Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Chloe Tomlinson (Clerk)]: I'm sorry. Just had somebody put you on my line. Are you ready to go?

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: I guess so. Wow. We are live. Yeah. Good afternoon. Here we are on Tuesday on February oh, It's a big day coming up here soon. Love it. I don't have to worry about stumbling over myself because I have an old friend here. Those people you count on for info. Logan is in the chair. We are started in house transportation for Tuesday afternoon, February ten.

[Chloe Tomlinson (Clerk)]: I just want to know that from the lead, very experienced, committee assistant, who is here to offer some today, usually with senate. Welcome. Welcome, Chris.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: Glad to have you. Logan, what are we talking about this afternoon?

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: So for the record, I am Logan Mooberry with the joint fiscal office, and we're gonna talk about revenue for evidence. So the January revenue numbers came in and I figured it would take just a little bit of time and see where the fund is at, see how things are looking, answer any questions there are. And I'll show you how to So I'm gonna start this, showing you how to find these documents every month after I get the revenue numbers, the schedule to as they call it, I put it into a spreadsheet and then I posted on our JAPO website. There's another document on there that if you're ever curious on your own, what's happening and revenue, you can go there and find it. How you get there, some of you will notice, we've done this a time or two, but from the general assembly web page, where we'll start, you can click this box here that says joint fiscal office, that is my office. Most important piece on

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: there, Yes.

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Some might differ, but yes. This will bring you to our homepage. They just go under subjects, left hand sides, scroll down a little till you find transportation. This will bring you to the transportation subject area, scroll down until you see this monthly data. And this has apparently two thirty five entries. So I don't actually know how far back this goes, but every month, or at least the past four or five years, it's been updated with the revenues as we sort of get them. So you'll see here, there are three January ones and then one December one. The December one is focused on gas and diesel gallons tax. The reason it's December is because that data is lagged an additional month. So, it's the sales of gasoline in December, but it shows up due to accounting and reporting processes in the January numbers. But anyways, that's not that important for this subject. You can go through all these. The transportation details is you can download the entire spreadsheet that I have, and that's the one I'll sort of walk through in a second. That's a lot of information on that one. You can also look at just the summary, probably very big. You only get just the summary, which sort of breaks it down and I'll walk through what all these mean in a second. And then if you want this very basic, you can do at a glance. And this will sort of show you total keep on revenues versus the forecast. So, this is for January. You can see where it's just slightly below what we forecast to be at.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: The dark green one there.

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: The dark green one is the actual amount of money we brought in. The light green one is what our target was that the forecast that the economist set. And then the gray one is what reflected last year. Look out at

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: a glance, It was a little bit behind, a little bit behind, a little bit behind. We're working our way backwards. A little bit behind. Ones that you can show us where it would be ahead?

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: We could probably go back a while, but not

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: with what we're dealing with, Right. I could go back a while, but yes. Being a little bit facetious, I guess. But that's why the conversations are as important in and outside of the committee as they are because it just doesn't deliver. The way it's set up structurally right now.

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Let me pull up the big spreadsheet You can download if you wanna follow along or the summary sheet is the sort of the main one we'll highlight on, but I'll point out some other things in the spreadsheet itself. Perfect, so there are all the numbers, a lot of them there. Very briefly on the left hand side, you have monthly numbers. So, the revenue we collected this month, the target for this month. And then on the right hand side, have cumulative year to date with the total amount we've collected year to date, and then the target year to date. So, it's kinda separated in two halves. You'll see here, actuals, this is what we brought in this month target. This is what the forecast estimated we were gonna bring in or thought we were gonna bring in this year. And you can see just simple math for the verses and then the percentage off from that target. Gas and diesel were above, more significant for diesel, gas 2.4%, which is pretty close to on target. Purchase and use down again. It had been down below target for a number of months. And then I believe November, December, were above target. January now we're down below target again, 11% below what we were forecasted to be. Same with motor vehicle fees, that was similar trend to purchase and use. We're also, this month came in below. Up for other fees. And total, we're about 2% below per clutch this month to where we should have been.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: Logan, I mean, you're looking at something that targets, I mean, you look at these things a lot. We know how old people are in the state. We know how many drivers that are there. We know how many renewals have. We know how many students are in driver's ed that would be looking to get a license, etcetera. If it's off by, what is that, 9.9% in motor vehicle fees, at what point do you kind of look at that and say there's something more significant? When you're that far off of a target that would seem somewhat pretty predictable, We know exactly how many drivers there are. We know exactly how many are coming of age. We know exactly how many are up for renewal. We know exactly how many registrations are due for renewal each month. We know how many inspections are needed each month. It should be pretty, I would think, as a total amateur, it would be pretty darn predictable. What percentage, if it's off by 10%, when do you start going? Is there something bigger going on underneath? I think when you're

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: looking at the monthly, the percentage versus target is less important because it's much harder, right? Just monthly variations. Some people get it at the end of the month or if it's reported, it's like a day late, right? It shifts between the months. What you wanna be looking at is year to date or the twelve months. When those numbers are starting to deviate, that's when we're getting these longer, bigger trends that are changing from what we forecast. Month to month, there's just a lot of noise and variation that could cause changes. It's hard to say one month, what causes it or doesn't cause it. It's the bigger picture ones that you want us really focus on.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: Is it odd that the entire variation for the seven months is all in one month? Maybe it's not all, but it's 707

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: So, okay, yeah. Okay, so that is because the forecast was just updated. I guess I should say that. So this target was just updated January 15, it was a new forecast was adopted. So all of these numbers took into account the first six bunch of collections, forecasted something new to create a new set of targets. And that's why we only have one month versus the target. So that's why this equals this is because these were all just updated January 1, essentially. And it's calendar year, not a fiscal year then, it's just this January 26, it's not this year. Yeah, there's only been one month cause we did the forecast in July and January. And so this is working off the January forecast. There's only one month of data.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: Not a fiscal year to date situation. So you could

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: look at this twelve month, some year over year, which sort of looks back twelve months, so it looks at last January, and you can see the change from there. But this number will sort of, these numbers will change as we get more months that are up and down.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: Now I'll go back to my original question, guess, is that when would you think in a world that is generally pretty predictable in motor vehicle fees because those are not purchased in use, that's not new activity, it's pretty predictable. When would be a big enough number that I would be concerned that something's not running

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: right? What number would trigger you to say, wait a minute, what's going on? For me personally, I'm always looking at these and questioning, 1%, 2%, that's variation in a forecast. It's when a $300,000,000 budget, right? But you start getting these larger numbers, you start seeing this 4.5%, maybe there's something there. And then at that point you dig in and see if there really is. I can't say that there's a set point. Part of my job is I'm always looking at these and keeping an eye off them, and when they sort of get to an issue. The other thing to note is that due to just the nature of reporting revenue, sometimes we see at the end of the year, there's sort of an end of year true up, where we're lagging behind, but then we either get a bunch of revenue at the end of the year as all the books are sort of finalized and things come together, and these numbers can shift very drastically at the end of the year. So it's, I guess, to your point, nuanced and hard to say at what point it becomes a bigger issue other than I think it would be prudent to be looking at these every month and see how things are progressing.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah, and I don't wanna speak for the chair, but I think purchase and use be straightforward. Maybe people buy cars and don't register them, but they're gonna, you know, so there's some of that maybe. Gas, you either buy it or not. I don't think there's too many people buying gas on the black market. But motor vehicle fees, think over time, we're sort of And we don't, I think, have really any good data other than taking a walk in our parking lot and seeing how many cars have been inspected. They're not up to date. And we have a little bit of nuanced data saying more people will get pulled over, know, their registration is not up to date. So that would be one that would be like, is there something else besides people not registering their cars? Or, you know, is it, you know, there's something else to go after to get that? But you don't have any of that data.

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: I

[Unidentified Committee Member]: don't. And I'm curious, so over the last five years, there's been a trend since, say, COVID.

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Yeah. And so for stuff like that, that's really a question I think DMP could probably answer and bring in. I know they have recently done sort of a fee report if you're interested in digging into all that, and they can sort of speak to how much of it is a trend that we're seeing and how much of it is just noise and fluctuation and variation in how people behave and all these different factors could lead to a lot of these things. So, it's hard to say and one that you could definitely dig into and D and B might be able to shed a little bit of light on that.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: And I think where we are now with funds is now forcing us to look under the rock. Did somebody leave some crumbs there?

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Right. Yep.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: Representatives on that. I will say that I've now seen three plates, three white plates on the back of vehicles that are which expired So, I don't know and I haven't gone around looking at them all but since since hearing things from the DMV there a few weeks back, I've been paying attention. So I'm just saying that's where some of the money is, A little bit. I don't know how much. Is there a way of telling? I mean, is there a way of the DMV telling us, okay, this was so much of this so much of this is registrations, yearly registrations, so much is purchasing.

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Yeah, yeah, the revenue that they bring in. That would be to the extent that they can get it granular, they should have some sort of breakdown. The

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: new shift from the T bill to the miscellaneous motor vehicle bill and moving to the DMV part. Yep. But there's definitely The question was out there. That's why I just thought maybe it had something to do with that. Look. Keeps looking. But the everyone I've looked at so far in the dates.

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: It didn't. What else do I wanna mention here? The forecast as you all may remember did downgrade the target revenue. I believe it was one and a half. I have to go back and check. So this number here was slightly lower than if you went back to the December 1, it have a different number. That's because we sort of change it up every six months as information comes. But just after sort of one month of data where I would call this right on target essentially, This twelve year, we had the revenue downgrades past few times. We had the recession plan. I think we all sort of know the state that the T bond is in. And then we can drop down to the TIB. It's, I don't wanna say not interesting, but it's just gas and diesel fuel assessments. So those are doing fairly well. You can see on the right hand side, as we sort of know with gas, it's been going down and you see a 13% decrease. I think that TIB is sort of forecasted to be about at 16,600,000 for the next five years or so. So pretty steady state there. That's all on sort of this summary sheets. This spreadsheet has a lot of other useful information depending on what you're trying to do. This is that at a glance spreadsheet or graph, sorry. And then there are scroll down here, a bunch of different charts you can come in and look. There's a search chart out if you wanna look at gas tax and assessments that goes back to 2001, you can sort of see all these trends. I presented a lot of these charts to you already. They're all started here, diesel tax, purchase and use. So, there's a lot of information here. Revenues, if you wanna know what we actually collected this list of numbers as the numbers that we actually collected from the schedule to every month going back to probably 2,000. Probably not that interesting for all of you. Dedicated, this is the TIB money that we collected. It's similar to the revenue, but we just call it dedicated. And then this last one targets is essentially what the forecasted targets are. And all of these sort of go into that summary sheet that I showed you and give you it all on one page. This is where the numbers come here. These are the specifics if you ever have the interest. And then this running sheet is that year over year change. And so, this sort of just looks back twelve years. It has all the different fuel or the revenue categories. You can go in and see what the twelve months somewhere, what we collected that month, then sort of how it has changed for the last twelve months ago. And then these go all the way through, can do total T funds. So, these are all the numbers again. It's all reflected on the summary sheet, but if you want to dive into it, you could. It's about the extent of the revenues. I don't know if there are any other questions. I can talk to you about all the specific numbers if you want. Don't know if that's useful.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: I'll see where is it month by month. And you know where you want to look if you want to find out what revenue monies are from month by month. So

[Chloe Tomlinson (Clerk)]: where would I, am I on the right page?

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: That means I have tabs.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: I think they're on the top

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: of So yeah, that's the summary one. If you do the details one, it'll download the whole spreadsheet, and then you can go to task. Most people don't need the details in their day to day, so the summary usually will get you all the information you want, but sometimes when I'm doing analysis, we do those. And so, I put it out there for everyone to see if they want to.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: Sometimes wonder, I guess, is it if we downgraded the target, I mean, idea is we're trying to nail what actually is coming in, downgrade the target so that it matches what happened, then we change unchanged in the target in the last twelve months. So you you wonder where it ought to be, but it's not. We do change the target. Every six months. We're not exactly comparing somebody's predictions from one or two years ago to how often we are, we rise it every six months with the idea that they're basically supposed to be equal if we're doing a good job of forecasting. That's the scary part, this is even a month, it's what three weeks? We wanted to eat more, we January, right? That's like $500,000 worth of outfires. I was two weeks away, away. Three Which might make it up to February, but we don't know. If we had a, so if you showed us what you were planning on showing us for this morning, this afternoon. The one that when you went back, you get out of here and you have that list of reports to grab onto and it shows the gasoline piece. Yeah, I don't know for that one. The reason I want to bring it up is because it is through December. So it gives you the year to date totals of every year that's in there. And there's a of twelve months, there's a couple of charts that show a really interesting piece about where we were at maximum gasoline consumption into where we are today. It's the year and dates at the end chart as opposed to the graph as opposed to each of the data pieces. I don't know where you were just at your list of reports, and it

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: was the top one. Yes, is in the top one. This chart.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: And then the seasonal gas.

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Seasonal gas, yeah. Just briefly,

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: this

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: chart just essentially uses the fixed gas tax that comes into the T fund, backs out using our known fixed cost to see how many gallons we sold every month. So that's this number, then you get your twelve months sum. This is if you index it back to 94, and then some other numbers out here. We do the same with diesel,

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: then you wanted The chart that shows a year over

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: I bet

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: it won't. I believe No. Off of that. That particular chart you just showed is amazing to me, but then it graphs it. That's consumption. That is our consumption in Vermont. It's hard to see the years, but the peak back

[Unidentified Committee Member]: in can find COVID in there.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: Yeah, you can see COVID. Yeah,

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: so we sort of peaked back here in the early 2000s, 2005,

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: slowly declining COVID dropped off significantly, bumped back a little. What's the gap between the kind of flattened out since COVID and where the top is? I can't read it. But if you were run it across and we're using two sixty five million or whatever right now, what was the number way back at the top? It was just in general. Okay.

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: So right there, it's at three fourteen. Right now we're at

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: so pull up for me.

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: 288 289. And then if you went all the

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: way up to 60. If you're all the way back up to there.

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Go here.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: 365. So 65 and 11. Is that what you're so you're talking like 70 right, then all the way over to the right. 14 versus what is that?

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: 88. 388-9038.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: 10%. What was

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: the $3.14? What was the, I don't whatever the high was. It's right underrepresented.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Do we have any data that shows how much of this decline, just straight decline, is due to higher efficiency, which could be EVs too, I guess, higher efficiency versus reduced miles driven.

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Which I don't have any with me right now. I think there is data out there, and I do know most of it comes from efficiency.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: Miles driven- Everybody hasn't moved closer to the store?

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: No. Or the schools? I wanna say, and I wanna check this, but I believe miles driven has not changed that much. It is mainly driven by efficiency and EV adoption to some degree, although relatively minor still, cars are just more efficient. You can drive further on those guests. But I think the agency might have some data on this or there's definitely some data out there that I could look into. I think the agency tracks average field to miles driven, but I don't know how up to date it is, guess. Know

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: it It's sounds like they interesting, could be driving much further. In other words, we have no We

[Unidentified Committee Member]: might have more miles, but more efficiency.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: Right, I don't know. That's an interesting thing.

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: We don't know if

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: we're driving further or not. We know we're using less gas, but we don't know we may actually be going farther. There might be more efficiency there than we had thought, I guess. I think you would initially predict if we are driving more. I it

[Unidentified Committee Member]: sort of reminds me of the cigarette tax when the tax that's there, the state or whoever is relying on that tax money. And at the same time, we have programs to reduce smoking. We have a lot of programs and a lot of goals, statewide goals and whatnot to get higher efficiency, drive less miles. And that's all good. But in fact, unless we were to do something with the amount of gas tax, that's just gonna continue to go down. We're intentionally There's nothing saying the amount of miles that people drive is gonna go up or the vehicles that they purchase are gonna use gas per mile.

[Logan Mooberry (Joint Fiscal Office)]: Most estimates say that gallons consumed will continue to decrease. Miles driven, I'm not sure on that, but gallons consumed is forecasted to be decreasing as far as retail.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: So the policies we are making directly impact the revenue that we have to fix the It's just amazing. We're intentionally trying to get that number to go down. We haven't made an adjustment to pay for it. Back to our biggest theme of the year.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: And driving less miles, driving more efficiently is an affordability. It's, you know, if we were all driving vehicles from 1980, we'd be consuming a lot more gas and would be costing a lot more.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: It might have better roads than it is. I can't guarantee that. All righty, does anybody else have any questions or any pieces? I think we are got a little short break before our next piece.