Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Unknown committee member]: Act 21.

[Unknown committee/staff (brief interjections)]: We are live.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: We're live. This is senate appropriations, February 25. We're going through FY twenty seven twenty twenty seven, I think. Budget requests, and we have the department agency. What do you call yourself?

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: We're a sole department of the state.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Department of state attorneys and sheriffs. So this today, I'll let you introduce yourselves for the record and give us your presentation.

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: Thank you. Tim Leaders Ginny I am the Executive Director of the Department of State Attorneys and Sheriffs.

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: Anne Newman, President of the Department of State Attorneys and Sheriffs.

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: And also with us is Barbara Ginny, a longtime fiscal officer from the department and Lauren Clemens, Director of Operations and Labor Relations. And we will give you a bit of the presentation you received online is really in part, you know, JFO staff sent out a memo on your behalf about the types of things you were looking for this year, trends and performance. And even though some of that is a little bit square peg ground hole for the criminal justice system about what success looks like, there is lots of information and lots of data. Our department is engaged in essentially a nine hundred day data analysis project using judicial filing data. And so a lot of that is in this massive presentation that's available on your website. I'm going to be your speed tour guide using about 30 slides, which will appear on screen for you. And starting with that is just a bit

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: of an executive summary. I know your committee As far as the documents online, is

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: it the budget presentation? Exactly, yep, it's a consolidated budget presentation. And before we get to that on your screen, we have our executive summary, which we will jump right through. And just as a bit of a reminder on the department structure, back in the 80s, the department was created and it was comprised of a central office and then the 14 states attorneys and 14 sheriffs. The state attorneys and the sheriffs both had executive committees made up of five members each, which elect the executive director in my position and essentially provide oversight over our central office through a bit of a corporate board structure and statute. A lot of the work that we do is county government passed through through a state department, essentially. We provide IT support, the appellate litigation for the state's attorneys, human resources, labor relations, managing the state's budget across four different budgets, of which you're aware, we'll go through those. The department also handles labor relations. The department does not utilize the Department of Human Resources with respect to labor relations with our unionized employees. Because of a Supreme Court decision a number of years ago. And the two units within our department, bargaining units are state transport deputies and the state's attorneys office, the SAO. Our four budgets are the state's attorney's budget, which is our largest of the four budgets. The SIU budget, the special investigation unit's budget, we coordinate a grant program to investigate certain types of crimes. And there are 12 SIUs out in the field. We coordinate dollars for those. It's a very simple budget. The victim advocates budget

[Sen. Robert Norris]: the victim advocates used to

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: be paid for through another entity. They are now paid for through our department and even though they're in each state's attorney's office, they have their separate budget, but it is really under the state's attorney's umbrella. '22,

[Unknown committee/staff (brief interjections)]: to hear. Why?

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: We were originally funded through a local grant with Prime Victim Services and Prime Victim Services said, you know, most of the states across the nation were moving away from funding state victim advocates with with federal money. So CCBS came in and asked for the switch for us to go into state general fund for our 28 victim advocates. So when that occurred, the money which of course is all state general fund money came to us. They were because they're essentially our employees and we had a grant through them through CCBS with that terminated. We still have one grant with CCDS and we'll talk a little bit about that which is basically what they call the stock grant and it's primarily for support three investigators to do domestic violence, sexual assault investigation for three of the officers. We only get enough money to fund three, but it's been a very successful program. So we still have a connection.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: But each office still has a victim advocate.

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: Every office has victim advocate. Some have more than one, but every office has at least one.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Do they work for the attorney's? For the state attorney's? Yeah. That's correct. So they're just funded through a separate Yeah. The

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: department has the four budget lines, but really as you'll see with the victim advocate's budget, it's salary and benefits. That's what it is. The operational support essentially comes through the attorney's budget. And then the fourth budget in our department is the sheriff's budget, which is primarily the salary and benefits of the sheriff's and then the transport that the state employees that are allocated to the field under the supervision and Senator Norris to give you the description and history of that program better than people at the end of the table, but we'll leave that for a different day. But those are state employees stationed at the county level that work for our department, but are law enforcement supervised by a local sheriff of my choosing. In terms of some of the pressures getting to the JFO memo, looking over a three year time period, we have moved 15%, a 50% reduction in the number of cases pending from 2023 until 2025, it's the last December 2025. We have 22,000 pending cases right now, seeing staff by our offices. In 2023, we had 26,000. So that's substantial progress in terms of moving cases. I will say that includes almost all of the Chittenden County docket program, but we saw a reduction of nearly 800 cases. So if you think about 22,000 cases, 800 is a not insignificant number within that piece and it shows you the progress of a surge of focus and AHS resources and designated agency resources at the local level and what that did. So I would say we've now slowed some of our statewide progress. There's a potential for a bit of a plateau of around 20,000 cases in my opinion, because we're kind of just, now we're just maintaining. About 107% clearance rate is our average clearance rate. We're clearing 7% more cases than we're filing or 107% on average over the last year, which is excellent. But to really make progress, you need to be at what Chittenden was after the last quarter, 170%. They had 170% clearance rate and they saw a dramatic reduction in nonviolent case types. The other major engine of progress over the last three years, Over the last nine hundred plus days, we've used five forty trial dates. That is a lot, the majority, more than 50% of the days we are in trial. Without trial dates being set, cases do not resolve between twenty twenty twenty four, fifty four percent increase in trial date utilization. That is a huge uptick. 2025 volume still remains 24% over the 2023 level. But we're seeing a little bit of that leveling off. In 2025, we used 178 trial dates. In 2024, we used two twenty. So less than the prior year, but there was so much to do still coming out of the COVID pandemic for serious cases. Most of those trials are felonies. Most of those trials are violent felonies or felonies where there is a sexual element. That means that we're not having a lot of misdemeanor trials. So we're still resolving ninety nine percent of our cases through plea agreements or things like focusing in Chittenden where it's treatment court, it's a probation, it's some version of an alternate path. But those trial dates are so important and the counties that see the most trials are not surprising to the people in this room. Wyndham County, Brannock County, Chittenden County, Rockland County, Washington County and Franklin County. It's the major locations of criminal pub activity. The smaller counties are also having trials. And last year, every single county saw at least one trial, including Grand Isle County. And they don't have a trial every year, but there are other counties where they have a trial every single month. And there is typically one, maybe two trial dates set each month. So these are not happening every day. And it's because it takes, you're not moving other cases, you're not doing arraignments when you're having trials because we're using the same court spaces. Another huge component of our pressures and looking at our pressures is the high volume defendants over here, We'll call them nonviolent and are violent crime. Those are competing for the same court spaces. And so right now, we have about 6,000 pending felonies, 13,000 pending misdemeanors of the felonies with 111 pending homicides. 103 of those are being staffed by our department, and that is the 111 number, that's 24% higher than 2023. So even though we're making progress overall, our violent cases are continuing to rise in terms of violence. In 2023, there was 90 pending homicides and today there's 111. If you look at some larger states, those types of numbers might account for a large city like Baltimore, certain sections of New York City over a two or three year period. These are statistically higher based on per capita than locations like Vermont has a higher per capita homicide rate than New York City over the last two years. And part of that, as we know, and especially a couple of the members in this room know, even as we've made progress with our lower level cases, we're still a fairly hospitable location for the sale of drugs and we still have a population of people that are struggling. And with that, there's a ripple of activity that no longer is the homicide docket domestic violence alone. That has remained very consistent and it's still a really serious part of our homicide docket. The homicides that are on the increase in a review of the affidavits of the last year are drug direct, drug adjacent or drug nexus with firearm present. So it's usually a drug debt of $500 in the state of Vermont can get you kicked. And that is an important thing to note. I personally prosecuted cases where that's the fact pattern. And it's not uncommon, particularly in our pathways of 91 and Route 7. 89 connects the two, but Route 7 and 91 has two sort of major corridors of drug activity. Route 7 has more pending homicides right now than the 91 corridor, but Wyndham County has a lot. The Northeast Kingdom has a lot. Windsor County has a slight bump. And Rutland County has 16 pending homicides. Chittenden County has 24 pending homicides, which is a lot better than a year ago by the way. State Attorney George using the accountability docket as a little bit of a pressure release was able to focus on homicides last quarter and resolved all of the twenty twenty two firearm related deaths in Chittenden County. That was our huge uptick. 2022 was the highest homicide spike that we've seen across the state. And as all the people in this room know, people who live in Chittenden County are not the only people looking at crimes in Chittenden County. Same with Washington County and same with some of the other hubs. So that was a good thing, right? But also we were seeing this overall trend. At one point in the last twelve months, there was 130 pending homicides. The fact that we're at 111 during that 2025 snapshot is not indicative of the high watermark. It's a snapshot, so snapshot tells a story,

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: but it doesn't have a

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: whole story. The high volume defendants, the folks with three and five or more, the folks with three or more dockets still make up 45% of all the pending cases. Docket and case are the same thing. I use them interchangeably because of the same term. 45% of all pending cases relate to persons with three or more and 26% relate to persons with five or more. Think about that number for a second, only six percent of people with a pending criminal case have those 26 cases. So we're doing six percent of our defendant population is driving one fourth of our trial and court activity. So as we've done in Chittenden, as we hope to do in Rutland, on that group, reduce repeated activity, reduce recidivism is an important piece. At the bottom of page two, you'll see the caseload averages. I rounded up to the closest here. Our victim advocates have roughly 600 cases per. Our administrative professionals have about 800 cases per and our attorneys have two ninety eight, but I rounded up to 300 cases per. Two years ago, we were at three sixty five for the attorneys. So we have driven that down. But why we have victim advocates with twice as many cases in that is because we have about half as many victim advocates as we have. Attorneys, administrative professionals, the same story there. I know those numbers are sometimes helpful. There is a map included in your presentation at the suggestion of Emily Byrne to create a map. So we created a map by county with caseload and homicide by county that you will see later in the presentation. I also have a large printout of that, which I'm happy to bring in at some point on poster board. A couple of specialized programs for the department I just wanted to run through quickly. Our department employs two deputy states attorneys that just focus on traffic safety activity. They carry a caseload and they're mostly dealing with DUI, distracted driving, reckless driving cases that are either highly complex and technical or have serious bodily injury or death involved. And keeping in mind, eighteen percent of all pending cases have the term DUI in the charge somewhere. So it's a huge percentage of the criminal activity in the state is driving cases that doesn't include negligent operation and other things. That was just a DUI search, but it's important. There is a point of success. Yeah, just wanna mention

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: that those two positions are funded by the National Highway Safety Administration through this agency of transportation here in Vermont. What used to get increased the governor's highway safety programs now called the State Highway Safety Office. Vermont is unique in that we have had such success that a number of years ago, we were able to request and be granted the second prosecutor in that role. We we as you know, Vermont is often hindered by the small state minimum that the Fed's, you you can't have any more money. You're a small state. We were very fortunate in that the state agency of transportation and the highway office said we we think it's worth giving Lamoille to second position. Both positions are federally funded 8% and they have a lot of success in terms of prosecution work out for our 14 field offices. So while they work under Tim, they're dispatched to the 14 offices to handle some of the most egregious cases with regard to driving, impaired driving, reckless driving, all of that.

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: One thing I wanted to mention is, and I'd say the word successful because the data is better than it was five years ago but still talking about fatalities. In 2022, there were seventy six deaths on the road, seventy three fatal crashes. Since that peak, which was a peak, fatalities have decreased by twenty percent as of the 2025. You would like to think that our dedicated education and prosecutorial resources are part of that. We still had 61 people die on the roads last year, which is horrific. Only one of those sixty one is accounted for in our homicide data because we're prosecuting those DUI serious bodily injury or reckless driving serious bodily injury or death. The one that is being prosecuted as a homicide is the case in Romney, which folks may be aware of where a police officer was killed. And the TSRP program is supporting some of the work going on in that case in Revelin, which was in the news. Looking at that five year trend here, that's AOT's data. So you can just see we had a spike in 2022 and 2024. Last year, had 59. 2025 sorry, this past year, 61. So a slight increase over 2024, but still trending in the right direction, think. The last one of the other specialized pieces we do at our central office is we have one deputy state's attorney that handles almost all of the appeals at the Supreme Court for the 14 state's attorney's offices. Chittenden County does have some folks that do appeals on a regular basis and today we have the state's attorney from Wyndham doing one of his own appeals. But Evan Menon, who used to be in this building quite a bit, over the last three years, he has been involved, now it's over this number, but a 100 appeals as of December 2025 through October 2022, about 25 filings a year. Those are cases that involve sometimes years of litigation. They're all related to convictions, sometimes thousands of pages of litigation occur. They're incredibly time sensitive and all of them involved people that have already gone through the lower courts. And so there we use one attorney to do that, to try to speak with one voice as best we can because as we know, you all pass the laws. The other way we shape our laws is through case law at the Supreme Court. And so we're very proud of Deputy State's Attorney Ginny and his work. This past year, he had worked on 24 cases turning the calendar year 2025. 2023, there was a sort of a high year for 30 Supreme Court cases and all of those are staffed with no administrative support specific to that program. So he does all his own work. He's incredibly efficient. We're very proud of him and the work he does. One of the last areas of specialized work we do at our office, which is related to the whole system is our state transport program. As you know, the transport deputies, our state employees and over the FY '25, the last full year reporting we did 4,035 transports. Those numbers for this next fiscal year FY '26, we're still in FY '26, so we will have that number for you when the year has completed. It's going to be this very similar or more because of the activity that we're seeing in our courts in a 2019, twenty eighteen level of detainees. So a lot of detainees, a lot

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: of serious cases, we will have

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: a lot of transports to get those people who are all presumed innocent to court. Looking at some of the high water locations, Chittenden County, Rutland County, the same places we have in trials is where we have the most transports. If you look at the fourth page. I also included some numbers. Oh, yeah.

[Sen. Robert Norris]: In looking at the Chittenden County, the highest volume, in Chittenden County is very busy, we all know this, but does that include Franklin County Northwest Correctional Facility transports also, who does those?

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: So Chittenden County's transport team covers Addison through Franklin. These numbers are actually delivered to the Chittenden County Court. So Franklin, I believe, was maybe fifth on here, Senator, but I can get you the total number for Franklin as well.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Thank you.

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: But there are, and it should be noted, in the Chittenden docket that we see, there are lots of folks with cases that penned that live in Addison, Franklin, Lamoille, or Washington. And so when we wrap those cases up in Chittenden, sometimes it's a central location for that. I do have some crime trends numbers here. Those are from the FBI. They have not fully analyzed the year 2025, so these lag by a year. Our judicial filing data is very current. The NIMBRS reported data is different. So if a homicide happens in 2024, investigation, search warrants might take two years to file. And so judicial filing data is not indicative of reported incidents. In NIMBRS, and it was correct to point out, the national incident based reporting system that the FBI uses to talk about when crime is reported to police. And are these percentages kind

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: of a trend line over those six years or is

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: it just? So there is raw numbers included later in your presentation, I think somewhere on page 19 of the larger presentation. Shoplifting and retail theft. So that's up 110%. Theft in motor vehicles is up 84%. Aggravated assault, which can sometimes be charged as attempted murder, is up 46% and murder and manslaughter is up 73%. So those numbers I'm sure don't shock many of you, but they also co occurring with the pandemic. There has been an increase. Also I'm wondering, is

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: it just like 2018 to 2021 was pretty flat and then the 110 has been in the last three years?

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: So you can actually see in the larger presentation and I'll find the actual piece of the actual number of reports each year. And I can send that as a standard.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: It's like

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: a big table. Yes, exactly. So the last thing I'll get to is our asks for the FY twenty seven budget.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Sorry, no

[Unknown committee/staff (brief interjections)]: more time. And

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: this year, Mr. Chair, we prioritize them in the order that the department believes is most urgent. And I have numbers actually, if you look at your, there's a document that if you just actually, Lauren, if you scroll to the next, just below the carry forward document. So right there, the numbers for each of the asks by category. So the first ask is to eliminate vacancy savings targets for FY twenty seven in the three of our four budgets. In the fourth budget, the SIU budget, there is not a vacancy savings target. So for the state's attorneys, these are to avoid layoffs. Dollars 330,000 for the victim advocates, 147,000 and for the sheriffs, 139,000. Again, these are our department in our collective opinion does not have vacancies for long and we have them if we have the money to pay for positions, if that makes sense. So for the state's attorneys, that would mean, let's say Washington County lost a deputy state's attorney, goes to the private sector. To meet that type of target, we would have to hold it open for the year, even if we could hire forward. And in our opinion, we need to maintain our current workforce to do the work that we're doing and not have any slippage on data or progress. Anne, do you want to provide any context on the vacancy savings pieces?

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: Well, we were really grateful last year. You all eliminated our vacancy saving that we had built into our budget for both the state's attorney's budget and the sheriff's. There's a small amount left over in the sheriff's budget but we will be absorbing it very quickly. We didn't get to the point of absolving the vacancy savings for victim advocates last year, and we still haven't quite made that number yet. So we were still running in the deficit on that program. Part of that the good news is we didn't have turnover in our victim advocate program. The 28 people that work in the program have been very stable, long tenured, we didn't have the vacancy so if we get the other vacancy saving number we can't absorb. That's so what we have to do is at the end of the of the year, finance and management looks at the budget and

[Unknown committee member]: says, is there any way we

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: can fill the hole if something isn't spent elsewhere? They can see savings when we have to build it into our budget, which is what we have to do to meet the governor's recommended. We got to find somewhere. We have such a small operating budget in all of our programs. There's really no place to come up with a 270,000, which is what the vacancy saving number was for the next year. So we didn't have place to go. So we basically had to hold position open in the which was which was had somebody had left to go back to graduates. We helped position open. We don't really, we still haven't made up what we need. So really what it does when we have vacancy savings starting out on July 1 just puts the budget in the hole right from the get go. We really try to manage to the money that you give us. That's just that's just a really difficult thing to do.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Do you have zero vacancy savings or just I I guess you said you did zero on the victim advocates but is there through all the employees would you have some vacancy savings?

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: We might have some vacancy savings and what would happen, it would be that at the end of the, in the last quarter, financial management would meet with us and say, who's gonna end this year in a deficit? And they might allow, they would allow us to move money around from one budget to the other. So it's difficult to say one of the things I wanted to mention, if I could, we can go back just up to the

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Scroll a little bit

[Unknown committee/staff (brief interjections)]: there. Yeah. Okay.

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: So one of the things I want to mention with this is there is a chart in here that basically showed us what we had left over in each year. Barbara and I were talking she reminded me the other day and part of the reason we had that kind of what looks like large amounts of money you know, just look at the state's attorney June. What had happened and you probably will remember this is that we were coming down the end of the year, the state of Vermont, and spending the ARPA loan, and what happened is that finance management went into state agencies and departments, and they took state general fund money out, and they subbed in the federal ARPA money, which made sense because they were gonna lose it, It made sense. But what it looked like is that extra money. Well, didn't have that extra money going in. It was just the money that was switched around. So this year as we look, you know, we run our blood status pretty much every every two weeks to see where we're at. We worry last year we came into the June 30 with the sheriffs with $1,200 in their budget. Two or three years ago state's attorneys didn't make payroll the last three pay periods so we had to take money who had money well they shifted money around from sheriffs and from SIU. Last year we had a litigation expense with risk management we owed risk management $441,000. We were able to find that money in the SIU budget only because they didn't spend all their law enforcement money, and they didn't some of the programs had a lot of staff turnover. So if they lose a position, you know, we de obligate that money. We're not paying for a position that didn't wasn't there. So we were able to kind of come out of last year in a in good shape. I'm worried this year about the sheriff's and terribly worried about the sheriff's budget and I worry this year also a little bit about the state's attorneys where we are really struggling. Tim will mention this is we're really struggling in terms of our operating expenses and Tim will talk to you a little bit about mental health crisis for when I say crisis I mean for the expenses crisis in terms of competency hearings, insanity hearings, all of that that we're really struggling up against. We have a case out of Windham County where the you know we're almost afraid to see what the bill is going to be because it's been time and time again they keep shifting, shifting, shifting. They keep bringing witness experts in. We have to then get somebody to counteract that. It's really a tough budget when we, that's all to say, it's really tough budget when we start in the hole. So they can see savings for us as a priority to eliminate that. So we can at least start out fresh without owing in the money, you know, having to meet a vacancy saving of 270,000 for the victimized like last year we didn't do.

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: So our number one priority would be the elimination of those savings so that we can retain staff because those savings are targets that we have to meet post facto when someone leaves a position. The second priority we have would be we're appreciative of the governor's recommend, but we would ask for, in our estimate, dollars 100,000 over and above to mostly, and this is where the priorities really come in, go to our expert witness fund. In every state, every county but two, there is a pending homicide with a mental health element, which is either competency or insanity will be raised at trial. And Defender General Valerio, a couple of years ago, said that he spent a million dollars on the Garram case in Chittenden County in testimony. Our expert witness fund is $140,000 for the year. That means, you can do the

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: math, this is 140

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: divided by 14. In one of our cases in Bennington County two weeks ago, I approved an expense of $31,000 and that is all pretrial preparation, working with experts in depositions. And so it is a real area of concern. And I will say it is the one thing I've told all of our state's attorneys, if I need to come in here every year on DAA because we overspent in that, I will do it, but it's not the best way to grow the budget. And I want to thank Senator Lyons, who has a bill right now, which includes a provision to better our contracting behavior as a state. Right now DMH has a contract for mental health competency evals and the like, which only incorporates the initial evaluation. So then when they come to us for the subsequent trial related evaluations, we're getting charged $604,100 dollars an hour. So we're paying in summonses double and more than double for the same experts that the state already has under contract. That is bad government and we appreciate Commissioner Minole has testified last week on a fix, an umbrella contract that we can all benefit from at one set price. So we hope to drive down some of that cost. And I want to thank Senator Lyons for her work on the mental health and forensic work because I think it's a huge pressure. And we're talking about of the one hundred and eleven homicides, ten to fifteen of those cases are driving most of our cost. And it is mental health. And in Washington County, less than a couple miles from here, there was an alleged homicide within a home that we'll have to spend money on. It's every community is dealing with a case like that. And they're very, very expensive and we need to ensure we're doing justice for those cases. And it's competency, it's hospitalization, and it's having those experts at trial with us for whatever we need. Another huge area of concern for our operating budget, and it's included in a memo that we sent you after our BAA testimony concerning the transport program, is our overtime costs for the transport program. We are trying to work with the courts to have blocks for detainees, which will cut back on overtime into the afternoon and early hours. Right now, one county, only one judge has adopted a block scheduling system. So we're limiting overtime with our courts in one county, the other counties, the judges are often setting 8AM hearing or 04:00 hearing. And if you have to go to Newport or Southern State and you are in Chittenden or Franklin County, or in Bennington County is one of the biggest commutes from Bennington County to Newport, It can take a sixteen hour day. And we are working with our staff internally to try to curtail behavior. As Senator Norris knows, this is a real area of focus for my first year as the executive director working with our team, put out a series of policies which have created a lot of angst in the judiciary and amongst some of our staff about curtailing overtime. Because we do not have a very robust overtime budget, we're at roughly 80% spent for the year right now for overtime and we have that is not gonna work out mathematically. So with the BAA, I just wanna thank you all. I know we're not supposed to talk about it during FY '27, but thank you so

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: much because it will put a little bump in our ability to So overtime and also you have

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: to do lodging sometimes. Correct. Yep. So we are that's a major area in part because we want to expand our accountability dockets to places like Rockland, Wyndham, Washington. And so my ability to say yes to overtime is contingent on what we have in those budgets. And overtime was increased in terms of the expense line during the accountability docking and Chittenden because we weren't gonna say no during that time period certainly. And the same will be true in Rutland. Rutland has a great advantage. Marble Valley is a mile from the courthouse.

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: But the defendant in New Port and years ago when corrections had more staff, we would be at our folks be able to connect and ask if they could if corrections could move the person. The person's got a hearing can you get them down to further down to towards us you know towards Robin but corrections doesn't have a span to basically move people around on our needs So that's been a real problem.

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: The third priority, in part because I would be remiss not to mention it, but I know the budget year that you're in, would be for victim advocates and six legal assistant secretary positions. Those are broken down by the cost that we've estimated per position. And those are our third priority for a reason because we know that when you hire a new employee, a person needs a place to work. They have salary and benefits. They have healthcare and retirement costs which we do not control and which are very, very problematic in terms of the healthcare costs. So we know that these are important things that we should be asking for. We also know the year that we're opening. So our order of priority is eliminating vacancy savings, means keeping our current workforce, operating expenses relating to our most serious cases and overtime for moving cases. And then the third priority would be increasing administrative staff and victim advocates, which are lower cost than attorneys, but still very helpful in moving cases at a lower cost to the system in the state and have very low turnover. We have secretaries and admins in our department that have worked for thirty and forty years. We have victim advocates that have worked for the same time period. They come to our department, they stay and it is they are the backbone of our whole department, those two positions. That's really three positions, but that's our priorities and executive summary. We're happy to hop into more of the detail if you want, Mr. Chair. I have

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: a question about chair of deputies. And I don't know if you heard the testimony from judiciary, NHS, how the different deputies are charged or have they have

[Unknown committee member]: two different contracts. Somebody's paid 75 and somebody's paid 57.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: But your your transport deputies are employees, so you

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: don't have a. So there's an action. You don't have a contract. There's two worlds. Yeah. There's the private side of the sheriff's operations, which is what you're talking about those contracts. Our folks are state employees. We do have per diem for non state employees that help the transports. We pay about 56.

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: $50

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: $50 an hour for those. But the contracts, sheriffs are allowed to enter into contracts in their private county capacity, and they have one with AHS at, I believe, 75 an hour, and they have one for court security with the court, which is a unified contract at Well, $50.57.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Yes. And is that because there's different work like if you're doing transport work versus court work?

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: So the court security, I know that the sheriff's executive committee is conversing with Greg Mosby from the judiciary about the rate. And by act 30, which passed a couple of years ago, said that the sheriffs that have one unified contract with judiciary not separate settlements. There are problems with that. So there's one unified contract that the sheriffs do for court security primarily and that is a $57 and union services does the $75 similarly they do a $75 for the sheriff's owned folks, the sheriffs who called them for deemed that they're actually sheriff deputies not state employees and they primarily are working to support DMH DCF and just thinking that's pretty much who they work for human services.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: They're doing more of what I would consider. Yeah.

[Unknown committee/staff (brief interjections)]: Well, no. They come up

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: in terms

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: of human services. They would pretty much be doing working, like, maybe supervising it at at the kids who before they get a placement for the you know, maybe the maybe they're gonna move their that that needs down to a gradual retreat, because somebody's gotta be with the kid during that period of time. For DMH, it might be moving somebody to the state psychiatric hospital.

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: The two buckets are One is a court order.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Yeah. One is And a comment. So all

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: of our employees, the SAS transport deputies are directed by either court orders or minimus to go back to a facility. The contract work is, those aren't court orders, that's an agency working with the sheriffs on the other side of the house to say, hey, we need help in this thing. And so it is another area where the sheriffs are providing, It's where government is paying itself. But there's nowhere else

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: for them to go. They kinda have to go to the sheriffs for that work.

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: I don't think any of the other agents law enforcement agencies want it or have the capacity. And the sheriffs are

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: They they are kind of our police force. But I haven't I'm

[Sen. Robert Norris]: gonna be meeting with the sheriff's board

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: after we come back. That's right.

[Sen. Robert Norris]: The administrative cost, which we were referring to, we thought maybe it's what the the governor's office would have. It is. It's these private private contracts. It's a wide load of traffic details, things along the lines where they're actually using their vehicles quite possibly paying their deputies time and a half

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: to do these details if

[Sen. Robert Norris]: they're not securing the details. When the other agency came in and said they wanna get 56, 57 up to 75, we need to delve into that. Right. Well, that's what

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: I was wondering. Yeah.

[Sen. Robert Norris]: But the MH contracts, security contracts. Yeah. Administrative cost goes to the share overhead, not not the shares office. The share's office. Right.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Because they're not funded accordingly.

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: It's even a following up with senator Norris' saying, it's even a problem for us insofar as we pay $50 an hour for a share of redeem. So if a sheriff has two transport deputies one of them down workers comp or sick leave something and we need a transport done thing and take it a court order the sheriff will need to pull it from a per diem or their folks in there. It's difficult because the sheriff might be able to put that person on a private contract in Pike Industries or someone on the interstate, but it you paid, you know, maybe $90 now for that person. So we're competing against private rates. So in in some ways, we've talked about this apparent amount that the sheriffs underwrite the state transport system because they are providing the car. They are providing uniforms. They're sending people to training and all of that stuff. There's a fair amount of underwriting that goes on by the sheriffs to support the state of care back and forth. And this problem, we need to take a look at it at some point, you know, in more robust fiscal times, whether we can get our our per diem rate that we reimburse the sheriffs a little bit higher because we're not we're not competitive at all with any of the other rates.

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: And then what you

[Sen. Robert Norris]: have to realize is that when the wheels are moving on state transport, whether it's per diem or else, they're making no money. They're quite possibly losing money because the $50 they pay per diem goes to the per diem, doesn't go to any place within the office. The only thing you get on transport basically is

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: miles. Right. That's it. So the wheels are moving

[Sen. Robert Norris]: on state transport. Yeah. They're not making money on those things.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: And have you brought up before, like, the question of who should be paying for the transport? Like, it should be out of a corrections budget or a year budget. I think it's a great question. I'm not going there. Mean, wherever we have it, it's gonna be a problem.

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: We are not driving, we are responding to a system that is asking for transports. I hypothetically set the job duties of the transport deputies and put out a policy to that effect, but the courts feel that that is a slight encroachment into their branch.

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: But they're driving our the courts are driving our overtime

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: Oh, yeah. Right.

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: They say we want we want a defendant at at the courthouse Yeah. You know, for for an 08:00, and then they're not seen until 02:30 Right. Or three. And we're sitting around and that, you know, it's not only our staff. I feel you know, we feel badly for the defendant that's been sitting in court all day long. And then, you know, the releases, now they've got to get the person back to Newport. We've got overtime at the front end and the back end.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: So maybe if they were paying the transfer cost, would figure out the schedule.

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: Sure. Absolutely.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Can go into that. Yeah. Okay.

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: I just wanna notice this is on page three of your reports, the map. I know you're all interested in in the state, but also your own county caseload per county, number of homicides, number of attorneys in each county, and

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: it's current

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: as of December 2025. So good visual for you all to have and we're trying to do more visuals in our department. We're not just drowning in memos. I wanted to quickly run through the four detail pages, which Anne can quickly run through. Page six, if

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: you go This is 155. Correct. Correct. Yep. So page six of the report is

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: the state's attorneys highlights, which Anne can rub

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: Yeah, mean, I think that the most important thing to know is in terms of the state's attorney, the overall budget increase was 5.7%. I mentioned to you that you may see some changes on the interdepartmental. There's a $53,000 charge. Basically that is one of the domestic violence, sex assault investigators who came back to us. He was a retired state police officer so he can't come back as anything but attempts so we have that money listed there. Not a big change we have some changes in terms of our we listed some money that we received from the Governor Highway Safety State Highway Safety Office in terms of our expenses. We've traditionally just listed that there that that as the salary benefit

[Unknown committee/staff (brief interjections)]: but we've took some of

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: the operating year showing some of the operating expenses here. So really, really the takeaway from this budget for the state's attorney's budget is 5.7% increase with basically again, their vacancy savings numbers $330,000 for FY '27. We had so we're looking, of course, to see if we can get the agency's salary eliminated. And Tim did, I think, a good job of explaining what some of the work pressures are.

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: So any questions on the state's attorneys? So if you go to the next page, it's just always provide a breakdown a bit more visually, up a little bit more on the pie chart. Basically, is taking up the most resources and you can see salary and wages, the fringe benefits you're aware of, and then smaller pieces operating being smaller and some of the other services there. Moving to the

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: SIU, which is our simplest budget,

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: which actually we jump all the way to page 95, because there's a ton of data in between on the state's attorneys, which I ran through in the executive summary.

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: So as Tim mentioned, in essence, the SIU program money that we have is just a grant pass through. We have one staff person who helps administer all the grants and all the SIUs with all their questions and we have that's just one one permit position and the money is just a pass through. The increase on that was just 3%. We consider it level funded for the year and that their biggest challenge right now is to connect with law enforcement resources trying to get dedicated hours to the FIV from law enforcement, local law enforcement because they are struggling to fill their vacancies. So we've been working, we've got some success going. St. Albans PD just came back in. They have been a longtime partner to the music unit in Northwest. They had to back out because of staffing problems. They're back in. Some of the counties do pretty well with connecting. Lamoille County actually has three agencies that support the SIU in Lamoille County. They each give a little bit of hours, if their law enforcement people connect and work together on the cases. So our biggest challenge with the SIUs, it has been some turnover of their own staff because they're all 501c3s by the way. They're not connected to state owned agents except for this grant program. So it's level funded and there's not a lot to report other than the fact that I think having our own staff person being available to the SIUs daily and working with them daily and helping to recruit and helping them with their even with physical their physical infrastructure problems sometimes with that with the BGS and things. So it's been a good program. We think it's working well. We hope that having you got Rutland having some problems. Orange County is having some problems just structurally for their own units and I think our our staff person is the reason they're

[Unknown committee/staff (brief interjections)]: back online.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: K. Senator Norris, then we gotta move along. Yeah. Quick question.

[Sen. Robert Norris]: The state's attorney's salary set by statutes with pay act or whatever else. Deputy state's attorneys, are they now unionized?

[Unknown committee/staff (brief interjections)]: They are unionized.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: So you

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: don't have control over that? Okay. And the state transport deputies, as you know, are also the two units in our department. Moving to the victim advocates budget, which again can be thought of in a way as a on the state's attorney's program.

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: So the VA budget was up 13.1 but to a large extent when I looked at those numbers, most of it had to do with salaries and health insurance and retirement costs going up. The $270,000 of vacancy savings that we had to, that was built into our budget last year, we haven't met. This year that vacancy saving number goes down to 147, which is great. But we'd like to see that eliminated too because that is a program that has essentially no turnover.

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: Yeah. And high case loads.

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: And high

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: case loads. Yeah.

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: Last budget that we have is the sheriff's and that's starting on page 124.

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: The sheriff saw a 9.3% increase in their budget allocation. They have a vacancy savings number to meet for 01/26/1939. I mentioned that right now we're holding three positions that are funded in the '26 budget. We're holding them vacant because if we don't hold them vacant, we will end this fiscal year in a significant deficit based upon expenses in the sheriff's programs over time, mileage per diem, all of that, we're just really, it's not in good shape. But even with a 9.3% increase, it's not in good shape. So we are and that's largely being driven by those three things. So we're happy for the increase. We are grateful to see the increase, but we really need to need to have a conversation and it may be some conversation about how how is the program being, the sheriff hardly being funded, what needs to get done. And it's primarily in terms of the transport program because the sheriff's salary is set by statute, we get the salary, the benefits and all of that similarly. It's the cost of running the transport program that's dragging the sheriff's budget into a deficit.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: I did want to mention one thing about

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: the sheriff's salaries just because

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: I think it's

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: a

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: point

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: of public record. The sheriff of Windsor County was his certification was removed by the criminal justice council in temporary fashion, but pursuant to a law that our department advocated for at 30, his salary has been reduced by 30% by working with the Department of Human Resources. Yeah. And that is really it for us, our four budgets and our highlights. And again, there's a ton of data in here that's available to talk about performance in the different areas. And I think we really appreciated memo that you all sent out about how we should talk about what we do. Yeah, you're a rare example

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: of somebody following it actually. We gotta go, but the last question is, in the past you've talked about coordination or case management with the Attorney General's office and what cases they take on or don't take on and how that can relieve pressure or not. Is that

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: I believe in Addison, they've been doing quite a bit in Addison over the last year. And Addison is an area where we have a lot of concerns. It's a point of public record that we had to pay a law firm, Paul Franklin Collins, to do an independent investigation into the Addison office, much in the same way we did with John LeBoy. And pursuant to the report we received, we referred that matter to the Professional Responsibility Board. So Addison is an area where I believe the state police is working directly with the Attorney General's office. We still have very high caseloads and probably a larger conversation for a different day. But the state's attorneys, I'm sure would like to see more equitable case loads across the two entities for sure. As far

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: as the murder cases, these homicide cases? So 103 of

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: the 111 as of December 10 were being staffed by our departments, about 93%. Which is a little last year, we were maybe closer to 96% of the pending cases. So it looks like they picked up a couple of homicides more than at the same point last year. But I'll let them speak about their their data. The data we use is judicial filing data. It's the best available data. And the way we pull that data, they're sort of buried in your report, is based on the prosecutor of record. So if the prosecutor of record in a large Excel sheet is Annie Newton, there might be another prosecutor, a second chair, that's not captured in the report. So it's possible there's some of that going on, but it's it's hard to suss through. Alright.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Well, thanks. Thanks for your work.

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: Thank you, senators.

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: Thank you very much. I'll bring over that big map for Amy.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Put it up on the wall. Yeah. Okay, we'll continue with our FY twenty seven budget request. We have Public Utilities Commission. I'll let you introduce yourselves for the record and give a presentation.

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: Great, thank you. I'm Ed McNamara, I'm chair for the Public Utility Commission.

[Anne Bishop, Operations Director, Public Utility Commission]: Anne Bishop, I'm the operations director for the Public Utility Commission.

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: We also have your presentation on our website. Yep. Alright. So just a quick overview of who we are. Commission has been around for a long time regulating public utility commissions. At this point, it's primarily most of our work involves electric and gas utilities. There's some components for both those industries that are regulated on the federal side, we regulate on the state side. Excuse me. We also regulate private water companies, telecommunication and telecom or sorry, cable television as well. Although there's much less regulation on those sides simply because the federal government is occupied most of the space. To give some sense of scale, there's 27 positions. Three of those are currently vacant. And also this will be relevant later on when we do the ups and downs. This is actually down from three positions even a year ago. In 2023, I believe, the clean heat standard passed that provided two full time and one limited service position. After the legislative session ended last year without any movement on the clean heat standard, we still had those three positions. We essentially gave up those positions because if clean heat standard does move forward, it needs new appropriation, new positions. We didn't want to just carry those indefinitely when it wasn't clear what was gonna happen. So FY '27 budget request or proposed budget is basically 5,300,000.0, which is an increase of 2.8% above f y twenty six. That's an impressive low compared to what we've seen on the but I guess that's partly because you've been beat through your position. Exactly. That's a large component of it. The projected revenues, though, are 4,300,000.0,

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: which we

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: do have a reserve of roughly 3 and a half million that can be used when there is a deficit between the projected budget and the revenues. Just wanna spend a minute on revenues were funded primarily from the gross receipts tax, which is a tax paid by the regulated utilities. Electric makes up, I think about 70% of that. That represents 96% of our funding. Application fees, which are paid by merchant generators, those are those who are not regulated utilities, that makes up about 4% of our budget. And also this little bit silly chart here, we're 100% special funded. We have received general funds only once in 2023 because of putting heat standard. I think that was the only time in recent memory that we received. Is this dealing with the delta of your budget versus your revenues using the reserve, is that training your reserves? Yes, it does. Yep. Reserves have been around at least twenty years. And depending on the year, some money could be put into the reserve, some can be taken out. And there's certain limits on how much we can put into every year versus simply returning. And finance do work with finance and management on that? Assume Yes. They'll steal it from you. They pick you up too much. They've not done so yet. So they also understand sort of the situation we're in where because we're special funded, we

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: actually and

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: the Department of Public Service is funded primarily the same way. They receive they're the ones who actually take in the money from the utilities and from merchant generators. We don't receive that until end of the year, end of the fiscal year. So we're essentially self funding through the year with our reserves as much as we can. I

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: think you had a report that came out about unregulated fuels and adding a surcharge on that. Would that at all help you and your revenue shortfall?

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: No. So that report, that was a legislative request to look at potential ways to help low income Vermonters, specifically on the electric side. What we mentioned in that report is what we've been saying for the last six plus years, which is

[Unknown committee/staff (brief interjections)]: That's all.

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: At least, which is essentially heating is one of the most significant portions of energy burden for folks. And that one way to address that is to increase the fuel tax that is used to fund weatherization. That would not impact our budget in any way. We are not involved in unregulated fuels such as oil and propane. We regulate natural gas but not others. Right.

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: I've been looking at that one for a long time too.

[Unknown committee member]: Thank you. So and so just to make sure that I'm understanding, so you'd be looking at using about a million dollars in your reserve

[Unknown committee member]: That's correct. Of the of the 3 and a half?

[Unknown committee member]: That's correct. Okay. And you said that there's also limits as to how much you can put back in to the reserve in any given year. Is that so how much presumably, this would not be a year where we're refunding it because you're using some of it, but what are those limits look like?

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: This is quite honestly, I did not memorize that because we're not seeing no. I mean, the main issue is we're not seeing putting money into the reserves for foreseeable future. The things like health insurance, and this is health insurance for us, retirement costs. So we also pay ABS and BGS as well for their services. They also have the exact same budget pressures as well. What we're seeing is our revenues are increasing two to 3% and our budget is increasing faster than that. Again, if it wasn't for the clean heat standard position, essentially putting those off to the side, the budget would be probably over 3%.

[Anne Bishop, Operations Director, Public Utility Commission]: Yes, essentially what's, we've been looking at some of this data and it's been for and if you look over the last ten years on average the cost taking clean heat aside our costs have been exceeding our revenue growth by at least a couple of percentage points. And so we have we are now forecasting that we're taking approximately almost a

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: million dollars from our reserve this

[Anne Bishop, Operations Director, Public Utility Commission]: year and those we're expecting those numbers are gonna just get larger.

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: And I will also say that again, I mentioned earlier electric is the most significant contributor for a gross receipts status. There has been some thought that electrification, new electric vehicles and heat pumps would actually add to gross receipts tax and would help catch up with that delta. That's not showing up. One of the purely theories that I have is that if you're net metering, you're more likely to be able to it makes more economic sense to do an EV or a heat pump, and those customers are therefore we're not seeing the same growth in gross receipts for utilities and therefore, the funds are changing. So that's the main issue we're seeing. The other aspect gross receipts taxes on sale for the utilities.

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: So any net meter generation doesn't pay the pressures.

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: That's correct. Yeah. And if again, this is a theory, and we haven't dug into it yet. If a lot of the electric vehicles are being used by customers who have net metering systems, it means that additional kilowatt hours not as much is showing up as I would have expected absent the net metering system. I'd say there's definitely part of that. Definitely part of it. It's a part of that. Have no idea what percentage of that is. The other aspect that's important, especially for electric and natural gas, it entirely depends on the weather at this point. Partly sunny days, how much you're not metering, but also how cold. Like I fully expect that January and the February, we would see increased, we definitely would have seen increased natural gas usage and increased electric usage. Terrible for Vermont consumers, good for those receipts tax. So okay. Alright. Just to give a overall context or sorry. Some more context to

[Unknown committee/staff (brief interjections)]: our

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: workload. So about 2,200 new cases filed with the commission just in 2025, large portion of that is net metering. More than a 100 hearings and workshops, we do public hearings at night. Most of those we try to do over teams, try to do it electronically so that way more people can participate, particularly if it's for example, next week we have Green Mountain Power in for a rate increase and that's a statewide utilities. So we'll have a public hearing at 07:00 next Thursday if anyone wants to join. Timeframe for resolving cases, we try to keep certain criteria in terms of resolve the cases as expeditiously as possible. That's what this is about here. I'm not gonna, I'm gonna try to fly through it. Recognize you're a little behind. Yeah. Right, major cases at 2025, part of what I wanna pause on this slide. The first four bullets are all related to legislative. So we're seeing obviously a budget pressure and need to figure that out. I am telling people, we don't really have bandwidth to do brand new significant reports. Like, we just don't have the ability to do that. So if you're hearing that in senate chamber of this is a great idea that the PUC should do this three year report, this has nothing to do with any work that we do. Just assume that I said we shouldn't be doing that. So a little advocacy there. Also 2025, we did a fair amount of small, like a small electric freight cases. That's small municipal electric utilities, cooperative utilities, looking at GMP's integrated resource plan and a couple of solar projects that was all in 2025. I mentioned Green Mountain Power. They have a proposed 7.5% increase that they filed recently. So that is going to be a investigation contested case. And also they are looking to renew their four year multi year regulation plan. We're also looking into what happened with Village of Hyde Park Electric Department as well, looking how to improve the services for energy efficiency utilities and also the electric utilities under tier three, essentially the electrification tier under the renewable energy standard. Also, what we're working on right now is called demand. I always get this from DRP, demand resources plan. Demand resources plan for efficiency Vermont City, Burlington Electric and Vermont Gas for the energy efficiency. And then obviously got a lot of other things here. A lot of wireless telecommunication towers. Those always ramp up every year, but the sunset on that regulation where that statue gets close. That's this is it is it calendar year? '26? Is June 30. We would no longer be regulating setting for telecommunications tower unless legislate tracks.

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: So

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: a lot of the telecom providers are proposing a lot of things.

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: Thank you. This is kind of

[Unknown committee member]: going backwards a step, but in relation to how the gross receipts tax is calculated, is it on the volume of consumption, or is it on the is it like an additional tax on the price, which is to say that you all are not necessarily, like, motivated to approve rate increases because of what your gross receipts tax isn't in addition to that or on top of that. Does that make sense?

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: It does make sense. And is so gross receipts, so it really is the total revenue that the utility receives and that's a portion of the total revenue. So it's actually interesting. Some states have changed their PUC, how they're funded, because if you look at it from a strictly economically rational perspective, we should be encouraging rate increases because it increases the revenues for the utility and therefore increase. That obviously is counter to what why we're appointed, why we do our job. But some, at least one state that I'm aware of has changed that they now just say, here's our budget that approved by your state's legislature and then the rate is set to meet the budget so that way it takes any consideration, it takes a lot of the, that sort of up and down depending on whether it takes a lot of that out. Yeah, Nobody does it until it out, do you? I don't know. I have not looked at that either. Yeah,

[Unknown committee member]: would still have the weather dependency.

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: Right, yep. Okay. Alright, so comparing FY twenty six to FY '27, FY 'twenty six was 5.144 and we're increasing to 5.3. So trying, we did our best to keep below 3%. FY '27 includes 217,000 vacancy turnover savings and a large portion of that change again was because of the three vacant clean heat standard positions that are no longer in there. I do wanna sort of flag at the very bottom here, these bullets, FY '26 to FY '27. So retirement increased by 4.1%, healthcare 10%, other fringe benefits almost 9.5%. And then internal service funds, essentially what we're paying to ADS BGS that increased by 5.6%. So that's where our primary budget sort of pressures are coming from. I've already mentioned revenues, essentially gross receipts tax. Apparently, there's a discrepancy. 97% of our budget is gross receipts tax. I think somewhere else at 6%. And then the application fees, 2.3%. Build backs is essentially when we have a open case, we sometimes build that cost. So I've talked about budget challenges already, except for the fact that 87% of our budget is salaries and benefits. So not like we have any capital costs or anything else. We're not paying our way to own a lot of property. It's just primarily salaries and benefits. Do you wanna mention application fees? It's a really small portion of our revenue, but it represents about a quarter of our work. And so that's something that we need to resolve at some point. Different ways of resolving that, one is potentially increasing application fees. It's difficult in this current environment to pose increases in application fees. The other possibility that has not been, that we're currently looking at, but looking a little bit more detail is Vermont is only four states in the country where the PUC is responsible for citing small scale generation. Small scales being anything 10 megawatts or below. So vast majority of our merchant generation is under five megawatts. That's because of the setup of res. Most other states in the country, those projects would actually be reviewed at the local level. So that's one other possibility as well is instead of increasing application fees, take a look at that chunk of work. And whoever we give it to will want their budget to go up? No, because this would actually be up to the local towns to actually set their application fees for municipality, city, some of the local municipalities already do zoning. I'm sorry, what if it's a big deal? There special exemption. I just figured it would kinda go through, like, LRP or the it'll be, like, an active 50 permit, and

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: they would want more money to

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: handle those cases or the per the the appeals and stuff. There's definitely a fair number of projects over 10 acres that would be through LURB and that is they already have an application fee structure and I have not talked to LURBs. So this is because it's not

[Unknown committee member]: a proposal that you're throwing out ideas. And I

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: also haven't talked to Vermont League of cities and towns who might also hate the idea. Yeah.

[Unknown committee member]: Well, one question about that. Do you have a sense if if that shift were to happen, do you have a sense of how much cost demand would be avoided on for your budgeting purposes?

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: So about 25% of my work involves citing merchant generation. And so probably 20 to 25%. Okay. Up to 5,000,000. Of the five. Well, yeah. It it would it would be a material savings.

[Unknown committee member]: The I so I would love to chat more Mhmm. About this. And I especially would love to dig into some of details about where that is. Like, is it the maculears or is it the victories of Vermont that are having to navigate that where those projects end up being cited and Yeah. Support that they could

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: Yep. Sounds like a special hearing instead of natural resources.

[Unknown committee member]: Sounds like some some future work.

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: And to be clear, this is again I'm throwing out some sort of flagging issues and potential because the budget gap a million dollar gap in a 5,300,000.0 budget is significant and it is not going to be one magic like silver bullet that solves the problem. And so in my mind, we need to put everything on the table and then sort that as opposed to just because I've heard from other people just well, just increase application fees, increase gross receipts tax. And I don't think that is looking at only one side of the equation doesn't make sense in my mind. I mean, look at both. I would just

[Unknown committee member]: say to you, they're never gonna do it in victory anyways. They don't have the power lines to carry the power down. So it's going it's going to be in a larger town.

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: I think that's possible. Right.

[Unknown committee member]: There's lots of other examples and one possibility is with the these kind of larger projects.

[Unknown committee member]: The problem is everybody in the larger towns wants to shove it to the smaller towns where they weren't the power lines.

[Unknown committee member]: There's lots there's lots to be. Zone. Dug into there. So open to the conversations.

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: You could attend her here.

[Unknown committee member]: That's right. You I've been in hearings. I decided to make a walk project.

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: And I would suggest this is reflecting more information because also quite honestly, on the other side of gross receipts tax is difficult to predict. I mentioned before about what's happening with electrification and other things. Obviously, we need to look at that and better predict that. We've been working with some folks at the Department of Public Service on that wastewater. Alright. Just trying to think if there's things there's fund balance. Okay. Fund balance. We've talked about the reserve a little bit. So ups and downs, this really is when you look at this, again, it's 3%. Is this '26 and '27? The columns don't know. Oh, sorry. It's '26 and '27. It's the change. It's the change.

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: The change of '26

[Anne Bishop, Operations Director, Public Utility Commission]: to '27. Yes.

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: Special plan. So it's just probably all of the the two columns are probably all the same. They're all exactly yeah.

[Unknown committee member]: Because there's no GF.

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: Right. Right. Yes. Exactly. So, again, this is largely related to the fact that there's three positions that are no longer housed here. Right. And then shows sort of some of the budget pressures from some of the other aspects that I've already talked about. Up to you folks what else you wanna hear. I'm just looking at your Unless there's some other thing within these other data specifics if you have a anything that stands out. It seems it's pretty straightforward. There's nothing else that we want to proactively present. We submitted these just this morning, so apologies on that. Morning, feel free if you have any questions, please just reach out and let us know if we can answer anything. And your did your SL I don't know if you know this question, but your service level agreement, did it go down even though your ADS allocation went up? Does that make sense?

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: There is actually included in our service level agreement

[Anne Bishop, Operations Director, Public Utility Commission]: is a cost related to EPC, which is our online filing system. And we have made a change to reduce the costs associated with that system. We used to use a program in the background called OnBase software program. The annual licensing fee for that would be paid ADS through our SLA. So we don't have to pay that in FY twenty seven. And so it looks like our SLA costs went down but if you they actually went down by less than the amount of the license fee that we're saving. In other words, everything else went up but

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: Right because your allocated charge went up $18,000 I thought I saw somewhere else because some they're trying to they're trying to change the way they are billing agencies and departments.

[Unknown committee/staff (brief interjections)]: Yes.

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: There's a little more structure. So because some people are getting hit with SLA fees at the end of the year that they can weren't counting, weren't touching. Course. It's also the year that the ABS fee carried into that fiscal year. Yes. They tried to change it. Yeah, yeah, They to pay some of that upfront. You don't have some people have hundreds of thousands of dollars in cities. You don't have that much of an IT budget. We

[Anne Bishop, Operations Director, Public Utility Commission]: end up paying about a $180,000

[Unknown committee/staff (brief interjections)]: in

[Anne Bishop, Operations Director, Public Utility Commission]: in cost to $80,000

[Ed McNamara, Chair, Public Utility Commission]: That's in part because of EPC. It's online filing. Yes. It's online filing but it's also a way for anyone in the public to access any of the files involved in the cases. Increase transparency. So there's a fair amount of cost for nine to one benefit. Okay. All right. I don't have any other questions. Okay, great. Thank you very much. Thank you.

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: We're here for money.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Everybody's available. The military department

[Anne Bishop, Operations Director, Public Utility Commission]: Tim should be in the hall. Yes, they're

[Unknown committee/staff (brief interjections)]: out there. They just peeked it. So

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Okay. Well, we can go on mute or

[Unknown committee/staff (brief interjections)]: Yeah.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: So we're gonna go so, yeah, we're back to FY '27 budget presentations. We have the military. What do we say? Military. Military. Department? Depart. Department. Yes. What is the military agency that I didn't sorry. No. Have a good time. Military department is here. So I'll let you introduce yourself for the record, anybody you got with you, and give us your presentation. Sure.

[Unknown committee/staff (brief interjections)]: Good afternoon. My name is Kim Fidelli. I'm the financial director for the military department. I have with me Felicia Bosley Gutierrez, who works in our finance office as well, and Alana Tate, who is our legal services specialist. So we're here to assist.

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: I'm just going to

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: hop on.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Are you a for good year general?

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: I am not. No.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: I'm sorry. Is that what BG stands for?

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: That is what BG stands for. Our adjutant general and our deputy adjutant general both out of town this this week, so they sent their regrets. They couldn't be here today, but they will be happy to come provide you an update on the guards Yeah. When they return. Yeah. Right. If needed.

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: Okay. Just trying

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: to share my screen. Just a moment. What is happening? Okay. Alright. So cells. There we go. I unfortunately won't have any opening comments from that in general, but I'll I'll get into just an overview of our department, talk about some of the program performance that has been accomplished over the last year, and then we'll go dive into budget and talk about some of the ongoing projects and accomplishments that we've been working on. So the military department, essentially, the mission is to support the National Guard. The there are five appropriations that we operate to to do so. We have our administration appropriation, our air guard services, army services, building maintenance, and veterans affairs. I'll talk a little bit more about each of those. And going in the wrong direction. So under the administration appropriation, we house a couple of our bigger programs like the Vermont Entrepreneur Tuition Benefit Program, which has been very successful operating through in conjunction with VSAC to help help bring some great educated folks into the guard. It's been a very successful program over the last several years. We also have our joint enlistment enhancement program, which is a fairly new incentive program where we provide incentive payments to any soldiers, airmen, or retirees that help us bring somebody into the National Guard. So they can refer somebody to recruiting and if that person enlists in the guard, then they'll receive an incentive payment. I'll talk about more about the success of that program a little later on. Also, within administration, we have our internal service fund. We also have seven employees, including all of our executive staff, which is paid through the administration appropriation, all of general fund.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: CF seven, not six and

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: a half. Six six and a half FTE. Yes. That is that is accurate. And this admit the administration appropriation also supports any state active duty response during states of emergency. The last event that we had was the July flooding event when the guard was activated to perform some staging. So water rescue, again, in the July 2023 flooding events, same similar situation happened there. And, of course, COVID response. Sorry. Keep going.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Do they do this with swabs? What do you have a Swiss water rescue team in the garden?

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: I believe so. Or I'm not I'm not really sure which unit responded to that, but I know that they were working with the Swiss water rescue team.

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: Because they yeah.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: We have the used our Mhmm. It's just probably some overlap to people that serve in the guard that are also

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: Yeah.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: On the part part part participate in the USAR teams.

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: Okay. Unfortunately, I won't I don't have as much knowledge as the generals will have. So we also have our air services program. Now we're getting into a lot of programs that that bring in a lot of federal dollars to the state. So all of these programs here support the Air National Guard base. We have some construction program, the sustainment restoration maintenance program, and the facilities operations and maintenance programs. Those support all of those facilities at the Air National Guard Base in South Burlington. An environmental program, security forces, the fire department, STARBASE, and some major military construction projects that are STARBASE in acronym

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: or what is it?

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: STARBASE is a youth STEM program. So they have a space up at the Air Guard, and they they actually bring in fifth graders from all over the state. And they come and they they do hands on STEM related activities.

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: Launch rockets. They launch rockets.

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: It's actually a really, really cool program. It is all funded to Both

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: my daughters get stopped.

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: Yeah. That's what

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: those rock DOT.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: She did George Wallace.

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: All of these programs here, you see, except for the facilities, operations, maintenance, and environmental programs, they're all 100% federally funded through the National Guard Bureau. The facilities and environmental programs have a 25% state share. For our Army Services program, many of the same programs just on the Army side with a couple of extra couple additional programs. Similarly, the only program in this appropriation that requires a state match is the facilities operations and maintenance program. So that's really supporting the state match for that is really supporting most the majority of the outlying armies across the state. A lot of our army facilities are 100% federally supported and some have a state match of 50%, some have a state match of 25%.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: So you're

[Unknown committee member]: welcome. Saw this on this slide in

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: the last one, environmental programs. So what does that entail?

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: That is a great question. The the at least on the army side, I have a little bit more knowledge of, but there are a lot we own a the the National Guard itself owns a lot of land, especially at the economic hiring range. Mhmm. There's acres upon acres of land up there. So there's a lot of wetlands that is maintained. They do a lot of maintaining of the actual ranges themselves. Sometimes they actually build around the ranges to try to maintain the vegetation. Mhmm. And a lot of like that habitat that has to be maintained up there as well. So there's a lot of federal requirements that go into maintaining the environmental related tasks that

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: go along with that. I could provide you some more information. Thank you.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Sure. Lyons.

[Sen. Virginia "Ginny" Lyons]: So the word anti terrorism caught my eye. And so what is that program? How is it? How do you coordinate those activities?

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: So we have a contracted position that that acts for is our anti terrorism coordinator. So he works in conjunction with our security forces and and our executive office to essentially just assess situations. They work a lot when we are inviting other delegations to visit Vermont. They he helps to coordinate, make sure make sure safety requirements are met and assessing any threats or or any situation that come up. Our building maintenance appropriation is very simple. It provides the state match for the army facilities program. There's just under 2,000,000, I think, in this appropriation of state match, it's essentially supporting all of those state owned facilities that have a state match and some other activities that might not be supported through our cooperative agreements with the National Guard Bureau. Lastly, we have our Veterans Affairs appropriation. So you might be aware of the Veterans Affairs office that sits just across the street from the State House. So there's a team of individuals down there that helps to support about 36,000 veterans that still live in Vermont. The veteran service officers that work over there, they help to assist veterans with obtaining federal benefits from from the government and help to advocate for them through the process of of obtaining those benefits. The Office of Veterans Affairs also administers the Vermont Veterans Fund grants. So those are that's grants that are awarded to nonprofit organizations that support veterans every year. We actually receive funds through donations, mostly during tax season. Folks can choose to donate to this fund when they're doing their state refunds. So we award somewhere between 70,000 and $90,000 worth of grants every year for that fund. And they also provide emergency financial assistance to veterans in need. Any at at a certain point, any veteran can obtain a $500 assistance for our emergency.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Are they working in that building or since the flood, did they Yes. To leave, they moved back in?

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: They moved they had to leave for a little bit. Most mostly the the basement got flooded, which they

[Anne Bishop, Operations Director, Public Utility Commission]: don't work in. They've been back in for a while. Lastly,

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: the Veterans Affairs team also operates the Vermont Veterans Memorial Cemetery down in Randall, Northfield.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Okay.

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: Talk a little bit about some of our programs that we've been running. So first is the Vermont National Guard tuition benefit program. That provides tuition assistance for guard members that are working towards either a first or even a second bachelor's degree, master's degree, or certificate programs. The recipients of this funding, they will complete two years of service for every one full academic year that they receive funding for. So anyone receiving, for instance, a bachelor's degree would then turn around and provide eight years of service in

[Anne Bishop, Operations Director, Public Utility Commission]: the National Guard in return.

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: It's been a very successful program with over 100 recipients the last three fiscal years.

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: Thank you.

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: So our budget request this year for the program is just over 1,200,000.0, which is level to the current state fiscal year.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: And is it whatever tuition is or is this a set amount regardless of what the tuition

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: It is it's whatever the tuition is for the school that they're attending. I believe they

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Is it in any school or is it

[Unknown committee member]: just kind of a requirement somewhere in the school?

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: There are requirements. It's it's Vermont schools mainly. If they if they're looking to pursue a program that is not offered in Vermont, they can utilize an out of state school, but I believe they'll provide the UBM tuition rate in that case. Next, I spoke about this a little bit, is our joint enlistment enhancement program. So this is the program where we're providing an incentive payment to soldiers, airmen, airmen retirees who are providing a potential recruit to the National Guard. So this has been this program has really taken off in the last couple of years. Last year alone, we brought in a 108 new recruits into the guard through this program. That was actually responsible for 40% of of all of the Army National Guard investments during the that last federal fiscal year, which is is really outstanding. The numbers you'll see will be a little skewed because the Army's reporting on a federal fiscal year, we're reporting on a state fiscal year just for your awareness. And then for the Air Guard, he was responsible for about 19% of the total homelessness.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Is the army guard about twice as big as the air guard personnel one?

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: I think it it it is around there. Yeah. It is there's certainly a lot more personnel in the army than here. So our budget for this fiscal year is unfortunately, it's only about $70,000. We have been able to utilize carry forward funds the last couple of years. It really took off a lot faster than we had anticipated. And unfortunately, we haven't been able to grow our general fund budgets for the the need that it's trending towards. So we're we're certainly working hard to find any any other areas of opportunity where we can move money into that program. And I do anticipate similar numbers in current state fiscal year, just the way that things are trending so far. But it's this program has been a very high priority for the adjutant general and the National Guard as a whole as it's it's really putting a lot of the onus on the current members to try to help and to help to recruit, and it also helps to I think it also helps with retention because it gives them some incentive to stay in the guard, bring more people into the guard.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: And is it they have to be retired or they have to be can they just be a veteran to get to get the thousand dollars?

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: I am not positive on that. I just wanna look at our policy. Let's see. Okay. I see. Okay. Our next program, I'll talk a little bit about our veteran service officers. So those are the folks that work in the Office of Veterans Affairs to help bring federal benefits to veterans. So we have six veteran served off their positions, which are budgeted just under $700,000 of general fund. But in turn, this shows how many federal dollars of benefits are actually brought into the state for those veterans that they're serving. That the return really is is a mess because that's less of a strain on on the state benefit programs that that may help. And it just it's it's been a huge a huge benefit to the soldiers who and and for the veterans that are finally getting health benefits that are that are who didn't. They really provide an exceptional service. So this is a little bit more on Starbase. So this, as I mentioned, is a youth program that operates at the Air National Guard. This shows how many of Vermont students have attended those programs. So they have several different programs, five day program, anywhere from one to four day programs, and after school programs. So they're serving anywhere from two to 3,000 students each year, which is roughly 25% of the fifth graders in Vermont that get to come participate in this program, which is a 100% federally funded through the National Guard Bureau. And there's a link to the website as well person, some more information. I see kind of cool stuff that they get to do. I'm very jealous. I wish I could participate in this program myself. One of our one focus that is always something that we're always looking at is energy management. At least this is specifically for the Army National Guard. So we have an energy manager within our team that focuses on projects, construction projects that we can help to increase efficiencies and energy efficiencies across our facilities. As you can probably guess, we have a lot of very old facilities. Some of our armies are upwards of a 100 years old, so they're not the most energy efficient. But there have been a lot of program a lot of construction projects to try to mitigate that, especially with some of the new new buildings that are being put in. They are are built are focusing on energy efficiency. We converted about 20 facilities at the the Ethan Allen Firing Range from propane to natural gas last year. We've been working on some weatherization projects. And a couple of the armories, they are converting some old boilers from fossil fuel to electric. So at least we're aiming towards a cleaner energy.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: And the solar array at the air tour next to the air guard hangers is owned by the

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: guard. Right? It's owned by the guard. Yes. Yeah. It is.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Yes. Better one.

[Unknown committee member]: So and it might seem that you have a a microgrid at Camp Johnson. So we are

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: in the design process for microgrid. So that is one of our major military construction projects that we've been working on. I think they wanted to design last year, so they're trying to put in a solar field there as well. Hopefully, it looks like they're estimating construction not till that much time. Certainly take a long time to get rolling. So we're hoping that that will provide not only some cleaner energy, but more resilience, energy resiliency. So if the power grid is down for whatever reason, then Camp Johnson could still fear and be off with our energy. Okay. So I will get into the budget overview, and I'm not sure if we're still tight on time. Yeah. Okay. So I'll keep it short and sweet if that's okay. These items are basically our new funding requests. Other than these items highlighted here, we've maintained as much as we could, just a 3% increase across the board. But these items are above and beyond that. So

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Are these above and beyond the governor's recommend?

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: These are in the governor's recommended budget.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: But it's above the 3%?

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: Yes. Okay. Exactly. So first, we have a request for six new positions within our maintenance team. So these positions are essentially working in all of our buildings, keeping them running, operating, working with our contractors who need to come in and perform maintenance to the buildings. And so those six new positions will require a a maximum 25% state share. So the 75% will be funded through the National

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Guard Bureau. Do you have approval from the past to add these?

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: Yes, sir. Yep. Okay. Second, we have a request for a $10,000 annual grant to the USS Vermont support group. So that's an organization supporting the military members that serve on that shift and their families. So that's Yep. That has been accepted as a one time budget, I believe, the last two or three fiscal years, but we've been it's now been put into the governor's recommended for a base.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: A base.

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: Lastly, I have a request for the office of Department of Veterans Affairs. So the Vermont Veterans Memorial Cemetery is currently almost entirely funded through a special cemetery fund. There is lot of payroll personnel costs that go into this and maintenance costs to maintain that cemetery. Those funds come in from mostly from the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Federal Department of Veterans Affairs for internments that take place at the cemetery. Cemetery has expanded pretty significantly in the last five or ten years, and the cost that it takes to run that cemetery has increased accordingly. Our personnel has grown in order to perform that maintenance. And unfortunately, we are spending more than we're bringing in at this point in that special fund. So our request here is to shift the at least the personnel cost from the special fund to the general fund so that we can utilize that special fund to really put back towards the grounds and the facilities at the cemetery.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: So is that the 167, is that the one at the six seasonal position?

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: Yes, sir. That is. And then we can allocate those special funds toward actual perpetual care at the cemetery. There's three facilities down there. There's a chapel maintenance building and a welcome center that all will start to require a lot of care pretty soon. So that's our main goal with this request.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Okay.

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: And would you like me to go through any of the ups and downs on the other tabs?

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: I guess we can just look at the bullet points here pretty quick. Yeah. Seems pretty straightforward.

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: Sure. Not a whole lot of change on any of these other slides. Some change in personnel costs. The operating costs have kind of shifted up and down between administration and Veterans Affairs. So any increase you're seeing on this page is really shifting some of the internal service funds from vet affairs over to admin, just the way that they build it differently this year. It simplifies it to put it all in one. But again, I'll highlight there are no proposed changes to the tuition benefit program for this year, you won't see that as a line item on this page. In the international guard, there's really very like $28,000 change overall of 800,000. That's really just in standard personnel costs and very minimal change to operating costs.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Is everybody in the military department funded partial? Get their, federal money, that's 75%

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: The majority of personnel are, the folks under Veterans Affairs and under administration are those are the only two appropriations that are 100% general But I'd say 85% of our personnel are have some sort of federal

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: share. What is this for? Eighty twenty? Or

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: It depends. Some are 100% federally funded. Some are seventy five twenty five. Okay. Fairly standard. Under army services, this is just the federal share for this program. The state matched this under building maintenance. But you will see here the increase 400,000 for the federal share of those six new positions that we talked about earlier. Another 600,000 of increases for payroll for most most of the federally 100% federally funded positions. That includes a couple of new positions to support the Ethan Allen Firing Range. Operating costs really fluctuate quite a bit based on some of the programs that we have. A lot of it just depends on what federal funding is available in that fiscal year, so it could go up and down from year to year just based on what NGB has has authorized, but it doesn't necessarily affect our our operations.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: What is the 62,500 on your next slide that you need for energy rebates?

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: Oh, this one. Yes. So the 62,005 is kind of a standard in our budget each year. So we sometimes will this for two different reasons. So we accept energy rebates for some of the those energy related projects that we do. Efficiency Vermont will send us funds to just an incentive. It's really just budget authority so that we can

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: accept

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: funds.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: So pay them to get the rebate?

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And then we have also received some grant funds for maintaining the memorial that we have at Camp Johnson. So that's just budget authority to be able to receive those funds. Also here, the major increase would be for those six positions, the 25% state match that we talked about. Yes. And veterans affairs, again, the only major changes are those those two that we talked about, the grant for The US this month and then the shift from special fund to general fund for our personnel. And then one item I will highlight too is a is a budget adjustment for the FY '26 general fund budget. It's actually to return some tuition benefit funds that were not used in FY '25. So that piece that could end the balance or had ended the fiscal year with a balance of 286,000 so we'd like to return that to the general fund. We do our best to, you know, maintain as little carry forward as possible. Really, the majority of our carry forward funds for this year are going towards Pay Act and then some minimal or additional expenses that we will utilize for anything that's not supported by the National Guard Bureau. Okay. I think that's I think that covers the budget.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Yeah. It's good place to end. I looked through there's some other interesting slides here that so I'm just gonna look through in your budget details. Did you tear down the armory that was in in when you

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: We did. And are you

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: still did you give up the site too, or is the site gonna be used or something?

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: We are in process. We have a authorization to actually sell the site to the city of Winooski. Oh, good. So they're working through some environmental review to purchase that site, and they intend to open housing on

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: it. Good. Yeah.

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: Just because I showed I talked about this earlier. It's just an image of where they're they're burning Right. The ranges to maintain the vegetation. It's pretty cool process. Okay. That's all we have.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: Okay. Well, we're gonna take it quick. I got a quick question. St. Albans facility, that's still up in the room.

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: Which one?

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: St. Albans? It is.

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: It is. We do sell one. I think

[Anne Newman, President, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: they Did they move out? I'm not going to. Okay. So so do you need

[Sen. Robert Norris]: And the Asbury was sold. Right? Quick break.

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: Which one? The Asbury facility was sold.

[Kim Fidelli, Financial Director, Vermont Military Department]: Yeah. That's been gone

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: since before. Thank you. Thank you, Kim.

[Unknown committee/staff (brief interjections)]: Okay.

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: I think we'll have a car.

[Timothy Lueders-Dumont, Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs]: I gotta go. So we're

[Sen. Andrew Perchlik (Chair)]: gonna take a quick