Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Speaker 0]: Rail Trail.

[Chair Matt Walker]: Good morning. Friday, 01/23/2026, house transportation. I just got off a little bit longer floor than we expected. We have Jack Cacino here with the Vermont well, I guess the agency's rail program director and program manager. I'm sorry. And we're looking at budget and money and perhaps some accomplishments of the last year, but maybe some goals for this year. And how are you spending taxpayers' money in your area? Welcome. Good morning. It's all yours.

[Speaker 0]: Thanks, Chair Walker, and good morning, everybody. I'm Jackie Cassino. I am the Agency of Transportation's Rail Trails Program Manager. I'm here today to give you an overview of the program, as well as discuss the proposed 2027 budget. So just a reminder that the Agency of Transportation covers 145 trail miles that are rail banked and are owned by the state of Vermont. This means that it is inclusive of four trails across the state that run through 31 of our towns. We have 27 trailheads, 90 bridges, and seven thirty eight culverts. The agency is responsible for the maintenance, operations, local and regional coordination, marketing and outreach, and planning for this trail network. And I'm proud to report that trail use is diverse and it's growing. In the last year, we permitted 30 special events on our trails. Trail user volume varies across the state, but just some highlights from the 2025 season on the Lemoyle Valley Rail Trail in Morristown.

[Chair Matt Walker]: You said permitted 30 plus special events?

[Unidentified committee member]: I'm not

[Chair Matt Walker]: sure I saw that on there somewhere. What kind of events are we talking Sure.

[Speaker 0]: So it can be everything from at the end of this month, we'll have the annual North Country Mashers Sled Dog Race in Morristown and Bullkit that draws a couple of 100 people from across New England. Fundraisers that can go end to end on trails. An example of this would be on the Masiskoye Valley Rail Trail, the tidal paddle event that's sponsored by the Northern Forest Canoe Trail. So there are a variety of events that happen on our trails.

[Rep. Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: Speaking of those events, and I don't know

[Chair Matt Walker]: if we're going to get into it, but

[Rep. Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: I'll get ahead of it, last

[Chair Matt Walker]: year we

[Rep. Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: had some language dictating what was and wasn't allowed. Correct. Was there any issues with that implementation as far as those events?

[Speaker 0]: Yeah, not as far as the events go. Okay. It's been successful and we really look to partner with organizations and communities across the state to increase that because they're a public resource and it's been a great asset for our towns. So trail user volume can vary across the state. Just some highlights from 2025 includes on the LVRTE in Morristown, daily trips average around 200, and they're up to around 80,000 trips per year. On the Masiskoit Valley Rail Trail in St. Albans, we had some disruptions because there was an end to end resurfacing project that unfortunately closed part of that trail for a good chunk of the busiest part of our year. That's how construction season goes. But even with that, that site averages around 125 trips daily. The Delaware And Hudson Rail Trail, one of our trail counters in Castleton, which is adjacent to Vermont State University and Bear Trail Network, averages during the school year 900 individual trips a year. And so between that and special events for the cross country team in that area, that counter actually came up to 185,000 individual trips. So it's significant. And on the Beebe Spur, a highlight is in the city of Newport. That area averages around 160 individual trips daily. And I'm sure if we were to put a counter on the Minfor Maygog Trails, which are adjacent to the BB Spur, that number would be even higher. There are various businesses that are operating on our trails and adjacent to our trails. And I'm proud to report that we have four sixty one individual trail friendly businesses across the state. We conduct an annual trail user survey, and we had four thirty one folks complete that So survey this overall, that's just to give you a picture of the impacts of the trails, who's using them. But I think it's safe to say that the economic impact of these trails cannot be overstated. They are a key and accessible component of the state's outdoor recreation network, and they are a significant contributor to the state and local economy. They directly contribute to our towns through lodging, food, fuel, and gear. And of note, statewide, in 2023, the US Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis, or the BEA, released a report that examined outdoor rec's significance and growing impact on the Vermont economy. The BEA found that outdoor recreation created $2,100,000,000 of impact to the Vermont economy, accounting for almost 5% of our GDP, or second only behind the state of Hawaii for outdoor rec and its contribution to GDP. According to the findings, the highest economic contributor to the state's outdoor sector was snow activities, which include skiing, snowmobiling, dog sledding, bat tire biking, and the trails allowed for all of this. Those activities contributed $222,000,000 to the state's GDP in that year. More specifically for our trails, the Northeastern Vermont Development Association released an economic impact study also in 2023 regarding the LVRT just in Caledonia County. And the projections showed 4,700,000 in annual sales and the creation of up to 75 jobs So we know that these trails are important not only for our towns, for our multimodal transportation options, but as well as Vermont based businesses. Looking at our program, I think it's important that we acknowledge that partnerships with our regional planning commissions, our rail trail councils, towns, key stakeholders, such as nonprofit trail groups and VAST, are really critical to the success of these trails and to the program, because we are a full time staff of four. So we are a lean group managing assets across the state. We have the opportunity during the peak of our summer season to hire one to two field staff that are temporary employees to assist. Glad you did it. And just to note that the Rail Trail Councils are staffed through our regional planning commissions, and their staff time is funded with a combination of state planning dollars as well as Rail Trail program funds. The role of the Rail Trail Council is to support engagement with trail towns, to coordinate our volunteers, support local projects, and assist in trail promotion and outreach. They also help to encourage educational growth programming and provide eyes and ears on trails. Rural Trail Council support the implementation of their specific trail management plans in a collaborative and consistent way. They provide the opportunity for rep representatives of the towns along these trails, different user types to really have a voice and a seat at the table for how the trails are managed. Looking to our priorities over the next year, just want to remind folks that the program is still relatively new to the agency. It was established in 2022. Our focus over the last three years has really been emergency response and recovery, as well as establishing a program foundation. It's been a bit like driving a bus on a NASCAR track while trying to put the wheels on. Our overarching program goal as we look forward is to continue to focus on rightsizing the program, to develop our appropriate systems and foundation, and to manage these assets in a responsible way.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: Totally. Do you see that?

[Speaker 0]: Yes. Over here.

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: Mattville And Moyle Valley Rail Trail.

[Chair Matt Walker]: More than one trail? There. More than one trail.

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: There is. Incredible.

[Chair Matt Walker]: Well, we're gonna have to look at this little title. It's Main Street right there.

[Unidentified committee member]: Great site.

[Speaker 0]: So the priorities for the upcoming year include wrapping up what I'm calling our legacy projects. They include FEMA funded emergency response and recovery projects, as well as some of our earmarked projects. But to really begin to focus more so on asset management and preservation of our system, working to integrate our program within the systems that already exists within the agency for those things. At the same time, we'll continue to support our core programs such as way finding signage that's tied to the Trail Friendly Business Program, education and outreach through the Trail Ambassador Program, and really working to mature our Trail Counter Program. Diving into the numbers a little bit regarding the proposed budget. The major buckets, for our program include operations maintenance, capital projects, and staffing. Under the bucket of operations and maintenance includes small scale projects, emergency projects that are not eligible for FEMA, basic repairs such as bridge decking, things like that. It also includes our mowing and vegetation management of invasive species and hazardous plants, equipment maintenance, facility maintenance, trail monitoring and enforcement, asset inventory and inspection, marketing promotion and planning as well. Capital projects, as the agency has reorganized and the Railroad program has now been pulled out and is a standalone program, a lot of our previous capital projects were under the umbrella of other parts of the agency, and we're working to pull those out as well. So it's definitely a transition for us. But you'll see here reflected in this chart, one of our larger projects this year is the MBRT extension project, and I'll go into more details on that in the next slide, as well as some smaller scale projects like culvert replacements, bridge repairs. Thank you, Jackie. I'm just curious, looking at the operations and maintenance line and the 716,000 from federal, so can you just give a little background? Is there STBG, is that a federal program where they're matching similar to other highway programs? That's a great question. So it's important to note the majority of our program funding derives from federally funded sources with 80% coming from the federal level on average. And historically, that has come from the Surface Transportation Block Grant funds, which is that SDBG line you see there. It has also come from one time monies such as earmarks. And we've been able to, where appropriate, utilize the CRP funds or congestion reduction or sorry, the carbon reduction funds as well. And that program will specifically go to fund 80% of the MBRT extension project because that is extending that trail into Downtown St. Albans. At the same time, the city is funding an investment in sidewalks and shared use paths to connect from downtown to where our trail will end. So essentially, it will provide a connection from folks from Richford all the way into the downtown that's off road. So that's how that money was eligible to be used for that project. You feeling confident that these funds will continue to be available? So SDBG, as far as I know, yes, things are a little different right now at the federal level. But historically, yes, that has not been an issue. We've been very fortunate to be able to take advantage of earmark funds that are special one time funds. So I think as the program matures, as we're going from really a build out phase to a maintaining what we have phase, I think it'll be critical for the agency to consider other funding sources besides the earmark funds, because we just can't guarantee that those will always come about. And I guess my last question on that is, are those funds specific to rail trails, or are they more for trails? So the STPG funds are one of the more flexible source of funds, so they can be used for trails. So they're not specific to rail trails. There's not, as far as I'm aware, there's not a specific set amount, or excuse me, a type of funds that are specifically for our trails. Thank you. Sure. Rutland, Rutland, Rutland, Rutland. Yeah, thanks for all this information.

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: Under operations management, the federal funding, are those competitive grants? It's not a formula fund that we get based on how many rail trail miles we have or anything.

[Speaker 0]: I'll actually have to look into that. I'm not sure. I don't believe it is a competitive grant. Think it is a set amount that we're awarded on an annual basis, but how that is based is the detail I will need to just confirm, I will get back Are to you on

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: you able to accept other funding, like individual donations or foundation grants or

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: anything like

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: that? That's a really great question.

[Speaker 0]: At this time, we do not accept foundation or donations. One of the establishing benefits the Rail Trail Councils is that they have the opportunity to determine whether or not they want to become a registered nonprofit. So for example, the Northwest Trail Council, which covers all of them, the Sisboy Valley Rail Trail and the Franklin County for the LBRT is a registered nonprofit, they can fundraise. That's very critical for the local projects that Things like signage and- Correct, and typically their funds will go towards trailheads and amenities and things that are really off the linear corridor.

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: Did I understand that in combined, there's 200,000 trips on those trails? Combined total for all of the trails? I would have to look back

[Speaker 0]: in terms of the annual 2025.

[Unidentified committee member]: Well, I understood you to say that the rail trail through Botany and that type of thing was 185

[Speaker 0]: individual trips. Now that can be because of where that's

[Unidentified committee member]: No, understand. But your counter says that we've got over 200,000 trips on all the trips.

[Speaker 0]: At that location. It'll be greater if we take all of So the you're correct.

[Chair Matt Walker]: It's more Very than good. Thank you.

[Speaker 0]: So lastly, just in case there were any questions about current and planned projects, again, there's a number of projects that you see here that are funded with those one time pot of monies. Just

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: to follow-up on Rick Keyser's point, it would be, I know you just said those numbers, but if you wouldn't mind just putting those into a follow-up email for us. I think we're all very interested in this. It's showing the trails are being used perhaps more than some of us realized. You know, I think the economic development opportunities not just for tourism visitors, but also just for day to day transportation to reach jobs and so forth. These are pretty profound. I would love to sort of have chance to kind of stew in that a little bit. It's very fascinating. Thank you.

[Speaker 0]: I'd be happy to provide that. And hopefully in a few more months we'll be able to direct people to a public facing dashboard that we're working on cleaning up right now that will have all the count data in real time as well.

[Chair Matt Walker]: This is going to have an aerial trail extension

[Unidentified committee member]: in San

[Chair Matt Walker]: You're Juan's saying so what do we this time so if you're talking construction next year?

[Speaker 0]: We anticipate being able to put the project out to bed this year and potentially starting construction this year as well. Okay.

[Chair Matt Walker]: You said the city is paying for a par or they're doing work around attaching to it.

[Speaker 0]: Sure. So they are working on a bike ped improvement along Federal Street from the downtown, and that will terminate at Lower Newton Road. So right where the Yeah, Yeah, I'm very familiar. Exactly. At the moment, it's like And so our trail will terminate there, whereas the city infrastructure will stop.

[Chair Matt Walker]: And the crossing of Route 7 by the Old Muscle Deer and whatnot, that's all at our state? Correct.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: That's us as well. And parking along that, up the side, what's going happen to

[Chair Matt Walker]: trailhead access? Is that going continue to be the trailhead access or is there some other way we're driving people?

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: We're

[Speaker 0]: planning, so what we would like to do when we're working with the city on this is to look at an opportunity for trailhead parking that would be at the Lower Newton Street Road, so right where our trail ends, and their sidewalk system begins to have a trailhead area there and work to terminate that existing trailhead that is near the Maple City Diner, just due to long term maintenance issues, enforcement issues. That's very obvious.

[Chair Matt Walker]: Do you anticipate, through some time here, I know you spent a ton of time inventorying, know you had summer people, you've been working on bringing uniformity to all the trail pieces, and we spent a huge amount of money with the floods and a huge amount

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: of money to get it

[Chair Matt Walker]: up to speed and all over. Now we've redone the entire NVRT. Are we going see a spot where the funding in this area is going to level off or perhaps even decrease a little bit in terms of once we kind of had this whole project that needs an entire amount of work through the whole state. We anticipate at some point it will level off, that it would be more a maintenance than a continued build out, signage, effort work, all the liaison work we're doing with all of the communities. We see a leveling out here at some point that would be less expensive to the state after the investment, more return and less invest?

[Speaker 0]: That's a really good question. And I think in 2022, when the program was created, was the sole staff person. And the agency went from managing 30 miles of trails to almost 150 miles of trails. So there's been that big change and went from using the general fund, as my understanding, to now looking at a more sustainable way to fund basic maintenance and operations. So it's not quite apples to apples of an answer, I would say, because we went from such a small amount of trail miles to what we have today and are really working on establishing systems. But I think big picture, you are correct that the maintenance and operations of these trails, the regular projects to keep those assets in a state of good repair will level off, whereas a lot of the bulk of our spending over the past few years has really been to build out this network.

[Chair Matt Walker]: Are there other empty beds or empty trails that are abandoned, I guess, that you had all those targets that would be eventually added to this?

[Speaker 0]: Not any that I am aware of at my level.

[Chair Matt Walker]: Representative Quirk? That was my point.

[Unidentified committee member]: Now I don't know, Representative Quirk, what is the one in Bennington,

[Chair Matt Walker]: that some kind of a circular thing? Oh, have

[Unidentified committee member]: the Vintage Trail? Yeah, what is that? Do you have is that a town owned?

[Rep. Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: What is that? Yeah, town managed, yeah. So they're piecemealing it together.

[Speaker 0]: There's a rail trail in Bennington that is rail banked, that is owned in the state of Vermont that is leased. The agency leases to municipality and they manage it. Very similar to the last. So it's not over miles

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: to Swanson?

[Speaker 0]: Correct. Because we don't actively manage it. We do inspect the bridges. Similarly, the Western mile and change of the LBRT in Swanton is actively managed through a lease agreement municipality, but it is state owned rail bank.

[Chair Matt Walker]: How many mileage, or how many miles? I don't know, Bennington. I don't know, it's just spanning out. That's great.

[Speaker 0]: I would say, but my understanding is only a portion of that, and I want to say two miles or maybe less, it's a small amount of mileage, is rail banked, and the rest maybe has been produced in the East Coast or other.

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: Correct, yeah. Okay,

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: that's Thank you.

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: Yeah, thanks for all this. We are looking at e bikes and whether the rules that we have now are sufficient or not. Are you challenged at all with e bikes? And maybe you could just share what the issues are, what you're finding, and if you have any suggestions, that might be good too.

[Speaker 0]: We have more so have had enforcement issues on segments of trails in a few locations across the state that we have really been working over the last few years through education and outreach, partnering when there's local police or county sheriffs, excuse me, to assist. That has not been very successful. But typically, what we see is less so of an issue with a class one or two e bike and more so an issue with an ATV or a motor vehicle or a motorcycle or a moped or an e bike that can act as a moped, really traveling at unsafe speeds. That's the biggest issue. Yes, for us, the ATVs and motor vehicles and the weight of those and how they're operated can significantly damage our trail surface. So that is an issue. But more so from a user safety perspective, it's the speed. We did have a death on the MBRT this year. Someone was on a motorized scooter overnight. A segment of the trail that had recently been resurfaced, that the trip surface hadn't been finished being compacted. They lost control and died. So part of our enforcement this year is putting more funds behind enforcement and working with the game wardens to target areas where we know we have repeat issues. And it's a two pronged approach. One is education and outreach, and then the second phase of that would be, if necessary, to ticket people, because it

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: is a safety issue. Yeah, so you're a female, e bikes are allowed. So what They are I'm saying is occasionally e bikes are part of the problem of people going too fast with the wrong vehicle or If

[Speaker 0]: you think about it, part of what makes our trails at times boring for folks on snow machines is that they're straight and they're flat. But it's what makes them accessible. And so it means that people can really, if they're using a vehicle that is able to be operated at a higher speed like that, they can and will. And it's not everywhere. It's a few select areas. So we are working to target those areas. Thank you. Sure. What

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: is the speed limit for us in Mobile?

[Speaker 0]: It is 35 miles an hour in most areas. We do have in a number of downtowns and village settings where the speed limit is 15 miles an hour. A

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: couple of things, one is you said that it wasn't necessarily e bikes that were the problem, it was the mix, not the lock and

[Speaker 0]: move pads and things like that. My understanding is that and again, this is a little bit before my time in this role. But the e bike statute, and the rail trails rules and regs follow that statute where we say an e bike is allowed on a bike ped facility. This is a bike ped facility, so all e bikes are allowed. So again, it seems to me, just from the interactions we have had, that Class one and two e bikes have not been an issue at times. It's those devices that can go at higher speeds. And if you think of even a classic bike that is not an e bike, they can certainly go 35 miles an hour on a straightaway that's flat very easily. But I think for us, it's looking at the weight of the vehicle. Is it a loud vehicle on the trail? How it's being operated? It is very challenging to differentiate between some of these e bikes. So again, what a lot of other states are doing with similar trail systems is looking at trying to regulate and enforce speed.

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: I just wanted to follow through with, we have a wonderful rail trail, it's up the Western Rail, 36 miles, and it's based on an old rail then, a narrow gauge railroad, and there was a book written about that railroad called 36 Miles of Trouble, because the train kept falling into the water, these different things, but the trail is so much used, and it's a very active nonprofit that it runs in.

[Unidentified committee member]: Same case? Do they

[Chair Matt Walker]: shoot radar on there? Does the law enforcement?

[Speaker 0]: So VAST, as you all probably are aware, has significant contracts across the state for enforcement on key weekends. And I can't speak to how they ticket folks. So they will

[Chair Matt Walker]: be the only one. So during the summer, there's nobody out there. If somebody comes whipping through, whether

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: We'll they're again right

[Speaker 0]: for the first time this year to have enforcement trails. Primarily, at this point, what we've asked for is for folks at the Gaylords to look for things that are obvious, like a vehicle or an ATV on the trail, and less so focus on speed limits, because we don't have a posted speed limit for the summer season. If that makes sense.

[Chair Matt Walker]: So would the, so if I'm, if I need the higher, the level for, what was the class? We got one, two, or So three on the if I'm on my electric bike and it'll do, say it does 30 or 40, there's no rule that says I can do that?

[Speaker 0]: At this time, do not, outside of the vast season, do not have a speed limit for the red chiles.

[Chair Matt Walker]: Jackie, in the presentation we received from Candice about the budget effort, there is a mention of reductions, miscellaneous reductions, expenditures and operations for 2027, admin policy, public transit maintenance, and it says rail trails. The grand total is not only, but it's $459 Is there a particular piece of your program that you're aware that you had to reduce or adjust or perhaps some vacancy piece or what your portion of that contribution is in that reduction?

[Speaker 0]: Not that I'm aware of at this time.

[Chair Matt Walker]: Does anybody else have anything? Thank you very much for your Thank you. Coming in and for your flexibility related to the floor this morning. Thank you. I think we're transitioning into the next budget overview piece. David Thurber is here on the fleet. And I guess Ashley's back with the support in another position after yesterday too. So I guess welcome up to the chair piece. It's a pretty significant portion of the budget of T fund expenditures.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: We have a,

[Chair Matt Walker]: I think a return from a couple sessions ago. I know you presented here when I've been in the committee but not when I was, I don't think it was from here.

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: Last year?

[Chair Matt Walker]: And then year before. So a

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: couple of different

[Chair Matt Walker]: a couple of repeat. One, two, three. Third time's a charm for me, I think.

[Unidentified committee member]: Central garage.

[Chair Matt Walker]: So that's the central garage is where they pull them up from different parts for That's great. What Phil is speaking about? Are you going to tell us about a new building too, or is that some another day?

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: I can give you some information on the new building. Odd Law, of course, predecessor has been dealing with that for the most part. I apologize, I'm not sure is there a plugin? Like I need to share?

[Chair Matt Walker]: Plug in. Where is it share? I don't know if it's actually I don't think we're doing plugins anymore. I understand a couple of trucks have been involved in accidents and then we're also loaning out some vehicles to a town that has faced a huge that was up your way, isn't it? Representing the

[Rep. Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: The crash. Also the tower garage. Crash.

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: That's actually where I guess the little misconception.

[Chair Matt Walker]: Which one? Lowell?

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: Yeah. And they've

[Chair Matt Walker]: blown some vehicles, like I said, down. The V Trans attempted to loan a vehicle, which was very decent, but they had a good relationship with Charlie boys, Charles Charbonneau, which are very friends, and the Frenchman in my area called Charbonneau. Anyway, they got him a truck in twenty four hours. Tremendous service by Jericho truck dealership. Yeah. Good question. Still on time? Anybody need any maple sugar? I harvested five trees and cooked this last night.

[Unidentified committee member]: You're very skeptical.

[Unidentified committee member]: I thought

[Chair Matt Walker]: you made it. I just said that. Great reflexes.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: I apologize for the delay here. Can hear

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: you. All

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: good? Yeah. Think so. Morning, Let's

[Unidentified committee member]: see what you got

[Chair Matt Walker]: to say. That's a big chunk of my mouth. Guess a

[Rep. Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: little bald.

[Speaker 0]: Good

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: morning, thank you for having me, I appreciate it. For the record, my name is Dave Gerber. I am the director of the Central Garage Fleet as of officially this afternoon. Don't appear to give you an overview of our CG budget and hopefully answer any questions that you have. We did have a much appreciated increase of $415,949 this year overall. So our budget is broken up pretty much into three pieces, personal services, which is all our salaries and benefits all the time and things like that. And we have our operating costs and our equipment costs. On the left, you can see that it does say 26 at the top here, but our equipment fund is broken into a supplemental transfer from the transportation fund, which is approximately 3% a year, which kind of gives us little boost to help fight inflation. And then we take the depreciation from all our active units. And the third piece of that is auction proceeds, is probably the most variable, depending on how many vehicles we have to sell, what kind of condition they're in, what folks are willing to pay for them. We did do an exercise to reduce our budget and spending for '26, reduced it $576,000 to give us $8,400,000 to spend on equipment, which has been also spent, or at least encumbered. We had lost stuff on order. Takes some time to get things from our dealers. We had a modest increase from last year to this year in the equipment fund, which I do have a plan for later on in the slideshow, which we'll go through a little bit towards the end. Questions on this slide? The trucking is the trucks as well.

[Unidentified committee member]: Yes, it's Your fleet, so how on average how long does it take you once you order it receiving? If you're ordering July 1, you could

[Chair Matt Walker]: see $4,000,000.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: Our pickups have been six months roughly to get the dump trucks. The chassis itself has been a year, six months to a year, and then another year or so to have the market. So right now it's quite a bit longer than it was in 2018, 2019. We were kind of

[Chair Matt Walker]: on a year schedule now. So pretty much that 8,400,000.0 is out the door on July 1?

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: I try to encumber it quickly. Over the last year truck chassis in particular, they go up halfway through the year, then they go up again later. So we try to get that converted at the lowest cost we can before prices change and what it is with tariffs.

[Chair Matt Walker]: Thank you. You're welcome. For the who pouched, I mean Wells,

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: and then White. Yeah, thanks for doing this. Did, on the top of your head, I guess, how much of the work, the maintenance and all that for the trucks is done inside and how much do you actually contract outside?

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: Am gonna say that we're probably 95% in house.

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: In house, yeah.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: We have 35 technicians around the state with seven locations where we do repairs. We are able to do our own in house warranty with international so that we can do that, submit, get reimbursed. So we do a lot of that rather than trying to send them to the dealers because they're suffering similar basis. We are finding

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: That's my question. Getting certified technician is a challenge.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: The biggest challenge is unfortunately Chittenden County. We have a couple positions that have been open for a bit, trying to get folks to them.

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: Do you pardon me right all with the tech center?

[Chair Matt Walker]: What are We tech

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: do have as much as possible, maybe we'll try to get an intern for the summer, I know that helps the BTC students or university students.

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: So you do bring in them? Try, when you can. Fortunately,

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: we don't always have the position later to bring them on full time, but I am a VTC graduate of the Automotive Technology program, and we do have, I want to say probably half a dozen around the state. Two or three rated Central College in Berlin. We do have some graduates there. So that I would expect they are good technicians and do good work for us. But we try not, we did have last couple of years we've sent some of our preventive maintenance work to a dealer, but it just was very expensive. We were chasing some of the stuff that they may have looked at or tried to repair. And they don't do all the same work that we do. So despite the fact that we are behind in chimney corners, having all the trucks 100% ready, we're still working on them. But I think when it does go out the door, I think we're in a little bit better shape as far as being more about it. To disrespect our dealers, they just do things a little bit differently.

[Chair Matt Walker]: Yeah. You have 255 plow trucks on the road, 215 in service, 40 are spares. What's one truck cost these days, fully outfitted?

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: Our tandem axle dump trucks have reached $240,002.90 dollars $290 I'm sorry. This is Mike Lateri. He will be our next superintendent at Central Garage. Kind of wanted to have him here today to get familiar with the process and see how it goes. But so $2.90 and probably $2.40 for a six award. That's outfitted. Yep. Thanks. I'm currently waiting for 46 to be outfitted. It's a lot

[Chair Matt Walker]: from telling me.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: We have 46 chassis waiting to be outfitted. So we've been able to get the trucks that are upfit vendors, they're swapped too. And they have some of our trucks, and we get generally a few at a time, but they're also doing work for New York through the way, state of New York, Connecticut and stuff.

[Chair Matt Walker]: Is that one repairable that got buckled over and barton the other day?

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: Yes, we are going to attempt to fix that. It's probably going take a little while, it's going to take some time to get all that together, but they've been in service for six months, so we'll fix it up.

[Chair Matt Walker]: What happened there that was rammed from behind by an 18 wheeler? Too bad he's like 200 yards from where he was going to park it.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: It's unfortunate.

[Chair Matt Walker]: You also, Representative White?

[Speaker 0]: Yeah, thank you. Just a little big picture to make sure I am understanding. So you are overseeing Central Barrage, which has a location in Barrie Montpelier, I think you guys are talking about getting to a new garage right now, and then six others around the state, and you are overseeing the vehicles and the people maintaining the vehicles. And so then Ernie's group comes in and drives the vehicles. Okay. And did

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: you say that you have 44 vehicles waiting to be outfitted? I think it's 46. So they're sitting in your garages waiting for South Park or Sand Park? These are brand new. It's just the cabin chassis that we have waiting to go to the vendor in New York, have the bodies put on, not

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: the power program. And some of those are actually at our truck dealer, they're not all at our

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: shop just yet. Did you say how long it takes to get them up and running?

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: These chassis will be available to us by hopefully November, December of this fall.

[Speaker 0]: That's a lot of value sitting around them not being produced.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: On the other side, I'm glad we have them, I

[Chair Matt Walker]: know they're

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: sitting, but we have them, so when they're ready, can say, Here you go, now we need our traps.

[Unidentified committee member]: Thank you. How

[Chair Matt Walker]: many employees in the central ground fleet? 52. Two positions.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: And when the

[Chair Matt Walker]: CFO and the secretary presented their budget, was there any reduction in force in your area? There is not at the moment. And the savings that they were looking at presenting for the I don't see where any of it was coming out of any of your vehicle purchases or any of

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: your plans to purchase? Correct. At the moment, there has not been

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: Okay, it's there.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: Okay, it hasn't been targeted for a reduction at this point. Important to continue to buy new vehicles to get the old ones out of the fleet for repair purposes. And as we buy new ones, we get the increased efficiency from the manufacturers, whether for fuel efficiency, not that it's going to be great while they're plowing snow, with fuel efficiency, we reduced emissions, a lot can change in eight years. Hopefully they're better now than our oldest trucks. We'll continue to cycle them in and out. We have had to keep our older trucks longer right now because we're still waiting for this batch to be upfit. So there's an increased cost to keep the older trucks, to keep them prepared.

[Chair Matt Walker]: You're confident as they, I guess if and when these get outfitted, that we'll have the equipment that we need continue to deliver. Agency didn't choose to use anything in your entire area as part of

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: Not at this time. I was not in my current position, but I do remember back in 2009, we were only able to buy trucks.

[Rep. Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: I just had a follow-up here. I'm assuming that includes the transfer from the T Fund, because that's my, I think it's my statute of formula. Yes. And we don't have that

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: number because it's not in

[Rep. Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: our book, so is that going to be the same? What's the number for FY20?

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: I would have to get you that, because we added it into the equipment cost.

[Rep. Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: But I'm just saying that that's been a go to as far as an outstanding and taking money from there. Is that going to be at the level that should be at?

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: For '27? For

[Rep. Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: '27, yes.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: Currently, yes. Yes. Okay. I think it would be about 3% more than what hits here in '26 that often is. Would you open up a vote for McCoy? I never heard we're done well.

[Chair Matt Walker]: I just remember coming on

[Unidentified committee member]: the committee about eight years ago. This was one of the problems because we didn't have a schedule replacement for trucks and we held onto them because they're so expensive. So I'm glad to see that I think we now have a schedule that we're following after a certain period of time, and we are funding to keep on that schedule, because I

[Chair Matt Walker]: think in the long run it costs

[Unidentified committee member]: us less, because we do less repairs on much older trucks, etcetera. Does this We

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: do shoot for eight years on the plow trucks because they do the hardest work, they have mud salt all over them, that sort of thing. So we do dredge them for eight years. Right now it's more than that. And of course we like to think that if it's newer we've got fewer problems. I think that to the most part is true. Sometimes just because it's new doesn't mean it's problem free, but.

[Chair Matt Walker]: Alright, thank you.

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: Yes, I am just wondering if the older trucks have to be used longer because of the lag in getting the new ones in, that means that they're further depreciated, right?

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: No, so the plow trucks in particular are depreciated for eight years.

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: Of They sort of stopped at eight years? Okay, Okay, that was my question.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: Eight years has been the time that we've figured, you know, history it shows that eight years is a good point to get rid of them because their costs do start to go up. But they end depreciation for eight years.

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: Okay, that would mean that when, because I know they get sold to municipalities, it's sort of their second life, right? They're sold at auction, at which

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: time a municipality could come and bid on.

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: Okay, but anybody could, okay. Okay, great. I guess I was just wondering if the 415,000 increase of penciled out for you, but

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: it sounds like maybe it does. I think that increase may have been largely in operating or personal services, Okay, not necessarily in the

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: thank you. Thanks for that clarification. Yeah,

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: it's a curiosity question, I guess. So you've got the people who maintain the trucks, the technicians, and then you've got the drivers. I imagine there might be some conflict sometimes with that. How close do they work together? And does the driver tend to drive the same truck for the year unless there's a problem? Yeah, so on the district side, are assigned, the truck is assigned to an operator. If they have night patrol off and it's someone else that drives it, but there is sort of a primary operator.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: We encourage and try to work together as much as possible between the technicians and the operators. We do ask that if an operator finds a problem, that rather than all of them go into our supervisor in our repair facilities, they kind of go through their team, making their teams first, their VP of supervisors so that they don't have quite as many calls coming in.

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: They have some like a work order thing, like an official, hey, I don't know, the steering is pulling to the right.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: Yeah, they use what we call the TA-one 160 form, which is basically a CDL pre trip checklist. So they can write stuff on there, then we get the paper. If it's something that's serious, it's generally a phone call. We try to wait for the paper to fill out.

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: Okay. But generally it works okay? For

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: the most part. And we will actually, if we see some maintenance, something's being missed, greasing, we will have in some of our shops, we'll have an operator come in during PM in the summer months and help them go through all the grease fittings that are kind of get them Yeah, responsible for that.

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: We're just operator maintenance they can And do last question, do all the trucks on the road right now have a name?

[Speaker 0]: Most of them. As far

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: as I know, they all do. So that program is still going as well. Very important question. Great, thanks. I understand, I'm a little bit away from that, but once they're named, I understand that they take the truck to the school to name this. Students get a chance to see it and see the driver. Parents and students and teachers are all pretty excited about that.

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: There's not a Thurber snow crusher out there, is there?

[Unidentified committee member]: There is not.

[Unidentified committee member]: Are you gonna put that in name for Yeah.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: Anything else on this?

[Chair Matt Walker]: We named the Ellensburg truck.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: Here is our fleet value. We have an asset management program. We put all our purchase costs and upfit costs and everything in there. Keeps track of it. It does our straight line depreciation. That's also where we make our work orders for the items that come up from the operators. If we had to replace all of our fleet tomorrow or Monday, its value would be $79,600,000 and our total depreciated value apparently is 30,100,000.0. At least it says typical single axle pop truck and I actually changed it for it. This is just to show that even it's actually been about a calendar year, we've had about a 9.5% increase in the cost of just chassis. Truck vendors have been less eager to sort of hold the contract price for us, where the body outfit vendor has been pretty decent about his contract price, maybe a couple of percent change. I just wanted to kind of give you an idea of where we're at with purchase prices over here. Here's our vehicle age by class. The 16 category is our tandem axle bump trucks, they're the big trucks. We have 41 that are between seven and eight, 37 that are greater than eight years old and eight is our performance measure, and then 49 that are less than seven. 17 categories, the Swallow Dump Truck, Single Lots of Dump Truck. Quite a few greater than eight years old because we're rating along with the 46 that are rating our single axle dump trucks. Hopefully by next year that number will be reduced. And the last number, the 27 categories, those are our small trucks that are under seat belt. And we have that change actually.

[Chair Matt Walker]: So the fleet is pretty well aged after you get the full six new ones? Yes. Not right now, but there's a plan there anyway.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: Yes. Try to always try to keep it, keep things moving in and out. You know, at risk of maybe somebody saying, Why are you getting rid of that? Or something. I wouldn't argue that, but it's, as far as the fleet's concerned, it's done its time, and it's time for it to move on.

[Chair Matt Walker]: We have enough vehicles out there to make sure we can get on the roads yet. Can I say that or could you say that?

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: Yeah, the number of plow trucks doesn't change much because our vetting milestone change, so the two fifty ish is

[Chair Matt Walker]: a good number. So we hear from homeowners that our roads are or are not taken care of to the level. One of the answers is not that we need more plows or that we don't have a plan for replacing and we do have continued significant investment in the equipment. We have not pulled back our investment in equipment and we have the amount of equipment out there that drivers need

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: to get the work done.

[Chair Matt Walker]: And you're not asking for any substantial increase in the current plans that you feel they're adequate?

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: Correct. Mean, we're at the point now where I have to adjust some of the other stuff that we're purchasing to cover the dump trucks. For this year, we're good.

[Chair Matt Walker]: And for next year? Well, this is the budget for next year. So I just wanna make sure. Yes. You're telling me that you

[Unidentified committee member]: have what you need for

[Chair Matt Walker]: this year and the next year into the future

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: to do the job. '27. Again, we'll make adjustments and make sure that we have the plow trucks that we need.

[Chair Matt Walker]: Looking

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: at this, the previous chart, two forty seven vehicles, is that your total in your

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: Yes. For the trucks. This is just the big

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: This is just plow trucks.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: It's not included pickups. Okay. Some of the medium duty stuff with plows.

[Speaker 0]: What what is your total number of vehicles that you

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: are at what you see?

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: Six sixty five. I could get you a firm number if you would like.

[Speaker 0]: That's okay. I just wanted to

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: get a flat five there. Thank you.

[Speaker 0]: And Mr. Chair was asking if you've got sufficient resources in the current budget, could you deal with a little bit less?

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: I'd say yes, I have to. Concentrate on the plow trucks because that's the biggest dollar amount of fleet as long as I can continue with pilot trucks in 2009. We only bought three. So the equipment fund then was needed for other things. Took a while to catch up. But I think we like to cycle everything out as much as possible. Pickups, we gently depreciate for five years. So we can move those in and out as well.

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: A pleasure.

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: Yeah, I'm enjoying this. With the big storm coming across the nation, and I know when power lines go out, power companies are probably heading down there now, who knows?

[Speaker 0]: Has there ever been a

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: time when we've gone to help, I don't know, Boston or somebody, and do you get those requests?

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: It has been a while. I do recall, maybe ten or fifteen years ago, we all put together a group of plow trucks, motors I think, we sent some mechanics or technicians, and they did go to Boston I believe. That was not many years ago, yeah. Prior to that when I started I heard Texas.

[Unidentified committee member]: She went

[Rep. Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: to Texas.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: Maybe we did. I thought

[Unidentified committee member]: they did. Who did not?

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: We've been to Massachusetts. We've We've to

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: Yes, we do go to Massachusetts, Massachusetts. Hopefully around that $5.44 in a big store packet. We get these requests often. Actually, we're dealing with requests right now for assistance and have submitted figures as far as if our fee was to go down and our personnel what that would be. We're working very closely with my emergency management as well to figure out what the request might be and are we able to provide that assistance if it is requested along with making our roadways still showing that's expected as well. So those requests come in very frequently, and we support as best

[Speaker 0]: as we can.

[Chair Matt Walker]: Yeah,

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: all right, thanks.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: And our technicians have a pickup or a van. We put parts in there and they have the tools in, so they can go with our vehicles. Here's a graph of a, try to just kind of pick some random units in our fleet. This is a tandem axle dump truck. They went in service around 2017, 'eighteen, and you can see initially when it goes into service there's a kind of a spike in the cost. It's all about purchase and not fixed costs. Of course that comes down over time and around 'twenty three, maybe around the first flood, you can see there's a bit of a spike there for repairs and operating costs. It's like we used in flood recovery and then of course here toward the end of its life, I'll say, you can see the costs go up fairly considerably. Try to replace hoses and a lot of things sort of preemptively so it doesn't break down and have to do it on the side of the road with a snowstorm on the interstate, that sort of thing. It does tend to start costing a little more. And this is a 17 category truck. John Corcoran, just a quick question on repairs. When you get past the lifespan of

[Rep. Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: the seven, eight years that you ideally would like to replace a truck, do you have sort of

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: like a ballpark of how much

[Rep. Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: you have to put in for maintaining it? You know, if you go beyond that point, is it costing us

[Chair Matt Walker]: like a 100,000 per vehicle, break

[Rep. Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: it down like that? What's it causing us to go beyond the life?

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: I would have to do a little research. Don't have the

[Rep. Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: number off the top of my head. Just curious, no big xelospora yet.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: So the other thing we'll do is when we take them out in a perfect world at eight years, we'll keep it another year, possibly even two as a spare, especially if it's been a good trunk, in decent shape. We may cut back on our maintenance a little bit, but of course it has to be safe. You know, you might not put any hoses and other things like that, hydraulic hoses upon it, but we do keep them safe and operable in case that one of the mainline trucks gets hit or breaks down.

[Chair Matt Walker]: Works on what?

[Speaker 0]: On the operating costs and operations, is that including diesel or gas or? Okay. And I'm assuming that there's no, you're not

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: working with electric vehicles in these fleets right now? We have

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: six, eight, nine, nine electric vehicles in the central garage fleet. We have six lightning pickups. We have Ford Mach E. We also have two small electric pieces of construction equipment. We have a small excavator and a small, I'm sorry, two small wheeled bucket loaders. Unfortunately, and I'm trying to watch and keep an eye out, the manufacturers are kind of really small, really a lot bigger than what we need. They don't want to buy a lot of rollers for instance, that makes more sense for using a gravel pit versus loading salt with some of your trucks. And unfortunately they're considerably more expensive. But it's, yeah, course, the current climate, it's not quite as big as push from federal level. But I think manufacturers are still looking at sort of the alternative fuels with battery electric vehicles and products. If we could find something in the realm of what makes sense for our fleet, certainly we consider looking into that. I I do see on this this slide, fuel costs. I think it's sort of the life of this truck in this slide is approximately $61,000. It's at a 111,000 $112,000 for the prior silver cycle. See, I missed expanding the column that shows the totals. This next slide is a smaller dump truck single axle. They're a little less expensive. Less axle with brakes and tires on. Tandem has a little bit of other some other things that signal access sometimes. You can see that the last couple of years it's starting to increase in cost to keep it down. Here is mice. This is just a plan, spending plan for central drug for fiscal year 'twenty seven. We have a total of $8,900,000 and this is the breakdown of sitting at my desk doing this on the computer is how we want to spend that $8,900,000 We will be getting only 15 plow truck chassis in 'twenty seven. That's what need to pay for. The way we have to buy the chassis and then upfit them. I buy the chassis one fiscal year and pay for the upfit the next. Catching up with these 46 trucks that I really didn't have upfit had to make sure that they had funding to pay for them. I had to bring down the number of trucks that we're getting, new trucks, new dump trucks. But we also buy an outfit, the DLP fleet, the Expired Central Garage, for a pretty hard last couple of years to get them into newer vehicles. Like to have the newer vehicle. Makes sense. Thank you, brother. There's kind of a list of all the things here that we have and we may or may not, many who may or may not yet, don't have plans for towing tractors or graders or any of that stuff. Get a couple of loaders. Now at the bottom, this latest capitalized expenses are things that we buy to outfit are small, light duty pickups, salt scrubbers and snow plows and some of the things we pull on those trucks.

[Chair Matt Walker]: Do things like the loaders being like

[Unidentified committee member]: a request from one of

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: the district garages and saying,

[Chair Matt Walker]: you're going out or it's on a plan or rotations, how

[Rep. Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: does that work? That's all

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: I would try to, they depreciate for fifteen years, try to stick with that. If someone says, hey, this is really bad, we might replace that before something else. We generally try to make a list of which ones will pop to the regional supervisors, get their inputs, they often see them for repairs. And look at all of it, not just the age or the hours of the unit. You've got to get all of it. A lot of times when it comes out of service, you might keep in an area for a spare. It breaks down and it's going take a while to fix it. Least we have something else. Something else they can use, particularly in the winter, for cold and salty.

[Rep. Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: Tell me once, you said you were buying less trucks, because you have to sort of sync up the chassis, so the truck carry box. What's the difference from last year?

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: Ordinarily I would be looking at '27 to 30 chassis.

[Rep. Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: 30 and we have what you should?

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: For FY '27 it's 15. Oh, so that's, oh, sorry, that's the cap. Okay, alright. Can you

[Chair Matt Walker]: reiterate the chairs in your set for this year?

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: I'm sorry, twenty seventh. Twenty seventh, yeah. I get that confused because we buy our trucks in calendar year.

[Chair Matt Walker]: Buy anymore, we buy. We buy more. Yeah, We

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: I still like to have folks in here. He kind of keeps it partying. I can appreciate that. I don't like to see him sitting in our yard either. Anybody else have any questions? In a nutshell.

[Chair Matt Walker]: I would say welcome to your new position, congratulations on your new position. We look forward to hearing from you. David, thank you very much.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: You're welcome.

[Chair Matt Walker]: If you have more questions, then I know there was a follow-up question or two that you had said you would be able to give back to a member on during there. Don't remember exactly which part it was. I thought I heard that. And thank you very much.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: That's something that I offered to follow-up with.

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: I think it was Rutland with Bali.

[Chair Matt Walker]: Maybe I missed it.

[Speaker 0]: Oh, that was rail trail. Yeah.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: Okay.

[Chair Matt Walker]: No problem. I may have missed it. That's okay.

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: Thank you all for your time. Appreciate it. Thank

[Chair Matt Walker]: you. Thank you

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: very much. Thank you. You as well. Stay warm and safe. Thank

[Chair Matt Walker]: you. Thanks for your input. We're going to welcome William and Smith from Vermont Truck and Bus Association. We may not be able to cover all the things that we were when you're in the building, we can bring you back. I know there's a couple of things you'd like to cover as well, and then we can bring you back in for the rest of the testimony. We're talking about some permitting and talking about some issues and what's going on with that piece. I know you have some other announcements and some stuff for the committee. Well, you.

[Unidentified committee member]: I'm sorry.

[Chair Matt Walker]: Just one second. Yes, I

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: have to go to at noon.

[Chair Matt Walker]: Yeah, we're gonna end at noon and we're gonna bring them back. We'll bring you back. But I know there's others that have meetings as well, and I appreciate that, Representative Bird. You're going to pay the price for the little bit longer floor.

[Unidentified committee member]: That's fine. I'm appearing here all week. Don't forget to tip your waiter. Very good. Can come in anytime. Happy to do it.

[Chair Matt Walker]: So Bill Smith from our Truck and Bus

[Bill Smith, Vermont Truck & Bus Association]: Association Association of maybe it's about 300 member companies speaking a lot the from size of Michael new trucking in St. Jay or B and B trucking up in Irishburg to Belovenge trucking in Barrie or Barrie trucking in South Burlington. The ranges there are maybe two trucks to 150. So by national standards, that's all pretty small. I mean a medium sized carrier nationally is over a thousand trucks owned by one company and typical those big companies you see coming in from out of state could be 5,000, 10,000 truck fleets owned by that company. So we're a speck on the fleet on the back of the dog. But we're your companies and they appreciate, and one of the benefits they provide to its members, and I'm an associate member of this, but I don't have a trucking company, but I provide legal services to members and also institution lobbying for them, as you might have noticed. So, some of the new things this year, we have a new president, Emo Chenoweth, the Butler Bus is our new president. Emo's company has been in Vermont for quite a while and in New Hampshire. So between Northern New Hampshire and Northeastern Vermont, they have six locations. It's about 300 buses total spread around the six locations. The Vermont ones are in Orleans, Linneville, and White River. So that leads me to nice if we could meet him. We have our March meeting over here at Capitol Plaza, Wednesday, March 18. It's

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: going to

[Bill Smith, Vermont Truck & Bus Association]: Mollie for a buffet style lunch over there. Get you in or out would be quick because of that. You folks have done it before, but with the changing of the guard at the association. I know that Chris Stacy Anderson was also a bus person. She was president before him, then before that, was rolling Belle of France for twenty five years. And I quit on it. Although he's still active somewhere in the association. He had my cell and he calls me on the weekends. In any event, some of the issues, a couple of issues started five minutes ago here is the state online overweight permitting has been rolled out. It came out late November, early December. This is the program that we've been nagging DMV about for the last five years and they've been working on it finally, it's out there. And initially there were some hiccups. I think it was mostly companies that didn't pull a lot of permits, is my sense of it. But as of month of January, things smoothed out and going well. I know that when I came in the building here, was, you would say, jumped perhaps by a senator who had some problems. So he reached out to the people, the companies that he was referencing, and they were already fine by that. So it was a bit of a lag in reporting to their representatives and senators versus what what the people have gotten to. To support to continue to support that because this is not a linear line. Maybe nobody hiccuped for the future. Truck and Bus has a series of Zoom meetings with our members that if they wanna have problems with their system or they wanna come in and learn how to do it, we've got some members that have volunteered. Jeff Newton from Barrett Trucking said he'll help anybody who wants to know. Why does Jeff want to do that? Because the guy or gal in front of him takes more time, he has to take more time to get his permit. So he likes to have everybody go fast. There's some educated self interest there. So that seems to be working. My understanding from the folks at DMV is that they will also be working with municipalities on their overweight permits, working with a couple of pilot programs and some volunteer towns to see if they can work that out so that a trucking company can pull an overweight permit for a town through the same system. That's always been kind of the goal here, at least my goal, is to link those up as closely as we can so that companies have one stop shopping and so the towns and our state regulators can know where the big trucks are and make sure that they've got their insurance and they know which routes they're supposed to be on and all those things can work out so that freight can move. So I don't know if you wanted to hear more about the Old Lake permitting or not, but cautious thumbs up here from that stuff and we'll see what happens with municipalities going further. There's nothing that needs to happen at this point legislatively. It's just administratively happening and we're trying it out. And we'll see if the members of the league of cities and towns that are working in the pilot program can share that with their members and hopefully get some buy in to that. There will always be towns that don't. What we do about that is a conversation for 2028. Let's see. Representative Pouech, have a question.

[Rep. Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: Yes, Yeah, I guess it's a question or a comment. Just so you maybe three years ago, I went to my town clerk, you know, I was doing something and the assistant town clerk, and then I said, hey, is there anything I could work on? That was her number one thing, the permitting. It's pain in neck and it's like a piece of paper. And you'll hear

[Bill Smith, Vermont Truck & Bus Association]: about it again called March because March is when the towns want us to have there's two kinds of permits in towns, but they allowed their overweight year long permit to be over twenty four thousand pounds on the back roads. Basically any road except Main Street is 24,000 pound road in town most sense. So any truck that you need a CDL for, about 26,000, you need a town permit. How do you get a town permit? You typically send them $10 and your fleet information and your insurance information, and they send you a permit that's good for your whole fleet for $10 from here. So is there any criteria to this? No, there's not. Do we do we need to do it? I have plenty of members who say, why are we doing this? Towns have the charge of maintaining their roads and they wanna know who's out there. The idea that no one has insurance anymore has kinda gone by the wayside now that we all have to have insurance. That's a twenty five year old argument, but it's still out there. So do we need to provide them with our insurance information? If it's easy and one stop shopping, on the go on the state website and say, I want to click on these 42 towns with some 150 towns. And I want my permits for all of them. Here's my insurance information. Here's my fleet information. And here's my money. If they opt into that, that would be fantastic. So if they don't want to opt in, at some point we'll be coming to you to figure that out. Carrots and sticks usually work well. Obviously, the budget issues, I have to at least say something about this. I read with interest age six forty three, so Keyser, think that our concept of weaning weaning the one fund off of the other fund over time makes a lot of sense. I think that I also think that this committee it struck me as I sat here looking around at this committee thinking that this is a pretty fair cross section of Vermont, both geographically, politically, even gender. It's just, it really is. So I put my faith in this kind of committee to come up with the right way to deal with these really tough choices to make. But I would ask, and I know you have this at the top of mind, gonna put it on the record. Please consider the leveraging of money that transportation fund money can do when it comes to fixing our infrastructure. That federal money pull down, you know, that 30,000,000 is 150,000,000, really, that you're walking away from if you don't fund it. You all know that better than I do, but I just haven't said that, and I'm gonna have some faith in this committee that you'll get there. Over time, there's no question that we're not keeping up on the costs of things. Just like my member companies, harder and harder, operational costs go up, freight payments are fairly stagnant, and insurance costs go up when there's a $56,000,000 verdict in Dallas, Texas against a trucking company that affects insurance rates across the country because we all get to pay for that. So things about other things, things from the price of fuel to the price of bringing your drivers to the price of

[Dave Gerber, Director, VTrans Central Garage Fleet]: a new truck, all going through the roof.

[Bill Smith, Vermont Truck & Bus Association]: It's not an easy question to make. Again, I'm here anytime you want to talk to me about it. If you have anything from a loud truck going through town to a conceptual issue about the transportation front, I'm happy to kick it around with you anytime. Think we have questions or standing between you and lunch, I don't want

[Chair Matt Walker]: a new thing. Well, you're here. We have openings throughout the week at different times, at different parts of the schedule, things change, floor goes over, people's delays happens, we can certainly have you back in at some point. We appreciate the invitation and the reception. We've always been fairly heavily attended by both the Senate and House Transportation Committees at the Vermont Truck and Bus Association reception. We appreciate that and your comments, and I think we'll probably wanna hear an update on the permitting later in the Take a look at that again, Arch. So does anybody have any other comments?