Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Okay, here we are in Ways and Means. It's still April 1, and it is 10:45. And we are hearing from Bill Kimbell. Hi, Bill. Thank you so much for joining us.

[Bill Kimbell (Superintendent, Maple Run USD)]: You're welcome. Good morning. My name is Bill Kimbell. I'm the superintendent of schools for Maple Run. Just making sure you're ready. I thought maybe I jumped the gun there.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: No. No. No. The floor is yours. I'm so sorry. Charlie was just making a joke about your similar last names.

[Bill Kimbell (Superintendent, Maple Run USD)]: Oh, yeah. No. Yeah. We do, Charlie, but they're spelled there's representative Kimbell, they're spelled differently. So yeah.

[Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: That's right. Exactly. I ring you bounce, and Richard Kimbell is a relative of yours, not mine. Right?

[Bill Kimbell (Superintendent, Maple Run USD)]: Yep. Yep. I get that a lot too.

[Mark Higley (Member)]: April Fools. It's April Fools,

[Bill Kimbell (Superintendent, Maple Run USD)]: so we need a few things today.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: What about the America's Test Kitchen Milk Street guy?

[Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: Bill Kimbell? That's a different guy. Right?

[Bill Kimbell (Superintendent, Maple Run USD)]: That's a different guy. Yeah. I don't know.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Anyway, the floor is yours, sir.

[Bill Kimbell (Superintendent, Maple Run USD)]: Alright. Well, thank you. As I stated, my name is Bill Kimbell. I'm the superintendent of schools from Maple Run. I've been the superintendent here for the past five years and working in the district for the past seven. Prior to that, I've been an administrator slash teacher for the past thirty three years, and I've served three other supervisory union slash districts through the before and through the act 46 process. I thought I'd give some context a little bit to Maple Run, and I know that you're taking testimony on tax incentives and other ways to support mergers. I I was present for about half of your previous testimony that you had from Brook Olson Farrell. In Maple Run, we were one of the first districts to merge in Vermont under Act 46, and one of the main reasons that drove Maple Run with that was the tax incentives at that time. That was a big incentive for our community. To kind of give you some data on that, when we the year before we merged in fiscal year twenty seventeen we had a tax rate of a dollar 45 and for the eight years after so the tax incentives went for five years but for the first eight years, our taxes never rose above that 1.45 Our community still asked today for us to prove that there was actually a savings of money. And I didn't bring the graph today, but I'd be glad to share it with the committee. When you take into account the impact of inflation and level it to $2,024, we've almost had a 20¢ tax decrease during that time. So for Maple Run, that's one that every budget cycle someone comes forward and asks me to show that slide, I kind of keep that in my back pocket. And the thing that has happened is our tax rate has escalated fast and very rapidly for our area. We serve St. Albans City, Town, and Fairfield, and the County Of Fairfield along with the city and town of St. Albans is growing very rapidly. So our CLA is really impacting our tax rates. The other thing that I would tell you about our merger that made it really successful was an investment in our once we call it our small school. It's actually probably one of the largest schools in Vermont. It's actually the I actually keep data on this where the our smallest school is Fairfield Center School, which is serves about 250 students, and our other schools in Maple Run, St. Albans City, is about almost 600 students. St. Albans Town is a little over 700, and BFA St. Albans, our high school, is at 09:30 students. So while my history is working in small rural schools, that's what I've done a lot of in my career, and before coming here, the largest elementary would have been smaller than Fairfield. They're like the seventieth largest school in the state, so there's a lot more that are smaller. In saying that, we know today, and we've talked with our board about it, that we could take all the students that are in Fairfield and put them in St. Albans City and town, but it's politically untenable for us to do that, under the current place we are. So when I look at tax incentives, that was something that really helped us in Act 46. One of the other issues that we're trying to tackle in Maple Run is our structure. We have three pre K-eight schools, St. Albans City, St. Albans Town, and Fairfield, and so we service all those grade levels in all those schools. We've been asking the question, is that the best way to serve students? And one of the things that's enticing to think about that's in Act 73 is having comprehensive high schools and bigger middle schools. If we were to move to taking one of our larger schools and making it our middle school, there would be considerable construction costs, not to increase the footprint, but renovation to make it a high quality middle school. So when I think about reconfiguration that's talked about in Act 73 and trying to serve all our students, that's something that we'd have to look to find those resources to reconfigure that school building, because half the building is a primaryintermediate elementary school, and the space needs and the needs of the student are much different than students that are in grades five through eight. So that's one of the things where as you think about incentives, would urge the Ways and Means to think about construction

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: first. Indeed.

[Bill Kimbell (Superintendent, Maple Run USD)]: And I know you've taken testimony on that. So that's one of the places that I'm in agreement for where we are right now. The other thing is for high schools. This is my of my careers, I told you my length. It's the first time I've worked in a high school that has a tech center on the same campus. And one of the things that I would say this is my first experience in working at a comprehensive high school, as outlined in Act 73, but just in general, we are able to merge our schedules between we have our schedules aligned between the tech center and BFA St. Albans and students easily flow in and out of two periods of a tech center course and back into the high school. Our highest performing kids are accessing the tech center. We have waiting lists for almost every program. And unfortunately, we're literally land bound. We can't find the space we need because we need to expand the tech center to offer more opportunities to kids. So that's one of the things that when I think about construction and those comprehensive high schools, it's having that modern learning space to meet students' needs.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Anything else you want to tell us about what worked or what you would

[Bill Kimbell (Superintendent, Maple Run USD)]: The other thing that worked was What didn't Community bought into the merger. And so it really helped the cultural change that we needed to have to think of us as Maple Run. This past, I'll just give you a little anecdote. This past December, we had a meeting of all the Franklin County representatives and all the school boards in Franklin County. My representative one of my two representatives from Fairfield said right in front of everyone, I was against this merger. But when it works right, I can see that actually the town of Fairfield and the school of Fairfield Center School has gained more from the merger because resources came in from the other towns to actually do sorely needed renovations and upkeep that were due to not doing long term maintenance and deferred maintenance issues. And so we've put almost over $4,000,000 into that school without having to bond a penny of it. And that's been our and I think that sums up our experience. It's but it was the cultural buy into the merger. I'm hopeful of what the House Education has been working on about trying to have communities come in and see what the evidence is because that community support has stead us well here in St. Albans.

[Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: I say this as a graduate of St. Albans City Elementary School, but do you think that your school districts were really positioned in a place to merge more easily than, say, some of the other communities we might hear from, from a forced merger standpoint? So at that point, it was really just the outstanding financial benefit that was in question.

[Bill Kimbell (Superintendent, Maple Run USD)]: I would actually say the opposite. We had long standing before I got here and I the superintendent prior to me, doctor Durth, he did a great job of just literally getting p and along with some strong leadership of the board, I kinda shortcut this part of the testimony. But there were strong leadership from the board and himself to get everyone in the same room. And there were prior to emerging in Franklin Central, there were long standing relationships between principals and boards and not the superintendent. So there was a lot of groundwork that had to be done, and there were strong leaders on the board and in the community that said this needed to happen, but it wasn't in the culture of the schools. The schools were very separated. And we're still working on curriculum instruction and assessment work right now. It took us three to four years just to get the human resources businesses and IT. And that's the other thing I would say is that I worry about the timeline when we're gonna take, we were all within the same supervisory union, so at least we all had the same financial platform for technology. When we're going to start talking about in between different supervisory unionsschool districts, I think of just my neighbors, I know they're on different software platforms for financial. When we talk about just trying to merge the payroll with different contracts, that's going to be exponentially in my mind more complex than doing it within a supervisory union that came together.

[Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: All right, thank you for that. One of your representatives from, well, Representative Dickinson was on the school board at the time that BFA went public instead of its private status. And that was a huge process as well,

[John (Legislative Counsel, Office of Legislative Counsel)]: as I recall.

[Bill Kimbell (Superintendent, Maple Run USD)]: It was, it was, and that was getting everyone on that idea of the public. And then it was a huge process. We didn't have merged contracts before the merger to Maple Run. So just getting all the contracts the same was a huge undertaking. It wasn't so much from the I think I can say this for my association colleagues. It was more as a higher undertaking from the associations because there were four separate associations and they had different agreements for how they did work.

[Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: Thank you for that.

[Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: Yeah, Representative Cheney

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: and then Ode.

[Carol Ode (Member)]: Okay, can you talk more about what happened with the contracts themselves? I suspect you had Fairfield on one end and maybe BFA on the other. How did you are they all getting the same step increases at this point?

[Bill Kimbell (Superintendent, Maple Run USD)]: Well, yeah. As soon as the contract was merged back in 2018, they all had to be what we call lift up and place down. So we had to put them in the same place. And everyone came BFA was the highest pain at that point, and everyone came up to BFA. There was nothing found mid range. And I will say, I can tell you for our current contract that we're under, we have one of the higher salary scales in all of Vermont for base salary. Our index isn't, but our I said that wrong. I'm sorry. Our base salary is one of the highest in Vermont. Our index is not and then working conditions had to be figured out, and we're still living that reality today between buildings because some staff have been here for thirty plus years.

[Carol Ode (Member)]: Were you able to let any staff go, I mean, reduce positions?

[Bill Kimbell (Superintendent, Maple Run USD)]: Yeah, we have been. We've been able to reduce positions through attrition. We've had a few reductions in force, but our main way of doing that, we were able to do support staff as in business. We had separate business accounting for every district, so that was a huge. We've been able to streamline that. I know that our current administrative central office is about 4% of the budget for all of Maple Run. And so we're able to really streamline that for HR, IT, and business operations. And then we've also been able to streamline some teaching positions. We're at the point, because of our size, it's easier to do that with attrition. And a year and a half ago, the board adopted clear our second version of our class size policy. And that's really helped us really try to look at class sizes. We're starting to see for the first time since the merger, we're starting to see a loss of students in St. Albans. We've been really flat for the past eight years.

[Carol Ode (Member)]: And I never tell you that I used to work in Fairfield. I worked there for years and so I have a lot of friends still up there in school. And I know from their mouths, they are much happier now as they're part of a larger district. They feel like their children, well, it's their grandchildren at this point, but are getting more opportunity. I think things are going much better. Certainly the facility, they could afford to improve that facility. Was needed greatly. When I was there, we had three schools, East Fairfield, Center School and the two schools side by side, one, two,

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: and then the school out

[Carol Ode (Member)]: in East Fairfield. So it was a lot of buildings to maintain and I think pretty much that's strong. So good job.

[Bill Kimbell (Superintendent, Maple Run USD)]: Well, thank you. I would tell you that one of the things I've been studying this year is return on investment. What are we getting for student performance for the money that we're putting in? And our highest return on investment right now is Fairfield Center School, and that's mainly due to class size and student need. While they have some of the more, they have the same intensity as some of our other schools for student need. It's not as varied. It's not the same percentage, I should say, as the other schools. And their class sizes are right in that sweet spot from grades four through 12, range from 18 to 26. And their class sizes K through three are in the high teens. And so that's really driving and they are it's our highest performing pre K as well.

[Carol Ode (Member)]: Great. Glad to hear

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: it. I

[William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: heard that you have a waiting list for your technical center, and then you mentioned first students go in the middle two periods of the day. So, you have the first and last periods where teachers aren't teaching, if that's correct. Are the teachers, do they have a lesser teaching load if they're teaching at the technical center? If so.

[Bill Kimbell (Superintendent, Maple Run USD)]: Yeah, so let me clear that up a little bit. We have a half day technical center that runs the same bell to bell time as the high school. And so we have a morning session for the technical center and an afternoon technical session, and then we have exploratory slash pre tech period, which is our fourth period or middle of the day. Our tech center teachers are teaching the same load as our high school. They have five periods of classes. That's what our contract calls four out of seven. What happens is a student can elect Let me give you an example of a student from seven years ago that I know really well. He's actually graduated from Georgia Tech now. He's an engineer. He knew that engineering and STEM was a real passion of his. So his sophomore year, he spent his year in our engineering studies tech center. So he took two classes of a sudden period day in the tech center, and then the other five periods he took for other classes. By the time he graduated, he had done BC calculus, which we're able to offer one period of that, and probably I think he had probably about nine to 10 AP courses along with an independent study and technical and engineering studies because it was past what the tech center normally does. So those are another really stellar program. We have a couple other stellar programs that I would just mention. We've been able to combine geometry and construction. So for kids that need a real hands on application math course, we have a huge waiting list for that. We could have three or four sections of that where math teacher teams up with a construction teacher in the tech center and they teach geometry to sophomores and our kids love it. And then the other one is our health sciences. There's a waiting list for that and they end up with usually 15 college credits by the time they end. They're two years in health sciences in the technical center and at the same time they're going back to BFA and taking AP bio, AP chem, things like that. Our construction trades right now, we are able to have four sections of it, which serves approximately 45 to 50 kids. We could have a 100 kids in that program, that's how popular it is.

[William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: I get it, but can I ask you one last question? If you have the building and you have the teachers teaching five classes, then is that five out of seven?

[Bill Kimbell (Superintendent, Maple Run USD)]: Yeah. It's five out they teach five out of seven.

[William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: Why not add teachers and then teach in that same space, the two more periods today, take up the wholesale domain?

[Bill Kimbell (Superintendent, Maple Run USD)]: It's a schedule that we need for the tech center to meet the requirements sorry, for the tech ed requirements. So you can't split it. You need a back to back period. It's a whole scheduling piece. So we have to leave those. It's a constant requirements under technical education. I'd have to get my director for the tech center to come in and give you more of those details on why that is.

[William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: Thank you very much.

[Carol Ode (Member)]: Bill, has there been

[Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: any analysis done of whether the merger saved money overall?

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: I know that we've talked about

[Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: this at the state level and the data is a little bit unclear about whether ongoing operating costs really went down as a result. Know I it wasn't necessarily the the reason for doing a merger, but do you have any analysis on that?

[Bill Kimbell (Superintendent, Maple Run USD)]: I I don't have any analysis. I will tell you one of the things that that we do get asked at budget time is, you know, the the question you just asked. Like, where's the actual savings, the dollar savings? And there haven't there's none that I could point to. What I could point to is I know in '21, '22, and 2223, the board debated about whether because we had the room in the tax rate, whether to expand offerings and supports to kids. As we all know, mental health has been a really huge issue for our students. And that's something that we've invested in heavily in St. Albans. We've brought a whole behavioral mental health division on within the school system, where we're providing a lot of supports to kids. And we're finding that really successful in our social emotional data and our behavioral data for our students. And but we've had to bring in a lot of resources to do it. So we've actually that's where our expansion has been, where we probably could have cut that cost, and that was a decision the board made at the time.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: And, Bill, where is your per people spending just relationally to the rest of the state? Like, I don't mean anything exact. Just, like, middle of the pack. No. We're probably

[Bill Kimbell (Superintendent, Maple Run USD)]: we're in the top we're in the top third right now. I know next year, we're going down quite a bit. It's one of the things the board asked us to readjust. One of the reason that that's being readjusted is we've had some revenues increase that we weren't expecting. So outside the outside the ed fund.

[Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: Like what?

[Bill Kimbell (Superintendent, Maple Run USD)]: Special Ed revenue has really gone up for us. We have had a real spike in special Ed spending, especially kids on high intensity needs. We've created our own special Ed programs. We now have three alternative programs that we're running within the district for kids because we can't find the outside services. And that's actually cut costs. But we seem to be increasing that population exponentially. So we're able to take that from money that we would have had that would have come from the Ed. I mean, it's all coming from the Ed Fund, but through special Ed instead of through the other people. So we'll be go we're at I can tell you right now, this current year, we're at 15,000, just about $15,000 per long term weighted average student, and next year will be about $14.06, which will, in the projection of the data that was just gathered from past budgets, will be about middle of the road.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Thank you. Thank you so much for your time today and all you're doing.

[Bill Kimbell (Superintendent, Maple Run USD)]: You're welcome. All right. Thank you all. Thank you all. Thank you.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Think we're

[Carol Ode (Member)]: we should go back to John or jump to Julia.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Think we should

[Carol Ode (Member)]: go to Julia.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Great, then we'll go to John.

[Carol Ode (Member)]: When we were last here

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: with John, it was just an hour ago. Hello again. Hello again. What's your name? Hey. Oh, thanks for calling, hon.

[John (Legislative Counsel, Office of Legislative Counsel)]: It's Justice the Council. We had actually largely wrapped up the statutory text that I wanted to show you. So what I might do now is you may have already seen, but I have a slide deck with some resources and I wanted to tee up some policy questions related to any tax incentives you might be considering.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: And before we I just wanna sort of on the phantom people conversation, we saw a lot of districts have fairly significant tax impacts from large magnitude changes in the number of people's weighted people's, not necessarily a large number of weighted people's, but with a small school population, a few students can make a really huge difference. And a few students' change in their weights can make a huge difference. That has less of an impact in a larger district. And it's something that we might wanna think about as we're moving forward with this, just how we equate all of that. And then also how we actually count the students and making sure that that's accurate is also a piece of that puzzle.

[Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: Do you have your Did you keep your

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: hands dirty? Not the drawing hand. This year,

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: it's actually very significant swings in student counts in bigger districts. And so it would just be it would be protecting the ferry and Springfield's and Bennington's.

[John (Legislative Counsel, Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I did this really quickly, so you got a calculator? Yep. Mainly this is just a set of resources. The first thing that I wanted to note is that people talk about the tax incentives in Act 46, but these actually predate and in Act 46 were contemplated together with previous acts including in 2010 and 2012. The same structure of 10¢, 8¢, 6¢ and so on was provided in act 153 of 2010 as part of an effort, earlier efforts to incentivize mergers. And one of the incentives proposed in 2012 as part of act 106 was that alternative options were extended to what are called regional education districts. Basically those districts could choose whether to receive the tax incentive discount or instead they could receive a one time grant for a $100 per pupil. So they were given a choice basically between tax incentives for some kind of grant. I don't know much about that, just flagging that these are kind of predecessor acts that predate act 46 and set up some of the measures there are maybe a place to take a look. We've talked through basically all of this, but I did want you to see the set of resources. So just to reorient what we talked about this morning, Act 46 set out those tiered tax incentives. If you were in the accelerated merger group, you received a longer period with the first fiscal year discount of 10¢, and then you were capped at those 5% swings. Technically, for the accelerated group, there's only a 5% cap on increases, not on decreases. But for the other less preferred governance structures, you had a shorter time period beginning with an 8¢ discount, and you had a 5% cap on both increases and swings. Sections 22 through 25 spoke to that bancum's pupil piece. We talked about the yield bill from 2016, this was the section that expanded the issues related to the calculation of tax rates and raised the concern around divorcing education spending decisions from folks' tax rates by including that 5% cap. And so part of that act was tasking the AOE with reporting on the tax rates. You can see the links to those reports here, the piece that I linked to before, it's the first of these report on tax rates for member towns of unified union districts. I did wanna note, there are a couple of acts that followed this that touched on the tax incentive pieces. So it's 2017 act 49 extended the incentives to supervisory unions that were not supervisory districts. So previously, it had been exclusively available to supervisory districts, so a single district. Then it was made available to supervisory units or a number of districts within. And then there's some technical measures related to how to calculate tax rates for certain school districts. I can pull any of these up, but don't especially know much to say about them. Just noting that as part of the cleanup efforts after act 46, there are a number of times that the legislature needed to clarify how the rates were calculated because it was not extremely clear from the x 46 measures and then especially clarify to whom the incentives are extended. And then x 73 from 2017, we looked at earlier. This was tracking the recommendations of AOE's report on tax rates and included that tax rate reduction review. If you recall, that was the if you're increasing, you get the 5% plus the gap between your ad spending per people and inflation, which is 4%. So you could get, in the hypothetical we saw, you could increase a maximum increase of 8%. The idea was to expose folks more to their ed spending decisions if they were spending above pledging, basically. And those were consistent with the tax rate report from the agency of education. The

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: third bullet point for perspectives from over town, is that the one that you showed us earlier? Yes. Okay. Thanks.

[John (Legislative Counsel, Office of Legislative Counsel)]: And that is a good one to look at. It's quite clear and helpful. The last piece I wanna flag, mainly this is just a set of resources, but things that came up to me and have come up in discussion this morning. One thing you wanna ask if you're considering these sorts of things, what are the eligibility conditions receiving a tax incentive? This is what I glossed over in subsection A of act 46, section six, where I said you need to get kicked in. And if you recall, I talked about how certain preferred government structures receive the tax incentives. So one question here would be what actually kicks you into the tax incentive bucket? And I know that there's contemplation for tax penalties as well. So if that's a consideration of what puts you in that camp. Another big consideration is on what timeline. This would need to be figured out either in conjunction with or replacing any existing transitionary measures. So recall that absentee three did set out a number of transitionary measures, including a homestead tax rate transition that occurs across under the timeline contemplated there, fiscal year twenty ninth to 2033. It differs fully transitioned in FY 2033. If you provide any sort of incentives, we would probably need to resolve, to my mind, at least like four different camps if you merged in advance of the transition, if you merge during transition, how does that interact with the transition? If you merge after the transition, if you didn't merge, there can only So there may be simple lines that encompasses that. It's just that we would need to think about how any incentive measures interact with those transitions, which just to remind you guys the way that it works in Act 73 is you identify the gap between school districts FY '28 had spend names, the rate it would have in FY '28 and the rate would have an FY '29 under the new uniform per say wide rate. You prorate that difference over a five year period to roll out the transition. But just how does the incentive interact with the timeline? It's kind of talked about in three as well, the measures that were put in act 46 that we saw, talked about that 5% transition and we've talked about some of the issues that arose as a result of that. I would think about too what sort of if we could anticipate any unintended consequences that a cent discount might lead to. This was foregrounded by the tax rate reduction review, which was in response to the way in which school districts were insulated from their decisions within their onset rate. Like I talked about before, that's maybe less of a concern in this particular case. If you're moving to a foundation formula with a uniform statewide rate, folks are no longer internalizing that decision through a pledget vote for Ed spending. But I'm sure that there are other kinds of consequences that we just thought about. And then I just wonder too, what is the difference how how does the change from locally varying onset rates based on local spending decisions to uniform statewide pay affect the incentive effects of a cent discount? Does it mean more in our current system because it directly plays into how you can budget, Or is it just generally that people love to have a discount on their tax rates and it doesn't matter what funding formula you have? So just things to think about.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: And then a few more that I would add in there. Are incentives paid for out of the same pot as everything else? So are they functionally creating disincentives for other people? And how transparent do we make the disincentives while communicating the incentives? And then when I'm sorry if you said this five minutes ago, Dawn. When are the 01/2027 tax rates finished? Is

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: that

[John (Legislative Counsel, Office of Legislative Counsel)]: a '27? Is it in FY '27? Do you recall what it was?

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Sorry.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Anyone else have any questions for Don on this? Look at you. That's

[Mark Higley (Member)]: cool.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Is there a calculator on the first slide?

[John (Legislative Counsel, Office of Legislative Counsel)]: There sure was. Full circle moment, Chandra. I don't know why I tried to

[Woodman Page (Member)]: do that, but I'd like to have

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: You bring the

[John (Legislative Counsel, Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yes. Sorry. I'm so embarrassed by my preference.

[Julia Richter (Joint Fiscal Office analyst)]: Hi, Julia yesterday about Act 127, well technically Act 84. The penny discounts are the last year of them existing is FY 2025.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: FY '29. FY '29.

[Julia Richter (Joint Fiscal Office analyst)]: So the first year was FY '25.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: And this year that starts in July is FY '27.

[Julia Richter (Joint Fiscal Office analyst)]: But of course, because they're decreasing over time, school districts are phasing out over time. So not all school districts will be experiencing the penny discounts through FY 2018.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Okay, thank you. You go to the one with the questions. Thank you. Oh. Oh, the policy questions one.

[John (Legislative Counsel, Office of Legislative Counsel)]: One I trying to

[Woodman Page (Member)]: show the cast.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Anyone have any other pieces they wanna throw on on here? Questions about this?

[James Masland (Member)]: Okay, great. The

[Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: merger incentive grants 60. Not just the discount and the tax rate, but which is the one that actually had money? You said there was $400 per student, If is that

[John (Legislative Counsel, Office of Legislative Counsel)]: you look at the 2012 Act, I think it's 156, and I could pull it up if you would like me to. It's in section 13 of that act.

[Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: You won't know, John, I don't think, as to what the impact was, as to what behavior did it actually

[John (Legislative Counsel, Office of Legislative Counsel)]: result in? I don't know, I just noted it as something I was not used to seeing. It stood out to me as a unique structure.

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Just a general high level thought, it's hard to even know if these incentives are relevant because the three districts that we're hearing from today are all qualitatively different from the districts that chose not to merge under Act 46. So I just, I wonder, I mean, I'll be very interested to see what House Ed gives to us, because until we're clear about what they think they're doing, it's hard to decide whether these incentives are motivational.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: We're hearing from Mount Ebe Unified School District.

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: All three operating districts with the exception to the Burlap. And the issue is around the areas, the small districts are like full choice districts now, and they're also all overwhelmingly small, and they're interspersed, so merging there is a very different project than merging in Sleep Valley, Addison County, and Franklin County.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Are there districts that you would like to hear from that we should add to the agenda? Because I've added everyone to the agenda that was We've invited everyone to testify that was sent.

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Mean, again, my understanding is that we're trying to develop funding policy that is responsive to the recommendations of health ed, and they're still changing things as we speak. So I'm just trying to figure that out. I just think that, and again, anytime you do tax incentives of a funding formula that may be inappropriately weighted, you're actually potentially not doing what you think you're doing. So I just think that it's just unclear in the news that any of these incentives are going to address. It's, we can get ad nauseam and said that if you're overweighting a town that is tuition involved kids to a neighbor, there is absolutely zero incentive for them to ever merge, because there will always be lower costs if they're not merged. So there'll lower costs, there'll be lower tax rate, even if they're more costly.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: So are there other districts that you would like to hear from in testing?

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: And I can come up with recommendations. Yeah, mean, could get someone like Elaine. Elaine Collins, who's been talking about Derby And Holland,

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: two great examples. So we invited the folks that were sort of on the list,

[John (Legislative Counsel, Office of Legislative Counsel)]: a couple of them didn't want to come. It's Morgan and all.

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Morgan and Holland to wishing all their kids have paid out child's pass rates. It's just a way to see what it looks like.

[Carol Ode (Member)]: And maybe you have to just settle with the fact that you may end up with some cases like that, but if we can do it with most of the state, I mean, the bottom line is you've got to make the voters happy. If Morgan and Holland and whoever else doesn't want to merge, they want to keep life the way it is, then who are we to say, no, you can't? I mean, if they want to stay that way, we have to cope with that. It's like right now, they vote on their budget, they send us the amount they voted, and we have to raise the money. And then the tax, system they're voting against. We're gonna fix the system. Think I told you this before. I mean, I honestly don't believe that these communities that are perpetually lowering their budgets down year after year, I don't believe that all of a sudden Vermonters think that information isn't important and that they shouldn't.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: No. And I think we heard that from folks in Slate Valley. I think Teddy talked about that. Oh, thank you, John. We

[John (Legislative Counsel, Office of Legislative Counsel)]: also heard from Slate Valley that, not that it wasn't a factor, but that the tax incentive was not the main driver for the merger. So I think that's also about all of

[James Masland (Member)]: those policy questions are how incentives should or should

[John (Legislative Counsel, Office of Legislative Counsel)]: not be structured and the consequences of those. There's also, I think, a conversation we need to have about what the point is of actually doing this.

[William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: I was thinking that Representative Brady came to talk about some of the facilitated things, I thought that was helpful, and I also thought that one of the witnesses talked about, Charles Ballard's, of an alignment of superintendent, excuse me, school district principal and school board. When the school board aligned to model superintendent, then there was a bigger overview of the whole system. So that was helpful.

[Carol Ode (Member)]: Representative Holcombe? I just wanna

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: uplift what Teddy said, because in my experience, I was part of a merger one hundred years ago, and we merged four districts, closed two schools, and built a new one. We couldn't have done it without construction aid, it was not about tax incentives, it was 100% about construction aid, And when we had that, we were able to manage costs to bring them down.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: That is the perfect segue. I want

[Carol Ode (Member)]: to spend

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: twenty minutes in this room with folks' takeaways from yesterday. Right, that was yesterday? That was okay. Okay, great. Yeah, of course.

[Woodman Page (Member)]: I thought it was interesting listening to the different areas. Having lived in Millennium, Virginia for a number of years, I'm a little bit familiar with Prince George's County. It's different from Vermont.

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: I don't

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: know if Mark can hear you.

[Mark Higley (Member)]: Yeah, speak up just a little bit, please.

[Woodman Page (Member)]: I was just saying having lived in Northern Virginia for a number of years, a little bit familiar with Prince George's County. It is as our guide on the screen yesterday said, it is a lot different than Vermont. Just as Rhode Island system, it's different from Vermont. It would be nice if we could look at I know we probably have time constraints, but it would be nice if we could look at something within the New England area, maybe

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: New Hampshire. You know Rhode Island is part

[Woodman Page (Member)]: of the Yes, but I mean it is

[Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: I'm you, Sorry.

[Woodman Page (Member)]: It is quite different.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I know this is very like an un Vermont thing to say. I find West Virginia actually a really helpful comparison case, Population wise, geography, the way they manage and don't manage local control, very different politically. But a lot of the issues of scale, I think, are more relevant in West Virginia than Massachusetts has a city. No offense to Burlington.

[Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: We are rural,

[William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: by the way. Governor Joe, no, I appreciate that. Not the governor, but federal government.

[Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: I will say, looked around for folks to testify on school construction and talked to Michael Gaunt, who we have talked to a few times about Maine. And the issue is that Maine hasn't figured it out either. So there was just an article a couple of

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: weeks ago about how out

[Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: of 100 applications for school construction funding under their program, two got approved for this year for some school construction. And so I think a lot of us in New England are struggling with it. New York, it keeps coming up as someone's building all the schools. But again, totally different in terms of scale and money and number of people and all that. It's hard to find a direct comparison that's really figured out something that we can

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: learn from.

[Woodman Page (Member)]: The other thing is, Wyoming, we talk about transportation. As far as population wise, I have it's what Vermont is and it is widespread in areas. That might be another area.

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: My concern about Wyoming is,

[Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: I mean, as somebody said

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: to me, worked in telecoms, somebody took Vermont's population in the butter knife and spread it out a person per square mile, whereas I think there are gaps in Wyoming, so they don't have a dispersed population that we do, which creates a unique challenge. One of the things that came out of all the testimonies yesterday, it felt like, was some sense that we're in a universe with finite resources, but it did seem like this place where it made the biggest impact was at the high school level. It was at low level? People talked about, I mean, when you talked about, when Marilyn talked about some of its unique needs, they talked about high school being placed where you can make it better and quicker, and then the other point was that scale is important to the viability of some of these interesting alternatives, it's scale and density to some of the funding schemes that people are talking about.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I'm taking notes, not writing emails. It

[Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: was interesting because what I heard yesterday was that middle schools and elementary schools are a little bit easier to build numbers of them, and that high schools are more complicated and more expensive and have different needs in different areas. And so it's harder to think about a program that has more standardized plans and more standardized programming and more standardized funding for high schools because they're different regionally and have different needs. That's what

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: I personally emphasize. Well, think it's hard to, like Prince George's County is really hard to untangle those relevant, because it's a county, it's not a state, and it's very high density, so they have specialized programs, so when they're done in their high schools, they're close enough, and probably more like 400 square miles, so they're able to pick, to distribute programs across schools that all kids still have access to. It's a different proposition. Think I meant that if you can't just do huge projects, I hear you, it's just the idea of bidding out projects all over the state of one company, the efficiencies of that just aren't there, is what I meant to say. Because for us, it's three schools in Prince George's County is not the same as a school in the Northeast Kingdom, the school in our Wells school. Why not? Because it's just, you don't get to get 50. My guess is you don't get the operational efficiencies of the

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: The contractors operational efficiencies?

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Maybe, I would think so.

[John (Legislative Counsel, Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Maybe we

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: can think of

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: that. Think it's a step proposition, I just don't know.

[William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: I thought I heard that you do get that yesterday in the testimony.

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: What I'm trying to say is they're dense. He said they had it because they could do what they could have, what they called swing school, they could move people, they could manage the projects reasonably in a tight way to swing people so they could take an entire building offline, then stagger the next one, stagger the next one. That's just much harder to do when you're closing the school in one place and then someplace else.

[John (Legislative Counsel, Office of Legislative Counsel)]: End up in Masons.

[William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: You end up in Macy's. Not everyone has

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: a Macy's.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I think no one has a Macy's anymore, as a matter of fact.

[John (Legislative Counsel, Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Thank you. Sticking on the theme of Prince George's County, I

[James Masland (Member)]: thought one thing that really stuck out to me was when they talked about building in the system refreshes after twenty years into those contracts.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Because I think what we've heard from,

[James Masland (Member)]: in a glib way, everyone and their mother about our current how to stock of schools is the amount of not just need to build new buildings if we're gonna

[John (Legislative Counsel, Office of Legislative Counsel)]: go to regionalized high schools, etcetera, but the

[James Masland (Member)]: amount of deferred maintenance that's been done. So as much as we can plan for and build in mechanisms like that upfront so that this body is not faced with this same problem thirty to fifty years from now, which I think

[John (Legislative Counsel, Office of Legislative Counsel)]: would be very helpful. And I don't know how you exactly legislate that, but interesting.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Yeah, I think there's something about the reserve guidance language. Right, right. One of the things that stuck with me, and I'm trying to find my way through it, I think the treasurer in Rhode Island talked about a rating system for how much aid a district gets. And that has a lot of overlap with the system we created for supplemental district spending, and that there's something in how those two things line up that's useful. But I haven't quite closed my Venn diagram yet inside my mind. Bridget and then Mark?

[Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: I'm going back to the reason for Teddy's thought about that well, not to say, thought of, but the reason, I think, we haven't maintained schools particularly well was something that Rhode Island said, which is we were really thoughtful to make sure that construction wasn't competing with programming. These were to separate funding systems and structures so that you're not having to choose between teachers and maintenance. Because that's what's happened in Vermont for years and years. Every year you get the budget season and you're trying to choose whether to spend $400,000 to put on a new roof someplace or four teachers. Usually people make the choice to keep the four teachers, which is not necessarily a bad choice, but we've just set up the system in that way, that those choices are competing.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Mark?

[Mark Higley (Member)]: I We heard too, as far as some of what you were talking about, that rehabbing school buildings is a whole lot cheaper than building new ones, And with that I go back to, I believe it was what projected that the cost for, from the task force of the group that looked at deferred maintenance was $300,000,000 a year and you know we just heard from the bonding folks that they had a capacity for 50,000,000, possibly 100,000,000. Right. So I just have a real concern with where are we going to get the leads. We're to run out rather rapidly, do have sort of projection?

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I'm going to add on to that concern because I'm nervous that if we jump into this with a let's just spend what we have mentality, then we're going to create more disparities around the state than we already have now, we're not careful about it. So if we can't do it all, we need to be really careful about what the sum looks like.

[Mark Higley (Member)]: I think it was Rhode Island too, didn't they say that they initially started out with a proposal to kind of have a rating defending and threw that out. Yeah, I mean, that's totally unrealistic.

[Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: Was just gonna say a few things. I mean Prince George's County was most interesting because it just had that different model, And to Rebecca's point, I don't know if you could just do it again here, but my questioning of each candidate, person giving testimony was how are you paying for it? And it was all mostly general fund money, Except when we came to Rhode Island, it was the state's providing assistance based on what the school district can't come up with on their own. So if they don't have statewide education funds like we do, so it's kind of, we're an apple and they're all oranges in some way. So it's like, it's hard to make that comparison. But I thought it was compelling to think of there's additional room in the state's ability to bond for more money, that we could use some of that as grants to different school districts as part of their instruction, as long as they're necessity, school by necessity, and then also provide some kind of funding formula for what that debt is on an ongoing basis and using that from a different source. Again, as long as it meets that definition. So it's part grant, part subsidy, depending on the qualifications of the district area. I thought that might be an interesting mix. So that's in my head.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Oh, Jim, sorry. Thanks.

[James Masland (Member)]: There were a couple of parts that I thought were really fascinating, particularly if we have to build new schools in different places as part of mergers. There were three things that were discussed pretty articulately, I thought. One was publicprivate partnerships, that's something new, we don't do that. We could look into that. Another one is the land bank idea. I mean those things fit together potentially quite nicely, and should involve other committees I'm sure, but it's a fascinating area to scope out on a whiteboard or somewhere, or something like that.

[Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: I don't what something Charlie said, because I had a conversation yesterday evening. It was an offhand conversation, a full conversation. It was an offhand remark from the chair of corrections and institutions, who this all used to fall under the capital bill. And her concern was, and for me to ask the question, really, and it's probably more of a budget council question that we need to dig into a little bit about whether it was actually legal for us to be using general obligation bonds to provide grant funding. Because she said that she had run into that previously when they were working on this years and years ago. And so I just wanted to surface that as something that needs a little bit more research to understand how that would work and what the impact would be on our credit rating, if we're issuing general obligation bonds that are then being used for grants to reimburse districts for their debt service.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I will make sure the treasurer's office gets that question. Thanks.

[Woodman Page (Member)]: I'm also wondering with the construction requirements that will be coming up, Are we going well, be doing I mean, as we do this transformation under 73, we're going to need new schools. What are

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: the requirements for a school construction? Thank you.

[Woodman Page (Member)]: One sec. Are we going to do it all at once, or are we going to prioritize one area over another? Just how is that going to be planned out? So in Act 73,

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: there is a prioritization criteria that came from two tough courses that happened before 'seventy three, and then that was handed off to the school.

[Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: State of the School Construction Advisory Board.

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: Yes.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: And there's rulemaking that's supposed to come from there that has not happened yet that should be developing that. But I think there's still an open question of, will they, even with all those guidelines and prioritizations, are they approving more than we have capacity to fund and what happens then?

[Woodman Page (Member)]: It also may get down to fairness, urban versus rural areas. Woodstock versus Newport.

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: I think it And would be

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: so I think it's helpful for every If you have that question, if we all have that question, to look at the prioritization criteria that's in That's sort of the statutory intent that's supposed to guide rulemaking and make sure it is comprehensive as we need it to be.

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: How do we balance our aspirations with the realities? I mean, I'm worried that we're lacking in some significant timelines and there's a lot of assumptions around pacing. We already don't seem to have enough labor in the state to build the housing we think we want. Now we're talking about bringing in a bunch of school projects. How are we going make this all work? Do we even have to labor businesses in the state to do this work? Is this going be competing with other projects? What's the impact on that cost? What's the impact of what's happening at the national level on cost? And I'm just wondering how we negotiate that while also trying to achieve some of the stated intentions of the funding transition we're talking about.

[Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: You know, that was interesting when we had Scott Baker in the chair talking about what did the current national events have an impact on. He says it's really about the level of need more than anything else. But he also said there's 192,000,000, I think, in approved but unadvanced bonds because the projects are delayed for whatever reason. And then measuring that against what Burlington had was the amount of out of state labor to do the construction was, I think, 40% of their labor force. So it's really interesting to look at that. So they figured out a way to get it done, and the concept of the P3 coming in and doing is they would bring their own labor with them, or they would exhaust what labor supply that was here and then supplement There's some concept like that. There's good concern,

[John (Legislative Counsel, Office of Legislative Counsel)]: because what does that mean?

[Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: I just gotta be a way to pencil it together.

[Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: And I heard

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I think Michael's gone, and the person from his George's County both talk about doing this at scale means that we're creating enough of a need for this that we're able to turn the curve on labor issues.

[Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: Yeah, I think I'm a confused about exactly what our bonding capacity is, because of what you were saying, Charlie, that Scott Baker had said about the way they're assessing what bonding capacity is based on how many projects there are that can actually take it off. It's like a little bit of a preaching and egging and talking about a lot of projects that could take it off. And so I didn't get a perfect sense of just how much capacity there would be if there were projects to take it up.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: What I heard him explaining was that there's three buckets. There's like, these are not the right words, maybe John should be answering this question. There's, my interpretation of the words, there's projects that are authorized and the money is flowing. There's projects that are authorized and the money is not flowing yet. And then there's debt capacity that's been that the state could afford and keep its bond rating that has not been authorized nor spent. And it was sort of that third bucket that were somewhere between 50 and $100,000,000 a year. But I think they can't give us a definite answer because they cannot imagine exactly what the ratings agencies would do because what we actually spend the money on is what matters for them.

[Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: I wasn't even saying that the administration's ten year capital my interpretation for the saying administration's ten year capital plan was for about $86,000,000 a year. So right now, we're borrowing at $50,000,000 per year, but could go up to a 100,000,000. So it creates a window of $14,000,000 in addition to what the capital plan is from the administration, but I don't know if any school construction is included in that $86,000,000 No idea.

[William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: Anyone? Yes, Carol.

[Carol Ode (Member)]: I thought about

[William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: the information that you were saying about the elementary schools, and I thought about culture change, and I understand it's extremely difficult to combine any schools, but if kids are, if it's a little easier to do that kind of construction because there's less of the shared spaces that have to be built at high school, huge gymnasium offices. Then I thought maybe for cultural reasons, although today it doesn't sync with what I heard today, but it might be easier to get the elementary school kids together and then they would expect to keep going together once they get into high school. And it might be a little easier to do that building construction physically. And then repurposing the school buildings, super key, and that fits in with the elementary schools. And then deciding of the schools where they're needed. And really important to differentiate new versus rehab and how we're going to deal with that.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Does anyone have anything else on that rehab of non school buildings question?

[James Masland (Member)]: It was an interesting conversation that they had seen was started early on, we're gonna make this into a housing, or we're gonna do this, someone said this morning rec center or something like that. If the school district decides near the beginning that they're gonna do the following with a school, then it would seem to me that voters in the district, people in the districts understand the benefits of doing it from the get go, rather than sort of being backed into it uncomfortably. Yeah. We could

[Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: The land bank is a very interesting idea, not only for school buildings, but also for vacant single family dwellings, apartment dwellings, that kind of stuff. So I think that's encouraging, but they'll probably come back to us in November with a request for money to seed the land bank. You to have money in order

[John (Legislative Counsel, Office of Legislative Counsel)]: to get going.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I personally need to better understand how they're different from housing trusts. I see that they are, I

[Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: just need a little side by side

[William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: for my brains. Carol? I loved what was asked about selling pills and irons for a dollar, because at this point, If you do that, there are multiple issues, you're trying to make a community see that something could be Oh, never mind. I just thought it was important.

[Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: Yeah, that came up in South Burlington when we were looking at two different projects. One was potentially consolidating all of our elementary schools. Like a decade ago, we talked about consolidating all the time, building one new one, and then what do you do with three properties? And partly, the city wanted those properties for other things. And then the project that actually did end up going to fruition is that one of our elementary schools land swaps, like an acre of land at that elementary school for the old city hall so that the new city hall and library could be built right in front of Brickmarket Central School. And the argument at the time was it's the same taxpayer. So it's a little awkward because as a school district, as a school board member, I was like, why should we just hand over property And to the the argument was just made that it's all the same taxpayer. So you're selling land.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: But I take I do not think it's the same taxpayer. And I feel like someone's gonna get a lot of emails yelling at me about that.

[Bridget Burkhardt (Clerk)]: I hear you. And I think right now, it's a lot more the same taxpayer than it is in the future state. I know that we all have a pooled education system, but there's a lot more directive, really, from the state about how much you're spending each year on students. That feels to me a little bit more like school properties start to feel a little bit more like school properties as opposed to municipal properties. But I was just saying, that's an argument that's gonna be made in different places, and came up a lot.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: So much of the testimony we've heard in the last two days has included folks saying, This is the percentage of money we send to the education fund. It's like, No, you send all the money to the education fund, and then some of comes back, right? But people are still figuring out their ratios from at 60. That's not gonna help.

[William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: I'm thinking about child care, and when this is a, I'll just say, when we made all the rules about how cold the floor could be or how warm the floor had to be and all kinds of rules. We lost a lot of chalk There

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: are rules about the temperature of the floor?

[William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: Yeah. Where? Rules about what? Well, yeah, some new services from them testify about this, but the thing is that when you make a lot of requirements about safety and security, if that would happen, that would necessitate changes to a building, that would necessitate conversations about how to meet those,

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: and then you might end

[William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: up with

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: more consolidation.

[James Masland (Member)]: Yeah, anecdotally, there are rules about day care centers, floor temperature. Anecdotally, I have heard that those are used partially against certain providers.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: That seems like a conversation for another time, but I appreciate where you were coming I understand where you're coming from, that more requirements might mean more costs, which could change sexuality. Really

[Woodman Page (Member)]: definitely.

[Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: I would be remiss if I didn't talk about the excess spending threshold,

[John (Legislative Counsel, Office of Legislative Counsel)]: that had an impact on

[Charles Kimbell (Ranking Member)]: Polchester and other communities that have school bonds, and the current structure in our current state that is really disincentive.

[William Canfield (Vice Chair)]: And just to add to that, I'm concerned about that also, we know now who's bonded, so we can just change that date to make it easier for ourselves now rather than trying to figure everything else out. But basically, we just going forward don't want to use construction incentives and money to incentivize a choice that is not a merged choice or something that the CISOs are trying to get to.

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: I think there's a So S220 sets a lower excess spending threshold, but exempts school construction. We have not received testimony on that. We can do that next week. But I think there's sort of an interesting piece in there about whether that actually winds up increasing spending or decreasing spending. Because we have one thing doing this and one thing doing this, and that'll be an interesting part of it. I also I think of Colchester, who in a slightly different category than I think of districts who moved a vote the following year after the anyway, but that's another conversation for another day. I think the challenge

[Rebecca Holcombe (Member)]: is we have been that eight weeks, everything we do creates incentives, and people are responding differently. I know districts help votes precisely because we've been talking about constructive data activity for years, and they said, let's not get ahead of the state. Some districts decided, even in my own district, to get ahead of the state, and we'll not be benefiting. So I just, I don't think fairness is ever 100% possible, but I do think if we have policy coherence, we can start moving people's soul in the right direction. It might, larger, really have expressed my concerns, but I think we're potentially incentivizing or disincentivizing kinds of collaboration that probably need to happen if we

[Emilie Kornheiser (Chair)]: Okay, thanks everyone. See you at 01:15. 01:15. We're exempt from floor.

[Carol Ode (Member)]: We are exempt from floor.