Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Up to your house bill. Let's welcome back, folks. This is House Corrections and Institutions. This is Wednesday, January 28. It's our 04:00 meeting. We are looking at House Bill six thirty five, which deals with supervisory fees that are imposed by the Department of Corrections on people that are being supervised out in the community. And the bill would eliminate these, and we're gonna have a walk through really quick with our legislative council, and then we're gonna turn it over to DOC. Welcome, John.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Sounds good. Thank you, guys. John Gray, office of legislative council. Happy to jump into this one. I think the idea is quite readily understood, and the sections I'm going to show you are not especially hard to understand, but I do think it's something where background from folks in the space is going to be especially helpful because we're talking about what happens on the ground. So h six thirty five, if I

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: can get my trackpad to work.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Okay. So this bill proposes to eliminate supervisory fees imposed by the Department of Corrections. You can see if you look in the subject line, but you'll see it as well below the sets of statuses to which this would apply, probation, furloughs, supervised community sentence, parole. But we're amending Title 28, Section 102, which sets out both responsibilities and powers of the Commissioner of Corrections. The first part, this isn't the substantive part, but it's kind of a conforming change that has to happen with what you'll see immediately on the next page. Part of what the Commissioner is charged with doing is entering into contracts with private collections agencies to collect certain things like fines, penalties, and restitution proposed under the criminal statutes. But included in that call out is also supervisory fees imposed under Title 28, which is what's being proposed to be repealed here. So necessarily, that's struck alongside the removal of the authority to actually impose the supervisory fee. So DOC would no longer be allowed to impose supervisory fees nor would they be allowed to enter into contracts with private collections of the agencies for those supervisory fees because they would not exist. And more to the point, if they did currently exist, as we'll see in a session law provision, those are essentially forgiven or canceled as proposed in this bill. But the real heart of the change is on page two. The struggling would you see starting on line nine. So in existing law, the commissioner has the responsibility to collect a fee of up to, it's an up to fee, an amount of $30 per month as a supervisory fee from each person under the supervision of the Department of Corrections who's on probation, furlough, pre approved furlough, supervised community sentence or parole. Those would be credited to a special supervision and victim restitution fund, And the commissioner would adopt rules governing the collection of supervisory fees, including the maximum period of time offenders are subject to supervision fees and the offender's ability to pay such fees. Those rules were adopted years and years ago, but what you're saying here is the authority for collecting that fee has been struck. So these supervisory fees would no longer exist. Charter of Corrections could no longer impose them, could no longer reach out to collections agencies to collect those fees.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So John, do you have when these fees came into effect?

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: I want to say the rulemaking happened back in 2008 or so, but that's just me. It's been quite a while that these have been here, and DOC may have better information on this. Jumping to page three, we're in a new section. So that previously was amending the powers of the Commissioner of Corrections in the Green Books. But here we have a session law provision that's setting up pretty clearly all the actions to be taken. Essentially, is wiping the slate clean of supervisory fees. So under subsection A, Department of Corrections shall not assess, bill or collect any supervisory fee or employ any other entity, any collection agency or other entity to assess, bill, or collect any supervisory fee. So both directly and indirectly, DOC may not assess, bill, or collect these supervisory fees. For any supervisory fees that exist, we can look to subsection b, Department of Corrections to forgive all outstanding supervisory fees and eliminate all references to outstanding supervisory fees in its record and on its web based portal for supervisory fee payments. DOC may have more information on this. In my quick combing, it looked like there's an online portal at which people can pay. So this is saying eliminate references to these fees in your records in the med portal. As you can imagine, there are other mechanisms other than direct collection whereby you might expect the fees could be retrieved. And so that's what you see in subsection C. Current of corrections efforts to collect any outstanding supervisory fees. So if they're already out there, including through wage garnishment, so taking away from the wages that an offender would be receiving or tax set off debt collection. So going for the tax department to receive those supervisory fees. The Department of Corrections would coordinate with any agency made party to supervisory fee collection to cease collection. So that's kind of saying, if you have called on a collections agency to go do this and this law came into effect, you would cease, I think, to collect those outstanding supervisory fees. And then lastly, under Subsection D, making clear that any failure to pay would not hurt. Notwithstanding any law to the contrary, failure to pay a supervisory fee shall not constitute a violation of probation, role furlough, or any other sentence.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: John, do you know if that particular case is in the underlying law at all

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: for civil Meaning that is there in existing law conditions for those to constitute violations? Did not

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Or vice versa.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Yeah, I did not see that. But I will just say that corrections policy is outside my bailiwick. But I did not immediately see something to that effect, and when I looked through the rule, don't recall something to that effect. But this clarifies if you happen to have And people craft different sentences and the like, so maybe this avoids confusion on that front.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So Kevin, we're on H635. Sorry, fine, Amy. Yep, that's fine.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: The last section here is about rules review. You will recall from the first page, maybe the second page, that set of responsibilities and powers of the commissioner of corrections. Among these is rulemaking to build out the policies that Department of Corrections have, and that includes rulemaking on these supervisory fees. I'm gonna scroll back up to page one. Yes, sorry, page two. You can see that the commissioner in the struck language shall adopt rules governing the collection of supervisory fees, including the maximum period of time offenders are subject to those fees. Will these pay such fees? Section three is saying Department of Corrections identify those rules that were adopted under that authority, and the statutory authority that you see there is the statutory authority for those supervisory fees. For each such rule, the Commissioner of Corrections shall notify the Secretary of State of its repeal by operation of law to three BSA section eight forty eight. Just to call out, this is not technically a provision you have to have. The Administrative Procedure Act, which governs the rulemaking process, filing of rules, final rulemaking, LCAR, all that, includes provisions that repeal rules in effect when they no longer matter essentially. I can jump to that section if it's helpful, but one of the things that the statutes there account for is if the underlying statutory authority under which that rule was adopted is repealed, meaning that the statutory authority for the rule no longer exists, you would expect that the rule would go away as well. So we have provisions in law to say that. That's what you see cited here, three BSA section eight forty eight A. But this senate is just saying, please do this. Identify each rule that was adopted under this particular authority. Notify the secretary of state. And the reason for the notification to the secretary of state is the secretary of state then deletes those rules from the system. They maintain the system, and the executive state would then delete that vote. Under subsection b on page four, as you can imagine, there might be scattered references to supervisory fees or supervision fees throughout other rules, including those that aren't so directly reliant on the same statutory authority. This may or may not be the case, don't know. But this is saying DOC review rules, policies, procedures to remove references to those. As you can imagine, if this didn't happen, it may not be particularly practically relevant because you'd simply have reference to a concept that doesn't affect anyone, but it's kind of a cleanup type provision. So subsection A is saying repeal by operation of law those things that have been adopted under statutory authority that is now repealed. Subsection B is just saying, do a review and see if you need to clean up any references to this no longer existing concept. And then lastly, effective date, the act would take effect on passage, which may raise questions as well as to immediate effects on Anyway, that is the

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So before you scroll out for the committee, go to page four.

[Unidentified committee member]: Okay.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: The b. A lot of things in corrections, they don't go through the administrative rules procedure. They may carry out the intent of the law through their directives, policies and directives. So this language would ensure my understanding is that if there's supervisory fees that are listed in any of their policy or directives, this section pertains to that.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Yep. And that's a good point. We have the code in the green book, we have the statutes, we have law, we have rulemaking that goes through a formal rulemaking process, that's the effect of law. But agencies, the executive branch, they use directives, they use guidance, they use policies, procedures. And if we ever go down the route of diving more heavily into that, we can look at the APA just see the way that those things are thought about, but just know that there's all kinds of different avenues the executive branch uses to set up its practices. And so you have to call out if you're trying to catch every instance of a phrase or concept. Need You to make sure that you don't just limit yourself to the statutes, making things in the rules and the like. So this bill hopefully has a rule identification and review process built in for getting rid of now superfluous rules.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Mostly

[Unidentified committee member]: for the committee, and I mentioned this during my introduction, as we were putting this together, John, you identified additional fees, areas where supervisory fees might still be able to sneak in. And we decided that we probably don't have to get that specific. If you want to I can talk to it.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: I have it in front of me, Dimal. I do, too, actually. Part of this comes from my unfamiliarity with corrections policy, but as we were looking through, coming through supervisory fees, making sure that cross references are eliminated and the like, we also asked the question, are there places where supervisory fees could be hidden or you could secret these away. I am making no claim that this is what's done, but in my own, just looking through the statutes, I identified statutes where if I was trying to hide a supervisory fee, I might put them post prohibition basically. So this is not at all a statement on anyone doing this. This is truly just me looking through the statutes and saying, hey, if I wanted to hide them somewhere, where would I do this? And so I noted some places where we have larger call outs to different kinds of fees. And I just wanted to note these, we did not land on putting them in the bill. I don't think you have to do anything with these. There is no indication there's anything off with these. Don't think you need to touch these, but it's just stuff that came to mind. So the first of these is in the supervisory community sentence chapter. Under subsection two, you can see that the commissioner shall be charged with the following powers and responsibilities regarding administration of supervised community sentences to establish alternative sentencing programs for sanction treatment and control of offenders, and then the commissioner's discretion to require payment of reasonable fees for such services. There's a direct tie between the fees and the services, there's just something that stood out when coming through for places which there might be fees. Again, these are not issues, these are just thinking places. If you're trying to do a broader survey of where fees are imposed, this is what got captured in that broader, hey, look for fees throughout the DOC policies. Another place is for parole under subdivision three to establish and provide, as he or she deems necessary outpatient counseling and treatment services to persons paroled from or on conditional release from confinement within the department and to require payment of reasonable fees for such services. Again, you can see the natural tie between the fee and the service to which it's being applied. So just identifying here's a place where a fee is applied, and you could

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: think. So you're in the same section, Mary, that you were

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: It's a new section. And so this is Before we were talking about supervised community That's

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: the power of the commissioner of DOC.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Yes, but this is specifically for parole. So what you're seeing here is jumping between different chapters for the kind of sentence. So parole supervisory sentence.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: I wonder if So go to that section that deals with the parole.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: This is the parole section. Parole section. You wanna go up to the chapter?

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: No, I'm just wondering some of those no, the parole board I'm just wondering if some of those are a condition of their parole that's set by the parole board.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Yeah, and I just wanna be ultra clear, not raising this as anything that needs to be relitigated or just combing the statutes for instances of fees where there's discretion as to how they are applied.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Yeah. I would flag them because I don't know if that comes through something that the parole board requires or not. You should probably stand out. Parts and responsibility of the commissioner of DOC regarding the whole vote.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: And here we're talking about outpatient counseling and treatment, and whether there would be payment accompanying that counseling. And it does have a constraint in place, Reasonable fees.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Reasonable fees, and the other one, if the person is financially able to make payment. At

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: the risk of creating more confusion, I can jump to the other statutes that I noted, or I can just call out the list to you guys so you have an awareness of what I'm Just call out. Yes. So the first we talked about was just supervised community sentence reasonable fees for alternative sentencing programs. That's what we just talked about before. This, under parole, reasonable fees for counseling and treatment services. For offender work, there are wage reduction processes, so wage reduction for various purposes.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Is that work within the facility, or is that work that they're doing in the community? Governing offender works, so that would be work within the facility. Delivery of goods services for food communities.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Yours may be employed in the production and delivery of goods, services, and food stuffs to communities, to victims of crime, to correctional facilities, to other state agencies, and to other public or private entities authorized by the subchapter. Commissioner may establish and maintain industries, farms, and institutional work programs at appropriate correctional facilities or other locations, plus community service work. Not really. Yeah, but C D.

[Unidentified committee member]: C gets really specific about wages and setting them aside into special funds for

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: And that's where your bill kicks in about, wages?

[Unidentified committee member]: Well, there's an intersection there. Yeah.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: And just noting here, right, guidelines that the department may provide for the making of deductions from wages offenders. So this is just good faith combing up the statutes for places to be a tenant, but it is not an indication that there is something.

[Unidentified committee member]: And then there's the same for work release.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Exactly. So the next the last one I have is work release 28 VSA section seven fifty five, disposition of earnings, cost or fines imposed by the sentencing court. So just noting throughout Title 28 Department of Corrections, there's a number of places in which fines or fees are imposed often tied to a concrete thing, outpatient treatment or counseling, wage deduction within service you're providing. So just noting that there are these other places where money can change hands, basically. But the bill itself is about supervisory fees themselves and removing that up to $30 supervisory fee that they'd be charged and then wiping the slate clean. That is the bill itself, h six thirty five.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Brian?

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: This may end up being a DOC question, but at least initially it sounded like this money was being collected both for supervision, but also for victim restitution, but then it was never mentioned again. You're right. You're right. That's the and I can scroll to it on page two. Supervisory fees on line 12. Supervisory fees collected by the department shall be credited to a special supervision and victim restitution fund established and managed pursuant to standard special funds. So the bill is meant to cover the collection of these fees, even if they're for victim restitution, even though I've never heard about it again. Yep. Yep. That's right. And we did look for other callouts to this specific fund and didn't have any to strike. There are other instances of restitution rate, so title 13 imposes restitution. And you see that throughout some of the other sections. So this isn't wiping anything related to restitution. So I think something Brad Petrick would have spoken to is eliminating the supervisory fees themselves. But other restitution mechanisms exist. There could be something in the DAO rules that Okay. Questions?

[Unidentified committee member]: TFC question.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Okay. Thank you, John.

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: Sure.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So who from DOC is going to get up? Is it you, Kristen? That'll be me. Hey. Come on Come up. And you do have a document. Do that. I have questions. So welcome, Kristen. If you could

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: identify yourself for the record. Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner. Thanks for having me. We have a slide deck prepared that explains the process and our policy. At the end, I'm sure you're going to

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: ask

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: addresses what's currently on accounts, how much we're pulling in, operational expenses, etcetera. So I can either go through as is or start there, depending on your preference.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: I think go through the authority because I have some questions on the authority piece. So

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: the authority you're well aware of just cited the current statute. But below that, and I've linked if you have an electronic copy, our DOC policy that establishes the process in which supervision fees are assessed. And to note that we are only charging $15 per month, not the $30 That policy also outlines exemptions for folks, things like reach up, Social Security disability, residential treatment, if folks are in a residential treatment, incarceration, certainly, or folks on parole that have been designated by the parole board to have a life parole sentence or on administrative status.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So have you only done directives or have you also promulgated rules?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: I do believe there's a rule in place that provides us authority to use a private collection agency. The rule being you went through administrative rules process? Yes. That was many years ago, probably around 2008 at this point.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: The reason I ask this question is when we would put in commissioners shall adopt rules governing the collection, blah, blah, blah. DOC at that time was interpreting, oh, we only have to do our directives and policies. We don't have to go through the administrative rules. Yes.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: We have very few administrative rules, but there is one on the books for this.

[Unidentified committee member]: That's what I wanted to make sure.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: That said, we do not use a private collection agency, but I'll walk through the different avenues for payment.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: You don't use a private collection agency. It's stated in the law that you

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: can. Correct.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: But you don't.

[Unidentified committee member]: So

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: the process is billing happens one time per month. We utilize the state's vision financial system to do that. When they meet with their parole officer, they sign a payment contract or seek an exemption that we talked about previously. Once that happens, they send that information to the central business office, and we set up the account in

[Unidentified committee member]: the

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: system. And the $15 assessment is done once per month. The payment options that they have are the electronic payment portal that was mentioned before. That accepts debit, credit cards, and e checks. There's a lockbox system, which is essentially an off-site PO box that's administered through TD Bank. And folks can send in money or check

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: to that lockbox, and then we get

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: a file from the treasurer's office.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So which payment option did people usually use?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: I think the electronic portal has become more popular. That's fairly new for us in the last roughly three years that was established. Prior to that, it was primarily the lockbox. And the third is the tax set off program. And through that, we send a certification to the tax department roughly around October, November each year of folks that have debt ninety days in arrears and $45 or more. And then that we collect through garnishment of state tax refunds. We do attempt to notify folks two separate times via email, where they'll have the option to appeal the debt, ask us to evaluate it, etcetera. There? Okay. So that's really as simple as the process itself. Next, operational expenses are all tied to the payment options. The tax set off program, both the operational expenses there for the actual mailing that happens is around $9,000 each year. And we can go over that in later slides.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: And that's the cost to DOC, correct? 9,000 to mail?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Yes. And we do pay for those out of the supervision fee fund. And I'll explain that piece on the next slides. The lockbox were charged per receipt. So it depends on the number of individuals utilizing that service. The bank charges the treasurer's office, then we reimburse the treasurer's office, again, using the supervision fee fund. And I should state, we don't collect money for restitution. So we're purely receiving funds into the supervision fee fund at this time. Then thirdly is electronic payment portal. And similar to the lockbox, that depends on who uses it and the type of transactions. It's a 3% per credit or debit card transaction and 1.5 per e check. That's also fees that we incur and not the individual.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Can you review just because my brain got behind? Think you just said that it is not collected for prostitution. Right? Correct. Is anyone on

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: those We don't slides pledge restitution That's been many years since. And it's transferred over to the Vermont Restitution Unit, I think, is the name of that organization.

[Unidentified committee member]: I'm sorry. I did not understand the last few sentences.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: I apologize.

[Unidentified committee member]: Are doing it anymore because?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: We don't do it anymore because the Vermont restitution unit was established of, I don't know, maybe 2005 or 2006. Someone should check me on that. And so they receive all restitution and disperse where the court ordered it to. Revenue, as I said, is deposited into the Corrections Supervision Fee Fund. DOC has spending authority in this fund up to $759,000 annually. However, we can only spend what we collect. Purely operational expenses. And then the balance at the end of each year, we offset probation and parole operational costs. The table on this slide has the last six years. You'll see cash collected total for fiscal year twenty twenty five on the top rows, dollars 303,000. Our operational expenses were a little over 20,000. And then the year end balance is 283,000. That's decreased over time gradually.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So I remember DOC saying last year in this committee that it costs more to administer than what you're bringing in. And they were talking about doing the labor supervision piece. I remember that conversation last year. Do other folks remember that?

[Conor Casey, Member]: Yeah. I

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: think that

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: statement could be true if you factor in the staff costs and other residual staff costs with other departments that have a part in this, finance and management or the treasurer's office, for example. However, those are general funded positions. And so we don't count them as a cost per se in this program.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So there's no staff cost on the DOC's part?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Not out of this fund. We do have staff that are dedicated to this and other work. So there's about three, four staff total that do help in processing this, but there are also other duties that they're assigned. So it's not purely this program that those staff are utilized for.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So if they didn't have to You've got four staff that help in the processing of these. Could they if you didn't have these supervisory fees where they have to spend time, which I'm sure sometimes they can't even get the fee from a person, could that staff time be used for something more fruitful?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: 100 percent. This is a fraction of what they do day to day. Kind of the extra workload we're experiencing from the new procurement system has really added to folks' workload, and so there's plenty of opportunity to redistribute. DOC, with our eleven fifteen waiver, has some added administrative needs in the business office. So there's plenty of ways to fill in those.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Is there a way to figure out what the DOC cost is to those four staff members to administer this program? Yeah. That would be helpful. Sure.

[Unidentified committee member]: They are full time?

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Yes. They're not working full time on this. Not on this one. They're amongst other duties as well, but there's forced staff folks.

[Unidentified committee member]: That's why I asked the question whether they were full of You

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: would then need a pro rata on how much time they spend on this or that information is not useful enough.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: I mean, that was the next question. How much time are they spending of their time on this? We can do an estimate. Four people.

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: Yes.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So if it wasn't that great a time, you could have one for two. But if you've got four, is it a tenth of their time each or is it half of their time each? Can mark that up for you.

[Unidentified committee member]: I thought she started this discussion by saying the commissioner stated that the expenses are greater than what is being corrupted.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: That's what he said last year.

[Unidentified committee member]: Yeah. So we're just trying to validate that at this point.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Because he said, you can't get blood from a stone, money from a stone.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: All right. And the next slide outlines that as far as what we assess versus what we collect.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So before you go there, FY 'twenty was if you go to back, FY '20, which would have been right before COVID, the tail end of the beginning of COVID. It was over four hundred and twenty six thousand, and now we're at February. Is it because there's less folks out there being supervised? I don't think that it's less. I would say there's other financial obligations that they're carrying, And there's no punitive

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: tie to this. We don't violate folks for not paying. We don't extend their term or supervision or return them to incarceration. So there's not a lot of teeth. There is an option to limit travel permits, for example, in the field and things of that nature. But otherwise, it doesn't hinder their supervision.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: I don't know if this asks for too much speculation on your part, but if these folks who are out who might pay these fees aren't able to, I think you said there's a greater financial illness on them. What chain to take the what burden are they bearing with this before?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: That's a good question. I think it's a cumulative answer. And I think it has to do with the change of the type of population we have also. They have more needs. There may be more waivers in place because of disability and things of that nature. And that's probably the iceberg answer. There's just a lot more to the folks' needs now than there was.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So you can charge supervisory fees for folks on probation. That's under the courts. Probation's under the courts. Furlough, which is under DOC, and parole, which is under the parole. Do you have, or does Haley quickly have the breakdown? How many people are on probation, how many people are on furlough, and how many people are on parole? Yes,

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: we do have that.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Yeah, I figured.

[Emily [last name unknown], Deputy Commissioner, Buildings & General Services]: There are 4,744 people on community supervision in total. And then 3,864 are on probation. 576 on parole. And two twenty seven are on furlough.

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: What was that number again? Was that for furlough?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: $2.27 per person.

[Unidentified committee member]: $2.27.

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: The first number that you gave us before probation was what?

[Emily [last name unknown], Deputy Commissioner, Buildings & General Services]: It's the total number, which is 4,744.

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: Okay. Thank you.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So the bulk of folks the bulk of folks who are being charged supervisory fees are on probation, which they are not under control of the Commissioner of Corrections. They're under the courts. So you're supervising folks and you're paying out of DOC's budget to get money from folks who are on probation, who you have no control over and are not under the custody of the Commissioner of Corrections. And then those are under the custody of the Commissioner of Corrections. Is you've got furlough and parole folks. So that's about 800 folks total. But of those five seventy six have conditions that are set under the parole board. And if there's violations, it's the parole board that decides what to do. So just to put that in context for the committee, Joe.

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: Does this flow of money also recognize those under the purview of the courts or just the DOC?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Just

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: you. So so it's not complete.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: But if you look at the law, you can have a fee of up to $30 for persons under the supervision of DOC who are on probation, furlough, pre approved furlough, supervised community sentence, or parole. So the law says probation. So does your internal rule say that you impose supervisory fees on those folks on probation?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: No, I think the rule just is the authority to use a collection agency. Our policy includes folks on parole and probation.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So that's different than what just answered to

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: Yeah. So the probation money flows to the courts or it flows to DOC? It's the cost. Okay.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Yes. So you aren't charging supervisory fees to those folks on probation? Yes,

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: I did.

[Unidentified committee member]: If I did my math right, 47.44, which is the total, Times twelve months times $15 a month is $853,000.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: That's very close. That's just rough order math. Yep.

[Unidentified committee member]: Compared to 283,000 would imply to me that most are not able

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: to pay. Many are not, and there are many waivers in place under those categories.

[Unidentified committee member]: The waivers generally are because they can't pay? Correct. I just wanted to make sure I understood what

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Do

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: you know how the $15 was arrived at instead of the 30? Was that just an effort to get more to pay?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: I do not know. I think that was established I think it was Commissioner Tuchat at the time. But I don't know how

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: that was arrived. Dollars 15. We've been through This has been in place Yeah,

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: for a very long Yeah.

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: We've been through many, many, years.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: We've been through about eight of them. Don't know. So on the probation, parole, do you have a gut sense of which category you are receiving the fees from or which categories are the most problematic to collect the fees from? As far as

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: their supervision status, I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. Not sure if we'd be able to find it just because we'd have to manually look at each individual that's being assessed.

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: On the bottom of page six, which is outstanding debt, what are all the site?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: The acronyms, Those are all the probation and parole sites at Yeah, so Springfield, St. John's, St. Albans, etcetera. You're ahead of us here, Joe.

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: Not by I was on the same page.

[Unidentified committee member]: You guys are

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: on the same page.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Why don't you explain? Sure.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Yeah, I think the bill revision addresses outstanding debt and wiping that out. And so I just wanted to provide you both the context in relation to what we collect versus what we assess, which is this top graph, and the outstanding debt by site and by number of days in arrears with a total outstanding debt of about $3,500,000 currently.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: That's what you should be getting. Right?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Yes, ideally.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Over how long? Since FY20?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: I think this outstanding debt goes many years, many years ago.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Because, yeah, one hundred twenty days plus is like $3,000,000 or something.

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: So that would imply that although you're allowed to claw back outstanding debts over a certain amount vis a vis withholding state tax return refunds, you probably don't. Because most of these parties, some of those exclusively, they still live in Vermont. They're getting tax refunds.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Well, maybe. I mean, they could be having their wages garnished. They could be having child support We out of just don't know. They could have property tax refunds going back to pay their property tax. I mean, income tax refunds to pay their property tax. I mean, you've got there's so many variables out there.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: And I do know we're not high up in the order of priority when it comes to those for the tax offset program. I do think they prioritize child support, property tax, everything.

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: Understand.

[Unidentified committee member]: Question about the debt just real quick.

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: So as part of the bill, we're also going to recover all the debt that's currently been incurred by No.

[Unidentified committee member]: Forgive it.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: We forgive it. Forgive it. I know. You're never gonna recover that, are you?

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Never. It

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: forgives. So we have a

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: so on top of taking care

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: of the roughly $300,000 a year that we collect in fees and losing that revenue, which is fine. We're gonna have

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: to pay

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: this money to DOC.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: No. No. What it is is page three.

[Conor Casey, Member]: It just goes

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Line five. Look at the language.

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: So you just recognize it as bad debt.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Right. You forgive it. You forgive all outstanding supervisory fees.

[Unidentified committee member]: As Alice pointed out, you're not gonna get any. It's not like if it stays there tomorrow,

[Unidentified committee member]: suddenly 5,000, whatever people are going

[Unidentified committee member]: to pay.

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: Has the department ever recovered or not recovered, sorry, forgiven debt of this nature?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: The only reason we forgive debt or write it off is if someone passes away and then we write it off. We do make adjustments to accounts if someone, for example, produces documentation that they qualify to one of the exemptions. If we overcharge them, say the supervision fee wasn't stopped and they were released from probation, things of that nature. Right. Okay.

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: But that feels like general standard practice.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Yes. Account maintenance. Yeah, was gonna say, exact.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So I wanna go through your assessment. So in fiscal year twenty five, you had $40,000 assessed,

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Right. That was the total number of assessments made that year. And the value of the year is to take some

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: of them. Assessments is what the number of. Fees, Correct. I mean, for the whole year? Yeah. For the whole year, everyone knows that you're supervising. Yes. For all the months, each month that you're supervising times 12. Correct. So you have 40,000.

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: Times 15, I think. Right? Yes. That's the number of people being assessed.

[Unidentified committee member]: Yeah. Right.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: It should have come in at 600,000.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Mhmm. Back by 12, though.

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: Right? Like, it's a 15 factor. Yeah.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Yeah. So the number of the size, the size.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: That's supervised individuals assessed each month. Yep.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: That's an average number. 2,340, which you should be receiving 50,000 per month. Right. Times 12 gives you the $6.00 3. And $6.00 1.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Right? Yeah, the monthly total would vary from the annual just because we had to use an average for the number of assessments, but the 40,000 is the actual number of assessments. Just wanted to give you an idea of the monthly amount.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So the monthly amount is 50,000 that you should be receiving, which you're not. Do you know how much you're receiving per month?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: I can get that for you. We definitely have it. Do you want an average?

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Is that covering your staff? No.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Because those are general funded positions. But I say if you take that out of the equation, no.

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: Well, could we not just take the cash collected for the fiscal years and divide that by 12?

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: Which appears on the bottom of page five.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: It's

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: And that's that calculator.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: $2.83.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: 3,000.

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: Okay. He's my right. He's got. So

[Unidentified committee member]: it's past here.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: That's old.

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: How many full time positions does this require to collect these funds?

[Conor Casey, Member]: Do you

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: have an estimate

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: on this?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: We have four full time staff on this, but not exclusively. So they have other duties that also make up their debt.

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: If you were to get rid of this, would you potentially downsize that?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: I would not recommend that, only because the amount of other workload that exists. Been very recently added.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: And then I guess, if it's okay, I have a question about If we're talking about operational costs, what are those operational costs per year? I don't know if you referenced that elsewhere. Part of my brain is happy with the $300,000

[Unidentified committee member]: a year number, but part

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: of wonders what percentage you're aware.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Yeah, absolutely. In that next block over the operational expenses, the 20,000 on that top row

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Yeah.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: That is the operational expenses, but it includes the fees for those three collections types that we utilize. So that pays for the online portal, the tax offset program, and the lockbox.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: That's That 20,004

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: total program. I need to operate all of PNP.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Oh, all of PNP? I can certainly get that for you, but

[Unidentified committee member]: I was

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: wondering how much the $2.83 is of that. You know?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Or Oh, understood. Percentage of the overall.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Exactly.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Yeah. We can get that

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: So credit card fees could be in there.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: They are.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So, Will?

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: Trying to formulate a question. I actually didn't have a question right there, but I guess I'm still stuck up on the debt. I guess my question with that is how many people in total, across all these different categories, across all the different sites, how many people owe debt on that 40.5?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: A lot. Tatum is our program administrator.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: She's one of

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: the financial managers. Can you just state your name for the record and if you have an idea of the number of folks on this certification this year? What's the potential plan?

[Tatum [last name unknown], DOC Program Administrator]: I'm not sure what the number, but I might be able to get it for you. Okay.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: I do have the aging reports. Okay.

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: If not, we can follow-up, because I want a few things on that. I want to know the total number of people that this 3,500,000 figure represents. Is it 2,000? Is it more than that? It's probably close to that. Oh, it's probably close to that. Okay. That's what I would have assumed. The average because obviously I could divide that total number with 2,000, but I'm curious if we were to just go right down the middle, if you had the 2,000 people, what's that middle person? What's their outstanding debt? Because I'm curious if there's just a small group that have a lot, if it's pretty evenly spread and they all have about the same debt, I kind of want to get a sense of that before fully committing to the forgiveness, because we could figure something out. But for me, I feel like the reason I'm caught up on that is because it sounds like other people have paid these fees, and I'm not saying the fees are right. I think that we're essentially trying to just collect pennies while we're spending dollars on people that could be doing other things for DOC that make the system more efficient, things of that nature. So when I'm looking at the bigger picture, I'd get it to peanuts, but it's also something that we said this is the statute, this is what we're going to follow, and I'm having just need to process that. So I like that data more to me.

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: So did the program start in 2020? Has it been going on?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: No, it's been going on since before I started in 2004. 2008, it became a little more refined through the statute. This just represents the last

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: six years.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Because the current statute outlines up to $30 It defines the types of super herb statuses that we can charge.

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: So for how long through all those years has it had outstanding debt? All of it. All of it. Yeah.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: That's a 3.5, right? Yeah. This is cumulative since the

[Unidentified committee member]: So whole

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: we're just addressing it now from 2004. We've let this program go on in a debt situation, and we're it up now.

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: Alice? Well, I hear what you're saying, Mary. That hasn't been rectified, but I think the the program is presented as an operational surplus. But, yeah, it carries bad debt bad debt that would be recognized as bad debt by any accounting standard.

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: Usually, start a program. The money's geared to go to something to provide. And as we see quite often, no matter what the agency is, we'll say we want this done, but if they don't have the money to do it, how are we side stepping those responsibilities as well? That's all I'm saying. I'm sorry, it wasn't directed necessarily to the same.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Questions? Mark?

[Conor Casey, Member]: Big question. Does the department support this bill? You provide great information.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: I mean, my official answer is it wasn't part of our policy or budget recommendation. So I can't support it from that area. My job is to provide the facts and we're happy to follow-up with anything so you all can read. Thank you.

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: Thank you. So

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: if you look at the oops, keep that back, wherever that went. Okay. I'm looking at what parts of the state the money is really collected from, and it's Burlington. 792000. It's Burlington. The ones that are collecting the least amount is where would be, is Brattleboro? Brattleboro. And I'm assuming the 190 is Springfield. That doesn't surprise me. And then you got St. Jay. And what's any Northeast? Newport. Newport. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me there.

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: It makes

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: sense. The lower economic places are not doing

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: It's probably somewhat linear to the caseloads. The numbers Well,

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: but wait. That's on the debt. So that means that they have less debt.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: That means they're not paying.

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: No. That mean yeah. That means they're not paying. But if it's a lower number,

[Unidentified committee member]: then that

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: means less debt.

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: So that means Burlington's doing more. We're

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: Well, There are just more people eligible to

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: be Exactly, that just means they're working.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: I was thinking of the inverse, you're right.

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: Because I'd be curious, that's why

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: I want to know kind

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: of how many people are in it, kind of what the range is of different debt. For example, do half of them have less than $50 in debt? I mean, that's not worth our time to try to ask about, but are there a few people that have, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in in fees and

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: figure that out?

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: So

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So when you go through the current column there under the outstanding debt, like the first one is 4,510, is that the number of fees assessed, or is that the number of people?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: That's the amount, the monetary value.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: And then Kevin?

[Unidentified committee member]: You probably said where it came from on your revenue page. Yep. The fund of $759.04 and $73 per year.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Where did that number come from? That's our spending authority in that fund. So we're allowed typically to spend up to that much, but we only spend in this fund what we collect in the current year.

[Unidentified committee member]: Okay, that's what I heard. Or did we come up with another

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Yeah, think in prior years, farther back than 2020, we may have collected up to that much. So we did have the authority to spend that much, but it's dropped off dramatically. If it's helpful, I can provide detail from longer back.

[Unidentified committee member]: So we've just held on to a high Yeah, water

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: but we don't spend it. It just is in our authority. And

[Unidentified committee member]: if we enact this, if this becomes law, and if the cost is equivalent to about what we're actually collecting, who's gonna suffer?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Great question. It would be a general fund replacement. And I think that's really the biggest consideration. I think you might have varying opinions on using this as a tool of accountability for folks in the field, but with not much teeth, I think there's varying opinion there. I don't know if anyone necessarily suffers, but I think that's a conversation for you all, probably.

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: That's fair.

[Unidentified committee member]: The reason I asked it that way is because if we're not raising enough to cover the cost and there is no money, the money that is being spent is coming from someplace.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: It's recovering cost of this tiny program.

[Tatum [last name unknown], DOC Program Administrator]: And

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: then there's however many hundreds of thousands of dollars left over to offset PMP This program is not running at a deficit.

[Unidentified committee member]: Oh, I was hearing

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: No, they're not running at

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: a deficit. It's not our debt.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: It's the debt of the folks that we assess that aren't paying. They're not big carriers of them.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: The $4.50 is working part time.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: $3,000,000 more. No, if we were,

[Unidentified committee member]: but we're not. It's like you said, you can't give blood out of a turn.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: But to to collect it costs 20, and you're collecting 300 I'm gonna

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: journalize that one, Kevin. It's $2.80 to the black.

[Unidentified committee member]: Yes, thank you. I'm done with my question. Conor.

[Conor Casey, Member]: I wanna flip Will's question there. So given the increased workload you're seeing in other areas, would there be potential you needed to add staff on a long enough timeline? I don't think

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: we would

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: need to add. Think we would

[Conor Casey, Member]: But they're running ragged with all these? You got to do it.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: It's a very heavy administrative program for not little benefit as far as a dollar amount.

[Conor Casey, Member]: Great. Thanks.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Will, did you have something, I

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: did have one thing, but I'm sorry. I spilled on Kevin's desk.

[Conor Casey, Member]: I'll

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: come back to you. I must be back.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Yeah, think I did take

[Unidentified committee member]: a shower this

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: morning.

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: It's

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: kind

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: of that overlapping of two or two.

[Unidentified committee member]: Just for context and for the record, what's the total budget for DOC?

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Right around $230,000,000

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: Thank you. So

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: the little budget committee that's working, this is a prime example that we keep a program that is so minuscule in tying up staff. It's not all day for all of them, but it's pulling them away from some other parts of DOC that may need their attention more than this. So that's the balance for you five.

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: You pointed to him. Right?

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: And Joe's on there because he's a good bean counter and knows numbers. It depends on Joe, and I depend on Joe to cut right straight through because you you get there quick. And Kevin's on there because Kevin's always asking questions about budgeting and how it works.

[Unidentified committee member]: And then you find out there to

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: understand the budgeting. Well, Mary's been on approves. Mary's been on appropes, so she understands the appropriations process. And Brian and Conor It

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: does look good. And I think beyond this, we don't

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: need to have witnesses here. There's a philosophical debate regarding the program, which I'm not saying that needs to should not occur at this time, but there certainly is one. It'd be a lot easier if the thing was net zero or deficit. Right. So they wouldn't lie.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: But of the 283,000 that you've collected so far in s y and that you collected in fiscal year twenty five, how much of that would be calculated to go towards those four staff folks for their time? And how much of that is also going towards covering the expenses in terms of paying the interest of people who are doing a debit card or credit card or a check or paying for the electronic transfer, that type of thing. What's our real net? That's a gross number there, $2.83.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: The $2.83 is the real net after we paid operationally. But it doesn't contemplate the staff because those are general funded positions. So that's why it's not listed here as an expense of the purse.

[Unidentified committee member]: And that's why we're trying to get a handle on what the real cost is. Yeah. Right. But also, because I've heard conflicting things. I thought we stated that the expenses exceeded the other was collected, but now I'm Yeah, hearing that

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: they do if you fold in the staff expenses.

[Unidentified committee member]: No, no, that's the

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: way you can do it. You can't

[Unidentified committee member]: compare part of the cost to the whole intake Even though paid out with general funds,

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: it's still a cost that's coming some way. So yes, it has to be taken into account.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: But then you'd free up general fund dollars to be used someplace else.

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: I could too, just for the record before we close this one up, at the bottom of page six where it talks about outstanding debt, whether we should or not is a separate question. I strongly suspect we could recover the least plurality of it vis a vis withholdings on state tax returns. You're not going to recover. And maybe that's not an avenue that people want to pursue, but I would strongly, there's an opportunity there. If you recovered 25%, it's a million bucks. Orange is just shy of $900.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Question is, can you not get it?

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: Oh, I Even if you did it dollar for dollar, forgiveness, and, you know, something like that. I mean Yeah.

[Unidentified committee member]: And I don't there's ways

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: to come up. That's why we

[Unidentified committee member]: need that. Wanna true up all

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: of this. But it's pretty simple. If you have outstanding debt to the state, you are not that that gets netted out of a out of a tax refund.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Yep.

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: So we That's gonna we're not supposed to be connected to do that.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: We're we have folks out in the hallway who are waiting to come in on age 50. Commissioner of Housing and Community Affairs and commissioner or deputy commissioner of BGS. So where are we here on this bill, folks?

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: We wanna move forward.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: You wanna move forward with us?

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Yep. Yeah.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: In what direction? Yeah.

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: I want to move forward to the information they provide us

[Unidentified committee member]: so we can

[Unidentified committee member]: get a better picture.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Yep. We can get you the staff cost, operational cost. We'll outline what fund they're each paid out, just so you're all really clear on that, And then the total number of folks that we send to the tax department. I

[Unidentified committee member]: don't know how we necessarily do this. And there's definitely gonna be different moral decisions on whether or not we should on the 3,500,000.0. But is is it a tax department thing to come in and say why not? I don't know if he makes that decision. Is it not being By the way, we can make that obviously we all know this. We can make the decision that we're just gonna write off. That's our judge, our values are gonna say that, that's fine. I just wanna know what the process is and why it hasn't. You know what I mean? Even if we decide that we're gonna not do, I wanna know why it What's the thinking is that we had, if that makes sense.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Yeah. Would it help if I also provided the amount we collect through each avenue so you can see we get more from tax offset versus the lockbox. I don't know if that information would be helpful.

[Unidentified committee member]: Not honestly to me, but I just want to know, and again, I may be very willing to write it off. Set that issue aside. I want to know through whoever it is, the tax department, whoever makes the spotlight, why it hasn't been collected? What mechanisms have made it so they haven't been collected? You said before, maybe it's because they're garnishing child support first and there's really no money left and there's statutory stuff. I don't know the answer to that. I just want to know so I can better understand the concept of how we got there.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: But where would we get that information?

[Conor Casey, Member]: Do you

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: see that or do we have to go through the tax department? Because that's something out of

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: our Probably guess the tax department or do we have any of

[Tatum [last name unknown], DOC Program Administrator]: Well, I can just speak to what we do as it

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: picks us.

[Tatum [last name unknown], DOC Program Administrator]: So every year when we run the mass mail out list, which gives us all the names of individuals that owe us more than $45 I have to go through the list and remove size supervised individuals that have not provided us with a valid date of birth or a valid social security number, because obviously we can't pull their taxes if we don't have that information. Also, remove anyone that's listed as homeless or incarcerated because we're not going to garnish their taxes. They probably will not file for taxes. There's a lot of different variables that would remove someone, so their debt would remain on the books, But we would not be able to get that money back through tax offset. But there's also a lot of letters that we send out that are returned to us because SIs are moving constantly. If we don't have a valid address on hand, the letter just gets returned back to us. So we make two attempts. And if we get the letter back the second time, there's really no lag that we have to stand on and their debt will just remain on

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: the list.

[Unidentified committee member]: That's good enough answer. I appreciate it. Perfect sense.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So if you could come back with all those little nuances of information and then the setup with Tate, the one you can come back, can you do it by next week? Did you do it by the end of this week? Today's Wednesday. Maybe. Maybe.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: That's enough.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: We'll for the end of this week, and then I'll connect with Tate. I

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: know. I know. But why don't you work with Tate and figure out the time frame?

[Unidentified committee member]: Otherwise, we'll get distracted.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: That's fair. Yeah. We'll have to start all over.

[Unidentified committee member]: Yeah. We'll you the times. Yeah.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Well, it's fresh in your mind.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Yeah. Okay. So

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Thank you very

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: we've some folks in the hallway waiting to talk about the governor's executive order on the inventory. Yep. Thanks

[Unidentified committee member]: for removing the old time too.

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: He will say this to everything, Don.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: What do

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: you mean?

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: I think it's in fact,

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: you were probably weren't just

[Unidentified committee member]: That's where he felt, but we're not going for the back of knowledge. I

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: mean

[Unidentified committee member]: To the degree that it's unfair

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Here's one for everyone.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: Madam Chair, I see you have the handout. Would you like me to pull it up on my computer or is the physical copy?

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Some folks work electronically and some folks work the heartbeat. It doesn't matter. Whichever way you want to do on each patient.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: It's a reading test, Kevin.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So what we're looking at, folks, we're on each trying to figure out getting an inventory, number one, BGS, of state owned buildings as well as state owned land. We've taken out the lease buildings.

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: Do you make magnifying glasses? Yeah.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: I don't know.

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: Since we do kill you.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: And then the thought also was the governor had an executive order back in the fall to do exactly what we had originally wanted age 50 to do, that there would be an inventory of state owned buildings and land possibly that might be available for housing and to do that analysis. And we really didn't get to that point in the version as it passed the House or the Senate. We're now dealing with the same bill as it came out from the Senate. And the thinking is that we would incorporate the thinking behind the governor's executive order language. So that leads to you folks in terms of what data did you get and how are you analyzing it, which will help us in language. Sure. So commissioner Farrell, if you could identify yourself for the record.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: Thank you, madam chair. For the record, Alex Farrell, commissioner of the Department of Housing and Community Development. And it's really the latter part that I'm able to fill you all in on just what I've been doing since the executive order in coordination with the Agency of Transportation, Buildings General Services, and then the Agency of Natural Resources, three of the larger landholders. I'm going to try to get my screen up here. You all should have been handed a packet that looks like this. That's just a PDF. It's a memo that outlines the process, what's been done so far to collect the data. The data collection, I'll say was the boring part because it's the analysis of Alice. Hate my own voice. That's terrible.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So when was this done? When was the date this was done?

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: December 1 is when all of the data was reported to me. And essentially since then, it's been an iterative process of examining the data and trying to narrow down to what's a top 10 that we want to have more in-depth discussions with the agencies or departments that have.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So when was this whole document done that you just handed out, December 1? Or was it done the past few weeks or two?

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: This document was prepared over the weekend without a feeling I'd be asked.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Okay. That's what I'm trying to get at.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: This document is really just a summary of what's been done.

[Conor Casey, Member]: It's

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Okay. You heard her. We got your attention.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: No, certainly. I mean, we wanted to be able to answer questions and we've been increasingly hearing, I think I got it this time, questions about where we're at in the process, what it could look like. So the goal of this brief memo is just to summarize where we've been and then what the data looks like that we've got and where we're headed. So I'll walk through it. So it sounds like you all have seen 4.1, section 4.1 of executive order six-twenty five. So I won't summarize that so you understand what happened to the data gathering process. To assist the agencies and departments in focusing their data collection, I laid out in collaboration with some members of the team a few criteria just so that they could focus in while still casting a very wide net. You'll see

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: Who are the members of the team?

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: The administration.

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: Well, who in the administration are part of it?

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: There isn't an official team. Sorry. I was using that in broad terms. So I'm the lead on this. I consulted with secretary Kerley, deputy secretary Brooks, members of the housing leadership team, which includes Secretary Flynn of A. T, Secretary Samuelson of A. H. S. Not everybody on the housing leadership team contributed to this. This is largely an ACCD set of criteria that we developed. I wouldn't put too much focus on team. So the criteria that I laid out was parcels half an acre and larger. The reason I set that small parcel size is to try to capture as much AOT property as possible. We really knew that AOT has a lot of property out there. Some of it has federal entanglements because it could have been part of a certain project or some other effort that could complicate the eventual use of that. We wanted to get the universe, wanted to get the known universe of what these properties are. So half an acre and larger. I asked for parcels without a conservation easement. There still may be other types of easements, use easements on these. But in the list that I've provided, generally folks were able to identify what that constraint was, be it federal or some other local use. And then we just sought, are there infrastructure such as water systems could be a municipal water system, as you can see here, municipal water, wastewater or or their soil so that it could feasibly be served by an on-site septic system. And then the fourth of these were is it is it reachable? Is it a parcel that you could get to an existing road? The reason for that is Forest Parks and Rec owns a substantial amount of property. Now, again, much of that would be under a conservation easement, Forest Parks and Rec, the agency of natural resources, but not all of it. And so if we're thinking in the context of building new housing, I'm also trying to understand what the legislature has done in the past few years trying to build dents and near our centers. So keeping it on or within a quarter mile of a road was at least a start. So again, trying to cast a very wide net. There's a substantial amount of context that's needed to understand the agency transportation data. So that's what's all laid out here. AOT has a lot of land holdings, and many of these parcels are very small. And so over the many, many, many decades that they've acquired lands for various purposes, they show up in a lot of grant lists. And sometimes they have a very clear understanding of their ownership role in that parcel. In other cases, I'm told it's unclear that whether it's an error in the grand list, whether they once owned it but no longer do. And so what's laid out here is just sort of an explanation of the high, medium, low confidence levels of AOT's ownership. Aside from that, there's also an explanation of how lands are categorized. There's one category that I'm going to bring your attention to near the top of page two here, this missing geometry. What that means is there's a span number. It's listed that they're an owner, but they can't find parcel boundaries on our parcel maps that we use as a state. It's unclear where that parcel is. So again, most of these fall into that low ownership confidence category, but they didn't want to not list it. So they listed it and just said, look, here's the challenge with us identifying exactly what this is. There's missing geometry. Then the other two categories in that as far as broadly categorizing land is, are there structures present or is it vacant land? And so those are sort of the broad buckets that the AOT land is in. So on the screen here, can see there were 26 parcels that were in the low ownership confidence. I did a fair amount of just searching for some of these parcels and trying to understand what this could mean. Seeing that it really did make any analysis pretty ambiguous, I decided to exclude those from sort of further further discovery, or at least set them aside for now knowing that we can always we've got them listed. We can always go back and investigate further later. Same thing with missing geometry. I tried to track down a number of these. It sounds like this is something that an AOT geospatial analyst is gonna have to go back and look at in more depth. It's not something that for sort of a get a big win analysis. These aren't ones to spend under dealing. So those 36 were set aside. The 26 low confidence and 36 missing geometry, there's lot of overlap there. So what we're left with of the original 120 parcels is a list of 78 parcels, one of which falls under ANR's ownership, 70 of which fall under AOT ownership, seven of which fell under BGS ownership. And you can see on the screen here the rough size breakout. So four of them being very large parcels and then all the way down to we've got 22 still listed in these where it's less than an acre.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So how many of those have a building on them? I

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: I didn't give that breakout. Just wonder

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: how many because particularly looking at AOT, are those also district garages, salt sheds? For

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: the most part, those were excluded, but not in every case. And I'll give you an example. A parcel listed in here is Paint Turnpike. There's not a garage there now, but there is a plant garage. And so between the time that they reported it and today, they've advanced plans for a district garage on that parcel.

[Unidentified committee member]: I just

[Unidentified committee member]: wanna alert you that the document we have on our website looks to be

[Unidentified committee member]: an older version. You may

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Looks to be what?

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: An older version. So Yeah.

[Unidentified committee member]: I just encourage you to send that version to tape.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Oh, great.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Different. That's what I was trying to follow on. It looks a little different.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: Okay, good to know. Thank you.

[Unidentified committee member]: It's not up by much, but the two on BGS is not listed on the piece that you had. Okay. The two left center.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: See. Okay. Let me make sure that the upgraded copy gets. This is another view of the same data, but just giving you all a sense of the scope here. How many total acres are included in these 78 parcels? And then just a rough geographic distribution. Some of this probably isn't surprising based on just the concentration of where we know we hold lands, but AOT obviously has a broader distribution just because of various projects or parcels they could have for

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: a number of

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: reasons. So our next steps. So my focus at this point is to narrow this down to five to 10 parcels that, again, at a very superficial level, have the most promise for a project of some scope, some scale here that could entice municipality and or developer to try to take on a project. Once we identify those top five to 10 parcels, we will engage in more in-depth conversations with the departments and agencies. Again, at DHCV, we don't have a ton of information aside from what's been provided here about these parcels. The agencies really know a lot about the history of these, what some of the constraints are. And so this first level is just to try to narrow it down so that we can really focus our efforts. And what's gonna be important here is finding parcels that give us a test case so we can see how do these conversations go? What is it like when we engage with the municipality to see what their interests might be? And then to better understand what our

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: It's really

[Unidentified committee member]: like That was a plenary. Really?

[Emily [last name unknown], Deputy Commissioner, Buildings & General Services]: Yeah. It's like, hey, it looks like it's coming back.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Did it look like a private plane or military? Sounded almost like a

[Conor Casey, Member]: military plane. They get pretty low from Berlin Airport sometimes since you

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Do they? Yeah. That's true.

[Unidentified committee member]: It's on

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: a weekend here.

[Conor Casey, Member]: Missed the dome. Troy.

[Unidentified committee member]: How did you get to five to ten? Is that just what feels manageable? And is there any geographical equity

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: in identifying these parcels. I appreciate that. That really is just a capacity constraint. You're basically looking at the team that's doing this. And so I wanted to be able to, like I said, just kind of hone in. And if it turns out that this more in-depth analysis is easier, we can expand to be 30 or 40.

[Unidentified committee member]: So you didn't put any widespread across the state. You're just looking at the five to 10 that rise to the top?

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: No judgment. I'm just curious. No, I would say that there is We have a goal of trying to seek some geographic distribution. Another lens that I'll add that I'm viewing this through is where do we know we have low vacancy rates? And so it makes sense for us to focus. So those are a couple of lenses we looked at, geographic distribution and low vacancy rates.

[Unidentified committee member]: So what I heard you say is this is just a start. You said, let

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: me at least try

[Unidentified committee member]: to find five to 10. Yeah, that's Thank

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: you.

[Conor Casey, Member]: I'm just

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: reading the language that we're working on just to try to track. Go ahead, Conor.

[Conor Casey, Member]: Yeah, that makes sense to me, Alex. Would there be some thought though, like with the bigger list, maybe send it to all the towns, though? Because you're Montpelier like. There was a quarter acre. We needed a food shelf this last winter. And maybe that would just get the juices flowing. Like, we could work with the state on this.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: It's not something we've done, but it's a good idea.

[Conor Casey, Member]: Yeah. I'm just thinking like, yeah, get the ball rolling with some stuff.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: Know what I think, interested to get your input, my thought would be to maybe only do that for the partials that we have a high confidence in ownership so that we don't create confusion. Yeah. So following a more in-depth analysis with agencies, if we feel like there's a path forward that's manageable, the the next internal step, I say internal, you hear why in a second here, would be reaching out to municipalities to understand what local stakeholders may feel about that. The goal of all of this is to have a robust and full sense of what what the real opportunity is with a parcel. Windsor is one that's talked about so often. So I'll just say Windsor or the land that was adjacent to the Job Corps land in Virginia. There's no reason for me to know whether or not there's even a potential on those lands right now. But if, for example, those are some other parcels seem like there aren't too many impediments, seems like the municipality would be okay with it, then that gives us a nice tight package for me to bring to the governor and to you all to discuss an actual path forward.

[Unidentified committee member]: Examples of why that is important. We had the youth center and the local community is like, nope, put a lot of time and energy into that. We had the women's facility and the local community is like, nope, we're not gonna do that. So you kind of have to have that local community. So I appreciate that you're considering that.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: Thank you.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So when do you anticipate all of this to be completed? Because the executive order said by December 1, each of the state agencies and departments would submit to BGS and you complete inventory of un or underutilized properties. In the assessment of multifamily housing development feasibility and infrastructure capacity, and make recommendations for disposal or long term lease arrangements to meet the state's housing unit generation goals. So how far along are you in achieving these bullets? Sure.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: I'd say we're in bullet number two.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: And did you receive all the information by December 1?

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: I did. I'll say because they're part of my department and I'm proud of them. Even even State Historic Preservation Office reported that they looked at all their lands. We sat down and looked at all of them. Too many historic constraints. They're historic sites. Exactly. But they gave it a good effort.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So this is where we're at. Are you done with your testimony?

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: I am. Thank you, Madam Chair.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So this is where we're at for language right now. In terms of, there would be an inventory. In each inventory that the head of the agency does, the head of the agency would identify whether any of their property may be underutilized and may be suitable for conversion into housing, which may include multifamily housing development, housing infill, mobile home park, shelter construction, or rehab. And we're looking at this to occur over the next five years. That's where we're at right now in terms of language. Is that doable? And you're I mean, we haven't specified where this information would go. It'd be basically just with BGS, but somebody has to do the analysis, the assessment. And not did you find that the head of the agencies that's or departments that submitted this inventory to you? Did you find that that they could weigh in and say this would be appropriate for housing, would be suitable, or they just gave you the inventory? Who would have the expertise to determine if that property would be suitable for a house?

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: I think my department would be the nearest to having the expertise, you know, because we come the closest to actual development happening. We don't do any development. We occasionally fund it. But we, as far as in the administration, probably my team would be the one that would come closest to having the expertise. The agencies and departments have tremendous understanding of at least the high level parcels. And so they're able to give quite a bit of input as to what the characteristics are of these parcels. I wouldn't want to put it on my colleagues and other agencies and departments to know what that would translate to the housing development. I I'd probably be better equipped than they would.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So the agency would know if there's water and sewer there? Yeah. That's right. But they wouldn't know what the capacity would be of that infrastructure.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: Right. Which is why we tried to start by setting some broad criteria so they understood what we would look for, things like suitable soils for septic or water and sewer.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Mark?

[Unidentified committee member]: I'll have the committee check me if this doesn't feel accurate to them. But just this presentation in and of itself, and this is an incomplete report, you're talking about five to 10 parcels that rose to the top of all the lenses that you

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: used to put this through.

[Unidentified committee member]: Just hearing you in this committee talk about that, even though it's an incomplete process, as I compare this testimony to the intent of age 50, this almost feels like a pilot of of what this could look like over the next five years. And I only see this as once you've done this completely and once you've done it once, twice, three times, our bill contemplates doing this for five years and then sunsetting. And I'm already impressed at the potential for continued conversation based off a very minimal summary of what you've done over the weekend.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: The effort was longer than

[Unidentified committee member]: the week. No, get it. I get it.

[Unidentified committee member]: I get it. But what I'm saying is, if you knew that this was happening on a biennial basis, right?

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Well, no. The the space But the report? Was done at the beginning of the biennium. This, I don't think we indicated in the language when it would be

[Unidentified committee member]: Let me sort of wind down to my ultimate question. The executive order left out the legislature as far as getting this report. So we inserted it back into age 50. And I'll just say it frankly, we're bringing back language into age 50 that was there at the start that will then take it into an executive order. Do you see any reason why you would not want to be part of a legislative briefing on this sort of report for the next five years?

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: Sure. Mean, what I'd certainly offer is, I think maybe to one of the points you're making, this this list of of parcels that was included in the inventory based in the criteria probably won't change from year to year. So what we would be doing from here on out is continuing to analyze and just taking that process further and further as we have capacity and to come back to you all annually and just report on where we're at in this process is something that I can certainly do. I'd be willing to do that formally or informally.

[Conor Casey, Member]: Yeah, I think that's what we're looking for. Yeah, I agree. This was really helpful. I know I threw a few jabs on this one, Alex. No, this is a great thing. I think we can take back to our communities and brainstorm. I agree what you did over the weekend or longer. Was really helpful. Yeah, it's good.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: I agree

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: with you.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: I'm just trying to think how we go forward with the language. I think it might be worthwhile for our draftsperson to hear this testimony by you two and of wordsmith a little bit.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Can I

[Unidentified committee member]: go You've off that done a lot of analysis here? In hindsight, is there information you wish you had asked when you were gathering the information by 12/01/2025?

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: No, because it's easy for me to get additional information.

[Unidentified committee member]: You know what? I know you can, but you said, in terms of wish I'd asked

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: It's not on the list.

[Unidentified committee member]: Something that popped into your head that said, Hey, this is something I wish I knew about all of these parsets.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: That's a good question. I might have been more explicit to say, is there an intended use? Because I think in really good faith, everyone just reported parcels and then made a note, said, boy, but we'd really like to use this for the purpose we already have planned for and here's what that purpose is. And so I think everybody offered that up, but I, as a good colleague, probably should have said, you can tell me if you already have a plan for this. Payton Turnpike, AOT should that should have been a factor in here that they say there's a project plan for this site. And

[Unidentified committee member]: I guess part of the reason I'm that's great. There's some pieces of property in Ludlow. Now the state owns because they got flooded out and the state's taken that land off of their These homeowners land are in their hands. That's important information. Oh, who

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: in the state owns it? Do you know?

[Unidentified committee member]: That's generic. I know that. That's all I know. It's no longer on our grant list.

[Unidentified committee member]: And to your point, just because the state owns it, but it's not usable for anything because-

[Unidentified committee member]: Well, in this case, it's probably not usable unless you jack everything up six feet so that if it gets flooded against.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Would that be part of those non I mean, where would something like that land?

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: I think there's a decent chance that may not have even been reported in this.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: I wonder if it's all part of the FEMA conversation.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: Also very likely. That's very likely That's where

[Conor Casey, Member]: probably it. That limits what you can do.

[Unidentified committee member]: So that's great. If you had been explicit in saying, what was the initial intent of buying this raw land, that would be helpful information. You've probably got something. Because this is fabulous work, right?

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: You've done a

[Unidentified committee member]: Your has done a great job.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: Yeah, I mean, BGS, AOT and ANR really serve the credit. And we're blessed at the state of Vermont to have a strong BCGI team, so our mapping capabilities are great. When I go to look at one of these, I can see the exact partial boundaries. It's tremendous. And I can overlay certain constraints. My team over the years has tried to overlay in these maps the best data that we have about where public water and wastewater systems are, where floodplains are, where wetlands are. And so I get to take all that into account when I look at a parcel to analyze it. That's really tremendous.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: I'm just wondering how to go forward with the bill. That's what I'm trying to put together here in my brain. That's not working.

[Conor Casey, Member]: I don't feel like the draft's too bad, but we have. It's great.

[Unidentified committee member]: If we keep fine tuning this for four years or five years, we're just gonna get smarter and smarter and that's the purpose, right?

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Well, I don't know if inception two of the bill, it really tracks what we're saying. It's what I keep thinking. I understand the inventory, the BGS, and that you collect the data on a yearly basis, but you report to us the beginning of the biennial. That I get. But in terms of yes. I know you did. But we've also gone into section two, which is the session law, which is the five year program, the five year thought. And I just don't know if the language that's there achieves what you have done for the executive order because we wanted to hear the report back from the executive order, and this is the report back. So the way the language is in section two, if somebody has that language that they can give, Alex would be very helpful.

[Emily [last name unknown], Deputy Commissioner, Buildings & General Services]: So you can read it.

[Unidentified committee member]: But Tara, I got it here if you want to read it.

[Conor Casey, Member]: It's on

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: page two, line 13. Where did get it now? Page two, line 13, on down. This is our five year thing. I'll let you read it and think it through. We're thinking of deleting the beginning of that last sentence on line 19 where it says when requested by. We wanna delete that last complete sentence.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: Or and well, maybe rather than me speculate, maybe explain functionally what you'd be trying to achieve with that. Would it be to make it so it's just an ongoing inventory that this is built and now we just maintain?

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: For five years.

[Unidentified committee member]: For five years. And as you said, it probably won't change, but it's also, as you just did, you reached out to the agency heads, they gave you the information. So in our minds, at least my mind, when you do it next year, for example, they already have it, they might have a new property, they might not, they might have

[Unidentified committee member]: no use, the tick comes off.

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: But

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: this goes to BGS. I know. Not him. The language here goes to BGS.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: Well, I'll offer, Madam Chair, that again, probably best to put the onus on me to be the one to do the outreach. I'm fine with that and for me to collect this from the agency heads. And given that I now am maintaining this list, again, it's easy enough if folks report to me for me to just make changes as they occur, especially because, to your point, I don't see that it would change much.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So what the language is saying, for the next five years, whenever an a head of an agency submits their inventory to BGS, it will be to BGS. The head of that agency needs to identify whether the property is underutilized and is suitable for conversion into house, can the head of an agency do that? No. That's why

[Unidentified committee member]: I asked her to say it may be underutilized and suitable. The head of the agency is not

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: the one that can do that. It would be ACCD.

[Conor Casey, Member]: Yeah. We need to bring ACCD in Did

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: you see that, Kevin? The way it's drafted, the head of the agency that submits the inventory needs to determine if it's

[Unidentified committee member]: keeping that up as

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: if it's underutilized and suitable. But they don't have the tools to do that is Alice.

[Unidentified committee member]: Right. That's true. I said all these agencies, they say, this may be unusable or underutilized, and it may be convertible, but somebody else has gotta make that determination. That's exactly why I'm saying, to add the words maybe, then opens it up to everybody saying, I don't know, but this looks like it's underutilized, and it might be good for housing.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: You've got to be in the loop Right? Getting

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: That's right. And as far as how it's framed, I'd be happy to talk to my colleagues at really the three agencies that primary landholders here to see how we can frame this and draft this. I think suit the needs that you all are seeking as well as functionally how we do about it. So if that would make the committee's life easier.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: I like that idea. So is it your department specifically that should be in this loop?

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: It's fine to say my department.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: ACCD?

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: Either is fine. It'll be me. So DHC is fine.

[Unidentified committee member]: You are the team. This is the farm.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: Well, that's I am the one that did it.

[Unidentified committee member]: That's good.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Is there another

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: That's good.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Do you anticipate

[Unidentified committee member]: getting the missing geometry or seeing

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: a rise in confidence on some level of confidence?

[Unidentified committee member]: Is that part of this? Figure that out and

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: let's talk about it again next year.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: The way it was left was further analysis can be done to get more info on this. So my interest would be if any of these I'm picturing this I'm being idealistic here, but I'll be idealistic for a moment. I'm gonna be able to check off the easier wins, and as I go down the list, That's few years from right. And maybe we get to these lower confidence as we, the lower proofs can take and get to these lower confidence missing geometry, and then the geospatial analyst dive in and they give more details on what those are. The sense I got, I'll just offer this, the sense I got is that BCGI folks are often trying to do that cleanup anyway. It might not be a concerted effort specifically. It behooves them to have cleaner data.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So the way that this executive order worked, each all the state agencies or departments submitted their inventory to BGS. Or did they submit some to BGS and some to you folks? Because the way it's written is each state agency and department owning property shall submit to BGS and Department of House Development. So which way did they do it?

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: It was submitted to me since I set the criteria, we just kept BGS on the loop so that they saw the inventory because we knew functionally I'd be the one performing the analysis.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So for the five year, this is for the committee. For the five year, we have the inventory right now going to BGS, the way it's drafted. Do we have it going to BGS and then forward it to Department of Housing Community Development? Or does it go directly to Housing Community Development? It's a policy decision for the committee.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Do you guys have bids?

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Emily, so if you could identify yourself for the record.

[Emily [last name unknown], Deputy Commissioner, Buildings & General Services]: Sure. Emily, deputy commissioner at Buildings and General Services for the record. So I did just want to share, as an option of testimony on age 50 last year, we did update our procedures with respect to the space book. And that is something we do every year. Statute says biannual, but we do it every year because that's how we key off our billing for fee for space, pilot payments, etcetera. So this annual process that we do to collect information to form an inventory on an annual basis from agencies and departments. And we did this year expand it because we had been doing only BGS inventory. So we did expand it to cover other agencies and departments, and we do break out land holdings and we do identify where there is vacant space. Some of that can be tricky, at least for me to understand, because when I look at it, might be some square footage within an office building that is vacant but it's not a vacant building. So that is an annual process. We are trying to capture that vacant space, but the step it doesn't take is that potential suitability for housing, like that analysis isn't included in here, nor does it include whether the agency or department might want to dispose of the property. So that's the step where our colleagues at DHCD really have the expertise. And so my sense is that it might be appropriate for DHCD to be providing that annual update directly and perhaps require of landholding agencies and departments that we update DHCE if we have any additional new

[Tatum [last name unknown], DOC Program Administrator]: information regarding

[Emily [last name unknown], Deputy Commissioner, Buildings & General Services]: the suitability of a property for housing. Because again, the universe is pretty well known at this point, but if something changes, that's where we would want to update the HCV because it might impact their analysis.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: And we'd be I'd be supportive of it coming directly to us rather than having to go to BGS first and forward to us. And I'd point that.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Is BGS supportive of that, that that particular inventory would go directly?

[Emily [last name unknown], Deputy Commissioner, Buildings & General Services]: I would think if it's limited not the information we need for the space book but just the inventory of parcels that are suitable for housing, that piece. And again, work very closely with DHCD and feel comfortable that we would collaborate and be kept in the loop on that. And again, we are one of the submitting departments for this and I do need to take ownership. Commissioner Farrell said everyone submitted by December 1 and I think I was five days late.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: So I may need to

[Unidentified committee member]: That may be forgiven.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: But this is where I get hung up. In that, you testified that the agency, these head of the agencies and departments, they don't know if that parcel will be suitable for housing or development. So if we limit that the inventory that they give you is what they perceive to be suitable for housing, we're not getting them what we want. That's my stumbling part.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: It could be modified to say suitable based on criteria supplied by commissioner of housing, which is functionally how it worked in this process.

[Emily [last name unknown], Deputy Commissioner, Buildings & General Services]: As a submitting entity for the executive order information, Commissioner Farrell shared the criteria that he explained. And that was easy because it was so broad and standardized. He could apply that. So basically I worked with Joe Asia and Eric Pembroke. We went through his Facebook and we tried to identify what parcels are we aware of that seemed to fit this criteria. And so that's what we submitted and that was our process. But we are not housing development experts beyond those clearly defined criteria that the commissioner was asking for. We wouldn't know on our own whether a vacant parcel is suitable or viable for development of housing. James?

[Unidentified committee member]: My thing is obviously we have to have our wording correctly to make sure that the inventory is done, but I don't think that's the hard part in the sense of our work is that because I think that they've done this part and I think they can do it. The harder part is we're getting into now, which is the analysis. And I think that's where my personal opinion is where we need to start looking and making sure our language is right, because we want the analysis and we can have a list and all of us together, 11, you know, people putting our heads together or anybody else, we look at the book without that analysis of whether or not this is even feasible for things that we want to use it for, AKA housing of some sort. That's the important part, but I want to make sure it's in there or really just add another book. Not that the book's not cool, it's based on schools, but it doesn't provide us useful information. I could read that all day long and be like, can I put an apartment here? So the analysis part is the part that I'm most concerned that we get right. Sorry.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So, picking up on that, so if we had the inventory from the head of agencies going to you, and we laid out the criteria, say the four bullets that you laid out to give them some parameter. It goes to you. And then if we had language that it's your department would then provide to the legislature an assessment of those properties that would be suitable for housing.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: I think you got it, Chair. And I what's

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: And a recommendation, if you want that. That's what I'm kinda looking at is to meld these two sentences.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: Yeah. To to give a I wanna offer a I don't wanna offer too rosy a picture of my capabilities.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Right.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: To to produce a list based on criteria and give you all the details that I have about that, that is something I can absolutely do. As far as the more in-depth analysis, I

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: can't right.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: I can't promise I could do it for all of the parcels listed. I I I could probably get through, I don't know, if you all want to choose or say that parcels most promising I'm sure you all can wordsmith better than I can

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: because we're Priority.

[Unidentified committee member]: You do tie. Consultant.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: No. Talk to John.

[Unidentified committee member]: John. John. Right.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: Yeah.

[Unidentified committee member]: Leave some discretion in there for like, this is what

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: I'm most excited about this year. I

[Conor Casey, Member]: mean, good thing about it being annually is we'll have a conversation like this every year, right? We can zero in on some of this stuff, which is important.

[Unidentified committee member]: I'm chomping at the bit. I want to get to the bottom line. Out of all of this work, did you find one or two that might be

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: possibly suitable?

[Unidentified committee member]: That's next week.

[Unidentified committee member]: Come on now, you got it here. You got it.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: I have thoughts if I look at parcels on a piece of paper, but without having talked to my colleagues, I don't want to make any assumptions because there may be a use that would negate all of my underlying assumptions.

[Unidentified committee member]: Well, the reason I asked the question though is if you looked at all of this, the work you've done and said none of them, in my opinion, look like they're possibly suitable, then that's important because the list isn't gonna change that much and to just generate a report every year and

[Unidentified committee member]: That's what was my point. Right.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: I'd be willing to bet that there are opportunities.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So those are highlighted here in yellow. Were they the ones that were seen as predominantly

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: Thank you. I appreciate that. Were in our first pass. As I say, my looking at a piece of paper, those are the first ones that we identified for. Let's make a list of those to have a deeper conversation with. I think these all ended up being AOT parcels. They were. Those aren't the only parcels that will end up on that list, but we did that. So the point I wanted to make of that is that we did start an effort early on to say, what's our list of 10 to 15? It may may be a list of 20, but again, I want I want to focus. If there's data that you all would want to see on here and if it's easy enough for me to obtain, I can try to get it. But I can't make any promises of another agency staff if it takes a tremendous amount of work to take it up.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So what are you anticipating for your time frame right now to finish up the information and come in back to the administration with some recommendations on the executive order?

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: Sure. I my hope is to start in-depth conversations with agencies next month. Sorry. We're I'm assuming it's February. By March, I wanna have those more in-depth conversations whether there's a realistic possibility of advancing some of these. My goal would be once we're past town meeting day, then April, May isn't a bad time to be talking to municipalities.

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: But there's not a lot we can do then as a legislature to push this or not.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: I'm thinking if we decide to do something as a five year, what you just said helps in a starting point. Mhmm. We'd be starting at this spring, we would start it next kind of continue it

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: Mhmm.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Next spring and twenty seventh. So if the bill becomes law in July 1, it's will continue next spring because you're already doing it this spring. So that takes care of effective upon passage or July 1. Oh, sure. It clears up that that issue. So I'm just thinking and working with our council person to kind of to look at the the language there in section two, which is session law. That's the five year thing. Incorporate that the head of the agencies need to provide the inventory to you, Department of Housing and Community Development, based on these criteria, the four bullets that are here. And that you would provide an assessment of those properties to see if it's suitable for housing development and report to the legislature.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: And maybe that's may be suitable for housing development. It'd be suitable.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So I'm gonna ask ledge council person to look for you to, particularly the end part of this, see if John can draft up language section. And when he has to get back to both BGS and you, Commissioner Farrell, and you can weigh in on it?

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Yes. We'd be happy to.

[Unidentified committee member]: You guys

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: can weigh in on it? That sound like a plan?

[Conor Casey, Member]: Sounds like a plan.

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: Keep an eye out for it.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Anything else?

[Alex Farrell, Commissioner, Department of Housing & Community Development]: Thank you for having me.

[Conor Casey, Member]: Thanks very much. Appreciate it as

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: well. Of

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: course, absolutely.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: That's But we're not on the floor until 03:30.

[Conor Casey, Member]: Right. We're getting spoiled today with all this time.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Know.

[Unidentified committee member]: Nothing needs editing right now.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So we do have a few minutes. And I know that James mentioned that there may be some committee members that want to bring a few things up. Also talking about when we start committee at 08:30 in the morning might be a little difficult. So I'm thinking this is internal to the process of the committee that doesn't have to be on mute tool. Make sense? So we're let's on the floor at 03:30. We'll won't get done before we'll be done by five tonight, or four. See in the work here. Thirty?

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Don't think there's much.

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: There's a roll call.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: There'll be a roll call tonight.

[Unidentified committee member]: Tomorrow. No.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: It's gonna be tomorrow.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: We got a push. Yeah. It's gotta

[Joseph "Joe" Luneau, Member]: be well, it's gotta go

[William "Will" Greer, Member]: from notes gallery. Yes. Sorry.

[Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Corrections]: Let me clarify that.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Hang tight. I want to ask Emily one thing. Hang tight. We're going to get off of YouTube. I want to just think outside. But stay put. Because I want to talk if 08:30 is a problem for folks because we've

[Unidentified committee member]: always

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: met at eight