Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: We are live, so welcome back to Summit Economic Development Housing and General Affairs. We are continuing our work on labor, and we're getting update on a on a report on data management and this came out of our work in the special oversight committee on workforce development which you've referred to earlier And we to present this work, which was sent to us in December, we have Savannah and Drake and Josiah. So if you Good. Take it away. Thank you. Thank you. Good good morning again. Brooker, and I'm the executive director, Simone Hinsdale, of the office of workforce strategy and development. As we go through testimony to go over the report, we'll each be taking apart. I'll start and then Josiah will chip in with all the work that's going on through the agency of digital services.

[Savannah (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: Right. And we've collaborated with them on this report. Right. And I I just wanna say we talked about this yesterday. I mean, the data and access to data statewide and and in and out of state collection, having a a a repository for data has been that we get all access so that we de silo data. I think that's maybe a good way of putting it. De silo data. Randy talked about this yesterday. I mean, we it's it's an issue that's ongoing. We talked about it earlier. So we are we are welcoming this report and this work, this ongoing this beginning of this work. Big time. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. And then I was just gonna say that Drake will walk us through walk you through the considerations to starting the data trust Correct. For Vermont or other opportunities in participating with multistate collaboratives. Moving on to the next slide, you directed us to do this study as we just mentioned, and much of this was developed and incorporates the SOCRAD model three, excuse me, on the SOCRAD report. I'll just say that as we've said a 100 times this morning, not already, that cleanup plays a very key role in decision making in every facet of our lives, both professionally and personally. We we use data all the time at home when we make decisions about things. So when it comes to figuring out a workforce workforce development for the state, a trust a data trust could be with that decentralized repository that you just referred to a senator that would be secure with data related workforce related data and allow everybody to share and evaluate how things are progressing. It has a lot of potential to strengthen our decision making, as you said, the accountability and looking at longer term economic resilience, which we really obviously want to do. And I'll just put in a plug that we need more people, need more housing, we need more businesses, and we need more opportunities for a robust future for Vermont, and we need to jump in and we don't have time to lose. So the current situation with workforce data, most everyone in state government, education, community organizations, municipalities, employers, they're keeping data for their specific needs and uses. But to your point, again, we don't have a standalone tool that connects it all and makes us us to be able to evaluate collective impact of these efforts. I just wanted to show I don't have my slide. I'm sorry.

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: I have no other papers.

[Savannah (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: The are you gone? No. I got it. Thank you. So just briefly here are some of the, you know, just a few examples of the data that we're doing right now, we do all the time. At the Department of Labor, participant outcomes, the labor market information that you're aware of, registered apprenticeship data, and way more. At AOE, there's data collected on CTE, adult education and literacy outcomes. ACCD, it's the Vermont Training Program. At AHS, I know there's way more than what I put here, but I can health care and then the health care workforce data center. Remember that's what I can stands for? Individual Career Asset Network. Network. Thank you. And then, of course, the chief performance office puts out the annual report and metrics and data that they collect as well. We we all use these assessments and what's virtual, what's changed, what needs to be changed and it's done every day by the data experts within the different agencies and departments and it's already informing how we are working to improve services and outcomes for Vermonter. Center data trust, excuse me, as the model three. It's a great idea and in a perfect world, we could just make the magic wand and make it happen, but we all I mean, even as the report points out, it's a huge endeavor with lots of considerations. There's substantial investment that's required as we all know. There's going to be complex governance agreements that will be needed in terms of keeping being a state from private and all of that.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale]: Madam chair or or or Sabina.

[Savannah (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: I'm right here.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale]: Yeah. I mean, I'm not I'm not there to your hand up.

[Savannah (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: I apologize.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale]: Oh, no. I did I didn't because I I didn't know if you'd see it. But I I would need a reminder, like, who who even asked for this, frankly. I mean, like, I'm all about good data, but this didn't start with talking about what federal sources we rely on and if they're still safe and stable. I agree that we're probably gonna get to the point where we're talking about alternative partnerships like the Vermont Futures Project, which does a great job with data. So I'm just trying to remember. Did the house ask for this study? I don't I don't know what this is.

[Savannah (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: It's part of the act one forty six, which I don't remember what the senate bill number was but it growing on a model that the state work the state oversight committee on workforce it was the special oversight committee on workforce development we didn't recommend data a data trust as a way to go. What we wanted to explore what would be required to provide a central repository for data that would break down the silos of data protection within state government in particular, but both in and out so we would have a place where everyone could go to get the data that was available and I think that data is so essential to so much of our decision making and we asked to explore what would be required for us to do that and to build on our data collection. We already, Department of Labor, as you know because we get great reports and use the data that's collected by Matt Berowitz at the Department of Labor, but there's so much more data out there that would support the measures. When we ask for measures, how are things doing? You've got to go and find that data at the agency of human services. You've gotta find it. I mean, all over state government. It doesn't exist in any one place. So what I believe we were looking at was a repository. What and and and help me if I'm mistaken on this. And I appreciate you elaborating on it but what we were really looking at is what would what what would it take for us to really be have a more robust data center with data from all over. The only thing I would add was we have so many parts and pieces to look at in that task force, but this was one that we well, there might be something there there, but we just don't have enough time as we're doing this legislative report to fully dive in. So this was meant to be kind of a follow-up of is this a good idea If or it is a good idea, what would it take? What would it look like? Not necessarily a appropriate endorsement of we're absolutely going to do this, but what if we wanted to do something in this space similar to how other states have done it what would that look like for us? This

[Drake (Office of Workforce Strategy)]: is I think they're gonna end up with a recommendation on

[Savannah (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: how we move forward with some data collection in a free I'm gonna leave it

[Drake (Office of Workforce Strategy)]: to you because you're gonna make the recommendations.

[Savannah (Executive Director, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development)]: Did I send you my talking points? Because the repository to me is the same thing as a data trust, So after your point, but that's why I've been using those words. It is an it's substantial investment of time and finances, lots of coordination, which we were just talking about with, you know, in state government, out of state government, employers, community organizations, etcetera. So at this time, it's our recommendation that we start by looking at these alternative partnerships. And, Senator, you've been on our in the executive committee where we've talked about that, and Drake will get into more detail in a minute with these multistate collaboratives that are collecting lots and lots and lots of data and let you look, you know, across state lines. How's Vermont doing it, you know, versus New Mexico kind of thing. So I'll leave it there and introduce Josiah. The agency has taken a number of proactive steps in setting up data structures in the state and that we've outlined in the report, but he'll give you an overview again here. He's going to walk through data lakes, data warehouses, and the agency's efforts for implementing all the data sharing among your partners. And then I'm introducing you, the chief data and artificial intelligence director at APS.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Alright.

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: Great. Thank you. Josiah Reich, chief data and head office of the state. So thank you. And senator Brock got a much deeper dive on

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: this

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: than

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: I'm going

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: to give today and Chittenden talked about

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: month ago, think, we were doing that. So,

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: do you mind if I peek at my slide so I don't have a problem. Sure.

[Drake (Office of Workforce Strategy)]: So,

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: in December, I guess this was about three weeks ago now, we completed the foundational infrastructure for our statewide next generation data platform. So this is specifically for enabling cross agency data collaboration much more effectively. And we call this our our data lake house.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Data lake house? Yeah. Like how we can go there

[Drake (Office of Workforce Strategy)]: for vacation? That is the number

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: one question. Cloud data and speech.

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: It's really fun. So the reason that we call it lake house is it has two pieces. So there's a data lake which allows for kind of very quick ingestion or or bringing in data into it and start getting some insights out of it right away. And then there's a data warehouse that allows for more complex data integration across agencies and things like that. So we combine those two and we call it a data lake house because it has the features of both kind of smooshed into one technology platform. Smooshed being a technical term. So this is this really important foundational infrastructure for us. Since three weeks ago we've begun bringing data from Department of Health, we're having conversations with the Agency of Education and Green Mountain Care Board, bringing data sets that they have that are high priority into the lake house and kicking off projects for that. And of course, we're also talking to the community. So as data gets loaded in there, it really gets rid of the technical challenges, the technical hard parts of linking data together. Because data is like adjacent. It's not shared unless there's a data sharing agreement, but at least it's kind of in the same place. So it's much easier to combine to answer analytical questions or build that reporting. So Josiah, I'm gonna

[Drake (Office of Workforce Strategy)]: ask a basic question.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: If data is not shared, how are we able to access it?

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: Yeah. So the way that we handle that is each data set is stored. It's literally called a bucket. It's kept in its own bucket and only the people who manage that data have access to it until we put together a data sharing agreement that says Senator Brock is allowed to look at this aggregation of this data for these purposes. And then at that point we create a view on that data that, you know, whoever, either another agency Or not just

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: the counselors, but the counselors might draft the bill so we can then we are going to need to be able to ask people that we are working with to go and find that data. As we know it's there, we need to be able to have it go mark and accessible.

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: Yes, exactly. Which gets to the next slide. Oh, sorry. So the other big thing that we're working on is data governance. So data governance is

[Drake (Office of Workforce Strategy)]: a big

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: nebulous, scary thing. But we're really, when we talk about it, we're trying to get at two things. One is maximizing the value of the data that we collect and steward, and then the second piece is protecting that data's privacy and security of our monitors and the integrity of our programs. So balancing those two things, maximizing value and protecting security and privacy, that's where those data sharing agreements come into play. But one of the other parts of data governance is building out what we call data catalogs. And so that

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: is It's only useful if we know that's there. Exactly.

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: And so that's what we're starting to put together as part of each time we onboard, say, Department of Health, we're cataloging all of their data and getting a high level view of of what's in there and how it can be used. Because a lot of times, and and we talked about this at JITOC, we go into it extensively if you're interested in it, but a lot of times data is collected and it may not be suitable for the purpose we wanna use it for. An example I use is like the secretary of state, some of the data that they collect on businesses is literally they take whatever the business has given them and they put it in a filing cabinet. Like it's a digital filing cabinet now, but it like they're not doing any additional validation, any quality checks on it unless they go into an administrative process that requires that. And so if you were to use, overall those submissions are pretty high quality, but if you assume that everything in those is 100% accurate, because it's the Secretary of State, you're actually gonna have some incorrect stuff in there just because it's collected directly from, you know, often very small businesses and there can be errors and Secretary of State isn't necessarily validating all of that as a part of their process. And so we run into things like that across datasets. So one of the of the things that we do in the data catalog is we make sure we kind of captured what are the things we know about that are like asterisks. If you're using this data, these are the things you should know about. This is when you should go

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: talk to With qualifiers. Exactly. Yeah.

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: Yep. So those are the two big pieces of the foundational work that we've been doing, and then, you know, it's very exciting now we're starting to put work those together. I get very excited about this stuff. It's very fantastic.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale]: Madam chair?

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Yes, Kesha.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale]: I didn't know if you were going to the next slide. Nope.

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: Go ahead.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Okay. Is it for the next slide or are you okay?

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale]: Well, didn't wanna leave this slide without

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: Yeah. Okay.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale]: Okay. So there's I I'm still looking at every slide thinking, okay. What what problems are we are we trying to solve? Mhmm. And I think here would would be a helpful place to to discuss two of the problems I've seen emerge and and get your thoughts. Number one, folks may remember we had a pretty public back and forth between the Joint Fiscal Office and Department of Labor a few years ago because we saw some really outsized disparities in women returning to the workforce in, like, a month point in time during the pandemic. What was problematic is we we were told we can't extrapolate that further. We can't trust that data because some of the data was gathered in a gender specific way or with a gender related question, and some of it was not. So I'd like to make sure somewhere in this, we're addressing the question, how are we cross how are our crosstabs? I don't know. There's so many terms. Lakeshore, lake house. I don't know. Like, how are we making sure those same demographic questions underpin all of the data across these agencies? And then the second problem I I think I've alluded to a little bit, and Matt Berowicz said he wanted to watch this more closely last year when this administration began in Washington. But I would say I stopped answering certain federal questionnaires. I used to answer the CDC ones regularly, And if I, as a pretty comfortable state senator, am am not finding it in my best interest to answer federal questionnaires, is ADS tracking any change in participation in the bedrock data we all rely on, which is US Department of Labor Statistics. So those are my two problems I hope were, that have been plagued, plagued me in my fourteen years here, is demographic data being very consistently underpinning everything, and how how we are monitoring people's response to concerns about federal data protection.

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: Those are both really great questions. So taking the first one about getting consistent demographic data across our programs. You're right, currently it is inconsistent. It's kind of yeah, it really depends on the program and the vintage of the data and all that. So one of the things on our work plan for this year is working with Susana Davis in the Office of Racial Equity to develop a standard package of demographic questions that we would like to evolve our business processes toward routinely collecting. That's gonna take a few years, right? We'll put out the standard probably, I don't know if we'll have them by July, but sometime next year, sometime in '26, we'll put out a standard for it. But it'll take some time to evolve all the processes to be collecting that. But that is something we're tracking and actively working on. Any follow ups on that? I know that's not the most satisfying answer, but

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Well, it's good that it's not already on your radar and

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: that you're working on it. That's, I think, comforting.

[Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale]: Yes. And and I my only suggestion would be to sort of add it to this presentation or or future presentations because, you know, I I mean, I think that's something that that has been a through line for so many sessions is we're not able to tell where our policies are having the greatest impact geographically or demographically without without underscoring how important that that Right. New strategy will be.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Yeah. It goes to your qualifiers earlier. I mean, it's until that's consistent, it's very qualified. Yes. And then the second question, the change in participation, how are we able to track that?

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: So far there's a lot of anecdotal evidence of a general chilling effect across our programs. We don't have anything hard yet, but we will go see what we can find to quantify that. But yes, anecdotally I've heard, you know, much like what you just said, Senator. By that, do you mean a chilling effect in terms of people getting the effects carried away by the amount, volume, and type of data that's being collected? Yeah, this is to some extent the other edge of collecting demographic information is you can actually scare people from participating in offer. And so we want to make sure that we are we have a standard way of collecting it, but that we're not forcing it in some places. But we just need to be selective about that. That's one of the like, we can help with demographic questions that we're gonna ask very quickly, but it's really the part that we're working through is when do we require it? When do we have it be optional? How do we approach that? Which means there will always be some asterisks on the data that's collected. But as far as showing it back, I'm thinking more about the last year when the federal government required or requested and required data on SNAP. And like that was a complicated data request to answer, right? Trying to make sure we were balancing the launch of privacy and compliance with the law. And so as a part of that we got anecdotes that families who had children who would otherwise have been eligible for SNAP, but the parents were not documented or dissuaded from applying for that program. Again, hard to quantify the number of people who don't apply for anything, right? That's the type

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: of You can only compare

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: it to who did before.

[Drake (Office of Workforce Strategy)]: Exactly. Given our time, I'm

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: gonna ask us just to

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: move along. So that was what I wanted to cover. I'm happy to answer more questions as we go through the rest of the presentation.

[Drake (Office of Workforce Strategy)]: So in light of sort of what we've been learning from sister agencies and from the agency of digital services with the work that they're doing, We have come across a couple of options that would potentially give us more information to drive policy decisions that would be, I think, free and easy to start to build even more information, and to Senator Brock's point, start to get access to comparable information about how other states are doing on specific issues. So we wanted to briefly talk about one multistate data project that we've been in conversations about that's offered by the US Census Bureau called the PSEO Coalition, which stands for post secondary employment outcomes. I just put that aside so I got the acronym correct. It's a project. It started out of Texas. Folks down there had some questions that they were wanting to answer, so then they elevated the issue to census and started

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: sort

[Drake (Office of Workforce Strategy)]: of coalition was born out of that effort. It's comprised of 35 states and over 1,000 higher ed institutions, and it allows states to combine their census data, wage and earnings data, with data from about employment, or excuse me, educational outcomes from higher education institutions. So the says it utilizes census data, so it doesn't really require, it does not require the state to do anything else that's already data that's being reported to a trusted federal partner, and it's also no cost to states. So what would need to happen for Vermont to participate is higher ed institutions would need to agree to share their data. And as Senator Ram mentioned, this is a time where that decision about whether to share data is a little bit more fraught. So we're definitely aware of that, but this is a product that we think has some exciting potential for Vermont to participate in. And as you can see in this map, Vermont and New Hampshire are really the only states in the Northeast Region that aren't participating. So it could give us access to information about folks in Maine, New York, Massachusetts, etc. So it gives information, and this is a group that's disaggregated and would be available. I'll show you a couple

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: of screenshots of what the dashboard looks like. Who has made the decision to not participate in this? Is that a don't know. I have a lot of No.

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: I think we just haven't started yet.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: It's really Okay. Yeah. And we

[Drake (Office of Workforce Strategy)]: have had some conversations with some of our higher ed partners who also expressed interest. So those conversations have been happening and will continue to happen. But yeah, I don't think it was an active choice not to participate. Just hadn't yet. Yeah. So there's a lot of information that this participation, this coalition would make available to the state, including earnings information and employment flows, they call them within industry sector and geographic region. And then the data would be available by institution, degree level, grad cohort, field of degree, and there's a couple of different time periods where that data is tracked. And the other thing I'll say about PSEO and the conversations that we've had

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: with them

[Drake (Office of Workforce Strategy)]: is that they're adding more data to this tool, I don't know, all the time, but there is the desire to continue to ask the types of data that are available. So they're working right now on enhanced wage records,

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: some

[Drake (Office of Workforce Strategy)]: additional demographic data and more specific geographic information. So really briefly, I just want to show what some of this could look like, and we can share more information with you all, and, know, depending on folks' interests, continue to chat about this. But this is Maine's, a snapshot of what Maine's information looks like. And I did my best to select programs that are in line with the priority sectors that the board has identified. So you could see programs, this is an associate degree group, the programs folks graduated from, the industries where they have sought employment, and where they are geographically. So there's interesting, you know, information that can be gleaned from this. And there's also an earnings capability that's so you can see folks, you know So

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: can you distill this for us? Because it's pretty small. It's pretty small. It looks like a significant percent stayed in May. 78%?

[Drake (Office of Workforce Strategy)]: Yeah, so this will is just sort

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: of distill it in words.

[Drake (Office of Workforce Strategy)]: And I think, from what I have, I have checked this with Matt Berowitz to make sure it was accurate. But this would show that folks who graduated with an associate degree in these programs, five years post graduation, 78% of them are employed in Maine and in a variety of different sectors. So based on how you pull the information,

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: you can answer different questions, but it

[Drake (Office of Workforce Strategy)]: does, I think, get a little bit more robust in a dataset. And I've heard over and over again in different capacities, know, folks wanting to know how many people are staying here. So could be something that could add value to some of the conversations and decisions that folks are making. And there's also the second snapshot I'll show is about earnings by program, and this also has three lines per program at one, five, and ten years post graduation. This is again being named with an associate's degree in these programs. So we can share the link to this with you all. You can go in and you know, work with the data, but it's something that the office is interested in. I know there's support at the Department of Labor, and we have had conversations with some external partners about it. So what our recommendation when it comes to this report is to participate in some of these multistate collaborative products, especially the ones that are no cost and don't require us to collect additional information. Like, let's see what we can do with information we already have for more immediate benefits with minimal slash no cost, monitor the success of those projects and and the work that's underway at the agency of digital services and across the eight hours

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: and support the work that's going on in ADF to to compel and Yeah.

[Drake (Office of Workforce Strategy)]: And see, you know, how over time, how is that?

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: You know? So what action is needed by us? Because it sounds like not you know, it sounds like we can just continue to work on this and the whatever authority you would need could be delivered by the commissioner and and the departments. Yes. That's great. Yeah. I I I think

[Drake (Office of Workforce Strategy)]: this is exciting. We need to yeah. We'd love to to we'll just, say, in touch about it, and if if folks are have additional questions, happy to answer them. Yeah.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: We appreciate you. And at the moment, we have a lot of data. Mhmm. The problem is we have to go all these different places to find it, and we don't necessarily have the authority to go and find it or access

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: it. So

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: what I hear you saying is that in the next year or so, we would be able to delegate our let's say lunch council to go to either this trust that certain people would have permission or agreements to be able to access this data and that we could then get fairly readily.

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: Yeah, we need to have conversations on the timing of bringing, you know, specific data into the environment, so I'm not going to commit to it in one year, but yes, that's

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: what we're working for.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Okay, great. So this is something we just

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: need to stay on top of and follow-up and And the PSEO stuff is actually faster and it's a publicly available dashboard. So you can go to their website now and do what we do. And so once data is in there, that will become available for you all for Legis Council. But then we

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: can also break into the one place we're gonna hope to drive everybody for data at least at Vermont dispersed. Yeah. The internal. Yeah. So the data lake house. Yes. Bring your beach towel. Okay. Right. Thank you. More to follow, it sounds it's exciting, and I think we will have more many more workforce conversations because the workforce is front and center this year of education just on its own. Thank you very much. Thank you. Really grateful and we will follow-up with other

[Drake (Office of Workforce Strategy)]: questions and concerns and anything else you think we

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: need to follow-up on also in terms of the next little bit, let me know. But this was this was terrific. Thanks

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: very much.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Good. Thank you. Thank you and good luck on day year one. Day three. Thank you. Thanks. And new leadership, exciting. I mean, all great. Terrific. Thank you very much. We're gonna switch gears because for this first week we weren't yet fully invested in all labor on Thursday. Next Thursday will be all labor. And so we'll see you back, some of you, on I think we're doing one seventy three. I think that's right. Yeah.

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: Yeah. Next Thursday. Yeah. Yeah.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Which would you may wanna check out. I think you're being invited. And so we're gonna switch and take a deep breath and turn to housing, and we're gonna invite our housing task force team because it's, again, very about work that we ask for. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, guys. This was great. Thank you. Thank you. Excuse me. Joining me against my slides for me. Great. So we are now going to pivot while you do that to a report that we asked for last year in Act 69, a report that has been titled On the Road Home and Kirsten Murphy from the Agency of Human Services spearheaded this work. There was a large robust group of people working on this task force and we're going to if you need help from Kierra, just let us know. I'm just waiting to get connected to the Internet which I thought I was or anything. I'm switching the building exit. The rode home slideshows I think

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: are posted on our website for anybody who's listening and participating.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: So as you may or may recall David and Randy, this is the report on housing need for our intellectually development and disabled community. As we look at both the numbers of Vermonters in need of that additional supportive housing and the amount of housing that's disappearing. I believe you might need to send me the link again. We have a significant population that we've identified in that county that about 600 people. There it is. Do too. Sorry. I just we started so late. I think we

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: had to No. Sorry.

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: That's My fault. No. It wasn't. Anyways No. It was all of us.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Who's the chair of LCAR back? Because I'm down to trouble school. What I'm telling her about is where's my slides? Here. Here. I'm sorry. There we go. Alright. Great. Alright.

[Kristen Murphy (Executive Director, Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council)]: So hello. I'm Kristen Murphy. Doctor. Rutland, I'm executive director for the Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council. And just with full disclosure, Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council is a federally funded, a 100% federally funded public board that sits within the agency of community services. And as a condition of our receiving our federal funding, I have unique permission, my colleague and I, so they're not that I have permission to come to the legislature and testify on behalf of our council at any time about the normal types of approvals. So we are speaking on behalf of our council and specifically today, I was chair of the Act sixty nine State Housing and Residential Services Committee, which Senator Clarkson sat on. And I also lead off around the report.

[Drake (Office of Workforce Strategy)]: So I'm here to tell you

[Kristen Murphy (Executive Director, Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council)]: what the report says essentially. We can go ahead and answer slides. There you go. Okay. First So I just want to thank the legislature for giving us an opportunity to write a plan about how we could get our residential services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, think of those as the kind of most significant highest support need population who receive extensive Medicaid funded services, how we could get that system calibrated around the realities of housing today as opposed to thirty years ago when we first set

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: up our system.

[Kristen Murphy (Executive Director, Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council)]: So if you could go back to if if you okay. So you asked us some very specific questions when you had us write a report. How long will it take to get to 600 units? 600 is an estimate based on evidence based kind of algorithm that that other states have used to predict how might how if you were having other housing choices, who will migrate to those other choices? What would this cost? Are there state policies that need to change and will the plan address the full range of support needs for this group? Because it's a very diverse group of people ranging from folks who are relatively independent to folks who really have to have 20 fourseven eyes on. Go ahead Sue. This slide just lets you know who was represented on that committee along with Senator Clarkson and representative John McHugh. What was important about what you crafted here is that you put people in a room who don't normally get to problem solve together. So we I mean, we've long had a relationship and been involved in Vermont Housing and Observation Board, but we had their housing director with us. And we had a representative from the treasurer's office and treasurer Kesha Ram followed very carefully to his representative what was happening. We had folks from Alice Sparrow's office. We had somebody from central office at AHS. We had Dale. We We had somebody from the trade association of general contractors, and then we had very active parent advocate from a

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: group of about 125

[Kristen Murphy (Executive Director, Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council)]: parents who've been really active in this space. We had Vermont Care Partners, you know, representative of the agency system, and we had the council and we had also a self advocate. So we had certain touchstones that I wanna call your attention to. The first I think is just worth saying out loud, that every provider with IBD deserves for the dignity, safety, and self determination in community they call. That seems pretty straightforward. That is the value of our system. Second, is maybe less straightforward than it was Green Mountain that brought this to the table right away. It's not about the building. You would be tempted to think it's about the building. Only this kind of apartment this kind of apartment is only appropriate for this kind of someone with with this set of support needs. That's not really the way we think about it. Any type of housing model that meets all the state rules and the federal rules that are making those, can the appropriate support be appropriate? It's not unusual in another state where someone with quite high support needs to live in their own apartment with a live in care provider for example. But that's not off the table. It depends on the support that people have. Yeah, there's some issues about having a second bedroom, you know, ADA compliance and all those things, but we really we're not focused on pigeonholing people into certain models anyway. So why are we talking about this? This pie graph shows you basically the distribution of residential situations for people in our system. And you'll notice that the two biggest pieces of the pie, almost 80% are either living with family members, many many of whom are aging beyond the ability to provide the level of care that they're providing or with a shared living provider, which is essentially an adult foster care model. People don't like it when I use that term. There are many fine shared living situations, but frankly, it is set up under the IRS code where it is called adult foster care. And we have when we built our system, it was a mechanism to get people into regular homes in regular communities, often people coming out of Brandon who did not necessarily have family members to live with, but might have a relationship with a staff person at Brandon who is willing to share their home with them and put him into their family. And as I say, there are many times straight living providers, but we're kind of maxing out on that model I'm just going to ask a question there because the adult foster care was post branded yes and it was when we post branded in 1993 that was where a significant percent if Brandon was open now would it be able to house the need the 600 that we that I had if we sold off those properties and things, but I no. No. I'm just gonna I think at the at its height, it was around 500, I wanna say, more like 500 meters. Yeah. So just to put that at at an incredible cost. Institutional care is extremely expensive, right? So that was part of why living with the community was kind of very widely supported. And we were right out of the gate very early as a state. We looked and had a lot of other states to look at, and shared living made a lot of sense for us at that time. I would also say that Ghostile kind of called my attention to the fact that VHCb was really right there as a partner. Han Hogun was you know, working on closing Granite. BHCD helped make that possible by creating about 125 units very quickly. They were somewhat more institutional or congregate than we eventually wanted. So a lot of those properties have kind of moved on to other places. But really from the get go, VHCD has been a partner in sort of saying, what do you need for this high need population that's dependent in a lot of other ways on the state and needs housing? I will also call your attention on this slide to the fact that group living is only 5% and that's pretty unusual. And also there is now 1% of the population that is in fact unstably housed. They are not technically homeless, but they are in temporary shelter because we have no place for them to go. That's about 27 people. But that didn't used to happen in our system. And the only reason they're they're not on a street is because the state would be responsible for their safety in that situation. Next slide. So here's a little bit about how the world has changed in the thirty or so years since we set up our system. Right? There are fewer Vermonters who are interested in coming into the fold in the shared living provider space. If you needed to monetize a piece of your house, you would find Airbnb a lot easier. We would come to you. Yeah. Or or how close you know, hosting a visiting nurse or something like a traveling nurse. You know, there are other opportunities. In addition, there are new fairly newly implemented rules that get on books for a while. CMS has new rules. Medicaid has new rules about the rights that people have when they are in a provider owned setting. And for some shared living providers, that's comfortable and fine. Their rights like access to food at any time, the right to have a visitor at any time of your choice. But some households may not be comfortable with that or that may not be what they imagined. And so there's a little bit of a kind of shift in like, hey, we thought we signed up for this and now we have this other, you know, rights oriented type language. You you have to have tenancy rights. There's a number of things that that may make home providers think twice about going into that. Not that they're not that we won't consider to use them. We also have the settings rule. These rules also create very clear expectations in group settings, small group settings. There's a difference between 10 people sharing a space and three. Right? There are really clear rules around if Medicaid is gonna pay for this, you are gonna have autonomy, you are gonna be able to control your schedule, you have a right to eat the food that you like, you have these are now sort of hard baked in. So things that we worried about when we were shying away from group homes, which I it's a term I try to avoid because it's not favorite in Vermont, but most of families have group homes. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, but but, you know, lots of people in their twenties and thirties share living space with other people in this economy. Of course, they do, and and we don't call it a group home. But so Medicaid now also makes it very clear that people have a right to receive their services and have a choice about where they receive those services. So when our system is very stressed and it doesn't have enough options, a provider may be forced to say, what we have for you is shared living even though that's not what you're interested in and actually we only have this one shared living provider, go visit them and see how they feel about that. You know, agencies that don't have enough to kind of comply with the choices and expectations. Expectations of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities have changed. People who come from inclusive education expect to do the same things that other people in their 20s are doing. We don't happen to have disabilities like building with their parents. We have talked about the age and parent situation and then of course we're impacted by the same housing crisis as everybody else in the state. I just wanted and I we're so grateful for this. We have a hard stop at noon. I we still have another a bunch of meetings, and I'm trying to talk very and we have no. You're doing a great job. And we apologize. We had a very late start for a variety of reasons like this is what happens in this building. And so I completely agree. Will also have you back with the but I think that's actually really front load that history because I think really important because we have shifted our thinking about what's what's appropriate. So the act 69 report, just to give you a very quick outline, has the core of it is a 13 plan. That's what I'm gonna review with you. Five of those recommendations are about how to pay for the housing. Two are about better information and data collection, two focus on state policies that, yes, I do believe need to change, and four are about coordinating this effort. It's important to understand that these recommendations work together. Not all of them are asks of the legislature, but, it is important that the legislature think about monitoring this process over five years, maybe through a committee or something, and and it has to report to you. Because we need to hold the other bodies in government like Dale accountable for also carrying out and carrying their piece of this puzzle that we have to fit together. Next slide. We also call some brief attention to the other big picture issues that impact on housing. We still have a workforce crisis, we still need to really attend to quality assurance issues in our system and we need to understand that people are often dissuaded from the more independent type of housing because of ableist assumptions about what they what is best and appropriate for them. What the report does not do and what we were not asked to do is to weigh in on what's an appropriate type of housing. The types and models of housing have to mean CMS settings rules, all the licensure regulations, all of the state components. We assume all of that. We are not going to say an independent apartment is better than an congressional committee in the

[Josiah Raiche (Chief Data and AI Officer, Agency of Digital Services)]: New York City.

[Kristen Murphy (Executive Director, Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council)]: That was not our charge so that's not what we did. Okay, the 13 plan and here is the most important part. Affordable housing needs, as I'm shorting out, two components. You need money to build a housing and you need rent subsidies, right? Our people live on SSI, that's just not enough to pay anywhere close to market rent. So we recommend a series of things around paying for housing. Before we do that, do you I mean I think it would be helpful for all of us to ground what that means financially. On average what would living on and for an individual living on SSI? Just means up a little bit, it's like about $900 I was going to say it's under $1,000. It's under $1,000. Think about a year, but think about what rent is and whatever time you live in.

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: So the next question is what percentage of average living costs does that

[Kristen Murphy (Executive Director, Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council)]: actually provide? Well that is 100% because you cannot use your Medicaid to pay for room and board so you might get some Medicaid supported services you will get your health care But you must live on that $900. Now maybe you have a little bit of wage, maybe, maybe you don't, but that has to cover room for it in all of your personal expenses. And right now, with the people who live with shared living providers, they're expected to give their SSI to the shared living provider. And they can keep back a small amount of it, like,

[Drake (Office of Workforce Strategy)]: you have the notes.

[Kristen Murphy (Executive Director, Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council)]: I think it's, $50. It's it's an annual annually determined amount that you could have for personal spending, but you buy your report from the shared living provider and they take all of your SSI as well, almost all of it. That that I just want to ground it in a real number because it's so it's very tight financial situation. Okay.

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: Let's keep going. Thank you. So

[Kristen Murphy (Executive Director, Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council)]: the F-sixty nine committee is very willing to discuss numbers with flexibility around what's available for resources but having to ask the question what does it cost? Yep. We recommended investing 10,000,000 each year for five years in capital. So managed by the Brock Housing and Conservation Board, that would allow you to build 50 to 60 units a year. That's ambitious, we know that, but to get to 600 in a reasonable amount of time, that seems like seemed like putting on the table. There are special federal grants specific for very low income people with disabilities. We should be applying for that. It's not open right now. We don't know when it will be, but we have not previously applied to that program. And as a state, we need to

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: do that.

[Kristen Murphy (Executive Director, Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council)]: And that's your purview? You would be applying for AHS for that? It would be AHS. Right. You have to apply, but we would do anything we could to help. So but building the housing is only a piece of it when you create that with a stack of different funding things. You also have to think about how are the tenants gonna afford the rent. So often built into that is an assumption of subsidized vouchers or vouchers that subsidize the rent. So from your $900 of Social Security money, you might only be asked to pay $250 of it for your rent. And the government right now, the federal government or HUD pays the rest of that. Without getting into too many of the weeds around vouchers, there are federally funded vouchers to section eight. They are not coming through the pipeline right now because of the situation we have with the federal government. Right. But there is a really successful program on the mental health side of the house. So for people who have long term persistent mental illness, there's about 80 state funded vouchers. We've been on the books for quite a while. They were created when we moved to a more community based system in mental health, and those state funded vouchers are fairly affordable. They're roughly $1,000 a month per person, so $12,000 a year with a little bit of a fee on top. They're managed collaboratively between the Agency of Human Services and the Vermont State Housing Authority. We were able to meet with the director of the housing authority. She said, you know, these are really successful. They're not that expensive. You need some of them for your pocket. We are continuing to talk about what that could look like, but that is an ask for the for the legislature. And I just want to highlight a a for housing, a very testified this morning in house general housing. She is working on a proposal to create a statewide pool of rental vouchers for the special populations that the agency of human services serves. So this is a slight variation on our recommendation rather than have, well there's 80 vouchers for people with psychiatric disabilities, that create parity and that they need for people with developmental disabilities, well then the question is what if you have a brain injury? She doesn't really like the silos and from psychology point of view, we would read. However we do want to increase vouchers for people with developmental disabilities so she's come up with this idea of having a statewide pool for special populations because there are vouchers she administers for people through the Department of Health and then there's housing for people coming out of corrections, and those are all populations under the agency of human services. So they're currently working. So this is being flushed out as we speak, but because then the pool gets much bigger in terms of the number of people. Right. And then looking at roughly 600 here. But Right. And then when And they grow back this is these doctors, one thing I didn't say that they'd be limited, so they're temporary. The state the state assistance would be temporary. The people would be first on the list for a federal voucher when it opens up, so they would move off of the state of the. We got all those through Kathleen. She's the she she is the funnel. That's a coordinator. Yes. And there might be caps like 20 for that senate it means for this pocket or whatever so that you know. So this requires legislative action. Yes. That's that's clearly a legislative option. Can

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: I challenge my number? So in one of your earlier slides you mentioned that roughly 40% were of this population were taken care of by family. But you're accounting for on the left hand side of this slide, you're 100% of the population needing units. In some, in many cases, like my family, as my parents changed, family took care

[Kristen Murphy (Executive Director, Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council)]: of it. Yeah. Yeah.

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: So I'll challenge that one. I understand the premise, but it's certainly not being this hard.

[Kristen Murphy (Executive Director, Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council)]: Well, I think that's right. We're gonna talk about that under data collection because there we have a path forward to get a more accurate number. This is what we have to work with right now. I agree with you that we need to figure that out. We don't track, for example, the age of family caregivers. If a family caregiver is 79, that's kind of a red flag for me. But if they're 64, I'm not you know, that's not an immediate But the people that I've heard putting their hand up and that we heard on the task force are are aging aging parents were in their eighties.

[Sen. Randy Brock (Vice Chair)]: Yeah. I'm just challenging. Yeah. We a 100% of the population. You may not that number may be Yes.

[Kristen Murphy (Executive Director, Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council)]: Right. And and and the plan that we're laying out here doesn't really get you to exactly 600. I can play with the map with you in a little bit. But let's go ahead and I I do want to talk about the importance of taking advantage of existing programs. So, yes, the section eight pipeline right now or existing federal voucher system is kind of shut down. But the challenge for our population for, you know, not really a lot of the peer attentional thinking is that our folks were dissuaded from getting on to the waiting list for Section eight, often just kind of for unreflective ableist reasons, like, so that's not the type of housing for you. It might be something your parents told you, it might be something the worker told you, but our people generally are not signing up and there's no cost to signing up. Like you might say no and your name eventually comes up, but we need to do some reeducation of our population and then maybe open those waiting lists, which you are allowed to do for time limited for special populations. And like that, you know, I have a very close friend, a self advocate, who spent years bumping from different situations, home providers and independent living, and he was paying market rate, and he never knew he'd get on the waiting list. He finally did, and it opened up this fall and he's in a sash supported apartment in Burlington now and as happy as he could be. So we can talk to you a little bit about getting better data. So one thing that we have the opportunity to do now that we didn't previously when people were being managed by 15 different agencies across the system, so we now have just two case management entities that started October 1. We need Dale to make it a routine question every time you see your case manager. What are your housing needs now? What are your housing needs in three years? How old are your family members? How old is your shared living provider? Just start to collect that fine grained data so that we can eventually get to a place, Susan, where we can map. We know we need this many units in Orange County in the next three to five years. We can get that if we work with our case management entities who have to see everyone multiple times a year. And this is the information everyone's been asking for. Vermont Housing Conservation Board. Everyone wants to know where do you meet the units? That you have. And this is the map based on audio 600 with the algorithm, but that is only so useful and what we really need is the fine brain data. So this hasn't been sort of ground tested? This has not been ground tested yet and in fact what we want is that we want a nine to twelve month period where the case management entities collect all of that data. Alright. I'm gonna try to talk pretty quickly in two and a half minutes. There are some serious policy change issues, and I will I will just say these don't necessarily fall to the legislature right now. I'm working to build a committee as fast as possible at Dale to talk about barriers in licensing. Basically, the licensing categories we have available are too narrow. They are too institutional in nature, they are not applied consistently, and they are a barrier to our designated and specialized service agencies being able and comfortable to support the types of housing that people want or maybe three you have to have more than two people together. You're supposed to have a license. But the licensing categories require costly nursing oversight that agencies don't necessarily wanna take on, and it's not what everyone needs. So we really some great good recommendations. Those are the serious updates. Yeah. Yeah. So the second again, this is being studied, but there are a few residences that are operated not by agencies. These are sometimes called intentional communities. They tend to be about groups of people that wanna share a certain lifestyle together, and there's three of them in Vermont right now. Oh, heartbeat Riverflow. Oh, Heartbeat. I have a friend of Heartbeat. Yeah. And Which is a farm. Yes. And yes. And they're the oldest and then Yellow House. These agencies are these entities are not paid in the same way, and we need to use the kind of payment reform in regards to progressive developmental services to figure out a sustainable way to not have that option go away. In fact, we will probably have other private nonprofits. They might not be intentional communities, but they might want to offer, I don't know, imagine a phone or sign language as the primary language. People have asked for that for a long time, but agencies may not be the only entity that wants to step in and create that. We have to find a fair way to pay that based on the kind of cost based accounting that we have now brought to generally all the rates that we're paying through development services. I'm gonna call attention to this slide because there are a few asks here that might come across your desk. I feel it is critically important that the legislature ask if you're going to make some investment over time to tackle this problem, that you ask that there be an advisory group similar to some of the folks that we had at the table. Oh, an oversight committee. Yeah, and that regularly reports to you because again the plan works all together and you should also be keeping an eye on this Dale Dulignant piece is, you know, Al Farrell's office doing the thing, that we need to make sure that we're, that there's a, that we're sticking to the plan and revising it as needed. And the council would be very happy to help with that. I don't know what's in the government's budget anymore than anyone else does, but there are There has been on the table a desire for a couple of housing positions. There are none right now in either in AHS central office or in the Department of Disability Aging and Independent Living. If we're gonna support our agencies to help stand up some housing and coordinate with Vermont Housing and Conservation Board and the State Housing Authority, we kind of need a staff person that state does housing. So I just wanna underscore the one about DHS access opportunity board. Sue represents us on that board right now. They have a project around helping create some housing navigators, and they might dedicate one, probably will dedicate one, to disability in general, so that's broader than our people, but it would include our people. We are gonna have to stop here. Correct. I covered we're stopping. I've covered most of the important stuff.

[Sen. Alison Clarkson (Chair)]: Yeah. This very helpful. We have a we're gonna go offline, and then I'll make my request, But we have a a committee bill deadline, January 29. So I we would need