Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Unidentified Committee Member]: And

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: we are still here in Ways and Means, All Present and Accounted For. It is February something. And we are going to pick up H802. John Gray is gonna join us. I'm gonna give a quick preface in more casual language than John might use. Two things. One, I'm imagining that this would go in the yield bill. There's no need for it to be in a separate bill. And two, so if folks can go back in time to when we created the special education block grant, which we refer to as 173. Right? Everyone remember that? Okay. There was a funny thing where we put in inflation adjustment for a couple years, and then something happened in the statute. I think anyone did it purposely. I don't really understand what happened. But you can't just inflate and then stop inflating. So we're going to put the inflator back in statute. That's the big Yep. Thanks, John.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Does that mean that these children will receive more money for their future?

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: It's the special education block grant. So it's sort of early intervention as well as non early, timely intervention. I don't know what the non early, regular special education.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: This goes to the schools? Mhmm.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Yep. It's a block grant. Afternoon,

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: everyone. John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel. I'm happy to screen share. Do you want to see the bill is introduced or just the we can now codify the dollar figure now that we know it. Do you just wanna see that?

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Think it's easier to just start where we are, and then we can go backwards if we need to.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Okay. Sounds good.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: So the bill is introduced, and then you know how JFO, like, doesn't do all the work until it gets to us because we're so lucky? So we have I asked John to draft an amendment to that matches up with all the math y math. Really getting formal and more and more formal as the

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: day goes on. A Tuesday.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I know. It's a Tuesday. It's so warm, though, John.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: That's perfect because that's basically the lead in I wanted to get for this, which is, to me, this is a happy bill that is a nice confluence of a bunch of people working well together. That's nice when that happens. And I will leave it at that. Here we go. Happy Phil, age eight zero two. I know. Okay. So this is an act relating to adjusting the census grant for inflation. I have this in the form of amendment. It doesn't have to be in this form, but this is essentially, the bill was introduced to solve the simple problem identified, which is that the inflation factors included in statute for the census grant stopped at f y twenty seven, and now we need to add in an inflation factor going forward. So that's what the bill does. At the time that I drafted it, I did not have the dollar figure that could be used in its place, and now I do. So there's lots of you're gonna see a lot of text here, which is gonna make it seem more complicated than it is, but I will walk through some of it. In section one, you're just seeing stylistic changes from our editing team to match modern conventions, so I'm not gonna touch on that. Uniform base amount at the bottom of page one is really the whole thing that we're talking about here. The uniform base amount is the amount that's multiplied by your district's long term membership to produce that census grant. So you can think of it as the per pupil figure that's extended for these purposes. And as discussed, we didn't have an inflator for the uniform base amount moving forward. And you can see all this language here that described the way to arrive at the uniform base amount in existing law determined by dividing the state appropriation on page two and increasing it by NIPA for certain years then increasing by average inflation factors for the following years, we can make it a lot more simple now. So what you see is the uniform base amount meanings on page two, starting on line thirteen, two thousand three hundred fifty as adjusted for inflation. So 2,350 is the figure for FY '27, and then going forward, you will now have an inflation factor. It is a little bit different of an inflation factor than we've talked about typically in other contexts where we just use a straight cumulative inflation factor from a particular year to the year of determination. This is using a three year rolling average to try to reduce some volatility, but uniform base amount, 2350, it shall be adjusted for inflation each fiscal year beginning in FY '28 by taking the base amount for the preceding fiscal year. So in FY '28, that would be that 2350 ECN statute, and adjusting it by the most recent three year average annual percentage change in NIFA and rounding upward to the nearest full dollar amount. I'm happy to pause if folks have questions about what that means. It's technical, but I'm guessing pretty uninteresting. This adds a three year rolling average inflation to the uniform base model, which solves the problem that animated the bill.

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: And what came over to us did not have the 02/2015.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: That's correct. I didn't have that figure at the time. This is speaking about the working together well, this is one where speaking to AOE, JFO showed some of the historical context for the terminations that were made back at the time of act one seventy three to produce this figure and then seeing how statute could reach this. The simplest way to do it is just to outright codify the dollar figure. So that's the happy thing we have now. Yes. I didn't have this figure at the time the bill was introduced, so you had a lot wordier of an amendment as introduced. I'll keep going unless folks have

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: So this will increase each year based upon the NIPA factor?

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Assuming that NIPA does increase, which we can probably safely assume, but if your inflator did not, if in fact it went down, affect your amount as well. But I think the expectation is typically that you're inflating.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Yes. There is a. No. That's what's gonna happen. Exactly. The

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: one thing I might add on that front is I think if you look back, just recalling things like once earlier today in the tables of the NIFA index factor over time, If you had a one year blip, that would be offset in some ways by having this three year average annual percentage change, right, because it would be offset by the two surrounding years, essentially. So if you had a blip, it's addressed somewhat in using a three year average, which is meant to smooth somewhat the annual variation.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So and if we didn't do this, then the local taxpayers would pick up the growth in cost?

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: If you didn't do this, technically, you would just have a fixed census block grant amount. You'd have a uniform base amount that is not moving over time,

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: and so you would potentially not have sufficient funding. And so functionally, yes.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I can't think of anything bad that will happen to our locals. We're gonna have to figure out a way to come up with the money, but to our local communities, I think this is the right thing for them. I can't think of any harm at all.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: And I think it was

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: the original legislative intent, but I really have no idea because Well, I don't

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: obviously, it does have a substantive effect because in the absence of it, you would have a fixed dollar amount. I would describe this noise as a technical fix. It's addressing what seems to be just an oversight in the statute that you didn't have an inflation for years forward.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah, thanks.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Just to show the remainder, we have the full section here and all the language that you're gonna see in the following pages is striking the transitionary provisions that were codified in the Green Books. Sometimes you would have those in session law. In this case, it was in the green books. For cleanliness moving forward, it will be much easier to just read this statute. You don't have callouts to specific fiscal years in the statute. So just striking for fiscal year 2023, the amount of grant will be calculated in this particular way. You don't need that now that you've passed FY '23. On page four, you can see the callout that got us here. For fiscal years '27 and onward, the amount of census grant shall be the uniform base amount, that figure we talked about above, multiplied by the supervisory union's long term membership. So we don't hate to call out the time period. That is just the way that it is now, and then we can strike the transitionary language for fiscal years '24 through '26. The act would take effect on 07/01/2026. It reflects the FY '27 uniform base amount, and then it would be inflated beginning in FY '28 using that FY 'twenty seven figure and the three year rolling average.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Deliberating whether I should even ask about the inflators. And the reason I ask is, IDA is such a broad umbrella, and some of the disability categories, I mean, there's 13 disability categories, some of them are health related, and healthcare costs are growing at a much different rate than HIPAA, and I didn't know if there was any consideration of that.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I think we are at a point where we're defaulting for NEPA for all education stuff, and when we're ready to change the inflator, we can do it sort of across statute. Well, you

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: might do, I guess I was saying something different. Oh, okay. You might do a different inflator for those disability categories. I mean, other health impaired, for example, or orthopedic issues are gonna accelerate much more quickly than specific learning disabilities, perhaps. I don't know, I'm not an expert,

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: I'm This just

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: is not a linear relationship.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: When we're ready to look at all of the different inflators and have more opportunity to be discerning, maybe we can revisit each one and make think you

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: that's an answer to Representative Branagan. Just say happy that it's important nuance. Anticipated this conversation, yes. And I agree with you. Yes. Rebecca Holcombe

[Unidentified Committee Member]: raises a very good point, but I think it's a good place to start. It's a good pylon that we're flying around. Put it in separate languages, it's me.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: This is my dream. I think I told you guys about my dream with inflation factors. Maybe I didn't. No. I thought you guys commented that my dreams were very sad. Maybe I'm recalling a different committee. But to me, I would love to because I find it so unwieldy to have all these sections in which we say as adjusted for inflation and then we spell out the concept. I would love if we almost had a sub chapter or something that was just different inflation factors.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I am joining your dream. You've never told me

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: And you cross reference to them whenever you're inflating a particular thing and you just say as adjusted for inflation, you and just go look at the inflation sub chapter and it says, we adjust this way for this, we adjust for this way. I like that. I don't know. To me, that would be so much simpler to read. I

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: think maybe we can do that at some point, not today. I think I'll find my dream set. Someone's ready. Make a dream for joining your dream. Thank you, John.

[Rep. Carolyn Branagan (Member)]: So it's $2,350 per student based on enrollment. A pretty blunt instrument I think we've all kind of recognized, but how does that compare to where it was when it was first initiated at 2,350? Yeah, sorry,

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: let me just pull it

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: right back. It seems like a better Julia question.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: I'm happy to not answer.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Cool. Great.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: I can also write an email, so happy to go.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Thanks.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yes?

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Hi.

[Julia Richter, Joint Fiscal Office (JFO)]: Hi, Henry Rector, DFO.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Good afternoon. So I want to fold this into the yield bill because it feels like a technical correction, I think it's We don't need to give the Senate more vehicles than they already were getting.

[Julia Richter, Joint Fiscal Office (JFO)]: Julia, back to you. So unfortunately, I

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: have to follow-up on that

[Julia Richter, Joint Fiscal Office (JFO)]: Julia question, unless John knows about me. I'm so sorry. Okay. So I will follow-up with that. I will say that in fiscal year twenty six, the average essentially, way that the Census Block Grant has worked is it's been phasing districts into this uniform base amount. And so the average Census Grant amount in '26 was $2,300 And then in FY 'twenty seven, AOE has estimated for it to be $2,350 And then it would be moving forward with inflation going forward. So because AOE already included this base amount of 2,350 for the purpose of the Census Block Grant calculation in FY27, by passing this bill, there would be no fiscal impact to the Education Fund in FY27, because that's what's already been done by the agency and communicated to school districts. In future years, it would be that there would be this adjustment for inflation. The other piece that I will add that the agency reminded us of in calls, and Ezra has done a lot of work on this, is the concept of maintenance and fiscal support. So those federal guidelines and so the importance of making sure that maintenance and fiscal support is met. This would be one way to move in that direction.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Any further questions for Julia? Great. Thanks, Julia. We're done for the day. Don't get used to it. Fees. And we have quite a few bills coming up on the docket, so folks could read ahead and let me know if you have any flags about anything. We're gonna revisit seven fifty seven tomorrow with some amendments to take a look at some of the tax law changes they made and bring it sort of closer in alignment with some of the requests from the tax department and to the tax policy. We're gonna hear testimony on the Medicaid school based services bill, H558, that we got from House Health Care. We have H549, an act relating to eligibility of detainees to obtain a state issued non driver identification card. There's a little bit of fee business in there. H841 is an act relating to miscellaneous animal welfare procedures. It includes a checkbox on your tax form for animal welfare or something. I have already had an amendment drafted to remove that checkbox because that stuff doesn't really work out very well, generally.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I like the excuse me for interrupting. Yeah.

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Well, like,

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Yes.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Enough checkbox, sort of like that, or is it?

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Sure. Is there a green up checkbox? Yeah.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Yes, it's like that. Yes.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: And the more checkboxes there are, the less the checkboxes will work.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: That's correct. This would

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: checkbox. And

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: then we have H775, which we talked about on Friday, but it's the rest of our witnesses. That's an act relating to creating tools for housing production. We're also gonna have an amendment on that. We're going to go back to school construction legislative language and ideas with a bunch of witnesses. That's going to be a collaborative conversation. We have H917 and Act relating to military affairs. I don't know anything about that. What are learning about that one?

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

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Any comments from general? We're going to go back to our conversation about the federal link up and tax conformity, with some new updated numbers with Pat and Kirby. And then we're gonna draw a poll, empty, our miscellaneous tax bill. So if there's anything else in there that we haven't talked about, let's talk about it. And then hopefully tying regional assessment districts and non homestead residential classifications up with a bow. But both of those pieces of language, I am anticipating we're going to hold until we get a bill from the education committee. And that would all be exempt from crossover deadlines. So we won't be formally voting on that for

[John Gray, Office of Legislative Counsel]: a little bit.

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Sorry. So RADS or RADS and the tax RADS and tax class. Yes. Miscellaneous tax is gonna leave us on Friday. Alright. That's it for the week, but I'm sure many more things are gonna get put in there. Wait. H nine twenty one, alcoholic beverages. Thanks. Do

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: we have the update on the first bill? Do we have the new language? Seven fifty seven?

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: No, we do not. The starting stats bill. There's a section by section from Friday. Teddy is working on it, Rebecca, and he might have it if he want to send to you. I don't know if he has it. Agreed. We don't usually post in advance, but maybe search, I can send it around.

[Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: I don't know if doesn't have it. Don't know if he

[Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: has Agreed. Any other questions? Yes?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I was around what you were just talking about. Tomorrow, I have a bill on the floor, I think it's $5.88. Can

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I