Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Good afternoon. Welcome in to the Senate Committee on Government Operations meeting on Thursday, April 2. First is a review of H-nine 35, And, also, we're gonna hear, from Lauren Glenn Davidian and Tom Leipold, from Vans, the Vermont Access Network and Community Radio. And Lauren is already seated, and good

[Tom Leypoldt]: to

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: see you again. Welcome in. I know you had longer floor sessions than we had anticipated last couple of weeks, so today was the opposite. We had a very short floor, and we actually could have probably started at 10:30. But, anyway, welcome in, and the floor is yours.

[Lauren-Glenn Davitian]: Thank you, chair, and thank you members of the committee. For the record, I'm Laurie Glen Davidian. I'm the public policy director, CCTV, Center for Media and Democracy, and I represent Vermont Access Network and the Vermont Community Radio Network. We are here to brief you, update you on our f y twenty seven budget request Yep. And to request that you include us in your set of recommendations to senate appropriations. This this request was at one point in house government operations included in h nine three five, and then house appropriations to get out of h nine three five and voted it forward not connected to that bill. So I don't have much comment on h nine three five other than to say that, and I can move on with the request itself.

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Can you give us an idea what the money was?

[Lauren-Glenn Davitian]: Yes. So that has not changed. The last year, Vermont Access Network received 1,350,000.00 under the Secretary of State's budget. This year, we were asked to join forces with the Vermont Community Radio Network. Vermont Access Network, I think as you know, that I will is 24 community media centers across the state. And the Vermont Community Radio Network is nine of 10 low power radio stations that operate in the state. Three or four of those which operate in conjunction with band members. We agreed and created a partnership, and so the FY '27 request under the secretary of state's office is for $1,890,000 this year. 90,000 of that is for community radio, which has, of all its members, really one paid staff person in GDR and GTH. They're volunteer run. So the 90,000 is to cover some salaries and equipment for those radio stations. And the 1,800,000.0 is for the 24 community media centers to address the decline in cable revenue, which this year is about 6%. The governor recommended 1,350,000.00 in his budget. The house in there, we feel very generously included an additional 540,000 for the full 1.89 request, and that's voted out of the house. So the governors had 1.3? Yeah, 1.35. So the additional 540,000 is what we were working on outside on. And ultimately, what happened is that bands one point eight was voted to be part of the the regular budget.

[Tom Leypoldt]: Right.

[Lauren-Glenn Davitian]: And then 90,000 for radio is a one time budget centro. So I'm here to just give you some of the highlights of why this is a good investment and what we're doing with the funds.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: Sorry. Before we get to that, because I'm all ears on that, you said it was separated out from the budget and it's traveling separately. What vehicle was it traveling to?

[Lauren-Glenn Davitian]: The 90,000 is included in the one time budget and I don't know what they call it. So, heart of the budget? Heart of the budget. Can answer. Amy could clarify.

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Do you mind if you

[Amy Shollenberger]: Go ahead. Amy Schulberger, I represent Vans. It's all in the big bill. It happened in ninethirty five, but probes took it out of ninethirty five and put it in the big bill. April in base, 90,100. So it's in the budget. Got it, so it's also in the budget? It's in the House budget, yes. Got it.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: So it's in the Senate. Okay, great. Got it. So the way you described it, it sounded like it had gone in from some separate vehicle. So, the describer. Thank you

[Lauren-Glenn Davitian]: for using the terms of our A and A. The base budget is the 1.8 and the 90 is one time up. Yes, so, as you know, we represent 24 community media centers. And What's interesting about these media centers is that we cover 94 and the radio stations. We cover 94% of the state's population in terms of reaching them for communication services. Again, to restate, we provide live hybrid meeting coverage. This was a pivot that we made during COVID and continue to provide this to at least 70% of the cities and towns of the state. We provide coverage of local news, weather, and emergency response, primarily, we've asked our radio colleagues, election forms, and election results. We had a great town meeting here where we really covered the entire state and the town meetings that happened and the candidates and the ballot items that were voted on. We provide media education and hands on skills for volunteers. In fact, it was cheese day today, and the young person who was wheeling out the cheese into the cafeteria, Nick, I took his picture with the cheese and he said, Oh, saw my phone. He said, CCTV, I've been an intern there for three years. And so that was great. I had not in that office that much, so I didn't know that. It was great. I haven't talked about how much it was meant to him. He's done a lot of work covering homeless encampments and really going where no other media outlets really are deep diving. Well, very few. So, a brave person with gaining a lot of skills once he's done here and he will return to do that work. And we also provide extensive preservation of local video and radio archives. I think as I've mentioned before in this room, CCTV alone has 50,000 artifacts dating back to the babies that we're almost finished digitizing. Those are made available to the public for research, for opposition researchers come when somebody's running for president. That's been very common. Well, Howard Lehnen, Bernie Sanders. And then we have just records of all these meetings that are taking place, these community events. It's just quite remarkable to see the scope of what we've saved in catalog just at CCTV. So there's 24 centers that are engaged in this, I think it's a very important community function. As I get older and I look back, people find, wow, it's good to have these video records. So together, the PEG centers, the access management organizations, we're called, operate 80 plus channels and dozens of online outlets. Together, we produce fifteen thousand hours in a year of local television, and our radio colleagues produce about twenty thousand hours of local MA programming. And all of our programming is available on the air and online all the time. The challenges that we face, as I mentioned, is a decline in our traditional revenue sources, which is cable TV. People are We use the expression cut the cord, but it's really a misnomer because people aren't cutting the cord, they're just changing the cord. So they're moving from cable to a la carte services. As you all know, we all have a variety of services that have no public benefit attached to it, unlike cable TV, which has this 5% cable franchise fee set aside for public purposes, which has been our primary revenue source since the 1980s. Of course, I don't need to mention to you the increase in expenses that we're looking at is on the order of, of course, the cost of living, but probably more in the order of eight percent a year. We've been losing revenue and our expenses have been increasing. The budget gap that we face coming up next year, coming up this year, it's on the order of $2,500,000 Next year, will be on the order of $3,000,000 and we are not asking the legislature to cover that entire gap. We have other revenue sources that we are developing. Bays for service, sponsorships, underwriting, we've gotten quite creative in that way. We'll be able to speak also to some of that. I wanted to just also underscore that across the state, there are these marvelous case studies I just wanted to highlight. In Brownellboro, which is celebrating fifty years of public access television, 44 community producers are active. They produced 1,300 programs last year and 250,000 YouTube views. With CCTV, we have about a half a million online viewers. We cover more than 500 municipal And as I mentioned, we have this vast archive of 53,000 programs based on it. GNAT, which is in Bennington, produced almost a thousand programs, and they have 300,000 online video views. So people are watching these programs, and not only are they watching, but they're making, and they're becoming involved in the critical diversity work that is necessary during this time more than ever. In Northwest Access TV, which is one of our rock stars in terms of sporting events, they produce more than 1,000 local programs, and they have about 160,000 online views. Challenges. Legislative support helps Vermonters to overcome the fact that we have fewer local media options for Vermonters. Emergent times require us to get words out quickly to our communities ranging from weather, government threats to our neighbors. There's a rapid decline in cable TV, rising business expenses, including health care and labor, labor, capital costs, music licensing, and then the rise of artificial intelligence generated news and information, which makes it harder for people to know what is reliable and true, and we are clearly reliable and truth. In short, our request will help us to add to local and radio TV's impact as providers of local meetings, news, interviews, address the decline in legacy cable TV revenue, help us meet the cost of doing business, and ensure that community media can remain a free and accessible outlet for Vermonters to get their communities and local community coverage. At just $3 per Vermonter reached by our services, we believe this is an investment that the state can be. Thank you for your consideration of our FY twenty seven budget request. 1,890,000.

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Does anyone have a question, senator White?

[Senator Rebecca “Becca” White]: Well, I don't really have any questions, but I'm very supportive of fully funding, and I hope we can include it in our appropriations letter. My understanding of the fee the change to go on to streaming services, my understanding is that's not a live bill at this point. I don't know if that's a correct way to characterize it. I do hope we can consider it in the future though, because streaming services are billion dollar companies at this point. So if they're not able to eat a little bit of that, I think it's unlikely we would see a subscription fee change for the average Vermonter because to drill down to the maybe 200 plus thousand people who maybe use any individual streaming service in our state would be very hard. So I expect they would probably just eat that cost, but they would argue they would not. So I'm very supportive of that as well. And I just wanna note, Jam, amazing. And so, so critical for our community and, like, shared memory. And they do podcasts now. They do digital online content that's, like, for your phone, for mobile, which is, a whole another area. Summer camp. They do summer they do everything, and we're very grateful for them. On top of that, we have Gannett, if I'm saying it We have Gannett. We have Gannett. We got the Woodstock one. We got in Windsor. Windsor on air. Got

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: Chemo? We got Bokema. Sappa, Windsor on air, Woodstock channel eight, and Jan.

[Lauren-Glenn Davitian]: And g GNAT. GNAT. Where is that? At Chester. Yeah. That's not our district.

[Senator Rebecca “Becca” White]: Okay. Well, I've done programs with them before, so they

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: They have, but it's not Windsor District.

[Senator Rebecca “Becca” White]: I think they serve West.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: So we have five in Windsor District alone,

[Lauren-Glenn Davitian]: which funny dovetail on Rebecca's.

[Senator Rebecca “Becca” White]: Yes. That was my comment.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: We are incredibly supportive of this. I also think as we look going forward, I would hope as you look at your sustainability that you look at some regionalization and some combining of forces. I'm not sure that we as your revenue shrink until we find another revenue source that's sustainable, It might make some sense because some of these stations are very small and within driving distance of each other, not very far. It might make some sense to regionalize and have a stronger single entity than five individual ones in one category.

[Lauren-Glenn Davitian]: So I think some of that, I think you made a good point, we're always looking at that. When we had this study done a few years ago, that was one of the key pieces of the study. There is a lot of cooperation across the access management organizations. We pull resources, for example, for involving and. And then you'll find, I think, Windsor on air in Woodstock are run by the same person. Yes.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: She's a well I mean, there are some aspects of the run back, Paula, but then but they're also Yeah.

[Lauren-Glenn Davitian]: And so there's an economy of there's economy of scale there in terms of having a coordinated leadership. I know that Patrick has worked pretty hard with him from O'Keehov to He was here yesterday. Yeah. That's right. Out of the chapel was sitting in the window. To rally the forces and to bring purchasing discussions together and sharing staff together. So I think regionally, we definitely are looking at that all the time. And then I think to your point about a revenue source, we're very sensitive to the fact that there is a limited amount of money that the legislature is able to allocate. The times are difficult and that we are currently not connected to a revenue source. And so we are seriously looking at that for next year. And that there are some possible options with excise tax on streaming. It might generate roughly $8,000,000 a year, which we can use part and then save. So I think that that's something we really seriously just to present to you. So we're working mindful of this really the economic scenario. And I just don't

[Senator Rebecca “Becca” White]: see them I just don't see them if it's, like, $15 a month for Netflix and we put it on it, I don't see them going and then raising individually Vermonters. Like, I

[Lauren-Glenn Davitian]: it's not like And then fast access, I

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: think, would be he's okay. But I I think what I think what both Rebecca and I and probably all the rest of us want to voice is how important these local access stations are into our communities.

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Services. About that. No. You might have to be a better salesperson than I think the excise tax.

[Senator Rebecca “Becca” White]: Yeah. Maybe easiest case is, like, the way we put it.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: We'll see. He'll be discussed next year.

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Okay. Can I get Tom up? So, joining us from Rutland is Tom Lapole, who runs PEG TV, which is in my district. And, Tom knows I fully support what he does seven days a week and have taken advantage of that to some degree. Welcome, Tom.

[Tom Leypoldt]: Thank you. Thank you, Senator Collamore. I won't take up too much time. I just want to say we very much appreciate your support here in Rutland. And I echo everything that Lauren Glenn just said. Just a small snippet of one of the big things we've done recently is a local town meeting recovered live. And we had the results first, essentially. And other media uses us for a hub. Vermont Public was here. WCAX took our information and read it on the air and gave us credit. They actually said these numbers are from PEG TV in Rutland. So that alone is invaluable. We also do the Rutland City Hall We Parade live every year, which is essentially our most watched event. We get feedback from around the world because we stream that live. We also put all of our content out for free on YouTube and on our website. Right now, we're in a position where in a few months, our YouTube channel is going to reach a million views. So that's pretty substantial. And we do. We cover the local select board meetings. We cover the Rutland City Board of Alden meeting live. We cover the Rutland City School Board meeting live. We have some field producers that cover sports on a regular basis. They go all around the county. We try to get different mixes of schools in there. I've been here for It'll be thirty one years in May, and I can't stress enough how crucial this organization is to our community as far as unedited content and governmental information reaching the community for free. We are losing, like Loren Glenn said, we are losing between 810% of our cable revenue every quarter, which is very substantial. And our cost, like everyone else, is going up. So I would like to see the funding model change. Think that is ultimately what needs to happen. We truly appreciate your support in the meantime until we can get over this hurdle.

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Any questions for Tom?

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: Okay.

[Lauren-Glenn Davitian]: Thank you, Tom.

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Thank you. And

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: just have a question. Tom, what does PEG stand for?

[Tom Leypoldt]: Well, back in the early days, my executive director at the time, when we were looking for a web domain name, he chose PEG TV, which is the acronym for public education and government television. It's basically the

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: name of all

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: I figured it was public, but education and government.

[Tom Leypoldt]: So she chose that and we just kept it as a thing, even though it represents everybody, really, the PEG stations, but we kind of adopted it.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: How many public access stations do you have in Rutland County?

[Tom Leypoldt]: We have one. We encompass all three of the letters. I have a government channel, a public channel, and an education channel. So we basically serve Greater Rutland County. There are a few small towns that don't designate us as their their access provider but we'll we still do what we can for them when they need us.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: That is it's great. Well, it's wonderful to watch this network evolve. It's just been really exciting to see. And I wish you well on finding a revenue source. We've been trying to find a revenue source for housing as well. And it's a tough time. I don't think the excise tax is going to be easy. I didn't mean to suggest that, but that is a good spot to start. Would be great to obviously get some of those ways and meanings involved in your work as you look at the sustainability because all of them love their access network stations and I'm

[Lauren-Glenn Davitian]: sure they'd be willing to help figure out possible revenues. Thank you. Rutland is the largest of our access management organizations in the state. Oh, is that? Yeah. Geographically, vast. You're vast, Tom. Right. How many employees, Tom, do you have?

[Tom Leypoldt]: I have nine. I have five on the inside and four field producers that go out and cover meetings, games, special events, which we are very active on a regular basis. If you watched all of our content that we've been putting on YouTube since 2009, it would take you ten years almost to watch all of it. So we're very, very active down here.

[Lauren-Glenn Davitian]: Yeah. That's that's it's very exciting.

[Tom Leypoldt]: Yeah.

[Lauren-Glenn Davitian]: And what I mean, that's true all over. So, I mean, it's yeah. You may yeah.

[Senator Alison Clarkson]: Because that hurts all moment. Jam or

[Lauren-Glenn Davitian]: That's true. Well, thank you, Rutland.

[Senator Rebecca “Becca” White]: Yeah. I won a jam award this year. Did you?

[Lauren-Glenn Davitian]: Yeah. So

[Senator Rebecca “Becca” White]: Woah. But Congratulations. Major did win best handshake. So that

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: was Congratulations.

[Lauren-Glenn Davitian]: Congratulations. And thank you very much, Trevor.

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: You're very welcome. Committee. Thanks for joining us.

[Lauren-Glenn Davitian]: Thank Okay.

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Next up is the OPR bill, $8.05 88, and we're expecting, Jennifer Cohen and Lauren Hembert to join us. We had a request from someone representing the pharmacies to speak about possibly amending the bill, but that person, I don't think, is gonna be with us today. But we can have more testimony to unlock the office of the secretary of state as we move forward on this bill. And then I'm still puzzled with this, but we're gonna hear from Chris Ford, a labor rep from the United Federation of Police Officers. If you'll recall yesterday, we took testimony from the Randolph Police Department about moving from group f to group g. Yeah. Chris is asking us to move them from group f to group c. And yet yesterday, in direct testimony, we had the police chief and the select board member make it pretty obvious they didn't want group c because there's a difference in retirement age. Anyway, he's gonna come in, but I'm not inclined to go along with that. I think we made our decision the most right yesterday of it. And I think it would be a fiscal note. Well, maybe not. I know. We're talking five people, aren't we?

[Lauren-Glenn Davitian]: Three. Three.

[Senator Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Why don't we take a ten minute break, and we'll be back hopefully with both Jennifer and Lauren from the OPR field and