Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: Alright. We are live. Alright. Welcome back after lunch, folks. Government operations, military affairs, house of representatives, state of Vermont. We are starting conversations on h 67, which is an accurate lading to legislative operations and government accountability. This is a flagship project of the committee. We did work on it last year. We are going to start refining the proposal a little bit, but before we get into that more granular work, we wanted to have a conversation with the, agency of administration's Performance Officer, Justin Kenny, and he is with us in the gallery. Please join us at the table, sir. Thank you. Nailed it. First time here, welcome.

[Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer (Agency of Administration)]: Yeah, thanks for having me.

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: Yeah, we'll do a quick round of introductions just to familiarize the faces. Representative Matt Birong, chair of the committee. I represent Addison III, which is Northwest Addison County.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: Representative Lisa Hango, Franklin 5, which is the Northwestern border with Canada. And I'm the Vice Chair of the Committee.

[Rep. Elizabeth Burrows]: Hi, Representative Lucy Boyden. I represent 100 Representative Sandy Pinsonault, I represent Bennington 1, which is Danby, Dorset, Mount Tabor, Land Grove and Pruv. Burlington.

[Rep. V. L. Coffin IV (Member)]: VL Coffin, Windsor District 2, which is Cavendish, Weathersfield in Baltimore.

[Rep. Kate Nugent]: Kate Nugent with South Burlington, and it's nice to put a face to name. I think we were emailing last year a

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: little bit.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: Hi, we're also email buddies. I'm Chea Waters Evans. I'm sorry, a little out of breath. I just went over heels from the pavilion. I represent Charlotte

[Rep. Kate Nugent]: and Port Of Hinesburg. Yeah,

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: so as we were chitchatting beforehand, we just wanted to have the introduction and familiarize ourselves with your charging duty and role within government accountability work.

[Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer (Agency of Administration)]: Excellent. Sounds good. So I've prepared a presentation just to walk you through some of the basics of what we do. Some of you might have seen portions of this before I've done it in prior years, but hopefully some things will be new for others. So for the record, Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer for the state of Vermont and the Agency of Administration. I actually live in Worcester, Vermont, where I'm from. So our office is actually a small team. So we're situated within the Agency of Administration's central office, so Under Secretary Clark and Deputy Secretary Brown. We're a team of two individuals. So it's myself and then Katie Bockwalt, who is our statewide director of performance improvement. The office has been around since roughly 2014 with the passage of Act 186 of that time, which created the outcomes report, which has some tie ins with age 67, as well as some other forms of performance reporting, and some results based accountability work that the legislature has done in the past decade or so. So vision for our office so we're really focused on creating a modern, effective, and efficient state government. And our mission, which is how we attempt to achieve that, is really about empowerment. So it's about empowering state employees to do three main things better solve problems, manage operations, and improve results. The majority of our work is consultative in nature, and it's voluntary in nature. So we truly don't have much authority to require anything of anyone aside from some of the reporting mandates that come from the legislature. So sometimes we get members of the public that will email or call. They'll complain about a performance issue in a particular agency's department. They'll be like, well, why aren't you do anything about this? But we actually don't control that agency or department or have any authority to do so. We can certainly work with them if they're willing to work with us to solve those performance issues. So as we think about our mission and what we do, we've defined it into five core main areas of work. And I'll walk you through all of those. The first is that consultative piece. And we've been doing consultation work since the start of the office in 2014. That consultation takes a lot of different forms. So really, any state employee within state government can reach out to us if they have a problem that they would like to solve. That sometimes is very simple things. Someone can come to me and say, I'm trying to get a formula to work within an Excel document. How would I improve that? I will respond to that, and I will help them do that. Two, even bigger things that, even bigger things than that, which might be something like, we need some support for change management on a new ERP project to transition from VisionVantage VTHR to Workday. Can you provide support on that? So we get involved in really big scale projects from a consultation standpoint all the way down to one on one consultations with individuals. I'd say probably the majority of the work that we do is team based. So a team will come to us. They want help improving a particular process, developing performance measures, something of that nature. And then we'll have an interaction with them and engagement with them through an actual project that we set up. So that's the consultative aspect of our work. I would say at this point in time, because it's changed over the years, that's probably maybe 15% to 20% of all the work that we do. The other core component of work that we do is training around continuous improvement and performance management and innovation. So this has become a big portion of our work. It's probably 30% to 40% of what we do. Over the years, we have developed a very robust training program that is available to any state employee. It includes 34 different courses that staff can take. So about half of those are recorded in our learning management system. Folks can take on demand anywhere from 30 to an hour and a half. And then the other half of those are live on demand courses, instructor led by myself or Katie. And those span from usually two hours to four hours. You can see maybe a little bit on here. We touch on a lot of different topics. So we're really focused on operational excellence. So we cover scientific thinking, analytical skills, how to better solve problems, different structured problem solving tools that folks can use to solve problems. Folks have ever heard about Lean, we train on aspects of Lean, performance improvement, as well as aspects of results based accountability. And then we also get involved in, quote unquote, some of the softer side or people side of the equation. So how do you actually facilitate conversations? How do you better manage meetings? How do you manage a team for better performance at a team level versus an individual level? Last year, we had nine forty one unique individuals participate in our training program, which is quite a sizable chunk of the state of Vermont, which is anywhere between 8,009 employees. So we're pretty happy with that. And that does not include the intro to continuous improvement training that's required as part of onboarding. So this is just people voluntarily signing up to take our trainings. And in terms of data on our trainings, you'll see some of it below in terms of how we measure success. But the data is really good. We've got good numbers. We've got great satisfaction with our training program. And we also measure whether people are attaining any sort of increase in knowledge, skill, or ability. And that continues to be high. And we even measure whether people are utilizing the stuff that we're teaching them to make government better, which also is very high. So we're seeing very good results in terms of what we're getting out of our training program. So that's a big chunk. Can imagine 34 courses. We're running multiple versions of that. We have at least one or two courses that we're running every single week. A couple of years ago, we decided that we wanted to ameliorate that training program with an additional training program that's focused on technology, which seems like an interesting choice for us. But what we were finding is that a lot of staffs what they would imagine in terms of processes being better was limited by their current knowledge of what technology existed and what that technology could currently do. So we realized that training in the technology suite that people have at their disposal, most of the Microsoft Office three sixty five products, as well as some Power Platform oriented things, if we could train people in utilizing those skills, we would see pretty instant and pretty massive productivity gains in terms of what they were doing. We realized that there wasn't a lot of technology training that was happening around the state. So if you're a new employee, you come in, you're sat down, expectation is you know how to use Word and Outlook and Excel and all of those things. And the reality is that some folks really don't. They might know the basics, but they might struggle And take a lot of time to do something that could potentially be done in a much shorter period of time. So we transitioned into this training program. We have two different badges that work on this Excel. There's 12 courses in that. Then And we just launched a SharePoint training program, since we have so many staff that are utilizing SharePoint. And that's a six course progression. And then we'll have additional ones on top of that. So right now, that's, what, 18 courses that we're training on top of those additional 34 courses. So again, training, making up quite a bit of the work that we do. And we've seen a lot of success. We have many stories of folks who have been working on something in Excel that takes them maybe four hours a week to do, and that gets cut down to fifteen minutes just because they learn all these additional functionalities and features. Just fantastic. I'm super excited when that happens. On top of that, we also have what we call communities of practice. And this is something new we started maybe two years ago, three years ago. What we were finding is that just because someone took a training doesn't mean they actually have competency or proficiency within that particular topic. They would take the training. They would say, yeah, I learned a lot. But then they might struggle to actually deploy those things and really, really integrate those things into their data habits. So we did some thinking about, well, how could we get better results in this space? We thought, well, let's think about how we might provide ad hoc opportunities and more peer to peer opportunities for people to learn these things outside of training. So there's a continual feed of information and support for state of place. So we created a series of communities of practice to help support employees. We have our continuous improvement network, which is focused on the continuous improvement side, and then we have our Tech Hub team, which is focused on the technology side. So for our continuous improvement network, that's a Microsoft team that anyone in the state can join. We bring in some well known speakers and authors on a monthly basis to speak to employees about different topics. We have done a quarterly series where we'll ask HR or ADS or others to share about particular processes as a way to help everybody understand how they work. And we have other ad hoc opportunities. That membership is about 1,500 state employees have joined that continuous improvement network. Really excited about that. And we have very good participation. Our speaker series will usually top out at 200 or 300 each month for participation in those. The Tech Hub team, similar. That one's actually larger. We have close to 3,000 state employees that are part of the Tech Hub team. And same thing, that's an opportunity for people to learn more about technology. Every month, I will do a forty five minute ad hoc session on something. So this Friday, I'm doing one on document sets in SharePoint, which there's not much training on. So little things people ask for allows us to respond in real time. Someone's like, oh, there's a new feature in SharePoint or Microsoft Excel. How do I actually use that thing? Great. We're going to do a training series that so that people can get that right away. And then they have a live instructor so they can ask questions. We also have government communities practice that we manage. So this is part of our continuous improvement network. It's a subset of that. But what we were finding as we were doing a bunch of engagements across the organization is people would have the same problems. And because everyone's fairly siloed within state government, they wouldn't know who to talk to. So I might have one person that comes to us and says, oh, we want to do a grants improvement project. And then someone in a different agency or department would say, we want do a grants improvement project. And then we get a third one a month or two later, we want to do a grants improvement project. We're like, why isn't anyone talking to one another? So we created these spaces for people to talk to one another. So we have communities for accessibility, artificial intelligence, community engagement, financial services, grants and contracts, project and change management, and workforce and organizational development. These are run by volunteers within the state. Usually, there's two co facilitators. So they'll run monthly meetings, and we have channels set up within Microsoft Teams for people to chat. So it's a great opportunity for people to connect across the entirety of the organization and to learn from subject matter experts when they have a question. And a great benefit of this is if someone does have a question versus sending an email to someone in DHR or finance and management, let's say, and getting one response, they ask that in the community, and everybody in the community benefits from that response. So rather than one person getting a response, we have hundreds of people that are now getting an answer to that question that they probably had. We just never thought to actually ask it. So those government communities of practice are really well attended. Participation in those is usually 100 to 150 each session that's run, and people really love those. And we've seen those as a great way to connect people across state government. And then the final piece of what we do is state outcomes and performance reporting. So this is going to have that tie in with age 67. So there's two requirements for us. Essentially, we've got the annual outcomes report, which is something that we've been producing since 2014. It used to be somewhat the responsibility of the Government Accountability Committee. And you can think about that report as essentially a report that will give you information about trends across Vermont's landscape, for its people, and for its systems. So it's really high level data. It's not data about the particular performance of a given program. It's really high level. So it's looking at teen pregnancy rates or recidivism rates or a variety of different health indicators, average median wage. Those types of things are included in that report, almost like census level data. It's not the ownership of any particular program or agency department. It's information about all of the bot. And what I would say I really like about that report, even though it needs to be updated because it hasn't been updated in terms of indicators since 2018. I mean, new data, but no one's ever said, we need to update this. There's nothing on housing. There's nothing on higher education. All of those things are not

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: included currently. Do you have housing in

[Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer (Agency of Administration)]: Yeah, there's not that much. Yes,

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: right? No, no, was just like, okay.

[Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer (Agency of Administration)]: Yeah, when I look at it, I say there's a lot missing that would be really helpful to have here. What's really nice from my perspective is that it's a centralized repository across multiple sectors. If you wanted to find this information, you would probably have to go to multiple agency and department websites. It's all in one place. And while it's limited in terms of what's in there, think it's 60 or 70 different indicators, it's one place you can see it all and see the trend lines and see how doing. It's like

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: central warehouse for all that.

[Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer (Agency of Administration)]: Yes. And that's really the intent is like, what are the trends that are happening that we, all of us collectively, should be potentially responding to? That's the intent.

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: Yeah, updated, unibrated trends since pre COVID.

[Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer (Agency of Administration)]: Yeah, so the data is in there for the ones that exist. But no one's taking a hard look and say, is this the right indicator or not? And what's missing? Which I would love age 67 to tackle.

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: We flag that for all our existing discussion. Got it. That's fine.

[Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer (Agency of Administration)]: Yeah, a lot of thought.

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: We had less on reaction on that when you went there. Yes.

[Rep. Elizabeth Burrows]: And this may be something that is coming up later. But

[Rep. Kate Nugent]: just wondering how the decision gets made about what goes in there. Is that from the legislation?

[Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer (Agency of Administration)]: It's in the legislation. There's not much ownership over it. That's one of the issues that I have, is it leaves it open for any legislative body or me to basically say, we want these indicators added. As the prior well, as the current legislation, I will say, works is that it doesn't really give ownership what used to be the Government Accountability Committee, I would say didn't really give them ownership. It was more like they were in this responsive or reactive mode to other people that might bring them stuff, which never really happened. And I would love them to take more of an active ownership role, or looking at the indicators maybe every biennium and determining what needs to be added or taken off with consultation from others. But there was no true ownership of it. And that was one of the issues I have.

[Rep. Kate Nugent]: That's so interesting. Yeah, more clarity around yeah, and much better than results based accountability for populations. So that report, we

[Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer (Agency of Administration)]: do every year. We gather the data from the various agencies and departments who are responsible for it. Who does that report get delivered to? We get a ton of

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: reports delivered to us. Are we one of the houses Yes.

[Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer (Agency of Administration)]: That it gets delivered to? Okay. Waterford's Appropriations and gov ops. Gov ops. Yep. Yep. And I think it was that's what the full general assembly is how it's written. But it goes out September 30. Oh, it's one

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: of the earliest ones. Gotcha. Yeah. Okay.

[Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer (Agency of Administration)]: Yeah. You would have gotten it a while then. Yes. Thank you. So that's the outcomes report, that's supposed to give us information about what we call population level accountability. That's why it's high level trends across Vermont. And then we have the performance measure report, which is where we get into the nitty gritty of government programs and what they're doing. So the focus of that report is measures that tell us something about quantity, so volume of work that's getting done, measures that are going to tell us something about the quality of work that's getting done, and then measures that are going to tell us something about the results of each given program. This report is an interesting one. So it's actually in Act 186 of 2014 and was written in there as a pilot report that the Chief Performance Office would provide on behalf of the Department of Finance and Management. Over the years, it's been blended with the budget. And it became known as the Programmatic Performance Measure Budget Report, or it was tying budgetary items to performance measures. And that didn't quite work out that well. So this past year, we actually separated them again. So we've got a performance report that we're providing. We have over 200 different programs, 300 different programs that are providing measures, almost 1,000 different performance measures now. And we've separated it from the financial aspect, which is just the budget process, which plays out. So we've expanded that report year after year after year after year. But the legislation still reads as it's a pilot program, which it doesn't quite fit anymore as a pilot program. And it's also not the Department of Finance and Management's effort. It's really the effort of the Chief Performance Office. So that's another thing I'd love to fix within age 67. And again, we don't have much authority here to say, yes, you have to have these programs or not, or performance measures. We're in a consultative space. People give us their measures, and we provide them with feedback and say, oh, you're missing some things. All of your measures are quantity. You really need quality and results. We provide resources and guidance and all of that. But at the end of the day, we can't tell people that one's in or this one's out. It's just not how our office operates. We don't have the authority to do that. But we like that report in addition to the annual outcomes report because it does get programmatic accountability. There's a lot of really great data. And as the outcomes report is a centralized repository, this is also a pretty good centralized repository of at least high level performance data for a lot of programs within state government. So it's one place that you can go to see hundreds of different programs and their performance data. It's searchable and pretty easy to find that information. Although it is quite a bear to collect it every year, we don't have a system. We don't have a performance management system like some other states. So it's primarily done with Excel sheets and Power BI, which just makes the gathering of data somewhat difficult. But we produce it, and we're happy with the product. Always room for improvement. Obviously, we want more programs. We want higher quality data. Doing a lot of work in that space. But as I look around at what other states are producing in terms of performance measure reports, I would say we're one of the best. We're providing more data than many other states, even Washington included in that. So we're doing pretty well in that space. So that makes up the majority of what we do. We also do random ad hoc projects, other duties as assigned. So things that come up, people ask us for assistance with, we do those types of things where we think about new work that we could do. Primary measures of success so this would be what's in our performance report. So number of unique staff who are participating in training, their knowledge, skill, and ability, whether they actually are using any of that stuff. We have a training that promoters score. We're also looking at our communities of practice. We're looking at the number of engagements. How many self reported continuous improvement activities do we have? So we have a form for people to report improvements that they've made in their programs or processes, and we collect those and share those out with the rest of the organization. And then there's other measures that we've been thinking about in terms of some of the performance management work that we're doing, how many programs are in our performance report, how many trends are increasing, those types of things as well. So we've got we really have gobs and gobs of data in terms of what what we do, if there's any additional interest in that. But I think that covers everything with a minute to spare.

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: No. You nailed it. No. Thank you so much. This is certainly useful for us better understanding what's out there. Right? And I very much have taken a hard take a look within the work of this bill. Yeah. What is the numerator for data collection within the the charge of the report itself. Yeah. I would love to work with you to update that.

[Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer (Agency of Administration)]: Yeah. I'd love to come back. And what I would say is if folks haven't looked at the original I have it here, Pinson. The original charge of the Government Accountability Committee, I would suggest you take a look at that. I think the intentions there were right. I feel like age 67 has gone quite a bit away from that. Currently, it feels like it's a mirror of the auditor's office within the legislature. But the original charge was spot on, in my opinion, in terms of what they were trying to do, like create a culture of accountability and data driven decision making in the legislature, they can probably want that. But of course, that committee was an off session committee that met only a few times every year, and that charge is way too large for them to ever do. So it was just unattainable.

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: Yeah. No. And we also plan on doing a pretty substantial reworking of the bill in its course. So this is not the end of the conversation. It's just the beginning. Wonderful. Yeah. Do we have any questions from the table? Rev Nugent, no, please.

[Rep. Kate Nugent]: I was just wondering how you got into this work and what drew you to it.

[Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer (Agency of Administration)]: How much time do we have? It's a long, circuitous path. So actually, I'm an environmental science major focused on ecological design. I worked in the environmental world for a while for my youth conservation corps. I managed the Winooski Natural Resource Conservation District and then came to the state in 2013 to be the green infrastructure coordinator, so working on natural systems related to stormwater. And then there was the lean effort that came to the Department of Environmental Conservation around that time, and I got trained in lean methodology. I really liked scientific thinking and everything that I had to do, really focused on process improvement. And eventually, I moved into the role of lean coordinator at DEC. And then eventually, this just became the work that I do on a daily basis. It's really fun because I get to work all parts of state government. I get to work at the line level all the way up the leadership level. Every day is something new and exciting and challenging.

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: And I can see the sincerity in your eyes, too. You're like, I'm so into Yeah. Roller it's coaster. I'm into it. I'm I mean, government's gonna government, right? Yeah. That's me. I'm sorry. So used to call on.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: I have a couple of questions. The first is, so when you say, for instance, somebody has an issue with an Excel spreadsheet and they call you or email you, do you know everything? Or do you think everything there is to know? Or do you find people to connect them to give the answer?

[Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer (Agency of Administration)]: Yeah. I know a lot of stuff related to the tools. I would say I'm probably a product owner because I use the tools all the time for my own improvement work within our office. So we got to know this stuff to be able to help people. So I know a lot of stuff, but I don't know everything. So if I don't, then I would reach out to other subject matter experts. But that's one of the benefits of the community of practice is someone will post a question. I don't have to be the one to respond. It could be someone in another agency or department that will say, oh, here's how we do that, which happens quite frequently. So it takes that scenario where you're at your own desk and you go reach out to the tech expert that's just around the corner there, to now you have potentially hundreds of tech experts that could answer that one question for you. My

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: next question is, when you were just talking about the data, or even showing us on your presentation, the percentages and the increase, and there are two people in your office? Yes. Do you collect that data on your own? Yes.

[Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer (Agency of Administration)]: Yeah.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: And. As we're working on this, we're hearing a lot from people about concerns about the time and effort and expense that it takes for data collection and to make sure that it's accurate and that it's useful and that it's it's being looked at through the correct lens and all that stuff. Can you we don't need to do a huge deep dive into it, but can you speak to that a little bit? Because it seems like a lot of. A lot for two people who are also solving people's

[Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer (Agency of Administration)]: Yes. So we train and teach on continuous improvement and do it ourselves. So the building of our dashboard, I'll actually share it really quickly.

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: Let's

[Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer (Agency of Administration)]: see here. So we have automated most of our data work. So it used to be fairly manual with Excel spreadsheets and those types of things. But over time, we've automated every piece because like you said, it's cumbersome to have to do all of this work. Any time I run into something that I'm like, I think I could do this with less time, I figure out a way to do it. So I put in that upfront time and energy and cost to make it better. And that's what's a struggle for a lot of folks is how do we take the time out when we feel like we're drowning in some cases to work on the stuff to make it better over the long term? So we always take that view, fix it now. And then it might take a little bit of time, but then it's going to save us time at the end. So this is all of our training data, training breakdown, evaluation data. This is all automated. This updates every single day. We built all of this based on data flows and using a lot of the tools. This is all Microsoft products that are able to do this stuff, Participation, membership lots and lots of data at our fingers that we use to manage our program. So we can take a look and be like, which trainings do we not have a lot of people attending in the next couple of weeks? Let's do a promotion of those trainings because we want people to get that. So super helpful from a dashboard management standpoint to have all of this data that we can use on a daily basis to do it.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: Do other people do this in their departments and offices?

[Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer (Agency of Administration)]: Yeah, so some places have data folks that are some places don't have necessarily a data team, but they've got folks that are interested that will do this work. So it's point variable in terms of what the technical capabilities are across the organization. And that's one of the things we want to do is make this available to everybody, or at least let them know about it and train them so that we can have more people that are utilizing data like this to manage their programs. We're really focused on that.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: Okay, thank you. That's what I was wondering.

[Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer (Agency of Administration)]: Any other questions before we shift over?

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: No? Thank you kindly for the time and the education on your workings. So, we will definitely touch for further work on this subject with you.

[Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer (Agency of Administration)]: Come back in time. Yeah,

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: no, thank you. Yes.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: So interesting. Thank you.

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: All right. Now, the next order of business, we have representative Burrows here. Please join us, representative. And we are doing just the introduction on H-five 82, Two board and commission member per diems. We did try to get Ledge Castle in here, but she's double booked, but you are the show. Oh, right.

[Rep. Elizabeth Burrows]: For the record, my name is Elizabeth, or Representative Elizabeth Rose, and I represent Windsor One, which is Heartland, West Windsor, and Windsor. Windsor County. I'm adjacent to Representative Coffin. Okay, just to give you an idea of the kind of legislative nerd that I am. Since we last adjourned, I spent every Friday afternoon and evening combing through every single report that was created since I've been a legislator, and then cross referencing what or study committee, and then cross referencing what legislative action had been taken to address the recommendations over the last five years. Very nerdy. Incredible.

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: What type of findings did

[Rep. Elizabeth Burrows]: you find? A lot. One of the reports was this report, which I asked Nick to email to all of you, which was from the Office of Racial Equity from 2023, and it had to do with advisory bodies. And I put in a bill that does not even come close to representing the recommendations from Director Davis from this report. But it does represent, in various conversations that I have had with others about the problem of study committees, one of the things is, how can we reduce the number of study committees and make them more valuable? And one of the ways is by paying better. In fact, the $50 per diem, which is a whole per diem, regardless of the number of hours that's put in on a study committee. So that $50 could cover a two hour meeting, in which case it would be a reasonable amount of money, especially if you have to travel a long way to attend that meeting. Or it could also cover an eight hour day. It's still $50 And that amount has been in place since 2007. And that amount has never been updated since 2007. I myself took part in a study committee, which was for the basic needs budget, which is what the Joint Fiscal Office uses every year to determine what the actual cost of living is in Vermont. They update it every year, but they have a formula that's used. And I took part in the study committee that looked at what should go into the formula. That was a couple of years ago. JFO uses that updated formula, starting with this biennium. But $50 an hour does not come even close to our own definition of a livable wage. Our own definition of a livable wage currently is more than $18 an hour. So $50 for a day in a state where we rely so heavily on volunteers, it's not humane. And it doesn't encourage participation. And so this bill touches Director Davis's recommendations. I do ask that you look through some of the other components of it, because they also create a more humane way to encourage participation by Vermonters in some of these advisory bodies, such as allowing for other kinds of payment, or I don't know. There are, I think, about 30 different recommendations in here. In this bill, I'm simply asking for the minimal amount paid for a study committee or other advisory body to be $50 or the basic needs budget amount, whichever is higher. And part of my thought is, A, that it would encourage participation by a wider swath of Vermonters. B, in budgeting for these study committees and advisory committees, it actually might cut down the number of study committees. Because having gone through every single recommendation and cross referenced the number that we've actually followed through on, it really is a real waste of heart, will, money, and time. But really most especially, when you get Vermonters to come in and take part in a summer study committee and then not follow through on what the recommendations are, it costs a lot in volunteers, especially if you're getting paid $50 a day. That's my pitch.

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: Well, first, I want to commend you on all of that data collection and cross referencing. Like, I remember you mentioning that we saw each other earlier in the session. And I believe you referenced this work there, and I didn't really grasp the depth of what you were referring to. Even in that moment, I was like, wow, what? But now that you spoke to it more

[Rep. Elizabeth Burrows]: You'll get more that are based on the you'll get more of my bills

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: Oh, yes.

[Rep. Elizabeth Burrows]: In the short form based on those things. Because some of them just it seems so egregious that they have gone unread.

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: Well, first and foremost, thank you for that. And thank you for putting this in front of us, because it's like that $50 per day per diem has always been a head scratcher to me. Mean, cost of living time, people's time, transportation, all of those things. So,

[Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer (Agency of Administration)]: mean, in this day

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: and age, 50 is basically a volunteer wage for days worth of.

[Rep. Elizabeth Burrows]: Yep, it doesn't even cover childcare.

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: Yeah. Any questions for the member from the members at the table? No. Alright. No, thank you. I really appreciate it. And we will definitely chitchat about this more later. Thank you

[Rep. Elizabeth Burrows]: so much for having me in here to rant about the problem.

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: The conversation kind of married a little bit with what we're taking a look at with our repeal project, our general accountability work, you know, what we're testing people to do, how we're compensating them for their time when tasked, you know, it all falls into this.

[Rep. Elizabeth Burrows]: I really appreciate you doing that. It's important.

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: Wonderful. And we'll definitely talk more on this, and I look forward to reviewing that magazine from your past employment that you were referring to.

[Justin Kenny, Chief Performance Officer (Agency of Administration)]: Are you talking about Cozzor? Yes.

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: I should have said Anno.

[Rep. Elizabeth Burrows]: Land of no means yes. Don't know how.

[Rep. Matt Birong (Chair)]: With that, we are a little ahead of schedule right now on our timeline for the conversation with the Essex Charter, so we will go offline until 02:00, please. And yeah.