Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: That's twice that I'm glad we didn't go online two seconds earlier. Didn't get to teaching twice. Well, I thought I was being pretty loud that we were going live.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: I know. Sorry.

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Welcome back, folks, to the Senate Committee on Government Operations for Wednesday, 02/04/2026. The remaining item on our agenda today is the Act one nineteen report. We'll go around the room quickly and introduce ourselves,

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: and then

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: our two witnesses can introduce themselves, and we'll start with the Senator Morley or Orleans. It's

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: nice to meet you. At Blog, I've never seen Alison Clarkson of Windsor District.

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Brian Collamore representing the Rutland District. This is Linda Levin who's filling in for our normal committee assistant who's out ill. On the screen is

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Vice Chair)]: Senator Tanya Vyhovsky, the Chittenden Central District.

[Jacqueline Bolden (Agency of Human Services)]: And I'm Becca White, and I'm the Windsor Park District.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: So welcome. And you are Just for the record. For the record, I'm Ted Fisher, I'm the Principal Assistant and Communications Director for the Agency of Human Services.

[Jacqueline Bolden (Agency of Human Services)]: And I'm Jacqueline Bolden, the Director of Performance and Improvement for the Human Services. And I just joined.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: It's been a teacher. So,

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: while Jacqueline is getting in, I'll start if that works. Sure. I'm actually going to pass around, maybe because I'm a little old school, and I started Thank you. Were making copies. Okay, thank you, Senator. Senator White, here's one for Oh, wait, Maury. You should have this also submitted to your committee.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: I have this. Right.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: I gave, I gave that

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: up for

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: I go on, I printed that up for you.

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Thank you, you're fine. I'll just say

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: as an interim deduction, Act one nineteen is passed in 2024, and it directed the agency of human services to investigate broadly its purpose and efficacy in serving its Mhmm. The all of the providers that we serve, as well as working with all of the partners that we that we work with. I think that and as someone who's worked for the agency now for about eighteen months, this was kind of my introduction, just speaking personally to the Agency of Human Services, but I worked prior prior in another state government agency and had experience with lots of legislative reports. I think just I wanna say upfront that we took this report incredibly seriously on its merits as a legislative report in terms of what the challenge was that was articulated in the passage of the act. But we also had our own reasons for being really interested in this work. And so there will be points where as we go on, I'll try to talk about what what is reflected in terms of providing what the legislature asked us to do to you all, which is the purpose of the report, which I also have copies of the report as well if you would like, as well as kind of what is useful to us for our ongoing work. The Agency of Human Services believes really strongly, in continuous improvement, and being just thinking carefully about how we can better serve our clients who are Vermonters generally and also some of the most vulnerable Vermonters. And so we believe that as a core ethos of our work, and that was a big draw for me as I was getting to know the agency. We have folks like Jacqueline with roles whose job is performance improvement and being really careful about, both in the agency and also in all of our six constituent departments. So you'll see on the front page of the legislative report that we put in, I think, seventeen hundred hours, I'm gonna misspeak, of work into this between our staff time as a team to do the work as well as to engage our colleagues across the agency. So I just wanna say upfront that we took this not only did we take this really seriously as we would take any legislative report that what you said you're tasked us with, but we really strive to go above and beyond in terms of making sure that we were learning things that would serve us into the future, and we are committed going forward and would be happy to return to this committee to provide status updates in the future. We are committed to kind of carrying that work forward, and I will say, we'll get a chance to go over this as we go along and and closer to the end of our presentation. We really do have much more work to do. We're sort of in the we got got the report to you on time in November, and now the work begins of sort of figuring out how we're going to address all of the because we learned many lessons for which legislation is not the ideal solution. Mhmm. And we now have work to do ahead of us to figure out how we're going to carry that forward. Like I mentioned, we would love to come back and let you know how it's going later in the session or next year or plus. So that brings us through our our legislative purpose, which you will see here on the screen. That's a quote from the act. And just wanna provide some context. We are the largest executive branch agency representing roughly depending on how you count, we are the largest budget. We're a little bit less than 50% of the workforce. We are very large. We contain multitudes. Some of our departments are larger many of our departments are larger than some of our agencies. We are a very, very large. And we also have a very broad portfolio of programs, and many of our programs directly serve people and serve families. And so that's a really critical aspect of this is we need to make sure we are successful and also as effective and efficient as we can be because it matters to the Vermonters that we serve. Mhmm. The honestly, and we did get asked this by some of your colleagues in the house. One of the best concise histories of the agency of human services is actually in the purpose of the act. So if you're interested in that, it would be if we started there, honestly, Jacqueline and I, when we were assigned this as our project. And so we have seen a lot of growth in consolidation since 1970, as well as an addition of many, many different programs and services, whether that's assigned to the agency itself or to our departments. I'm now going to hand it to Jacqueline, who is going to go over our project phases and methodology.

[Jacqueline Bolden (Agency of Human Services)]: Yeah, so we'll talk about process now for the actual creation of the report. This is just a diagram of the project phases. High level, can see the timeline starting from September 2024 through final report November year 2025. And then as a noted, don't fear beyond, which the results of this report will then become some actionable items for this agency to improve upon and use as impetus for future improvements and process adjustments in order to serve on others better. Initiation and planning was the beginning of the project, obviously, and then to the information gathering phase, which then led to the analysis of all of that. We did prioritization after that of what we learned and what parts of that were really the most probable and impactful for us to pursue, which then led to developing results and potential options from those of what the agency could potentially prioritize and work on moving forward, and then that led to our final recommendation, are

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: the reports. And we'll go

[Jacqueline Bolden (Agency of Human Services)]: into that a little more detail here. The information analysis and prioritization sort of phases began with outreach and engagement, which were in the form of discussion groups, surveys, interviews. We engaged with over 1,000 participants of various different places, backgrounds, different relationships and ways they interacted with the agency. We started with a very broad approach overall in our process, in that we did not ask any specific questions of people, and we just went into rooms and asked if you wanted to improve the agency of human services based on your relationship and your interactions with it, what would you do? That's where we started, very broad. We began initially with AHS staff for a couple of reasons. First, because as internal people who really enact and perform the processes and the implementation of the policies and the way the agency works, they have a good view into that process and also see from policy high level down to implementation of how the work we do hits the ground and meets those people who actually are benefited by the work and who receive our services. Also, were just the most proximal group, easiest for us to access, and sort of pilot some of our outreach strategies. So that's where we started, and then from there we moved on to some of our groups that we interact with a lot, committees, maybe that includes State of Vermont and agency human services staff and also external partners, partner organizations, also advocates, representatives of our client populations, those people who could give voice to the other side of our organization, those people that really are the mission and the purpose for which we do this work. Let's see, after that, well, the appendix B of the report has that full list of folks with community and the organizations that they represented or the groups that they chose to represent when they introduced themselves to us and that we engage with them. In a lot of cases, we leverage sort of the existing spaces, existing work groups, existing committees, rather than taking up people's time to schedule a bunch of additional meetings, etcetera. And then we also used outreach through surveys. We had an internal facing web page and an external facing web page where we put out information, where we put out links to surveys or open comment forms so people could hopefully access them as easily as possible and then sort of through word-of-mouth, spread through our departments, through our leadership, through our staff and their programs they worked in. We sort of sent out the word that this opportunity existed for people to provide feedback and comment. As we gathered some of the information, we did sort of an ongoing sort of iterative analysis, which then brought up some themes that then led us to ask some more deeper questions. And from there, our broad approach got a little bit more narrow as the information that we received led us into more narrower areas of repeated comments or repeated feedback in thematic areas. Then we dig a little deeper into specific areas with the next groups that we spoke to, where we choose specific groups to speak to based on some of the specific thematic issues we're learning about. Finally, that overall thematic analysis led to a set of final photo book, final themes that were published. That's in appendix c of the report. It can also be found on our webpage. But from there, we use those really deepest level themes to prioritize what we would then pursue further and would then eventually work its way into potential recommendations in the report. And so, from those priorities came the options for how we may want to pursue things or what we could look at to act on. And then that led to the potential recommendations that were in the report. And as we got closer and closer to the end of this process, we then went back to key interviewees, key constituents, key people that could really give us a little more detailed information based on our more narrow set of recommendations and sort of checked and validated what we had learned with people that became a little closer in field search network. Then And taking all of that together, we used some of these potential recommendations through a set of criteria, looking at potential outcomes, alignment, feasibility, as you can see on here, sustainability, resources that may need to be used in order to fulfill these recommendations and whether or not they would really be the best option to get the outcomes that we really wanted to improve the agency for the people we serve. That is how we sort of ended up with our final recommendations in the report. That covers the process, Pete.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: So I'm going to talk now about how we structured the recommendations, and and we broke them into three tiers as you see on the screen. Before I do that, just wanna note that we, as Jacqueline mentioned, we approached folks and from a very open ended perspective, actually, one of our most effective questions is if you had a magic wand, what would you do? Because it broke people out of the mental frameworks of what what is possible, and people were saying, hey. You know what would be really helpful in this space? That whatever it is. Right? And so we heard things from high level structural, I think that the agency should be reorganized down to it would be really helpful if I think one of the examples we found is, like, it'd be helpful if the whole music changed.

[Jacqueline Bolden (Agency of Human Services)]: The old music. Old music.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: Right? Some of some My son's. For example people. People have to call

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: department spend a lot of time on hold. Right.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: And we obviously, all one of our one of our goals is to reduce that and dep particularly Department of Children for Children and Panties has made a lot of progress there. But still, as we all know from being on the phone, even a few minutes with hold music, it's not right hold music. So so, I mean, that's somewhat of a humorous example, but we did hear a lot of, like, really helpful and that was both internal and public. Right? So we hear staff saying, you know, it would really help us work with this other division or other department that we work with closely if we have if we made this small change. Right? And so and all of that was there. And we heard a lot more of the, like, it would be really helpful if we did x versus the it would be really helpful if we reorganized the agency. And so we had to take this information and fit it into a framework that fit the the goals of the act. Right? And so as we went through this process, Jacqueline was mentioning the themes, I actually have the themes document here because we used those and they became part of what we're calling our tier two recommendations. So we've essentially divided up the recommendations in three levels in order to sort of figure out what the best approach would be to make progress on them. So tier one opportunities, and I wanna be really clear, these are questions. These are framed as questions, and you'll see as we go along and because we're gonna present the tier one opportunities to you today. They're framed as questions for which we have recommendations. So tier one opportunities are those that need the highest level of decision making authority and scope, and this category is one where potential solutions could include legislative remedies. So questions of is the really fundamental charge of the act to us is is the agency organized the right way? That is our tier ones. Our tier twos are opportunities that we really have agency significant change initiatives, either agency wide or sort of department wide change initiatives, things where there will need to be a lot of work and planning, resource considerations made, a lot of that kind of thing. But there's things for which we don't necessarily need legislative action, or for which at this point we're not ready to say, hey, legislature, we need your assistance on this. It might influence future budget cycles or there are things for which we know this is a significant thing and a significant area of improvement. But but at this point, it's not something that for which there's a legislative remedy. Those tier two opportunities track really well with the themes that Jacqueline mentioned a minute ago. So when we go through the tier twos, we'll hand out the themes document for you all. And then we also use those themes to assess and and do the feedback gathering that Jacqueline mentioned. I mean, ask folks to help us prioritize what are the most important. And we ask our staff, and we ask the public. And then we'll go over kind of what what what were the common, areas that folks thought we should focus And then tier three opportunities are smaller scale department or program level improvements, the whole music, for example. And those sometimes try to catch myself from calling them low hanging fruit because they may not be they might be something that's both very either very impactful or something where there's gonna be real work to change. But there are things that we as an agency can take on in house or things that we can give to departments to work on, and and we have many, many of those. And so one of our next steps is really working through those and making sure that if it's a department specific recommendation, it's with the department for follow-up or it's with the agency for follow-up. Okay. Prove that

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: positive palpitations in a penny mark.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: I I think so, but I don't want and I as we frame this, we don't wanna undersell. Some of these will be very impactful even if they're small. It's important to state upfront that we as we go forward into our tier one recommendations, we really did learn a lot about things that we're doing very well. A lot of the way the agency is organized is to help us leverage federal funds, to coordinate services, and to, you know, basically reach people. Many of our many of our clients have needs from multiple programs or multiple parts of the agency. So there's a lot that we do really well, in terms of colocating services. And and so I just wanna take a moment to highlight the strengths that you'll see here that we learned about. It's nice to have the work that you're doing validated and to learn it's as important to learn about what you're doing well as what you are that you need to improve on so you can make sure you don't lose any things you're doing well as as you

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: move forward. Senator Clarkson?

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: So it has really helped to de silo for those of us who use you as legislators because so many of our constituents, I've, you know, AHS is the number one area I think most of us interact with as as senators and representatives. And to have the area of the the two graphs of the world, the people who are can speak to us on every matter in AHS with a family that may have corrections and snap and DCF issues. And we used to have to go to every one of those different departments. Now when we can speak to one person about a in a whole totally holistic way. It is so much better. That one piece is really much better.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: That that was a major strength that we learned about. I don't know.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: We the people that are the area go to peeps?

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: So sues?

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: Soes are go to for

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: field services.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: District field services. Thank you. Much just such an important thing. Thank

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: you. We will pass that along. Certainly it was something that we learned as we went through this process. That's a big bright spot for the agency, and also an area where we can maybe even do more. Okay, so I want to dive into the findings and recommendations tiers here a little bit. I kind of covered a little bit of this, but the nice thing about this slide is that it shows our top tiers for themes for revisiting AHS here. These are the six high level categories that broadly summarize the things AHS can do to significantly improve how we operate and provide services, And there are 21 themes, the document I'm going hand out to you in a minute has 21, but these are the top six themes that we have heard in our feedback from the public and from our staff.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: So does the budget reflect this? Just ask, giving capacities on the top line.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: So by and large, no. As we get to our conclusion, be happy to to talk more about that. We have work that we need to do on all of the tier levels to present change. I agree. Yeah. The tier one recommendations and and we are clear in our report that we did not make any requests for legislative change this year. We are and actually, we can just skip, I think, to the next slide to go over That

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: capacity is not a legislative. Capacity is, that's up to you guys.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: I absolutely hear you on that, Senator.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: We We thought very just a follow-up. I think we wouldn't have to worry about the the hold time music if there were more people answering the phone and dealing with people's problems.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: Absolutely. And and I will say we heard that, like, the the the And I happy to follow-up with the committee specifically on the hold time because DCF did a fantastic job, including the Economic Services Division, really cutting those hold times, and that's actually a really good example of the continuous improvement work that we do on a daily basis. This is an this was an additional to our ongoing and complementary to our ongoing continuous improvement efforts. Where we are at here, though, is that particularly when it comes to the bigger challenges and projects, the reason why we're not making any legislative recommendations two reasons when we jump into the tier one here in a second, why we're not making any recommendations for legislation this year. But for places where we recommend change, one of the things that we looked very carefully at is the cost of change and the potential impact on our on the people that we serve. That's again as I sorry not to continue to repeat myself, but are some of the most vulnerable from

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: We are. It's no clear.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: And so and so we have to be very careful in whatever that we do, and so we are in a place where we were able to meet the goals of the act by writing a report to you, but we have more work to do in figuring out how to make that change management happen, and that is as true for the things that we are committed to doing by ourselves for which there we do not need legislative support or a legislative change as we are for bringing future legislative proposals that are based on the act. So so that's where we said we would really be happy to come back to continue to give you updates on this work because we take it really seriously and to moving it forward. But we wanna be very careful to make sure that these solutions we bring. So, no, it is not that that's one reason. Another reason is that we do our budget development process very carefully within the agency and and working with the administration over a period of time. And our timeline for providing this report to you was in November. So we have work to do for future sites. I'm not in a place where I'm able to make any promises one way or the other on that, but it's certainly, this is something that will be the agency is committed to as part of

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: our DNA as we move forward. Great. Appreciate that. I would just note you have every opportunity this year to affect capacity.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: That is

[Jacqueline Bolden (Agency of Human Services)]: They might.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: That is well taken. Before we go forward, I just wanna note some of the thematic challenges that we came up with here. I've I've said already a lot of the feedback wasn't structural in nature, but we it's probably not surprising that we did hear a fair amount of feedback of AHS as a entity that was kind of known and understood to people we were communicating with. And we said, hey. We wanna talk to you about this thing called Act one nineteen. This is our charge. People came in with the mindset of even if we heard more granular and specific feedback, were they people were sort of thinking about what's the broad challenge of AHS as as an entity. And so there were many well reasoned and valuable comments both for keeping the agency as one and for dividing the organization, and there was a variety of models that kind of surfaces as we went through. And we also heard a lot about channels and opportunities that while they didn't reference organizational questions directly, they have bearing on the overall press question of the agency's organization. I should just note at this point that when Jacqueline and I came into each of the structural questions, we approached them with an open mind and thought what objectively are the costs and the benefits of each of the options. So we're presenting to you several tier one recommendations which we recommend, you know, legislator, But we wanted to be transparent about the investigation that we did and what the challenges were that led us to consider the question. Senator Clarkson?

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: Just because you're not recommending legislative action doesn't mean we're not interested in what the choices are that you make because those all impact our constitutional Absolutely,

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: and that's why we're presenting that. So as a way of segueing, I'll say it probably isn't surprising that we heard more often the agency is stronger and better able to meet the needs of Vermonters as a single unified agency. As a matter of fact, one thing that we really kind of came away from from many conversations is that we haven't we, in many cases, haven't even really scratched the surface of what acting as one team can be, which is is really interesting. I mean, I I really appreciate your comments. Actually, I wanna come right back to your comments a second ago, senator, which is things like field services and coordination of services is wonderful, and I'm really glad with the breath of fresh air, we can do more of them. And there's a and there's a lot of good things. Yeah. Total There's there's a there's a lot of benefit to be gained, I would say, from strengthening us as one team and one agency. I mean, so that's that is part of the rationale as we go forward. Okay. So now we're gonna jump into our tier one recommendations. We have four of them. I'm happy to go as quickly and high level as you would like or as comprehensive as you'd like.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: Not at all.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: So the challenges here I'm sorry. I'm I'm ahead of myself, so I'm on slide. So the challenges here for AHS specifically, as I was just mentioning, our recommendation is to keep the agency together and strengthen as a unified agency. The as we were just talking about, so much of what we do and how we do it is dependent on aligning services across the life force of Vermonters and to meet their varied experiences and needs. There are things that we can do to strengthen our coordination, break down barriers and silos. But, you know, in reference to your question before, it is up to us to investigate that at this point. And something that Jacqueline reminds me of frequently, and if you're interested, she will be able to articulate it better than I am, is that, you know, if we're talking about adding capacity, for example, as you referenced, we need to make sure that we do the work to understand what positions we're going to need, for example, if we wanted to add positions in a certain area or certain program. Sometimes we know and have a really good sense of the need, but coming away with recommendations like strengthening our leadership efficiency, increasing our flexibility, making sure that we have the right tools and the right coordination between all of our departments and programs, we very well could need positions to do that. But we need to understand what positions we would need and scope those out and also take a hard look because we are steward stewarding taxpayer resources and other things that we can do to streamline, smooth, improve our systems internally prior to going and reaching for a position if that makes sense.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: I mean, you have some So my capacity budget, I I also be maintaining capacity. I am chair of a committee where seven positions were cut

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: Mhmm.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: In an area we the governor gives a lot of airtime to our housing prices, and yet seven positions were cut. Yes. Housing developed. So I also mean maintaining capacity, not just adding more.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: I absolutely understand that. I am not the right person to speak to the budget. No. I'm asking the budget challenges, certainly. But but, you know, it is a it is a difficult climate where there are

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: It's a more difficult climate when we have less in your agency, quite honestly, because you it's a catch 22, isn't it? The more trauma that we have, the more everything else we have. Trauma costs our state billions of dollars. And your agency is the one that deals with it.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: I I agree.

[Senator John Morley III (Clerk)]: And you've got some recommendations

[Jacqueline Bolden (Agency of Human Services)]: to tell us about it.

[Senator John Morley III (Clerk)]: I wanna hear what the real recommendation is.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: Yeah. Yeah.

[Senator John Morley III (Clerk)]: Because I do, I have some serious questions about the substance abuse and mental health.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: Absolutely.

[Senator John Morley III (Clerk)]: I do wanna get

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: Let's to Department for Children and Families. We did really identify, and fairly early on, some some fairly significant thematic challenges with Department for Children and Families. We ask DCF to do a lot, and DCF does several different things that aren't necessarily linked, like, aren't necessarily linked together. So for example, we have the economic services and a lot of the social services that we provide to Vermonters in the same agency that also does family services. Not every state in the country organizes that way. Those are big lifts for one department to do, and so we took a very hard look at whether DCF was organized in the right way. As I noted earlier, the comment to your to your point and sender, we had to be very, very careful when deciding whether to make a legislative recommendation. Is now the right time? Will we will the cost of change both in resources and in impacts to programs be worth the actual change? And so ultimately with DCF, we're not recommending so our recommendation for DCF is the same as our recommendation for the agency, which is more to strengthen. There is work that needs to be done to strengthen coordination and integration at DCF as well as to make sure it is appropriately structured and resourced to deliver on its many missions. But at the moment, we're not recommending a change in terms of how the organization structure is. We did look at some of the various fourth charts. Some of those are in the report.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: Can you just explain the acronyms ESD Yes. And FSD?

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: So DESEC has six divisions, and the big ones are family services division Yeah. Economic services division, and then also the child development Division, which does childcare and what AOE does in Preakin.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: Right, so what's EAS?

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: Economic Services Division. I

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: thought that was

[Jacqueline Bolden (Agency of Human Services)]: And then that's Family Support.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: Family Services. And Office of Economic Opportunity is also a division of of IHS and both ESD and OEO, Office of Economic Opportunity, work on housing related matters. So the GA housing program, for example, is in the Economic Services Division and Office of Economic Opportunity, one of their missions is shelter. We have a question from Senator Vyhovsky.

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Vice Chair)]: Yeah, absolutely. I have heard some, frankly, pretty horrific things coming out of, particularly I think it's the Family Services Division. Those conversations came up around working conditions, particularly when we were talking about raise the age, and why that would be absolutely impossible to do given the what was characterized, frankly, as complete chaos Department of Children and Families. So I'm a little concerned that there was no recommendations being made, given that year after year, we're hearing staff at the Department of Children and Families saying that there are horrific work conditions, it's untenable. So I'm trying to understand the disconnect here. Here.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: I appreciate that, Senator. I'm I'm I keep looking at the screen, and you're I'm actually actually looking here. Apologies. Is where the the way restructuring the report matters. We listened very carefully, and we certainly heard many, many challenges. Not and I'm not saying specific to to DCF, but many challenges about and and things we need to work on. The question here is is a legislative fix the right the right remedy? And like I said, we did take a very hard look at whether or not a re a reorganization of the department would be worthwhile. But at this point, I appreciate what your what what your your comments, senator. We need to make sure we make improvements and make make progress moving forward, and we're not at the point where we think a structural recommendation is, or a structural change is gonna solve the problem. So that's me acknowledging that there are many things that within DCF and within the whole agency, we can work on and are committed to working on, but not everything can necessarily be solved by reorganization. That

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: was Tanya's question, I don't know whether to answer.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: Tanya, do have a follow-up on that? No,

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Vice Chair)]: I am curious to see what recommendations are made. It's to me that it's year after year and it seems to be getting worse and it's difficult, and I'll own some of this as my own discomfort to sort of do nothing.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: I see what you're saying. And we'd certainly be happy to follow-up. Jacqueline and I have many amazing colleagues, and they're not, unfortunately, the we don't have the expertise in everything, so we can certainly follow-up with family services division if you're interested in more specificity on some of these things. I I'm gonna try to speak to stray away from sort of questions of working conditions or labor relations because it's absolutely not my area of expertise. What I will say is that everything we heard from staff and everything we heard from the public, we take really seriously. And our goal is trying to find the common themes and areas in between. And now the now the work begins to prioritize and sort through those. So

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: I don't think the problems with DCF need are structural. I think you need I mean, from outside users, which your legislative partners are.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: Mhmm.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: I'd say it's qualified management, thoughtful management, and and capacity issues. Those you don't need legislation for that. That needs leadership and good management and all all the things that this area cries out for. And so I think those are all in your camp and all that just need to, you know, this is just one of the most important departments that we all deal with all the time. And Tanya works in that particular area. Anyway, it's just, I think really attending to who's appointed, how qualified they are, and the management skills they have managing it are key.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: Without speaking to the specifics, I will say, as we noted in the report, we agree, and we are not making a recommendation for structural changes this time. Our hope is to use the resources that we reviewed to devote to that kind of change management if we were asking you for a change of statute to make progress on some of those improvements. Oh, that's a good idea. Okay. We can now move to our substance use and mental health intervention. Can I just maybe you could jump ahead to the actual recommendations?

[Senator John Morley III (Clerk)]: This is one of

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: This is one. This this is number three.

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Well, this is challenge. But

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: Yes. I'm sorry. So and I apologize. For each of the recommendations, we have a slide of challenges and a slide of the recommendations. These are recommendations. So this is the this is and I and I I apologize for trying to answer the questions, will fit you more to sort of way find us here. So one of the things that came up as part of the conversation about prevention and treatment of substance use, it came up fairly frequently. We heard, as mentioned prior, we heard both granular issues. We also heard questions of structural nature in terms of feedback. Much of this input showed up in conversations with organizations, groups, and people who are working directly in the field. Also heard some significant input from the Department of Health and the Department of Health. Some things that everyone agrees on is that there should be strong coordination and integration, and then that can be improved. However, there's very strong opinions both in the field and in the agency about the best way to accomplish this. Okay. So when we were framing trying to frame our recommendation, we focused, we really try to focus on the client perspective, thinking about the promoters that we serve. Just to give you a granular example, there are two different provider systems and two different billing systems within this space between mental health and substance use. One is in one department, one is in the other department. There's increased complexity and duplication on the level for clients, providers, and the system to navigate. And this is when you think about folks who struggle with mental health and substance use, that's a very like, that's for folks who are struggling with that, it can be very, very hard in that way. Good to do. We have unfortunately, have a system that is more complex than it needs to be. It was kind of the the solution. I should say that I am not an expert in this area, despite having some interaction with it in another part of my life. But we, so we would be happy to discuss or ask our colleagues at the Department of Mental Health and the Department of Health if you would like to dive more into sort of the challenge. I'll turn to our recommendations. Thank you. This is one where we do make a recommendation to integrate the clinical substance use functions into DMH. They're currently within the health department, And this is our way of trying to make sure we navigate the mixed recommendations, focus on the client perspective, and this is an example of where the judgment about whether to make a change tiptoed that sort of cost. We are not currently bringing a legislative recommendation forward. It's important to be careful in how we do this process and planful in how it's structured and works there. And then we would be happy to, go ahead.

[Jacqueline Bolden (Agency of Human Services)]: Oh, I didn't mean to interrupt you.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: We'd certainly be happy to participate in conversations if that is of interest to the committee or to the legislature general.

[Senator John Morley III (Clerk)]: Okay. So thank you. So I guess I have a couple questions. Mhmm. But if I'm understanding what you just said correctly, this will not happen. Because you're not making a legislative ask to do it. Or are you saying you're doing it and you don't need a legislative ask? I would love to know the answer.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: Think that we we are not currently asking for legislation. We might we may

[Senator John Morley III (Clerk)]: But you're gonna do it.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: We may ask for it in the future. We're in the process of trying of of working on making sure that if we bring if we were to bring a legislative ask, it would be the right one. And making sure that change management is done.

[Senator John Morley III (Clerk)]: Okay. But would you do this could you or would you do this move, this recommendation without the legislation? And I'm not saying we you can or cannot. I don't know. But are you moving forward with this recommendation? Separate question from the legislative piece. Right.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: Brendan, you could Yeah, was So Brendan Atwood, Policy Director for HCP Human Services. I think at a high level, the response is that this really reflects, as Ted, I think Jacqueline noted, the what. The how is the process that we're working on now, and so speed at which we do this, what the specific steps are that we do it, and frankly, the due diligence to work with stakeholders and folks within the agency and the departments is all forthcoming.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: Okay. So

[Brendan Atwood (Agency of Human Services, Policy Director)]: we're going through that process. This is like identifying essentially what we needed to do, the next iteration of this process and how are we going to do it. And we don't want to put the dart on the horse. We recognize that moving too quickly can make things, can jeopardize a lot of the the progress that we hope to make. And so you will start to hear more from us on this.

[Senator John Morley III (Clerk)]: Okay. So this just I guess my main concern is I have some issues with this move because I've heard that internally it's not a slam dunk. There's some and I appreciate your you referencing strong opinions. So I don't necessarily know if it's a slam dunk yet. So maybe that's work that you're doing. But I just wanna make sure that it's not gonna happen without us knowing it's happening.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: Absolutely. Would there's like a short form bill that rep Rebecca has on

[Senator John Morley III (Clerk)]: this. Oh, Rebecca?

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: Yeah. Basically

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: Rebecca, okay.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: It hasn't moved yet, and I think, you know, for us internally, we wanna make sure that we're with our finance, with our clinical folks, with, of course, the governor's office and other departments and folks in the state and all of the providers rely on their systems as We need to do our due diligence to figure out how we do this, timing we do it, or how well the pieces move, and we've not embarked on that exercise quite yet.

[Senator John Morley III (Clerk)]: When would you say that you got enough internal pushback that you would say, actually, we're gonna not do this, and any of the recommendations?

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: I think that's that's an interesting that's an interesting question. I I think just to be slightly more direct, the we do not wanna be in a position of of wasting the legislature's time. Mhmm. If there's something we can do without legislation, we will do it.

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Completely do.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: That said we want

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: we want to be transparent. Peace. We are also very sensitive to the concerns of our staff. We're very sensitive to, you know and and one of the hallmarks and strengths of this report was that we listened to the folks who do the work on the ground and heard from them, and so we wanna honor that as we go through the process, certainly. We also recognize, and also recognizing, like, is a big part of Jacqueline's job, something that we have a central office that got us, like, doing change management well Yeah. In a way that allows folks to see a vision and work towards it because it could you know, we we all experience this as humans. Like, we don't want you know, we want to feel valued in our jobs, and change can be can be difficult to navigate, and change, you know, we we owe it to our staff to make sure that the change is done as carefully as possible, which is why I'm coming here with a tier one legislation, like recommendation of a structural change that could require legislation, and saying, we're not ready to bring you something yet. And I recognize that's frustrating. Yes. That said, we will we are investigating this with an eye towards the client, just why we're gonna take on the other side of this. We need to do what is the best interest of our monitors, and there's a way that we can do that that's respectful to our staff and makes the most sense for the work, and also serves the needs of our clients. Because this is really, really, as you know, a very tough area, and an area where some of our most vulnerable providers are. I that's a really talk So it's really hard to answer. May it may be, and we'll certainly try to be transparent, maybe that we can make a change without legislation. I'm not at the point where I can say that one way or another.

[Senator John Morley III (Clerk)]: I guess I'm just asking, if you do move forward with this, I understand you're saying you don't wanna waste your time. This is

[Jacqueline Bolden (Agency of Human Services)]: worth our time.

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Absolutely.

[Senator John Morley III (Clerk)]: This decision is worth our time. And that's So if you are gonna make a decision or move in that direction

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: Absolutely.

[Senator John Morley III (Clerk)]: I at least would want more information because I am worried that you've gotten some internal pushback already for this idea, and I don't wanna see it go through and then us say, oh, well now we're gonna have to undo something. But I Rebecca, which record? Which one? One right here, to move substance use into mental health.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: So that is where our commitment to come back and speak with at the committee's pleasure. And we're running up against slum here, so. Yes, and I apologize. Please do take us up on that. We would be happy to come back. But you're Because we've only gotten through our tier ones, and and we have a whole, two other sets of tiers that we are really, we love talking about as well, so. I think I have to be teared up today. We can probably have you come back. And that's right, and then we have the report, can always follow-up with questions as well. I think just to close the loop on that question, Senator, of course, you will know. We will be in those conversations. Part of the due diligence will include consulting with legislators and the right folks before we do all that. Again, part of our hesitation in saying, let's do this right now, is that we haven't done that due diligence yet, we need to make sure that we understand what the intended consequences, the unintended consequences, and really how it's gonna impact the system. And as you know, the agency is embarking on all sorts of innovations throughout our various systems under our auspices. So, we wanna make sure that we're thoughtful about this. Shorty Anderson, can certainly hear more.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: Thank you. Well, and there are a lot on corrections that I think we're gonna wanna spend time. Yeah. Done on. Which is the next? So, I mean, both these two are just I mean, all three of they're all huge?

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: They are.

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: And I'm

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: just mindful, mister chair, of of the time. I wanted to quick quick move move through the DOC recommendations. Sure. Was just to say that we had we have we heard in some places, we heard a lot of really awesome feedback from correctional officers, from partners, and from folks who work in probation and parole on the field side of things.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: And from our residents as well? From

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: some of our Did

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: we hear for going prisoners?

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: We did not speak directly to incarcerated individuals. Throughout this process, most of what we heard for feedback was around, again, those recommendations for system improvements. On the whole, we did hear on the whole, we did hear on occasion about some questions about where DOC should be organized, thinking about how we best support our incarcerated population and incarcerated individuals, we are recommending that DOC remain a part of the agency of human services. There's a lot, personally, DOC is not those facilities, which I think sometimes missed in the conversation. We do a lot of community work through probation and parole. Very clear. What we heard time and time again from folks who work in the field was how important their relationships with the Family Services Division and the Economic Services Division and the Health Department were, and they work in the same locations in the field offices as folks from other parts of the agency. So playing as a team is really helpful. But historically, there have been questions about where DOC should be organized, whether it should be a separate agency or a part of DPS.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: I think it's where it needs to I completely agree. I just think you need to provide more of your services to our residents

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: And we agree.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: To the department. And I'm disappointed because I think you heard from people and clients in all your other departments. And

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: And we did, and and I should say we did speak to there there are many groups that are active in this space. We did speak to the

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: But that's not speaking directly with the residents of Corrections. And it thrills me that you're but I think we desperately need more programs and services in corrections itself and for the residents. And I think we I'm thrilled to see that you have as as increased access to workforce development because it's just one of the key challenges. One thing that failed I mean, really failed at One

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: thing I should note You bet. And this I say this as someone who was came into this as an outsider as a with the state government, but with but it's new to the agency. One of the things that I think is an unsung amazing thing about DOC is how strong their process of the continuous improvement is and how strong their process of engagement with the population that they serve. And so in the situation where we are with with a large charge for this work, we tried to, as much as possible, build on the work that DOC was doing. So DOC has a lot of different feedback mechanisms for speaking to incarcerated individuals. And I have to say, like, I gave them a lot of credit for being extremely aware and clear eyed about the challenges that they face, things like that. So I appreciate your concern about that, senator. From our perspective, what we wanna do with this report is is support DOC in building on the work that they're already doing, if that makes sense. And mindful of the time, mister chair, I just would like to maybe end because we've gone a lot about next steps as we've gone throughout. So if we can maybe end our presentation a little bit early by just talking about the tier one operational opportunity that I just passed out the themes and just because this is really gonna be the meat of the work that the agency is gonna be doing over the next year when it comes to taking on the in house improvement work. I did mention some of our lower hanging fruit. Those are things that we'll organize out either to specific departments where that's relevant or take on the agency, and that'll kinda become part of the agency's continuous improvement work. But these are areas where we need to think carefully and strategically, do you know, decide what our priorities are moving forward, and and then also make some, you know, make some decisions about what we wanna tackle and and build out project management around those projects and make the resourcing decisions. So those the prioritization, we did a, as Jacqueline mentioned, we did a prioritization survey for both staff and the public, and we used the themes, basically asking people to tell us. So the what you see on your slide here, this is slide 17, are the top priorities of both the public and our staff in terms of what we should be doing. And these are broad themes, but we have a lot of things that sort of fit into that that are both granular and bigger challenges to work on. So this is what we are in the process of staffing out right now, making those decision making with the executive leadership team at the agency, which is the commissioners and our three executives at central office level, And then we'll be moving forward in sort of the the hard work of digging into this.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: No. And I I appreciate your work and all the hour you've done

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: on this. I I do have to say, like, if I had to say

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: the number one problem that we and recommendation for DOC would be improved morale. I mean, you have a huge staffing problem here. Yeah. And you have I mean, with the turnover rate is up, it's just one of the worst

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: Yeah.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: In state government, and it comes across. We see the workforce. What's the the report we get on workforce happening on on on the state of the the state of the workers? What's it called? Anyway, Beth is so proud of it. You are always this is a department that is always top of the list with this the worst turnover and the worst morale. Yes. That this is not a recommendation is very concerning.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: Well, again, that speaks to the work us trying to be additive and not duplicative. So DOC is to DOC is two things I'll say. DOC is incredibly aware of this challenge. Oh. DOC has also made meaningful progress, particularly on cutting the the vacancy rate and doing a ton of hiring and and onboarding, and we'll keep taking a hard look at every part of that process to make sure that they're supporting candidates as move through the process. The other thing too, right, right. And the other thing too to note and to channel a former commissioner of the department, this is a nationwide problem. Corrections. It's a big industry problem, Vermont is actually nationally doing quite well, and I I know that's full comfort for the for the challenge, but it is something that they I again, to give them a lot of credit, they do they work incredibly hard at this. I think they can they can be very proud of their efforts over the last several years to to address this. Doesn't mean there isn't more to be done, certainly. But I think they have done they they they're this is very much top of mind for them, certainly. And and and I think but I do think that is you know, that's something they think deeply about. Something that we will certainly support them in in every in every way that we can.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: Yeah. That's a we're gonna look at by results. I mean, I didn't think we'd go back to Here's and results are still

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: I not appreciate the feedback, senator, because we set out to design this in the way best we could to meet the data that we had. Many of the recommendations that are tier two and tier three will be helpful. It's on us now to work with DOC to figure out what will be useful to them and dovetail with, integrate with, and not destabilize the ongoing work that they're doing. Right? So that's that's where we are now, and it's at the base of the process. I know it's hard to come in and say, here's the final report that you asked us to give, but really, we're just still in progress. But we're trying to make sure that this report is not a report that just sits on a shelf.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: But that's kind of exciting, that it's prompted ongoing work.

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: I think it's incredibly exciting. I do too,

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: so I applaud you. Thanks.

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Thank you very much for your time today. Thank you. Jacqueline, who's on here.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: Jacqueline, nice to meet you. Thank you.

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Else have questions? Don't see Senator, if you don't see his hand up. Okay. So, committee, that will do it for

[Ted Fisher (Agency of Human Services)]: the day, and we will convene again. You know, it's funny, the floor is

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: at one. I never know how long,

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: because I

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: set the agenda up five or six days ahead of the calendar. And

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: so like today, we didn't have a particularly long session, and

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: we could have started probably on Saturday. So anyway, to one of the floors at one, I don't have anything set until 02:00. I'm hoping that

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: the floor won't go longer than forty five minutes. Anyway,