in Burlington, etcetera.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: What are the things within the U. Division as far as I know that during the pandemic, you're having a really hard time getting people in and out. Does that all calm down now?

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: It has mostly calmed down, yes. We do have federal targets that we're supposed to meet a lot of times. If you go into adjudications or appeals, we are meeting all of our federal targets of what the feds deem acceptable. You know what? If I went around the table what each one of us would deem acceptable, I'd probably get 15 different answers. But we all are within our targets. I will say the first kind of right before Christmas through mid January is always a really busy time and it was again this year. That's around the time a lot of the education institutions shut down and colleges. And if you work with Sodexo, for example, all of their employees get temporarily laid off and call. And so just holidays, seasonal layoffs, then us being closed as a state on different days has a domino effect as well. So we did have high call volumes and high hold times, I will say, mid December through mid January. But as of last week, our average wait time on the phone was back down to twenty minutes. Still not ideal, but not the four hour complaints, the three hour complaints, the all day complaints that sometimes come in.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Remeeting the Vermont statutory time limits on when we're getting things adjudicated.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: They're all federal targets.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: I think we have some state targets too. I want

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: to go back and pull that and pull the numbers.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: I think a lot of that has to do with the computer system.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Yeah, and later I was going to again give you another update. I can't remember if I said this last time I was in or not, but the new UI system will launch this springsummer. We're not committing to a date quite yet, but we will be soon. But that is on time. It is on budget with the implementation costs that were appropriated. It's really exciting. It's really stressful because we're just a few months out and we really wanna make sure when this rolls out, it launches as smoothly as possible. So that's why we're working with our vendor and saying, Hey, if we need another two weeks to continue testing or to continue training, or because we found that there was a demographic that we didn't do a webinar for, we want to take that. So we're excited about that. With any IT project, there will always be little kinks that happen, but I'm really hopeful by this time next year, you will be sitting here with a success story. You won't necessarily be hearing from your constituents as often, and we'll be through kind of that that rollout and working through whatever kinks emerge with it.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: You also want to do the workers' comp?

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: We are. Have a few different IT projects in the queue. Our workers' compensation system is called YODA, which is a fun acronym which stands for Ye Olde Data Something. But it's different for Ye Olde Data Something. Maybe. And our workers' compensation division has actually been through fits and starts in terms of trying to update that back end system. There was a vendor that was procured and Chad, help me on timeline if you need to. Going say a few years ago, two years ago.

[Jay Ramsey, Director of Workforce Development, Vermont Department of Labor]: A year

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: And and a half, two years then once we got into the build stage with them, it became clear they weren't gonna be able to build the product. So we ended up having to cancel the contract and go back out to bid. But they have found a new vendor. They're in the procurement stages as well there. So that's gonna be, I would probably say, safely a year to two years or more out because we're again, we're still in the procurement stage. But yes, that one's being updated and Vermont Job Link is also in the process of being updated as well, which again is that job board where we were saying we now have close to 500 new construction tags included from this sprint that Jay's been executing.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: I'm sure the federal government's been giving us more money for that.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Again, you're asking all the good questions that are in here. So ROSHA, you want to wait till we get to the OSHA slide? Okay. So again, so we just covered a good variety of our programs. The only other thing I would point out on this slide in terms of just a level set is we're 50% federally funded if you look at our overarching budget, and then we're about 25% general fund and 25% special funds. Those special funds are primarily from the workers' compensation program where there's a surcharge that gets placed on all workers' comp policies, and that is what goes to fund the workers' compensation work. Is there anything you would add to that? So that's kind of the overarching high. As we'll go through this, you'll see, though, how that breaks down for each division is a little bit different in terms of the state funds and federal funds.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Dispating on the workers' comp, the percentages gonna stay the same this year? Same. Yep. Yep. No. I haven't seen any request for a bill.

[Unknown Committee Member (Vermont House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development)]: I think.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: There is some workers' compensation conversations happening downstairs in Senate Economic Development around the initial screenings and maybe a summer study.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: I mean, far as the the dollar amount goes, like, do you know we changed that so you don't have to come back to us if

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: you're correct. We changed that automatically ourselves to adjust for the cost to administer the program. So but nope, it's gonna stay the same this year. Okay.

[Ron Hoffman, Director, Vermont Department of Labor]: So the next slide here was

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: just to kind of give you a sense of our service snapshot year in review. We did delineate in some instances where we're able to pull data from fiscal year versus calendar year, but workforce services, so Jay's division, workforce development, you can see how many contacts we had through all programs and our regional job centers in terms of walk ins, the amount of Vermonters accessing Vermont JobLink. And a lot of this is pulled from data we track through WIOA, which again, I've used that term a lot, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, which is a program that provides federal funding and what funds the majority of our core workforce development services that we're offering. Jay, is there anything just because you're here you would add about those numbers?

[Jay Ramsey, Director of Workforce Development, Vermont Department of Labor]: Well, if we had a visual, it would be the shape of a pyramid where the lowest barrier service, meaning you can just walk in or help yourself with Vermont JobLink, is what's at the bottom. The middle is when you come into an office, we're providing a service to you. If you want help with your resume or you need help navigating systems, then staff records that. So that's the middle part. And then the top part is those people who It's a smaller number because it's the people who want to commit to all of the case management activities that are involved in the WIOA program. So that's the, it's a pyramid shape if you think about it in terms of the volume of people.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: UI served over 25,000 people with UI claims, wage and hour investigations. People will call into the Department of Labor, and we have a program where if you feel like you're not being paid the right wage, you were paid overtime, you're not being All sorts of different kind of employment complaints. But really, what we have jurisdiction over revolves around, again, wage and hours. So think payment and overtime hours that you're working. This is the number of investigations that were conducted and then VOCA in terms of the compliance support and enforcement. There's obviously much more, but that was just to give you a snapshot of

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Later on, do you show us what you've like, in the enforcement side? Mhmm. How much money you brought in?

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: No. But we could we could do that. So I we could do that. I'm looking at my cards if we can make a note of that. Please. It goes to the general fund. We don't keep it. It go yeah. We don't get we don't keep the citation money. It goes back to the general fund. But we could we do have that. I just don't have the fingertips. It might be something that we'll have been able to get. Maybe, maybe not,

[Ron Hoffman, Director, Vermont Department of Labor]: as we're seeing here. We'll see. Okay.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: And, you know, I guess I think the data would be interesting for us to know. I know we don't do wage an hour here, but we understand out of the $3.45 unpaid wage complaints, how many of those were legit.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: We have that too. We can follow-up with that as well.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: All of the stuff that's there. For the committee's awareness that the compliance assistant in BOCES, that's one of the good things of having Vermont do it, not the Fed do it, so that BOCES can actually go out and work with businesses to make sure they're compliant and help them keep compliant so they're not getting lagged.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Exactly. We're reinvigorating actually through that program a webinar series. So again, we're trying to do more education and outreach through VOCA too. So we have kind of the good cop and the bad cop of that program. Miriam Owens is our compliance coordinator educator, and she just did a webinar either last week or the week before that went really well. It was really well attended. She has three more so far planned for this year, as well as some other activities. So that's something There's a lot we're doing that might not come to you in a bill or an act, but I think is really good work that we're trying to lift up and promote and make sure you're aware of what's happening in the areas. So if we're able to go to the next slide. Already there, great. So our Work workforce development division, you'll see here has approximately 75 staff right now, again, an 8% vacancy rate, which is six positions spread across the state, regular churn and various statements of recruitment. Right now, I consider that just normal churn for us. You will see the list of programs on this slide that are federally funded that we administer. And then below it, the list of programs that are general fund funded from state dollars. The ones that are federally funded, again, second ago, I said WIOA. And WIOA is what funds one, two, oh gosh, at least four of these, but then we have a veteran state grant for the veteran services programs. And if you're asking what is the Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessment, or we call it RESEA. We don't actually say all the letters. We don't make it a word. Certain UI claimants through an algorithm, if you get identified as being likely to exhaust your benefits, you get mandated to have to participate in this program in order to continue to receive UI. And it's basically like job counseling. So again, like what are your barriers to employment? What do you need to zest off? How can we help you? That has its own kind of federal line item. And then again, state funds were face learning, adult CTE, the workforce expansion pilot. I think we gave an update of that, or least it was in a different slide deck earlier this session. Some of the sector work and job fairs, we just gave an example of the construction job fair that's coming up and our Vermont JobLink CRM backend. So next slide, if we could, because I'm gonna talk about for a second now the our more nuance of the federal money.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Yeah. How many people do

[Ron Hoffman, Director, Vermont Department of Labor]: you have that number? I don't.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: We could get it. Exhaust their benefits? Yeah. Yeah. We have that. I don't have it in front of me. Yep. That's something else we can share. So again, federal money, we do not have our current fiscal year allocations for this. In terms of what we know from the bill that was just funded and acted in Congress is the WIOA adult line item, overarchingly, is going to be down by 10,000,000 So again, if any of you were to walk into one of our regional job centers and say, Help me, there is a chance that We OA adult would be where our staff bill their time. I'm not too worried yet because again, dollars 10,000,000 down spread across 50 states and territories is not gonna be catastrophic for us. Again, I am hopeful anyway. I will let you know if that changes, but I'm feeling a lot better seeing this than I was if you had asked me what's going on like a month or two months ago in terms of what was being contemplated for federal money changes.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: What's ramifications of lower dollar?

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: If we were to exhaust all of our federal funds, if, again, one of you were to walk into our job center, we'd either have to get creative and find a way to justify billing our time to some different service line item, or we would be in a situation it would really be around how are we paying our staff or can we not serve adults anymore in, like, a worst case scenario, but we would we would try other ways to continue to serve through creative justifications.

[Sabrina Haskell, Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development]: Oh, you know what?

[Unknown Committee Member (Vermont House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development)]: Continue talking because you haven't even got to where I was.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Oh, Okay. There is a federal tax credit we administer called the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, which is if employers are hiring an individual that has had maybe a barrier to work in the past, if they've been on SNAP, if they've been on TANF, if they've been justice involved, there's a tax incentive that you can get through the federal government. Support admin for those activities, well as I believe, and Jay, feel free to jump in, WOTC itself is going to be down and or paused as a federal program. It does already happen in fits and starts. We've seen WOTC come and go over the years, which is kind of a pain, I will say, us administratively to ramp up and ramp down every time it changes. But again, that seven point Isn't

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: that open to veterans too?

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Yes, they are an eligible population that

[Drake Turner, Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development]: Go ahead.

[Jay Ramsey, Director of Workforce Development, Vermont Department of Labor]: Veterans have to have an additional

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: So

[Jay Ramsey, Director of Workforce Development, Vermont Department of Labor]: they have to be a qualified veteran and then they have to have another qualifier, like they're long term unemployed or they're on So just being a veteran in and

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: of itself isn't a If they were disabled in some way through the service line as well. I have an employee that let me know that I can apply for that.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Great. Nice. So again, 7,500,000.0, again, spread across 50 states and territories. Like, we'll see an area where money is up in this space is that RESEA program, nearly 80,000,000. So we will see likely a bump up in our allocation there, and we'll see again how we can use that in the best way to serve Vermonters and with the program. So again, these are formulaic. Another place that federal money is flowing and coming down in terms of good news, although not necessarily directly to the Department of Labor is the registered apprenticeship space. You all had us in, I don't know, a month ago, and we talked extensively about registered apprenticeships. So I won't necessarily repeat all that. And I think I touched actually on a few of these things during that presentation, but just the top one as an example, the 35,800,000.0, that is total in terms of what's available. But right now, manufacturing employers, if they bring on a manufacturing apprentice, can receive 3,500 through an incentive for manufacturing apprentice that they hire. So I'm hearing that there might continue to be more funds released to support registered apprenticeship in various ways over the coming years. So we'll do I think that's actually a great opportunity for Vermont. And what we'll be doing is promoting those opportunities as we can, especially if the money is not coming directly to us, but making sure those that could be taking advantage of it are aware and can seek it. And one of the things that I'm most excited about is I'm hearing they might make some changes to make registered apprenticeship more accessible to small employers that wanna be employer sponsors. And one of the points of feedback we sometimes get is, I'm a small employer. I like the idea of it. I just can't write for any number of reasons or there is a lot of paperwork. So if there are ways that make it more accessible to employers that are small, which is a lot of potential opportunity there. I'm very excited to see what's happening.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: That'd be a possibility for technical assistance.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: For the Department of Labor then to offer technical assistance? Potentially, maybe. Yes, and but. We will have to look at, again, and Jay, feel free to chime in, but we have kind of our Richard Apprenticeship budget as it relates to state funds set, and we are able to rearrange within that bucket. So we could potentially rearrange the way we're utilizing our state funds to do that if we saw the need. Yep.

[Unknown Committee Member (Vermont House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development)]: Hi. Do you all see any sort of I'm looking at these numbers of the programs that are going up and down. Am I reading this correctly? Is there a push to move people in the RESEA? Program? Or am I reading into something that's totally not related with the VOA adult?

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: No. So those are two separate programs. I mean, similar, right? And that it's adults that are seeking employment. But with RESEA, there is an algorithm that goes into our system and you most likely to max out benefits. And then if you get that moniker on your account, you say you get this RESEA referral and you have to participate. The goal is that we're helping you reenter into employment. So the two goals are similar in that it's adults hopefully reengaging with the workforce and finding a new job, but they're two separate programs.

[Unknown Committee Member (Vermont House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development)]: So it's still going to leave kind of a pool of people potentially under helped and under resourced. In the adults? In the VOA adults, if they are not It has nothing to do with their benefits.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Yeah, I don't think I mean, it could in a worst case scenario. I want to be clear, I don't think we're going to be in a situation where we can't serve the amount of adults that walk through our doors and that we won't be able to figure that out. If that changes because it does turn out, for some reason, out of the $10,000,000 Vermont's getting a $5,000,000 cut, yes, that would be a problem. And we would then have to have a much larger conversation about general fund money or do we want to backfill this or what do we want to do. But if it is, again, a smaller, hundreds of thousands or less, I think we can Again, I'm feeling pretty confident in our team and our ability to problem solve around that. So we're continuing to serve anyone that walks through our doors. I feel like I remember you guys talking about this

[Unknown Committee Member (Vermont House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development)]: at another presentation, but the numbers for participants, is that going up or down, or how is it?

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Jay, do you have those numbers? We do. Another one I

[Jay Ramsey, Director of Workforce Development, Vermont Department of Labor]: don't have. Have

[Unknown Committee Member (Vermont House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development)]: a full report,

[Jay Ramsey, Director of Workforce Development, Vermont Department of Labor]: but our caseloads are relatively low, which is a sign of people not wanting to enroll in the program or they're very complicated cases. I'm confident in what the commissioner is representing about. Like, we have enough money to serve people. If we see a giant a huge influx at the same time we're seeing it down in funds, then we're gonna have to come

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: back and have that conversation. Yep.

[Jay Ramsey, Director of Workforce Development, Vermont Department of Labor]: I just will also say one thing about the RESEA program. That money is just paying for staff to do that program administration. It's not money that serves people. So if you're an RESEA coordinator, you're helping a person with their resume and making referrals, but you're also in an office with the other job center specialists, so you're sending them cases. Hey, I have this person who's really looking for this job and they want to enroll in WIOA, and then it comes over, and then that case manager can assign funds to support that person.

[Unknown Committee Member (Vermont House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development)]: Okay, so this is just paying for administration of the program? Yes. And then that program is referring people out to the various other programs that are within the office. All right, thank you.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Welcome. All right, let's go to the next slide. So normally, VDAL's budget is pretty boring. Be honest with you about that. We live within our 3% target or up, and we apply equally across general fund programs, which we did do again this year. And you'll see The two things that make it more interesting for us today is this federal funding dynamic that I just flagged. And we do have some reversions of funding that is then released back into the general fund. And then in the governor's proposed budget is funding other priorities from workforce one time allocations, which are represented behind me that I did want to be very transparent and you guys were going to see it and talk about. So the first few, so you have the Vermont Returnship Program. This was put into place in 2018. And the idea at the time was to help serve people that had been disengaged from the workforce for a long period of time, and if they needed some upskilling, some helping, resume interviewing, internships. So things like if there was a mother who took six years off, had kids, stayed home, and was like, Okay, I'm ready to go back to work, supports to help that individual do that, just as an anecdote. It was really exciting at the time. We have since started serving the same population in other ways. And I'm going to let Jay talk about some of these things here in a second after I give a more broad overview. The next one, post secondary and new Americans, dollars 70,000 was appropriated to the Department of Labor in 2019. I'm gonna be honest with you, when we were trying to do the research, I could find this in the budget. I could not find the policy bill that went with it to dust off my understanding of what was the department supposed to be doing with this money. So I'm gonna just be very direct about that when I was trying to piece all this together. Workforce development, dollars 275,000 was supporting apprenticeships, training, post secondary CTE through the Workforce Education and Training Fund. We have a lot of other funding that is also supporting apprenticeship training, post secondary opportunities. Again, see we owe that we were talking about. We have a separate registered apprenticeship fund specifically during the time the department leveraged other funds to do these activities. The next one, the 189,000 for New American Labor Force. This was actually a pass through to the State Workforce Development Board. This one I do have a very clear memory of. They put out an RFP, they did not get any bids. Then the executive director at the time departed for law school. We had an interim, and then we kind of paused and we did the softwed, and we welcomed Sabina and Drake about a year ago. So they got no bids. They put the RFP out twice, and then frankly, things stalled with a lot of leadership changeover. And now the new office is getting up and running, defining their own goals, priorities, and kind of redoing an assessment of what are the needs for us right now. And then this last one, work based learning, a million dollars. The department was also appropriated around the same time, an additional $1,500,000 for work based learning and training supports that was fully expended, and it went really well. So we did get out over half of the money that was dedicated to this purpose. We had not yet spent these monies in their totality got reverted to the general fund. I'm sure you have questions, so I'm happy to pause there. But before we do that, in case he might answer any of your questions, Ivy, you want to just open it up and see Jay, if there's anything you would add about these.

[Jay Ramsey, Director of Workforce Development, Vermont Department of Labor]: I'm going to start with the internship program. In statute, there was created an internship program, then a returnship program. Saw it before me, but I was adjacent to it. Around the time that that workforce development, the bottom one was enacted. There was a shift in the policy, so the department was advocating more broadly for a work based learning and training fund and getting away from the specific internship and returnship because they were too restrictive in how they were defined. So that money that's up there in that top line is just what's left over from what was in the fund before. I'm And gonna skip over those other things to the big one at the bottom, the million. A little history. I also had to go through what is the context of what was going on at the time. I started the department in February 2022. In January 23, I became the interim director and we had a 20% vacancy rate. And in May 23, I became a permanent director. And at that time, we had an IT project going on, we were trying to fill vacancies, there was an entire leadership turnover within the workforce development division. And so at that time, we did not have the capacity or the bandwidth to handle all of the things that were going on. And I made a decision to fill the vacancies out in the field so that we could serve the public.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: As the top priority,

[Jay Ramsey, Director of Workforce Development, Vermont Department of Labor]: which As the top priority, but also recognizing that one, this $2,500,000 really for work based learning is a huge amount of money, and the legislature intended for us to get it out, so let's work on getting it out. And so we got 1,500,000.0 of it out as a separate line item, and that was We did it in two stages, and we were trying to put guardrails around it so that we're not having businesses ask for 1 or 2 or $300,000 and they're gonna use all that money to pay for the CFO. No offense, Chuck. No offense to the CFO down there, but we try to do it in two phases. One is, are you ready? And let's do small amounts to give you money to get ready for the second round. So that's how we rolled it out. The maximum amount that we would award is 75,000. Least amount I think that we awarded was 6,000. We issued 42 grants and we were shooting for 400 participants in that. We ended up with fewer than that, a lot fewer than that because there were recruiting issues, the way some of the grants were structured or the purpose that some of the grantees had wouldn't work. And then there was also a flood in a few instances where that led to them having to pause their grants. So we got the grants out, have a ton of success stories from the companies, community partners, and other organizations that were grantees. And if you've never processed 42 grant awards, it is a body of work that takes time, especially for a new grant. I'm not talking about me, but the staff person was a new grant manager who needed a lot of guidance and support, and at some point during this process also went on maternity leave. So you know, all of the people issues that you can imagine happen, I'm not trying to make excuses, but are the, this is the context of the programs. And it explains also why we didn't expend this $1,000,000 basically because we had $1,500,000 out in two different phases.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: I know that's the one people probably have the most questions about. I will just say off the top of the other three too, we also had a pandemic right around that time for the department with unemployment insurance. It was an all hand on deck situation.

[Unknown Committee Member (Vermont House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development)]: So I totally appreciate that, with each one of these appropriations, there are problems, and you weren't able to spend, but people were thinking that you have these families. And I appreciate that.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Mhmm.

[Unknown Committee Member (Vermont House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development)]: Stuff happens. Right? I'm just thinking from the big picture. You have, you know, money mostly involved in workforce, well, yeah, development, that you had allocated to the department, that is not gonna go somewhere else, as opposed to staying within the department, it's still maybe in a different program or something, but still using it for workforce development.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: I

[Unknown Committee Member (Vermont House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development)]: suppose that's what you mean by changing priorities or that's probably not at your level.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Yes, so all of this has been reverted into the general fund. And then the governor's proposed budget has various general fund funded proposals for you all as a legislature. I couldn't necessarily name them all off top of my head, but property tax relief, education transformation support. Sure, there's money in there for housing. We hear all the time from employers when we're visiting with employers. Housing is one of the major barriers. It's affordability. So big picture changing priorities.

[Unknown Committee Member (Vermont House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development)]: Yeah, think they haven't reverted yet. They're proposed

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: to be reverted, right?

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Correct, yep. So, correct. So this would be presumably something in your guys' policy memo to house appropriations if you were to say we support or don't support the reversion of these funds. But I will say even with the reversion of these funds, I actually feel really good about the progress and the things that we are doing and the way we are serving Vermonters and the workforce through our workforce development division. I think that going forward, again, like Jay mentioned, when he stepped into his role, there was a 20% vacancy rate. Now, again, we have whatever I just said, like six vacancies at a regular churn. So we're more or less fully staffed. With the monies that we still have, even with these reversions, I don't think you're necessarily going to see us coming in next year and saying we couldn't do anything or we weren't able to help serve the workforce or continue to further our shared expansion and development goals. This sprint, for example, kind of effort that Jay has been coordinating is really exciting. We did it with the part time jobs. Now we're doing construction. We have, I think, what leisure and hospitality lined up for the fall, trying to align it with some of the core sectors that the Workforce Development Board has identified. I was going to talk about later in the slide two, so maybe you can get a holistic view of some of the ways we're also supporting sister agencies. And I think, I don't if this was in here or earlier, but we have a lot of exciting partnerships going on. Example of Vammar thinking about whether or not we can co brand recovery friendly workplace certification program. Again, you guys will recommend what you're going to recommend, but even I, with the reversion of these funds, feel pretty excited about the future and the next year.

[Drake Turner, Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development]: Jay, you mentioned that the money was successful, the grants were successful. And is there a report on that that I need to reread to understand that? Or is there more information? Because if we have successful programs, I don't want us to just let them go without, at a minimum, learning

[Ron Hoffman, Director, Vermont Department of Labor]: from them.

[Drake Turner, Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development]: If the money needs to be used differently today, which is something we will talk about, but that's fine. And if another day we find that there are workforce programs that we want to stand up, we should have that institutional knowledge of this is a successful program in this country, whatever the other thing is. So I don't want

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: The money is one thing and the successful program is separate. Right. I hear you. Normally, if Jay has a report, it's in his lap. Do you He's right to bringing them stuff.

[Jay Ramsey, Director of Workforce Development, Vermont Department of Labor]: Yes. So refresh my memory.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: But I think if we have a successful program, that's where we should be at that stage going.

[Drake Turner, Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development]: Like what you said earlier, we don't want to stand up a program and take it down and stand up another program.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: That's a waste of resources. I think when we did the Returnship Program, I think we were looking at That was basically a pilot project, I think, that we were looking at to see if

[Jay Ramsey, Director of Workforce Development, Vermont Department of Labor]: it

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: really was useful and helpful in getting people back into the workforce that had been out for a period of time.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: I will take a point of personal privilege and say one of the things that I do think we get hamstrung on as a state is we fund so much of our workforce as one time pilots. And then it's like, what's the next shiny option? And every three years, it's like we have to right? Instead of just if we're gonna put these things in our base fund our base allocations and do them continually, like I will That's I what I'm that's on behalf of myself. Observation is just everything is always a one time pilot. Then it's like, what's the next shiny object? And we don't sustain these things that

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: we stand up. But when we see when we when we had those pilots and we get the information back that it's working, then I think that's where we now, with your help, say we need to put more money into this because it was a good pilot and it's working.

[Unknown Committee Member (Vermont House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development)]: Agreed. Right.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: I agree with you.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Happy to come back to this, but if you want, we can keep Okay. Labor market information. If you've ever seen a presentation by Matt Matt Barowitz, he's one of our state economists. They are 100% federally funded. So again, I see each of these divisions has a different amount of general fund versus federal funds. They're 100% federally funded. So I will say they are slightly vulnerable in that way. There is a down in one of the federal grants that they typically receive that funds their work. It's one of many, so it's not the only, again, of $9,700,000 but again, will be allocated across 50 states and territories. I'm just gonna keep saying that. So I think we'll be able and again, Chad, I know you've been working with Matt on this, so feel free to jump in. But again, I think that we'll be able to eat or figure out whatever down happens here. But also what Matt does is really because he is 100% federally funded as he assigns work to his staff based on the funding and the grants that exist. So then it's shifting from maintenance of effort and staff time to where they can build that too. So again, we'll let you know once we have what that means. We do say this as a word, the WIG grant, the workforce information grant, and what that means for us. Workers' comp and safety. So again, this is workers' compensation, project work safe, passenger tramway, which again, speed lift inspection, and VOCA. Workers' compensation. And Chad, I I would appreciate any support if I start going off the rails here. Again, like I mentioned earlier, is special fund funded. So that does not eat into general funds or federal funds. That is is safe. We adjust that fee as needed, but trying to keep in mind affordability and obviously not raising it unnecessarily to manage that program. VOCA here as the second biggest body of work, 50% federally funded, And there is a down in the federal budget basically to US DOL enforcement agencies, including OSHA. I don't know what that means yet. For us, again, it's possible we might see a little less money to VOCA, but again, 13,000,000 across multiple programs, 50 states, territories. Again, I'm still not overly concerned at this point. Will let you know if that changes. Passenger tramways also special fund funded where there's a surcharge based on per square

[Jay Ramsey, Director of Workforce Development, Vermont Department of Labor]: Linear feet.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Linear feet. Thank you. I'm like, it's not square feet. Linear feet of ski lift that you have that the ski resort owners pay that funds the administration and the staff time of that program. Project WorkSafe is also part federally funded. They're fine. We haven't heard anything that's not as concerned about.

[Chad Worsenick, Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor]: And that's that's the consultation side, not an enforcement side of of OSHA, so we're not expecting any any doubts to that program.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Does the tramways program include those on the National Forest?

[Chad Worsenick, Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor]: Yes. Yes. It does. Yep. All ski areas in Vermont. The National Forest Service

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: often comes to the tramway board meetings. Alright. Unemployment insurance. We're coming into kind of our last big division here. We are hearing that UI is gonna be level funded or rather it is level funded in the budget that just passed for FY '26, which again is the current federal fiscal year that we're in. What the federal money pays for is for administration of the program. So again, the staff time. The UI trust fund is all employer contributions. So again, the money we receive from the federal government is the admin staff support. In this current climate, I'm gonna take level funded as a win and and keep plugging along.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Federal funds for the administration, are those the funds that employers pay into the Fed?

[Ron Hoffman, Director, Vermont Department of Labor]: No. No.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Nope. Because I know we well, we don't. We have a reduction in what we pay the federal unemployment.

[Chad Worsenick, Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor]: Are you talking both FUDA and SUDA? Yeah. No. Both of those both of those dollar Go into they go into the trust fund. Correct.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: I didn't know if they used the FUDA funds for administration for the state. No. Both both pools of those dollars going to the trust fund. Okay. So we could get in we we have interest on that too, or are you? I

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: think you're getting at this is not what you were, but an important point that I lost over with VOCA. Nothing in here for federal funds is match except for VOCA. So VOCA does have a state match requirement. We actually over match, but I just, I should have mentioned that on the last slide. I apologize. Questions about UI? Yes. Sure. Do you want to introduce yourself and go for it?

[Ron Hoffman, Director, Vermont Department of Labor]: I'm Ron Hoffman, director of the Department of Labor. So it looks like the average number we just filed in July is 12.1, and preliminary data showed there are around 1,600 exhausted benefits payments, so 1,600 individuals who exhausted their benefit payments. Are still, LMI is still going over twenty twenty five data, so that number may change some and they go up in fact. That's my initial response on that. If you have any other questions to see if I can get answers as well. Thank you.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Okay, next slide. We have a business office with Chad overseas that helps with the internal functioning at the department. He does not have money that is specifically allocated for the work, but helping us with facilities, finance, contracts, procurement, operations, employee engagement and retention. There's really not a budget specific ask or highlight here, but just as we're going through, how are we organized? The business office is hugely supportive to all of us. They're kind of our backbone support system.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Business offices paid through gender funds? It's socialized across.

[Chad Worsenick, Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor]: Yeah. It's it's yeah. Socialized across all. I

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: don't know. So something that was in the budget instructions that we touched on with house appropriations was they wanted information on any single audit findings that agencies and departments had. Happy to talk about that if you're interested. Okay. I'm seeing nothing, like, or we can skip it, but go ahead. Okay.

[Chad Worsenick, Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor]: Yeah. Of the size of the UI trust fund, we are involved with a single audit every single year. The the independent auditors come into essentially in my shop and and look over the work that we've done over the past year and scrutinize everything that we do. Last fiscal year, we had three audit findings. All three of them, I personally would consider minor. They are things like if you read the first one, we had some federal reports for our some of our special unemployment compensation that we couldn't reproduce the documentation or the official sign off with those reports when we submitted the report, copies of the reports to the auditors to review. So, it was things like that. So, we were required to go back through our policies and procedures and tighten up how we do those kinds of things, how we document and how we retain that documentation. All three of these findings are very similar in that regards. And we've done those reviews and we've tightened up those procedures. As of The program that's being audited. So the unemployment insurance administration, the federal knowledge, primarily would pay for that. That's correct. Yep.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: And are there if there's deficiencies found, are there clawbacks if there's dollars in them?

[Chad Worsenick, Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor]: There's potential potential clawbacks. Yeah. If they find the that's The state would be on the hook for any of those clawbacks. Yes. Yeah. Those would be considered disallowed costs. And if we have to pay them back, they have to come from a non federal source. We one year, we had a disallowed cost of, like, $510 and, you know, something like that. And if it's not to belittle. Yeah. But yes, absolutely, it happens.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: And would that should I go back into the trust fund, or does it go to the Fed?

[Chad Worsenick, Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor]: No. That goes to the Feds directly to the Feds. This year, we are under we are we're at this moment. We are still undergoing the single audit Doing well. We had a meeting with our auditors a week and a half ago, and they are not seeing anything that's that's rising to a finding this year. Everybody, please knock on wood. That's where I'd like it to stay. Obviously, can't guarantee that the audit's not not over, but that's where we're headed at the moment.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Well, the new system actually helped a lot.

[Chad Worsenick, Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor]: It it should help. Yes. Yes. And not only in in helping with audit findings in that the the system will be programmed to do the things it's supposed to do, but also in, like, in the instance of all three of these audits, it it will be able to actually show the documentation and and the the quote, unquote audit trail of how these things happened. And so you can back yourself up on why did this happen and what decisions were made. So, yes, that's built into the system.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: All right. So next slide. We're gonna be a little bit more granular here. This is the traditional ups and downs document that, again, all the agencies and departments produce and the appropriations committees tend to look at. I would actually, if the committee is willing just for a second, if we flip to the second slide, I actually just based on questions, this is marginally easier to read, but also might be more insightful for you all where this goes program by program and shows the amount of state dollars, federal dollars, or special funds that get braided to then allow us to do the work that we do. In green highlight is again general fund. And what we have done is within that 3% target, and it's what we do every year, we've allocated that equally across all the programs that are general funded, but for two areas, this very last line here that says admin subsidies, budget allowances, ADS, DHR, vision, these are kind of our internal service fund fees. The costs for DHR, ADS are going up. So finance and management allowed us to put in a little bit more than 3% into that line item. Then where we're going to go to here in a second and they can share any additional information themselves. The Office of Workforce Strategy and Development has more than a 3% up to pay for their operations, but I'll let Savannah and Drake cover that who are in the room. But otherwise, if you were to do the math on these very tiny numbers, you would see that if I just point to a random one, one hundred twenty five, the change of 55,000. That one actually is more than three percent. Oh, it has federal in there as well. Sorry. It's about a 3% up on all of these general fund funded line items is the the moral of the story. If you're wanting to look program by program to general fund.

[Unknown Committee Member (Vermont House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development)]: I can. Yes. Very helpful. Like seeing it by COVID.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Yeah. I thought that this would be more, I don't know, helpful to the conversation. Good. Okay. So closing out, Rowan, if you wanna go to the next one. Go ahead, Chuck.

[Chad Worsenick, Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor]: On that sheet, just to reiterate, the the federal dollars that are listed on that program by program are based on the continuing of the based on what these are allocated last year. So, again

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Again

[Chad Worsenick, Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor]: when when we are are given our final numbers by the federal government, we'll be able to update that.

[Drake Turner, Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development]: Think we talked about this, but just are any of the programs match dollars? Are we maximizing our match? Contributing as much as we possibly can.

[Chad Worsenick, Chief Financial Officer, Vermont Department of Labor]: Yeah. It's required fifty fifty match, federal and general funds. And we slightly over match with general fund dollars. And, really, the reason for that is oftentimes there are states that have to give back some money to the voucher program. And in order to capitalize on that, we have to then provide another bit of match. So we we have that built into our into our base budget.

[Ron Hoffman, Director, Vermont Department of Labor]: Alright.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: So I so at the end the end of the numbers, he covered this a little bit with you. But, again, so we're not we're not asking for any money. So maybe should have said at the beginning, we're not asking for any money. So I don't know, hopefully that makes your life a little bit easier.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: It should take it up to you.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: It depends. There's a lot of details in there. There's some things, but other things maybe not. I know you're asking. But I I want to, I guess, just go back to one of points I made earlier is just because we don't have a bill or a financial ask or even with these reversions, there's still a lot of really good work happening that's keeping us plenty busy and things that we want to eventually update you on and hopefully celebrate. So this was just meant to give kind of a summary of that. This session, we do have a registered apprenticeship technical corrections bill that I'd actually like to follow-up on maybe with a chair. Okay. If we can move that before crossover, a little plea would be great.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: If we don't, we have a bill that's going

[Unknown Committee Member (Vermont House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development)]: be 50%. Great. Great. Okay.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: We can follow-up on that later.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: One way or the other. Yeah.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Okay. Thank you. So we have the registered apprenticeship statute technical corrections. We're supporting the agency of education in these education transformation conversations, specifically with CTE, adult ed. We've been in here with you guys on that. We have been really focused on service to career pathways through some funding through the National Governors Association, at least Rep. Granting and Rep. Marcotte came to that summit. So more to come there. We've talked extensively with you guys about our apprenticeship expansion efforts. I have a couple of times now talked about the sector focused initiatives. At the beginning, we're replacing the state job board. And then we're also supporting a lot of our sister agencies on things like the different work requirements for SNAP and TANF, some federal funding that should help expedite fingerprint supported background checks. Workforce Pell is another, again, another thing that's hanging out there that Savannah and Drake have done an amazing job pulling together conversations on how we're going to utilize that for the states. And then I mentioned earlier, again, things like the VOCA education and outreach. And we've also been doing wage and hour seminars as well that have been getting good reviews. The next slide. So I realize you guys are both very anxious. I know we just have a little bit more time, but I want to leave room for sublime energy as well. We talked about UI modernization. So again, just reiterating we're going live at the new Symphony Spring and Summer. I will make sure you all have an invitation for whatever we end up somehow doing there when we do it, if you'd like to come. And then I think with that, I would next yield to Savannah and Drake to talk about the office's budget, and I'll stay in the room or we can but that's kind of the end of the Vidal tour, so to speak.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Further questions? Kendall or our crew? Thank you, Kendall.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Thank you. We'll just stay on the links.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: So

[Sabrina Haskell, Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development]: for the record, I'm Sabrina Haskell at the office of workforce strategy and development.

[Drake Turner, Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development]: And Drake Turner, deputy director of the office.

[Sabrina Haskell, Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development]: We've been in here and talked to you before about the office and everything, but just very briefly about our budget. We are up over the 3% because of the two salaries versus and more benefits, the whole bit. And so we're about 51,000 over the 3%, if you will. If you I'm assuming the slide is up. Right?

[Ron Hoffman, Director, Vermont Department of Labor]: It is. Yes. Okay.

[Sabrina Haskell, Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development]: Yes. Just there and there's also a very small amount of money for, like, if there's we have meetings and we're gonna get lunch for our board or travel. Very small. 24,000 in there.

[Drake Turner, Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development]: Yep. So so our budget is it's just we can keep this short. Y'all have heard from us already this session. But as Sabrina mentioned, we're a stand alone office. Our budget lives within the Department of Labor budget. We're around $423,000 so small compared to the rest of the department. And as Abbey mentioned, are up this year above the 3% is 51,000 and that's going toward the salary needs of a fully staffed office. And we do have, as Abbeyta mentioned, I believe it's $24,000 for travel and other costs, but the rest of our budget is salaries, benefits and indirect.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: And I know, I mean, your job is much more than just a state workforce development there. The expectation from us is that you're catalog. So is that part of the funding that you get or I want to make sure that you have enough money.

[Drake Turner, Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development]: Right. Yeah. I think you're

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: that we're asking

[Drake Turner, Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development]: for. Right. You're referring to the inventory of programs. Yeah. So I will say we've been hard at work setting up the office and supporting the newly organized workforce development board, as you know, representative Marcotte is a member of the board. That's been really wonderful work and also pretty time intensive. So we're getting ready to launch subcommittees of the board that correspond to the goals that we presented to you earlier this year. So that's really where a lot of the work of the board is gonna happen and we're very excited about that. We've also been really focused, I would say since about November, December on some federal components of the work around WIOA. So we're modifying our WIOA state plan. We're in the middle of that period. We've been working to relaunch our one stop partner network, which is many organizations around the state. We relaunched our MOU and are kind of rebuilding that system. And then there are the other components of the office around the inventory, thinking about how we can support creation of a framework to assess workforce development funding requests. So these are big buckets of work that we're thinking very, very strategically about how we can do that. And I think the question about what additional funding we might need, I think we're probably a little ways away from that conversation, particularly around the inventory. I'll say we're starting with really assessing what are the state programs that exist and the next layer of that will be more complicated and great to look like what exists out in the community. And so we're also talking to a lot of state and community partners about what already exists that's cataloging those programs. Like Advance Vermont has some pretty incredible tools. Jay, as the department has been thinking about the Vermont job two point zero, could that be a potential area where some of those programs could live? We understand the urgency of that. It's something that we've really needed as a state for a long time, but we also know we need to get it right. So we're just trying to be incredibly strategic. And I think one thing that Savannah and I talk about really often is the success of this office is really going to hinge on our ability to add value and avoid duplication of services. So we also don't wanna create a tool that's really already in existence somewhere else. So we're trying to be creative, intentional, thrifty to the degree we can, understanding that our budget is limited at this point, and also really open to what opportunities might exist. And so as we're balancing the other functions of the office, we're always thinking about I think about the inventory and a framework for assessing funding requests every day. And I'm talking to anyone who will talk to me about it. So we're feeling really optimistic and are really lucky to have so many colleagues in state government and partners outside of state government that are also really invested in helping us figure out how to do that successfully.

[Sabrina Haskell, Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development]: Yeah, there's a lot of interest and there's a lot of focus on what we're doing and that's exciting for us, yes. The board is very engaged. They're ready to get going with the committee work. So that's going to be fun and interesting to see how they lay out their strategies for those four goals and start to build the metrics of what the board is contributing to and all of that. And then we have, Kendall had mentioned earlier, we have the workforce Pell coming in the second half of the year. So that is a state workforce development board responsibility, along with the governor approving the different sectors and all of that. And there's a lot of ROI and different data points that will be required by the federal government that we have to figure out how we're gonna report on.

[Drake Turner, Deputy Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development]: And I would say when it comes to Workforce Pell or any other programs that exist, we're trying to think really holistically about how a program like Workforce Pell fits into the work that the state Workforce Development Board is already doing. So the board is focused on identifying what are the sectors in our economy that need more workers? How can we be sure that that work is being folded into other workflows? The conversation around the Department of Labor's construction and trades job fair, that is one of the priority sectors of the board. So we're having a lot of conversations behind the scenes to really knit together work that's happening and make sure that folks know about the board, the board knows about the work that's happening. And I think workforce polo is a great example where the role of the board is to advise the governor on what our priority sectors for that program. So we think there's a lot of ways that the work of the board is gonna inform other work that will happen across state government. I think that will, we're hoping that will continue to happen and then hopefully become more natural, more intuitive.

[Sabrina Haskell, Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development]: I'll also add the Rural Health Transformation Grant with all the different workforce programs within that big, huge grant program. We just had a meeting today with them and are figuring out what the board's role can be with that and how can we be as collaborative as possible.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Any questions for wine or drink?

[Sabrina Haskell, Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development]: Thank you. Sure, sweet. That's four minutes, wasn't

[Jay Ramsey, Director of Workforce Development, Vermont Department of Labor]: Thank you. The

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: grants that we put out, how make sure that, number one, we're getting a return on investment, making sure that the money was spent according to the contract?

[Jay Ramsey, Director of Workforce Development, Vermont Department of Labor]: Staff capacity to even monitor the grantees. This was a little complicated when normally we would have people who are being funded by the grants create an account in Vermont JobLink if they can attach them to the grant. But because we were trying to replace Vermont JobLink, we said, Let's not do that. In these grants and the application, we asked the applicants to tell us what was the wage rate that they were going to compensate or how were they going to compensate the students, the participants. So they told us, and then at the end when they submit their report, they tell us they can reconfirm. We paid everybody 15 or 25, or here's three success stories of people that we ended up employing and now they're making $24 an hour.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: So it comes to us through the narrative reports that is how we look this time. You were able to verify?

[Jay Ramsey, Director of Workforce Development, Vermont Department of Labor]: That would be complicated to do, but they do, some of the grantees gave us their payroll records to show up. The new system will make that easier.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Anything else? Commissioner, thank you.

[Kendall Smith, Commissioner, Vermont Department of Labor]: Thank you.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Thank you, everyone, for joining us today.

[Ron Hoffman, Director, Vermont Department of Labor]: I do have just one more update.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Okay, sure. You

[Ron Hoffman, Director, Vermont Department of Labor]: all were so patient during the joint testimony we did on supporting the incarcerated population within Florida supports. We just had a very successful job there at Southern State Correctional Facility on Friday with DOC, and we're still kind of debriefing from that. But all of the reports that we have gotten have been everybody was extremely happy with how it went. C was really pleased with and how we set it up and kind of took that load off of them. We had a really robust turnout of folks in the facility that needed to engage with the employers and we've already got some ideas for how we would continue to do it if we would speak for next time. So Jess, I think we flagged in that testimony a few weeks ago that that was upcoming, happened on Friday, and things so far.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Good. Been great to see. Cool. Interagency collaboration, especially in this realm, helping people that are incarcerated to get out, get involved, and so to speak, that's what's good for the offender again. Great. Thank you. Okay. Committee, we're on the floor in ten minutes. Remember, we have the resolution of traction. Abbey is going to report. They'll be there for support. And we're back here at nine tomorrow morning to get the. We have a full day scheduled after that. If you're looking at the transaction, right after the floor, then we have three eighty five after the floor. We continue to make progress on these bills that we can get out of here, really focus our attention on CPE. I think if there's no questions, we're back here at nine tomorrow. Here, a week before I have time. Thank you.