Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Place off. Uh-huh. We are live.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Okay, missus. We're back. Senate appropriation on the thirtieth. The last week of the the. Bethchlik County, Fannington. Were having them last week about the BAA and they're back again this week talking about their fiscal twenty seven budget. So I'll let you introduce yourselves for the record and give us your presentation.

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Good afternoon, I am Melissa Jackson, the CEO of the Vermont Veterans Home, and with me is Steve McLafferty, our Finance Director. Good to see everybody again. Starting on the budget development form, our total budget increase request for this year is $337,439 And obviously the budget development form is far more detailed this year than it has been in past years. I don't know if there's any specific questions on that form or if you'd just like me to dive into our PowerPoint.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Yeah, the form you're talking about a spreadsheet?

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Yes.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Is that what you're talking about? What's that $31,000,000 how's that different? Is there a percentage different from last year?

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: I have that in the slide for the dad. Hold on. It's like what is it?

[Sen. Richard Westman]: 1.9 under 2%.

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Under yes.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Thank you.

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: 1.9%. Yeah.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Good job. Turn these times to stay under that.

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: So the next several pages are our detailed budget, the detailed report. I do just wanna touch quickly on our temporary where is it?

[Sen. Richard Westman]: It's on slide three, Melissa.

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Okay, yes. Slide three is under contracted and third party services. It says temporary employed agency, and you'll notice that there is a difference there, a reduction of $2,300,000 So we have been, I shouldn't say we, all the credit goes to my director of nursing, Sarah Sigsberry. She's been actively hiring since she started June, July. She's hired 16 nurses, so she's been very, very busy.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Wow.

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Yeah, so we are being really optimistic in hoping that we can save this amount of money. If we're unable to meet this target, you'll see a slide a little further on, we may be back for budget adjustment. We're trying to be positive and really work hard to reduce our agency staff. So when you see the slide a little bit talking about budget adjustment, I wanted to show you where it's coming from. The first thing Sarah does when she comes in the morning is go slides right onto SuccessFactors and looks to see who's applied overnight, gets them in for an interview, and is working really hard to fill our positions as quickly as possible. So fingers crossed that we can meet that huge reduction, but we're trying to be very, very positive.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: And you also have a decent reduction in your vacant facilities.

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Yes.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: You're filling more positions.

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Correct.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: That's great.

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Okay.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Yeah, hopefully you can correct that on how not to use the contract nurses.

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Yes. We will move into our PowerPoint. Just a reminder of who we are and what we do because we're always asked all the time, We are not the VA. We truly are an agency of the state of Vermont, and our incredible mission is to fulfill the promise to remind our veterans that their service to the country and Vermont is not forgotten and that our state is here for them and the vets home is here for them.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Slide 22,

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: that's the promise I'm talking about. Slide 23, just some quotes about caring for our veterans that we find important for what we do. Slide 24 talks about the history of the veterans home, how we became a state veterans home. People ask, Well, you're kind of a state agency, you're kind of not. Well, we are a state agency. My reporting is a little different in that I obviously report to a board of trustees. I am appointed by a governor. I was Governor Douglas's last appointment before he left office, but I have state employees. We follow all the same rules and regulations that all the other state agencies follow, and my employees are members of VSEA. Other than the weird reporting of myself and the fact that the board owns the land, everything else about us is is a state agency.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: But then they're all state employees?

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Yes.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Little perplexed here is under our history. A bullet that says our first inmate was admitted.

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Oh, I know, I saw that. Yep, so they were called inmates Oh, back

[Sen. Richard Westman]: okay, okay, thank That's why you put it in quotation marks?

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Yes, yep. And we still have a jail. We don't use it, but it's still here. We have all of our history. We do a lot of genealogy requests. And periodically we'll break out the matron's book and it'll talk about how a certain veteran came back drunk again and was put in the tank. It's very interesting, the history of things that have happened here. Moving on to slide 25, this truly explains what a state veteran's home is. It's a nursing home or an assisted livingdom, which we have here, or an adult day health center that is owned, operated, and managed by the state, which is what we are. So then we are recognized by the Veterans Administration and we're certified as a state veterans home. So we're fortunate enough to be inspected not only by licensing and protection from the state of Vermont on behalf of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. We also are inspected annually by the Veterans Administration. Currently, are 175 state veterans homes, and I believe there's about four more to come online. We're one of the few states only to have one veterans home. Most have four or more. We care for veterans, spouses, and gold star parents. We have 130 beds. Obviously, have the 30 beds offline that I've talked about in the past. Our maximum capacity is 99. We have our eight bed domiciliary, which we call the dom because domiciliary is a huge word. We are budgeted for 192 state employees and 50 temp employees. When I say temp employees, those are state employees that work intermittently or twenty four hours or less. Those are not our agency staff. We do short term rehab, long term care, physical, occupational speech therapy. We have our incredible memory care program, our hospice and palliative care, respite care. Right now we do outpatient rehab for Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance. I'm really excited that the Veterans Administration has now opened the door for us to apply to be providers for outpatient rehab for veterans in the community who are 70% or more service connected disabled. This is allowing us the opportunity to potentially garner more revenue without having to build any more infrastructure. When I'm in Washington next week with all the other state veterans homes, they're going to show us how to apply. If TriWest, which oversees this, what they call Optum, which is the insurance for 70% or more service connected disabled veterans feels there's a need, we can become one of those providers. Fingers crossed that we can become an outpatient provider and start generating a little additional revenue.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Do you offer any adult paid services?

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: We do not because that requires a whole additional physical plant. And right now, the VA doesn't provide construction grant funding for that. It's something the National Association of State Veterans Homes, which our home is a part of, is trying to change. And actually, the daily rate for adult day health is higher than the daily rate for our domiciliary.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: That would be good.

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Yep. Great, moving on to slide 27. When we met last week, I told you about this lovely award we received, and here's three of our staff members receiving the Silver Award in Las Vegas. A Silver Quality Award. This is the information on The US News and World Report Award that I mentioned last week. Again, the only home in the state of Vermont to receive this for both long and short term care. And then on page 29 is the pinnacle graph that shows best in class. So the red line on this is the national average for all nursing homes across the state. The dark blue line is what they consider best in class, and the purple line above the blue line is where the Vermont Veterans Home lands. The list off to the right of the graph is all of the customer service awards we achieved last year, and by achieving all these awards, we are in the top 15% of nursing homes across the country. My staff works incredibly hard every day. Next page is just What some

[Sen. Richard Westman]: is the Y axis on that graph?

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: It is, it goes from, you get from zero to five, it's a zero to five rating, five being the highest rating that you can get.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: By your tenants, or your inmates.

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Yes. By inmates or their families, yes.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Okay, thank you.

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: The next page is a summary of comments. When Pinnacle calls, they ask them various questions, then people give comments. I especially like the first one, says, I appreciate the fact that they walk their talk and they don't even talk about it. I know they communicate and talk with each other. It isn't just about having expensive materials. It is spending the time with them to make them feel they belong. So, the private for profit industry has the nursing homes that look like your five star hotels. We don't have a building that looks like our five star hotels. Don't get me wrong, it's well kept, but it doesn't look like a five star hotel. But we invest in the care and it being home. Think that comment right there sums up who we are and what we do. This is slide 31 where I mentioned where you would see that if we don't hit the hiring target, we might be back for a budget adjustment up to $2,200,000 but we are going to work really, really hard not to be here for that. The biggest increase in our budget was our salaries and benefits, which was $2,300,000 We did see a reduction in our vacancy savings because we went from 64 open positions in FY '26 to 48 in this coming fiscal year. And then obviously that resulted in an increase in our salaries and benefits, and those figures are listed there on that slide.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Are the market factor adjustments just for new hires, or do you do the?

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: We had market factor adjustments, our social workers had market factor adjustments. The whole

[Sen. Richard Westman]: class, it's not just for one person. Yeah, was

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: it our social workers, dietary, and there was somebody else I'm forgetting.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: HVAC and electrician.

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Electrician, yes.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: That market factor adjustments?

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: They increased their hourly wage.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Does HR do that? That's a reclassification.

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: It's similar to that, but what they did is they looked at what was going on in the market compared to what ours.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Do you ask for that?

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Our employees requested it.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Any employee?

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: I think the SCA has requested for management and then we can do it as well. And our staff can as well. Makes us a little bit more competitive with the market out there.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: So that should help with not having to view, well, if it's in the nurses, that would help with the contract

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: nurses. Yes. Slide 32 gives you a breakdown of our fixed costs and those costs that we have minimal control over. I love my food service supervisor, but he didn't come in with good news today. He came in and handed me an email explaining that Florida was hit by a huge freeze, so all of our fruits and vegetables that come from Florida are going to go up substantially. I'm like, You're just a bearer of great news on a Friday afternoon, but I will tell you that when it comes to my dietary department, they're looking and working with you to still get high quality food but not spend an arm and a leg. But it's a challenge every day with those kind of things. On slide 33 is just our salaries and benefits history in the past. This has been asked for, so we put it in there just so if you guys wanted to see it, you had it. On page 34 is our general funds history, and I just wanted to point out, obviously last year was the first year that we did quote the all in budget where we made an educated guess on what our Medicaid settlement would be, just as we did this year, where in FY '25 we held that money back and came in and that was built in after. So that's why there's the big difference between FY '25 and '26. The key factors of our budget request, which is on slide 35, is salaries and benefits, which is $20,200,000 Our state allocations are $1,100,000 This is one of the things Steve and I throw our hands up and like, what are we going to do about that? Other agencies, if they have increases in expenses, they can kind of push them off to us, but once they get to us, we can't really pass them on to anybody else, so we have to absorb those. Our utilities and then our bed tax. And even though we have those 30 beds offline, we're still paying the bed tax on those because we're not giving up the licenses.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: And what would be happening for you to be able to use those beds? Is just staffing or is there other

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: It's staffing and the need there's some environmental issues there that we're looking to rebuild tear that area down and rebuild it. There's some plumbing and various issues that would not make it a good environment for people to live. We do have the design work done. We've applied for a VA construction grant, which is one of the nice things about being a state veterans home. The VA will pay 65% of a project, the state would pay the 35%. The downside currently is there's over $2,000,000,000 worth of projects on this VA construction grant list, and last year the VA was given $185,000,000 towards those projects. Usually big construction projects like what we're looking at are funded first, but there's no guarantee. So we've been working with BGS on design work and we're meeting again after I come back from BC next week where I meet with the VA to guide on their thing. Hopefully moving forward with that project very soon.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Yeah, good luck. So,

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: a little less than 33% is from Medicare, Medicaid, private and VA funds. On page 36, we're talking about the two types of funding we receive because we are a state veterans home. The first one is a basic per diem. This is paid to us for any veteran who is 70 or less than 70% service connected disabled. So it's $146.98 in the nursing home and $63.26 in the dom. So then the remainder of the cost on the nursing home is made up by private pay, Medicare, Medicaid, long term care insurance, and the remainder of the cost on the DOM is done via private funds. For those on the nursing home side, if they're 70% or more service connected disabled, they get paid $567 a day, or we do. So always tell people, everyone in a nursing home looks old and infirm, so everyone would assume that the VA pays that figure for everybody, and they don't. It has to be tied back to an illness or injury that they can relate to their time of service. That's an all inclusive rate and it shows everything that is included. One of our biggest challenges right now is oral chemotherapy medications. We deny a lot of veterans admission if they're on these oral chemotherapy medications because they can be upwards of $50,000 a month. They're very, very expensive. Unfortunately, we'll say no to a veteran because we just can't afford it. But if we have a veteran who is here and they go on these medications, we're not going to say, No, you can't have the medication, and we're not going to kick them out. So for a while, we may be at a loss. What the National Association of State Veterans Homes learned about a year and a half ago is that if a veteran is in a private for profit home that has a contract with the Veterans Administration and they are on these very expensive medications, the VA is reimbursing these homes for this medication. So we currently, we being NASBA, have some legislation in Congress to get the same treatment. We feel it's only fair. Congresswoman Ballant has signed on as a co sponsor. So, I'm hoping this legislation will pass because this will be a big help to us. So, the legislation would be that any medication that is over 8.5% of the cost of the daily rate would be reimbursed to us. As you can see, medications were 86% of our drug expense in FY '25, so this would be a big help to us. So, we will keep you up to date on

[Sen. Richard Westman]: that. So

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: in FY '27, we anticipate receiving $8,600,000 in revenue from the VA. That's on slide 38. Slide 39 goes over our reimbursement rates, and we built our budget on it.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: What is your cost per day?

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Cost, cost reported was about $710 per day.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: So

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: our private room rate, and that's just the private room rate covers room and board, and then we bill, everything else gets billed separately, It's $3.45, our semi private room rate is $3.25. We have a board meeting coming up in two weeks and we'll be presenting to the board a slight increase in the private room rate. We anticipate that room rate may only it's a very small population that is private pay would impact the budget less than $100,000 over the course of the fiscal year. Our Vermont Medicaid rate, we get the interim rate, which is the $4.75, and then when they do the cost report, that's when we get the true up. And that's where that seven ten came from. But that was from FY '25, correct, That was because it's always like a couple years behind.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Yes. Okay.

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: And there is the VA raise that we just talked about. So and then based on the most recent Medicaid settlement, that's where we came up with the 3,700,000 for the estimated Medicaid settlement. Really quickly, on page 40, who still lives here, or who lives here. Our average age is 81. Our youngest veteran is 55. Our oldest is 98. We have 83 veterans, including three females, representing all branches of service except the Space Force. We still have one World War II veteran with us, and then up through present day. We still face the challenges of higher acuity, especially our veterans with PTSD and dementia, and substance abuse issues. On slide 41, we talk about our challenges meeting our census goals and our financial goals with our 30 beds offline. No control over our labor costs, but this year we are included in the Pay Act, so that's some helpful news. We currently have 58 open positions, and we're hoping to continue to Continuing fill to face that challenge where people feel that veteran care should be free all the time. So, we'll work on that. And the other thing we're up against with the federal VA is very interesting. It's been a phenomenon on the West Coast and it's slowly moving this way, is items that veterans receive in the community when they come to a state veterans home, the VA is now pushing the cost on the state veterans home. Things such as custom wheelchairs, which can start out at 20,000 and $30,000 and go upwards to $100,000 are saying, well, when they're in a state veterans home, the veterans home should pay for them. If there's the need for dental care, the state veterans' loans should pay for them. Again, NASWA, this is something we're looking at, working with both the House and Senate Federal Veterans Affairs Committee saying, why should veterans lose these benefits that they're entitled to because they're coming with us? Why should we have to pay for things that the VAs should be paying? Hasn't happened here in Vermont yet, but it's something we're watching very closely.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: These outside groups or individuals just trying to get the care and they're not getting it from the VA, they're just saying that the Veterans Home should do it. And they're telling the Veterans that?

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Actually, the federal VA in California is telling the California State Veterans Homes that they have to pay for the stuff now. So, we're just watching it because normally when it starts in one area of the country, it kind of rolls across the country, so we're trying to get ahead of it. But people feel, I'm a veteran, I should get care for free. Right, wrong, or indifferent. Slide 42 just gives you a quick overview of the difference between what one of our employees makes per hour, vice what an agency staff member makes per hour. That information has been asked in the past, so we included that. We are, Stephen and I and Sarah, our Director of Nursing, will be renegotiating these contracts very shortly and lowering the rates. A lot of other nursing homes in the area have been successful in doing that, so we are going to do that as well. Our budget challenges, we've talked about most of these along the way. I just want to touch very quickly on the last one on the slide on page 43, which is the Medicaid eleven fifteen waiver. Right now, this is good through 12/31/2027. This is the waiver that gives us our actual costs and that Medicaid settlement. If for some reason it is not renewed, we will be subject to what's called the Medicare upper payment limit. So we would no longer receive that large settlement that we're receiving now. And Steven and I have been looking to see what that Medicare upper payment limit would be. We haven't been able to get a very hard number, but we anticipate it would be an additional request of upwards of 5 to $6,000,000 of general funds if this goes away. AHS does all of the applying and paperwork for the eleven fifteen waiver, so any specific questions regarding that would have to go to them because I don't know the ins and outs of it. We're just the benefactor of all of their hard work. On page 44, some of our spending reductions. We continue to make sure our costs are in line with our daily census. We just recently did not renew our contract with our podiatrist. We have some highly skilled nurses who can do the nail trimming, and if there was something really beyond that, we were sending them out to the podiatrist anyway. He still sees them for the more technical stuff. We're saving the money by having our nurses do the nail trimming. And then we have several other people on contract that I will be talking to Doug Pine in his office about the possibility of having them possibly be either temporary or full time state employees at a potential cost savings to the state to see if that might be an option because their contracted cost per hour is very, very high. Our LNA class continues to be a great success. Yesterday, we had eight LNAs graduate, and they are all coming on board either full or part time on our second shift, which is exciting because on second shift is our highest use of agency staff.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Melissa, when you had like graduating class last year of five and only two hired, is that after the class they decided that they didn't want to do it or did they get hired somewhere else?

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Well, the first class, three of them went to work at another facility because one of the classmates' mom worked over there. And the other in the second one, went on to the went to school. She's working on her LPN, and hopefully will be coming back after.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Do you require any work there to do your class? You could give them an exception if you want to.

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: So I have asked about having like, you know, if they don't stay with us, can there be some I don't want to say penalty, but when I worked in the private for profit sector, if you did this class, you had to work for us for X amount of months, it's not something that can easily be done in this environment is the easiest way to explain it. I've had conversations with labor relations on that. And then lastly, on slide 44, we continue to do a great job with our one on one. It's been many years now since we've had someone who's been on continual 20 fourseven with someone with them. The staff does a great job of identifying when someone may be in crisis and needs someone with them for a little bit of time, so they're doing great with that. We do have a waiting list. We were really close to 90 the other day, and within twenty four hours we had four deaths. So, we've had three admissions. As a matter fact, we had one today, I have to go say hello. We have another one coming next week. So, marketing and admissions department is, even though we have a waiting list, continuing to make sure that our name is out there, making sure people don't forget about us, we're making sure that we're present at VSO events, and we're also making sure that we're available for any job fairs to recruit staff. And then the remainder of the slides talk about our community events. A little bit more about our high school affiliations and our college affiliations. Any questions? I threw a lot at you there.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Yeah. Well, I think we asked our questions as we went through. Thank you for your service to our service members. That's important. You're doing good job controlling the costs, seems to me. And hopefully you can get those other beds open soon, because I know there's a need for it.

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Yes.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Anybody else have any questions? Thank you, I always appreciate seeing you both being.

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Thank you, appreciate your time.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Thank you. Good, thanks. Okay. We'll move right into the Treasurer's Office. They're all here. Good afternoon. Good afternoon.

[Mike Pieciak, Vermont State Treasurer]: Thanks for for having me. We have a presentation that we'll walk through, but, you know, please feel free to ask any questions that you have, along the way. The way that You have to introduce me. Oh, sorry. Mike Peachak, state treasurer, of state of Vermont. And the way we've broken up our presentation, we have sort of our governors recommend the items that we'll go through. And then there are two bills that have an appropriation with them that would impact our budget. One is the Treasurer's Honor's Bill and has more funding items. And then there's a bill that Senator Lyons is helping us with and the Senate is the sponsor that is with the RARX that has a a one time funding request as well. So we'll lay those out. All of those funding requests are not phased through general fund. They usually, most of them are coming out of our special funds for our one time ask, but I'll get into those specifically. So just an overview of our office and our budget. The 27 governors recommend is just about $14,200,000 And to break that out a little bit about where does our revenue come from, you can see about 2,800,000.0 comes from the general fund, 1,500,000.0 comes from our unclaimed property fund. So we fund our operations or unclaimed property from those assets that we hold of unclaimed property. Then similarly, the retirement system funds, our retirement systems, those funds come out today for all of our employees and contracts and other things that we need. So you can see the breakdown there about 20% of general funded, 11% from ongoing property, and 69% from retirement system. So putting that all together, 20% general fund, 80% special fund before our budget. Looking a little bit on our team here, we have 45 positions in the treasurer's office, about seven staff in our front office, our treasury operations division, which handles paying all of our bills, investing our money, doing our debt issuances, relationships with the credit rating agencies, their 11 full time staff members, our retirement division, which again manages the, BIMERS, which is the municipal retirement, the state retirement, teachers retirement, the OPEB, the health care for the teachers and the state employees, and then a number of other plans that are available to exempt employees as well. They have 18 staff members. Our unclaimed property division has four staff members. They handle the $150,000,000 in unclaimed property that we have and try to return to Vermonters. We have our own IT staff, a little bit different than other agencies. We do work with ADS and we're on ADS systems for things like email and our files and things like that. But we do have our own staff because we do have legacy systems in our office for both retirement and on claim property. And then two staff in our economic empowerment division. So that is where our Vermont Sage program is, where our medical debt relief program is, and we've a number of financial literacy programs under economic development as well. So looking into the 27 budget, you'll see that it's an increase in totality from last year of about 7%. So representing the total dollar increase of $927,000 or thereabouts. So you can see the breakdown there of those different funds and where the pressure is, about 4.4% on the general fund, point 4% on retirement and 11.5% on unclaimed property. Generally the pressures that we're seeing in our budget are similar to what I'm sure you're hearing from other agencies, COLAs, the step increases, health insurance increases her retirement and the pensions, internal transit increases, and some other insurance increases as well. So all of those sort of pressures, some of the reasons for why it's a little bit different when it's spread out among these funds, some of the funds have more staff versus non staff expenses. When you have more staff, those numbers are going go up. Some of those divisions have had larger step increases or more of their personnel getting step increases than others. And then some of them have some IT related expenses that they're picking up on their budget versus, you know, some of the other divisions. And then the other thing I'll just mention about our office, we try to present it as cleanly as we can with general fund, unwilling property, retirement. But among those 45 people, some spend their time across multiple funds. So each person is sort of allocated to each of those funds just to add some complexity to it, but to make it as simple as possible, we have our divisions that are funded through their special funds and our front office is funded through general fund. I want to hit on a couple of things that will show up in our ups and downs that are not connected to our budget, both the pay deck the OPEB, pay deck for the OPEB and for pensions, and then also our debt service. So just one point to make here on our funded ratio for pension systems. Continue to have good news this year in terms of the increased funding levels. You can see on this chart the impact that these funds had after the two thousand and eight financial crisis. You know, they were in pretty good financial position and dropped precipitously overnight. And then we had a decade or so where we were meeting our ADAC, we were meeting the required amounts that we had to pay in, but the funded ratio continued to track down largely because of assumptions that were too high and things that we're putting in, the amounts of money that we're putting in weren't actually sufficient to keep the funded ratio level or even increase actually was decreasing even though we're putting everything in that the actuaries were telling us and then some. So we made a couple of pretty significant changes in 2002, both with moving the assumed rate of return down to 7%, which is much smaller than that before. It was 7.5%, but in the past it had been 8%, I think 8.5% at one time. So, you know, we're hitting that 7%. The mean peg is hitting that 7%.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: We take that or is the to the same people that give us the eight that give us a

[Mike Pieciak, Vermont State Treasurer]: So the way that we that that that process used to work through retirement boards. They would come up with both the assumed rate of return and then the assumed rate of return or the assumed inflation rate. Now that's in APIC's purview, but BPIC does, and we also separately sort of go through our actuaries and see if it's a reasonable assumption. So defect decides that, but it's done with the help and it's what's And they do it their actual words. You're saying they do it every year? How often? So I think it's every three years is the, you know, the experience study that we used to have was every five years and now it's every three years. So I think those three years go very fast, was part of the point, that we stay on top of these assumptions that we're making.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: A lot could change, as we found in 2008.

[Mike Pieciak, Vermont State Treasurer]: Yeah, exactly right. And that would be, I think it's already next year is the next experience study. So with those new better assumptions, more conservative assumptions, and with the pension reforms that occurred, you now see five straight years of funding ratios going up. The state system at 73.2 and the teachers at 63.4. So that's the highest the state system has been in ten years since 2016. That's the highest of Easter's has been, the teacher system has been since 2011. And how's that compared to other states? I think that you have that graph. Yeah. We don't we don't do this presentation. We we're not the worst, but we're certainly not the best. I mean, that's the kind of the simplest way to to put it. We are the back. I'd say again.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Middle of the pack, you'd say?

[Mike Pieciak, Vermont State Treasurer]: Or Yeah. Middle middle low. Yeah. But we are tracking in the right direction.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Yep. Yeah. That's important.

[Mike Pieciak, Vermont State Treasurer]: So looking at the ADEC and the OPEB numbers, you know, I wanted to pull these out because it really sort of tells two stories here. On the pension side for the ADEC, the increases are relatively mild, 2.6%, 3.6%, the average of those together is about 3%. So on the pension side, the increase over last year was about 3%. And that's sort of in line with the projections from the pension reforms. We expected to see the rate of the ADEC increases slow down, and hopefully that will continue. But also, we expected to see them actually from an inflationary standpoint become less and less as a percentage of the overall budget. So actually go down from an inflationary perspective even though the absolute number was going up. And we're kind of starting to see that here with inflation being around three or three plus percent. So that side of it, of the story I think is very solid. On the OPEB side you can see the increases were much more considerable, 12% and then about 25% on the teachers. So that's tens of millions of dollars and it's a pretty dramatic jump. But of course what that represents is the underlying cost of healthcare in Vermont and elsewhere, pharmaceutical costs, hospital costs, specialty costs, all of those things are going up in this environment and are just another way that healthcare shows up on the state budget and increased OPEB costs. One thing I wanna call out, which is the great work of our retirement team, that teacher OPEB is up 25%. That's a significant number, tens of millions of dollars. But you know, in July, we had gotten a rate renewal offer from Blue Cross Blue Shield of 50%, 50% from last year and then to this year. We were kind of stuck. We didn't have a lot of time to determine if we had alternatives, but our team did go to work and, you know, sort of do a lot of due diligence on trying to find some alternatives for us. We did come up with a couple and one which was called HealthSpring, a pretty significant Medicare Advantage provider across the country. They were very strong financially. They were very well rated from CMS, from the federal CMS regulators. They had a really good reimbursement rate. They had good record on their customer service. They had similar benefit structure, same benefits, same access. And their rate offered to us was 16.8%. So it saved us. Eventually we decided to move in that direction. You know, it's a big deal to change carriers. You know, a lot of the retired teachers are obviously very concerned about that. But we bought both for their pocketbook and for the state, you know, savings of about $22,000,000 having not made that decision. So that ADEC would have been even higher. So I really credit our retirement team for being able to find an alternative, able to do the due diligence, be able to do the contracting in such a short limited amount of time. But it's an example of, well, know, in a little bit because we do have a request for a position in our retirement division, but it just gives you a sense of the work that they're able to do and the savings that they're able to bring when they're fully resourced. The other thing I just want to hit on that is in our budget, but again, not necessarily in our office, is budget, but you'll see it in our ups and downs is the debt service. So we, when we issue debt, we have an expense of about $645,000 that will show up in our ups and downs. And then you'll see here the interest and principal that we're paying on our outstanding bonds. So about 75,700,000.0 fiscal year '26, 77,700,000.0 fiscal year twenty seven. You see the breakdown of the difference between the interest and the principal on that. One thing I'll just call out, we just did a refinancing for some of our bonds back in December, and we were able to save about $2,200,000 at present value of interest on payments that we're refinancing. What is our total debt? The total debt right now? Yeah. There's about 600,000,000 in that ballpark. So I think it might just be a touch under that, but it's in that ballpark. So one of the things when we're thinking about sort of our relationship with the rating agencies and how they view Vermont from a broad perspective. You know, 600,000,000 is obviously a big number, but our unfunded pension liabilities are in the billions, right? So we are trying to sort of take all of that into consideration and why it's so important to make progress on the pension. So that's everything in our sort of, you know, governor recommend 27 budget. I wanted to transfer over to our treasurer's omnibus bills. This is starting in the house. It's in government operations. And there's four things that would impact appropriations. One is this mechanism to temporarily fund the Vermont saves, which I'll get into. And then there's a one time ask for $75,000 for actuarial services for a pension task force, which I'll talk a little bit about as well. I mentioned the retirement division has a position request of one that would come out of the assets of the retirement system. It's not a general fund impact. And then our unclaimed property division has two position requests, and I'll get into the reason for that. That would come out of the unclaimed property assets, again, not the not a general fund funded item. But on the Montsaves piece, just a little bit of background on Demand saves. It launched about a year ago, fully launched in March 2025. As of today, we have about 5,400 accounts that are people are actually saving them, and there's money and they're saving for the future. Collectively among those accounts, it's about $5,200,000 collectively saved, both on the accounts and on the amount that is collectively saved. We expect to see that continue to rise, not only just this year, but in the years ahead and the decades ahead. In just five years out, we are thinking, you know, projection wise, it would be more like 20,000 savers, 20,000 accounts, and hundreds and tens of millions of dollars collectively saved among Vermonters. The The thing that we're really excited about is this percentage here, 55% of savers are 40 years or younger, 30% of savers are under the 30. So really a lot of young people taking advantage of this, and I'll show the chart on the next slide in a second here that just sort of visually shows that. And then from the employers that we've been out and about talking to on the road, you know, a lot of them really view this as a benefit for their employers, resident employers, and as their employees, a lot of their employees have talked about how they want to have a retirement system that they weren't able to afford it. Vermont saves is a no cost option for the employer. It's actually required to sign up for it if they don't offer retirement. But the reason for that is because there's no cost. It's a good balance there. And their employees are seeing the benefit of it. Senator Walker.

[Sen. Anne Watson]: Thank you. On that program, so the funds that are automatically saved, are they invested somehow in securities or bonds or not, if so, who was managing that?

[Mike Pieciak, Vermont State Treasurer]: Yeah, so the way that we set it up, and it's consistent with, you know, the other states that we've partnered with, we wanted to give savers option, too many options, so that they didn't get sort of a paralysis. And they wanted to make them relatively simple. So the options that are available are like target date funds. So if you're thinking you're gonna be retiring in twenty years, have a twenty year target date fund. And as you get closer to retirement, the portfolio changes and it goes from more equity to more of those fixed investments. So there's like a ten year, twenty year, thirty year, forty year, that sort of thing. And State Street and BlackRock are the two folks that are putting those target funds together for all of the states that are in this partnership. Great, thank you. Yeah. Helpful. And the employers can contribute? So the employers cannot contribute. It's not because we don't want them to, but, you know, Vermont Sage was designed just like the other programs to be as low cost as possible. And we wanted, they had to avoid ERISA regulation, which is a sort of federal, you know, retirement regulation that would have added costs and audit requirements and accounting requirements. And under that scenario, an employer could contribute because it is an employer benefit. This is technically not an employer benefit. The state is providing it, not the employer, so they aren't able to contribute. But there is a savers credit and savers match that's coming up next year that is money that would be coming from the federal government to individual saving and a qualified retirement account. So there's opportunity for additional monies to be paired with how people are saving. And is the 5,420

[Sen. Richard Westman]: about what you thought it

[Mike Pieciak, Vermont State Treasurer]: would be after a year, or are you on track with your projection? Yeah. I so, you know, I'll show you in the next slide sort of or a couple of slides sort of where we stand financial projection wise in terms of the account projection. When we look at some of the other states that are year end, like Delaware, you know, Delaware is, I think, maybe about twice the size of Vermont. They had about seven or 8,000 people saving. So we feel like we're doing pretty well compared to some of the other states that have recently set up this program. But we want that number, and we have some strategies to get it there. You know, we expect that number to get up to more than 20,000 once it's sort

[Sen. Richard Westman]: of a fully mature And that's where you're gonna say you need

[Mike Pieciak, Vermont State Treasurer]: to get there to cover it's cost? Yeah. That's what both we needed to get there, but that's also sort of our expectation as to where it will land. Okay. So just to show visually on the next slide, this is a little bit older data, but it just gives you the sense. This is the age band from age 18 all the way up to 80 and sort of where the savers are born.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Suppressive that somebody's 82 is 62.

[Mike Pieciak, Vermont State Treasurer]: Yeah. No No doubt. But, you know, I can see that sort of shift over to the younger folks. You know, lot of those folks in their twenties and thirties, they might not be in their full time career yet. They could be working in retail or hospitality, just not in a job that provides them savings for retirement. But by putting a few $100 away a month, you know, it's hundreds of thousands of dollars when they reach retirement age. So I think I mentioned we got a one time appropriation in 2023 for this Vermont Stage program. It was $750,000 It gave us the authority to establish the program and to get it to positions. We've launched the program with Colorado, Maine, Delaware, Nevada, and Minnesota. So they're part of our collaborative that allowed us to get it up and running more quickly and with less expense than we anticipated, which was good. But at the same time, the one time appropriation is set to be exhausted in this fiscal year. So we are expecting it next fiscal year to have about $300,000 of program expenses and the revenues for next year from the fees are gonna be about $57,000 So it leaves a gap of about $243,000 On next slide, you'll see sort of our projections of sort of when the program would become revenue positive. That number comes down quite a bit each fiscal year. In total, if you add all that up, it's about another $700,000 that's needed. That is probably the appropriation that we should have asked for in 2023. The state of Maine asked for 1,500,000.0. That's

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: getting

[Mike Pieciak, Vermont State Treasurer]: them sort of to their sustainability point. The ways that the revenues will increase over the next five or six years are that we'll have more accounts and there's an account based revenue fee. And then as you have more accounts, you just have more assets under management because more people are saving and the amount that they're saving is growing from investment return as well. So those are the two primary revenue streams. The other is that this collaborative that we have among all of the states As collectively the accounts get higher and the assets under management get higher, the shared fee that we pay to our vendor breaks toward our benefit, so we get more of that fee. So that will help us with revenue in the, let's call it years three and four and five if we'll get more of the fee revenue that is going

[Sen. Richard Westman]: to the. What's the current management percentage?

[Mike Pieciak, Vermont State Treasurer]: So I think the I think the the fee, like, the account fee is something like $26 and we get $4 of that. So the rest of the $22 goes to the It's just

[Sen. Richard Westman]: a 20 it's just a flat fee. It's not a percentage.

[Mike Pieciak, Vermont State Treasurer]: Yeah. That one is an annual fee that's paid quarterly. But then there's an asset under management fee that's very low. It's like point 03%. And they get most of that. I think we get point 6%, and then it'll be point 8%, and it'll be point 01%. So the break fees sort of go up as more assets are under management or more accounts. Great. So the mechanism that we have that we proposed to sort of close this gap on a temporary basis, Right now, unclaimed property fund transfers older unclaimed property to the higher education trust fund. So if you were a property that is over ten years old and under a $100, that gets calculated by our office and transferred to the higher education trust fund. The proposal here would keep the ten years, but move the number from 100 to 150 and propose that that money first goes to Fund Vermont Saves, and then any excess goes on to the Higher Education Trust Fund. So for example, next year, if we follow through on this, we would get about $240,000 The Higher Education Trust Fund would get $60,000 Right now, all of that money is flowing to the Higher Education Trust Fund. The reason that we pick that as the revenue stream is both because it's temporary and it'll eventually go back in total to the Higher Education Trust Fund and because the Higher Education Trust Fund had a significant windfall last year, about $27,000,000 from the estate tax. So it took that fund twenty five years to build up to the point that it had $30,000,000 and then overnight it doubled to $60,000,000 So they're sitting pretty pretty in terms of, what they will be getting in terms of returns over the next five to six years. And if we temporarily divert $102,100,000, it won't have much impact in total on a higher education trust fund. So that's sort of the overview on that piece. The other piece I wanted to mention was the one time money for Oh, sorry. So

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: in Vermont, it says, is it technically a Roth IRA that's been entered from the best community?

[Mike Pieciak, Vermont State Treasurer]: Exactly right. That's what's set up for them.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: So they can if they already have a Roth IRA, then they still do it. Yeah. For sure.

[Mike Pieciak, Vermont State Treasurer]: The only thing they have to be mindful of is that there's a limit. No matter how many Roth IRAs you have, there's a limit to how much money you can put in per year. So if we don't know that they have another Roth IRA, we can't can't help them with that. They have to do it on their own. But if we, you know, if they if they had two different employers in Vermont Sage, if they had two different jobs, that would actually track back to the same accounts so we could watch that. The amortization task force. So everybody, hopefully, you know, maybe nobody wants to remember the pension reform task force that was established in 2008. But what we're proposing here is to bring that task force back a little bit, slumped it down version, but for a very, very specific reason to look at this amortization schedule. And basically what we're why we're doing this or why we're suggesting that this occur, the closer that we get to these pension and OPEB liabilities being fully funded, there is actually a little bit of additional budgetary risk as we get closer to those end dates. So the pensions are set to be fully funded in 2038. The OPEB is set to be fully funded in 2048. So that's a little bit longer timeline. But 2038 from a budget standpoint is actually not that many years away. This is the twenty seventh budget. We'll soon, before we know it, be on the twenty eighth, the twenty ninth. So the fewer amount of years you have until it's set to be fully funded, if something dramatic happens, like the stock market goes down well beyond expectation, if some assumption is way out of line, you'll see your unfunded liability skyrocket in a particular year, and then we just have much fewer years to spread that over because we have this obligation to be fully funded by 2038. You could very well end up in a scenario where you're four years out from being fully funded, we're tracking well, we're at 90% funded, but then we have this huge dip in the stock market and we have a billion dollars of new unfunded liability that gets created overnight, then we just would have four years to spread that billion dollar Would

[Sen. Richard Westman]: it cost to just change the obligations? Well,

[Mike Pieciak, Vermont State Treasurer]: that's what we worry about. It's like if it happens a year where there's budgetary pressure and you can't pay for it, then all of a sudden you might be talking about reducing benefits or cutting benefits or And this is just a we're trying to basically do it in a more, you know, a bit more forethought and more intentionality about what do we wanna do to address this problem. So we're not suggesting a solution here. We want the the stakeholders to come together and have a task force to think about this issue and think about how do we get to either fully funded or, you know, a very high funded ratio by 2038 without having this risk exist alongside those improvements. And the bill describes who is on the task force. Yeah. Exactly. It would be the union members, like from the state employees and the teachers and the and the, you know, the state police. It would be from the secretary of administration or somebody from the administration. The the treasurer would be the chair of the task force. So and expressly for this very limited focus. And the 75,000 would just help with the actuarial cost as we pass the actuaries to run different scenarios depending on which direction we're going. So, on the ominous bill, the other item I mentioned was unclaimed properties. So, there's a physician request, actually two physician requests. One, both of them combined are about 2 and $14,000 The reason for these requests, you can kinda see it on the next slide. We just skip ahead one. Just our normal operations have increased dramatically in unclaimed property. We have done a lot of outreach and partnerships and that sort of thing, but unclaimed property across the board is also seeing a lot more money coming into these systems. And as times get tough, generally, our unplanned property division sees increased claims because people care a lot more about that $100 or that $200 when affordability is front of mind. But you can see our claim jump from fiscal year twenty four to '25 was a 66% increase from about 19,000 claims to 31,000 claims. And we have the still the same number of four people handling that. So all of a sudden their workload went up 66% and we had the same volume in terms of the number of employees. Then you can see the increase also from the amount of dollars going out. So more money went back to Vermonters also. So even just from their normal operations, they're underwater, but there are some other things that we think are important for these positions too. The fraud risk, the amount of fraud that's being attempted on unclaimed property, on retirement, on anybody that pays out money has, you know, really gone through the roof. So they need to spend more time on claims, be able to make sure we're paying them the right person. We also want them to spend more time actually making sure that people that hold the money that have to turn it over to us are turning over all the money that they're supposed to and that they're doing it on a timeline that they have to. We don't really have the capacity to do that right now because they're so focused on paying the claims. So we just wanna make sure that their operations continue to be solid, but that they also are able to do these other things like fraud prevention and making sure we're getting paid all the things you need to get paid for. And that in fact could bring in additional revenue into the unclaimed property division. And then just to give you a sense in terms of the revenue on the next slide, You can see the the amount on the left is the amount of revenue that gets turned over to us. So, that has gone up dramatically over the last decade. You know, just five years ago, was about 14,000,000. Last year, was 25,000,000. That number, whether it will be higher than 25,000,000 this year, yet to be seen, but it will be a high number and that trend is up. Then similarly, what we end up transferring to the general fund from our online property division continues to go up. So even with these additional expenses, we anticipate the amount of the transfer to the general fund to continue to go up. It's underground. What drives that? Which one?

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Sorry.

[Mike Pieciak, Vermont State Treasurer]: The increase from say That gets turned over to us. Yeah. So it's a great question. I mean, one thing is just that, you know, if you think about fifteen years ago, there just there are more people, like, like, there's more people now than there were twenty or thirty years ago. So it's more opportunity for unclaimed property. There's also a much more mobile society now. So people are changing their mailing addresses with much more regularity. There are a lot more online accounts. So Okay. People, you know, lose track of those online accounts, PayPal accounts. There's a lot of insurance proceeds that people forget about, like small, you know, insurance claims. So there's a whole host of reasons, but those are some of the major ones. And it's not a Lamont unique item that's happening across

[Sen. Richard Westman]: the board. It is. Yeah.

[Mike Pieciak, Vermont State Treasurer]: So that's sort of the underlying property fees on the the retirement deed, similarly a request for one physician, dollars 141,000. I mentioned that retirement is fully funded from the retirement assets and the stakeholders, the union members are in favor of this request because they certainly want to make sure our retirement division's well staffed or adequately responding to their members' needs and whatnot. And just

[Sen. Anne Watson]: to clarify, you mean that it's funded through the interest on those funds?

[Mike Pieciak, Vermont State Treasurer]: For retirement? Yeah. Yeah, basically the earnings. I mean, if there was a year where the earnings were down, would be paid out of Corpus. But yeah, basically out of the know, the billions of dollars that exist in the retirement. Did you

[Sen. Richard Westman]: ask for this position last year or the other one just

[Mike Pieciak, Vermont State Treasurer]: I think we only asked for the two unclean property positions last year. But this is a new request. And on the next slide, you just see the sort of where Vermont is. So compared to some of our peers, you know, in the median across the country for retirement systems, there's one employee per 1,300 members. For systems that are similar to our size, it's one employee per 1,200 members. And in Vermont, it's one employee per 2,600 members. So we're pretty lean already. And that's good. We wanna be lean. We don't wanna have a lot of expense. But when something like HealthSpring, the new Cross Blue Shield comes along and all of a sudden we have this extra work, we wanna make sure we're in a position to take that on because it did resolve a significant savings. We wanna make sure we have the ability to look ahead a little bit and anticipate other problems that we may have, IT or operational or things with the OPEB and investments. So this gives us a little bit extra capacity to make sure we're being thoughtful with having some foresight in our division. Then the last item that is a separate page of ARX H577. This is starting in Health House Healthcare and hopefully will be over into the Senate soon. But this is a pharmacy discount card that a number of states are now participating in. So it originated in Oregon. Oregon and Washington established a program. Nevada and Arizona and Connecticut have joined the discount card program On average, when their citizens are using this in Connecticut, for example, they're saving about 80% on generic drugs, on the cost of generic drugs at the pharmacy, and 20% on name brand drugs. On average, that's about $200 per month for people that are saving. If you think about the different categories of people that would benefit from this, it's certainly anybody, but people that don't have insurance at all would see a lot of benefit. People that are under insured, so they have insurance but their deductibles really high, they would see benefit here. I think unfortunately there's a lot of people that probably have Medicaid or Medicare, sorry, but they don't have a Part B plan. A lot of people shifted over from Medicare Advantage this past year to traditional Medicare, but not everybody knew they had to have a pharmaceutical plan. So they would benefit greatly from this. Also there are certain drugs that might be covered, not covered by insurance or by Medicare that would be able to get a discount from this card. So I think the opportunity is quite broad in terms of who could take advantage of it and benefit from it. There's no cost to the individual to sign up for the card. There's no cost to the state to participate in the program. What we are asking for is a one time general fund amount of $50,000 help with marketing and outreach. The ARV of Vermont has already offered to help us with the outreach and marketing if the program gets established, and that will be a big help too. But having some of our own funds to get the card up and running and make sure people are aware of it would be critical. So that's sort of the entirety of the of the various of our budget and also some of the vast that you'll see, hopefully coming from some of the other bills that were involved with this session. Mhmm.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Okay. And just so the community knows, I've asked to come and give us a overview of the hiring trust fund just so we know what that status is now and what this current situation is. Mhmm. Any other questions for the treasurer? Anything else? Yes. This

[Sen. Anne Watson]: is a little bit off topic.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Yeah.

[Sen. Anne Watson]: But in the in the spirit of unclaimed property, so I was teaching personal finance this this last year, which was great, came to find out that there were a lot of high school students who did not claim to be exempt on their w fours. So they're having taxes withheld, and then they're not making enough money to be required to file taxes. And so then they don't file the taxes and then they don't get that alternative. Anyway, just wanted to flag that. It's like, again, I realize it's not related, but, you know, the spirit of unclaimed property, there's some statistics out there about like the billions of dollars nationally that go unclaimed from the federal government because teenagers are not filing their taxes and getting their tax returns.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Yeah. No doubt. Exactly. I thought that was a dumb document. They don't wanna file that. Right? Right. That you can leave that out there.

[Mike Pieciak, Vermont State Treasurer]: Our National Treasure Association has been doing a lot of work with the federal government to try to find those areas, not necessarily on the IRS, but there are two examples. One is that a lot of times people forget about, like, a four zero one plan, and right now that is not in our on-site property system, but the idea would be that you can search it in our on-site property system, and that we'd actually get those transferred

[Sen. Richard Westman]: to

[Mike Pieciak, Vermont State Treasurer]: us from the US Department of Labor. Then the other one is that treasury bonds, Like, people will have fully matured treasuries. Very nice. But the the things that maybe they bought in 1960 and their grandparents bought us for them, and they don't they don't know where they exist. So that would be the treasury giving us that data so that people research for those. Yeah. I have on those.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: I got one on the board.

[Melissa Jackson, CEO, Vermont Veterans’ Home]: Oh, yeah.

[Sen. Richard Westman]: Sitting around. I actually I searched like bank property. I do it once a year when I talk to you, so I was like, I think you're tech. And I actually had one this year. It's like $30 or something. And I was like, why does this company even have it? It didn't, just to Brandon's question about why is there more? I think you're buying more online. Yeah. There's a with this company. You just bought something one time. So yeah.

[Mike Pieciak, Vermont State Treasurer]: Got might not have your address. Right? You know, they might not even know how to

[Sen. Richard Westman]: reach out to you. Yeah. So I got $31.28 or something like that. I'm sorry for drinks on it. Alright. Well, thanks. Yeah. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Have weekend.