Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Okay. So We we are live. We are live and ready to go again. So it is still January 14, and we are continuing our conversation directions. And we have with us Steve Howard, who's the executive director of Vermont State Employees Association.

[Steve Howard (Executive Director, Vermont State Employees’ Association)]: Thank you, Madam Chair.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Thank you. And I think the only person you haven't met yet.

[Steve Howard (Executive Director, Vermont State Employees’ Association)]: John Benson. Nice

[Russ Ingalls (Member)]: to meet

[John Benson (Member)]: you. Welcome.

[Russ Ingalls (Member)]: Thank

[Steve Howard (Executive Director, Vermont State Employees’ Association)]: you, members of the committee. I appreciate the opportunity to testify.

[Russ Ingalls (Member)]: Did you have a question already? I did. I think senator Plunkett and I have the same question. So, what do you think of the last presentation? What what's your what's your take on that? Is it valuable to you? Is it what you can use? Or sorry, if I only answered the question.

[Steve Howard (Executive Director, Vermont State Employees’ Association)]: Yeah. No. I think it is very valuable, and it's a study that we quote quite often in making the case some case that will make this testimony. I would say a little earlier that well, first of all, think the 94% in Springfield, the number of folks who say we don't have enough staff to adequately run the facility is accurate. My guess is it would be higher in Newport where their staffing is even worse, closer to a 100%, I would bet, in Newport. And in different facilities one of the things interesting, I had a conversation with about this. So my thirteen years of working with BSEA and spending a significant amount of time in correctional facilities, what's clear to me is that we don't have a system of correctional facilities. Facilities. We have six different individual correctional facilities. And if you try to run it as a system, which sometimes central office does, you miss the nuances in the culture, in the practice, in how they perceive things. You know, in a couple of other facilities, you might have a different response. Right now, I think Marble Valley, their staffing is pretty, is pretty much on track. The issue with Marble Valley is they have an honors unit that's somewhat controversial. It's not working as well there as it has in other facilities, at least according to the correctional officers that I've spoken to. And incidentally, you're getting me right off of a pretty much six month stakeout of all the correctional work sites. We had an election, which we thankfully won, but it required a lot of time in the correctional facilities and in the PP offices across the state for the last six months just listening to talk to correctional officers. So I think PRINT is a good

[Russ Ingalls (Member)]: program. I think it's Where's the value come from, Steve? Where's the help us understand that. We probably already have our own ideas about where it is, but where's the where's the value to it?

[Steve Howard (Executive Director, Vermont State Employees’ Association)]: The value of this other

[Russ Ingalls (Member)]: Other other research.

[Steve Howard (Executive Director, Vermont State Employees’ Association)]: I think what's key, what comes across to me and this is the same I'm gonna give you the same testimony I gave yesterday in house. We wanna be a little bit more special. Yeah. It's the same. So the whole ballgame is staff, and it's it's because all of the the reforms that folks have tried to implement and all of the stuff that that is in the print report that needs to be implemented in order to have people feel more prepared, All of that is dependent on having safe staffing in the corrections facilities. And the reason for that, and we have a slide on this as well, is that when there isn't enough staff, the facilities go into either partial lockdown or full lockdown, which means there's no education. There's no wreck. Yep. There's no nothing. People are just sitting in their cells, and that happens quite frequently because of staffing. And so we don't have enough resources to run the facility. We don't have enough resources to adequately prepare people. I don't know, so Newport's an example, caseworkers in Newport, because staffing are all required to work one day at a security post. So that's a one day out of their week that they're not planning for reentry, they're not doing any of the work they were originally hired to do because we don't have enough people to secure the facility. I think that's the what I've been trying to get across the post is whether care either care about the the staff and and that's your primary concern or you care about the incarcerated and that's your primary concern, both all of that is dependent on having enough sex. I'm not surprised to see the increase from 2024 to 2026. Two things are true that I think had a very big impact. One was a negotiated change in overtime category for the for the c o one, c o twos, which some of of the things say say controversial. The second is the end of double time. And if you take when we took we lost double time for coming in on your day off, or if you were a non security if you're in a non security position or in field, if you had the double time incentive, we had a flood of people coming in. The reason why people leave and the staff get out of their staff facilities is because we are running sixteen hour shift, sixteen hour shift, sixteen hour shift, and between the physical exhaustion and the physical impact on people and the family pressure from folks' families, they quit. And we have no problem hiring people the party. We have a huge problem, I think Commissioner, I do not agree on this. Commissioner, before we have a huge problem with the team. We can't keep them at the facility. So I think we have to get those sixteen hour shifts under control, and there's a couple of ideas that we have suggested. One, if we can't, we're not going to ask the legislature to be involved in any of this, This is a it's an issue of collective bargaining. We can't ask the legislature and the administration to get anywhere or anything that was a subject to bargaining. We aren't we haven't started bargaining yet with corrections. But I've said repeatedly to the commissioner, I would say to me, every facility I've met in, double time worked. Double time worked. It cost money, but it did get the overtime down so that we could create a critical mass, keep the overtime keep the sixteen hour shifts to a minimum so people stay, so we could keep hiring people to get to a safe staffing level. And it's it's, you know, it's kind of a tough and your challenge, but it's one of the things that we have to focus on. The job itself is, in and of itself, is a difficult job. The statistics bear that out. The life expectancy of a correctional officer is 59 years old. The rest of us will live to like 72 or maybe 77, I think it is.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Is that a national number?

[Steve Howard (Executive Director, Vermont State Employees’ Association)]: Yes, that's a national number. The research for that was done at Southern Illinois University. They have much higher rates of PTSD. They have PTSD rates that are sometimes higher than those of veterans with trabecorac and the VNSF. So getting away from the facility, getting away from the V and P office, and being able to have a life is really crucial. One of the big challenges is the TV ads ran incessantly, we all saw, which corrections promised the work life balance under a schedule called two two three that never materialized. It did a little bit slightly in Saint John's Prairie, but they're the exception to the rule. But even there, if you've I've been in a million labor management meetings there, the superintendent will tell you, they are one or two med trips away from having to call people in off their off their from their day off to come cover post at that facility. It's worked best there. It hasn't worked in other places. It probably could have worked if we had enough people. And maybe someday we'll get to that point where we'll have enough people, and then it would really be mean, I understand what correction is trying to do. It's like the chicken and the egg. They were trying to impose a schedule for which there weren't enough people available to work in hopes that it would attract enough people and maintain enough people so that they would balance out. And that just never happened. Were counting people on the schedule, people whose names are on schedule, but who are not available to work. Right? People take over the needs of duty. They're at the academy. They're at military. There are military orders. Be it workers' comp. This is a very physical job. And then just to doom the the doom the schedule from the start. So I mean, that's kind of where we that to me, this is the number one issue facing corrections that policymakers can focus on. The staffing the staffing crisis is the number one issue. It is the I don't wanna say it's the only issue, but it's like, if you wanna solve 10 other issues, solve this one first. So we just I wanna take a sort of a different approach than I usually take. We talked a little bit yesterday with the other body with how our members view the role of the legislature and the role of the committees of jurisdiction in this process. We believe that you have the power and the weight of oversight and that your job is to hold the executive branch accountable. It is our job to represent to you and to the executive branch what our members are telling us is happening in real time in their work experience, I mean, in the facilities where they're working. And and it's you know, as I said before, it's not just a concern for us, it's a concern for the incarcerated population getting the services that they need. But it's also part of our public. Like, we've heard a lot of discussion of late about public safety. We have a special prosecutor that's working in Chinook County, we've got state police that are walking the beat on Church Street, we've got a new judge that's been called in for those offenders who have multiple cases before the courts. All great stuff. The provision that we're missing in that plan, there's two things from this. One is we don't have correctional officers so that when those folks are either held without bail, held with bail, or are convicted, we don't have enough correctional officers to adequately staff the correctional facilities. So that's a major point of the public safety paradigm that we have to address. The victim advocates and the admin staff in the County State Attorney's Office we represent will tell you that the judicial staff at the courthouse had been overrun with work because nobody provided them with additional resources. And they're holding it together, but it's we gotta if we really wanna do it, we gotta do it. We gotta adequately fund it, and we gotta put new people in more people in to do it. And corrections is a major major part of that. We would ask this committee, as we ask the committee of jurisdiction across the hall, across the building, and also the government operations committee across the hall to hold weekly hearings, weekly meetings on this subject, to require regular in-depth data from the administration, and to use the resource of the JFO to give you impartial analysis of the numbers. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. One of the things we would suggest, I've done this in some cases where I can get this information, every day I look at the schedule. I look at how much yellow is on the schedule, and that tells me how many people have been called in on their day off, look at how many posts have been collapsed because they didn't have correctional officers for that those posts. I look at how many people were called in early or agreed to stay late. And I think what would be really helpful for this committee is to get those schedules, get JFO to analyze those schedule schedules on some kind of regular pattern, weekly, biweekly, and report to you what the numbers look like across across the six facilities. I think that would tell you and I'll just be honest. I mean, we have a new commissioner, and we hope it's a new day, and our members are excited that he has a law enforcement background. We're excited about his his beginning because we saw him stand up for his frontline law enforcement officers when the politicians in Burlington were giving him a problem. He stood his ground. We need him to do that here and really encourage the governor to make the kind of commitment and investment in public safety with corrections involved in that that we haven't seen today. So the weekly hearings will help keep the pressure on the administration to keep this issue at the forefront. It will keep the press informed about what's happening, and we know the board of the public knows about it, the board the governor's office tends to care about it. And so and and not just this governor, but any governor, any party. So we would encourage that that as well. Who should be in these hearings? We would ask you to bring in the Secretary of Administration, Secretary of Human Services, the Commissioner of DHR, and the Commissioner of Corrections, and you can, single week, ask them what they did that week before to solve this affid crisis. And just keep, while you're here, as much pressure on them as possible, knowing that they're gonna be asked to come in the week after and the week after and the week after, that this issue cannot get swept on the rug, and it has to rise to a high level. We can't just dismiss this as it's the it's corrections department's problem. You know, this is something that's gotta have the secretary administration, the secretary of human services. If we're gonna have this agency in the in this department in the agency of human services, we have to hear more from the secretary. We almost never hear her talk about directions. I've only met her a few times, a perfectly nice person, very impressive person, and but we just haven't seen that this is a department that's a priority in the agency. It leaves a lot of our members believing that this should be a department that's in the Department of Public Safety. They because they feel like they're they're sort of forgotten in the mass of the department the agency giving services. And so we would ask you to consider doing that. We'd ask you to look at other states, to really look at the 50 states, look what's going on in those states, what are they doing there, where are the states that have the best employee numbers and the best employee retention, what are they doing differently that we could put on the table here? You can't necessarily do it, it's an executive function, but you certainly can shine a light on it, and you certainly can bring pressure to the administration to consider some of the things that have worked in other states. We have seen things like hiring incentives, retention incentives that are much bigger than we've ever considered here. In particular, places like the Senators District where the pool of available people is much smaller, you have all sorts of different issues. Chitney County, have a much larger pool, but so many other options for employment in Essex or Leeds and around the Newport facility, much smaller pool, fewer options for employment. Although there are some and people are taking them because they don't require the sixteen hour shifts. They're required of very difficult, physically demanding, dangerous work that Gresh Ponsor faces. We'd also ask you that you invite the DSA to come in with the administration at those weekly meetings so that we can include the perspective that we hear. You can say where our members agree or disagree with what the administration's testified. You've done that periodically before. We'd like to see that on a weekly basis. It's such a serious issue from a public safety standpoint, but also from a criminal justice reform standpoint. We want that forty percent retention recidivism rate to come down. We've gotta prepare people better. I think the study shows that. It starts with the correctional staff. What our members tell you is that you can go to the six week academy and you can go through that training, but until you've been a correctional officer and you've been there long enough to know how to do the job in really trying circumstances, you really don't know how to do the job. You have to do the work in order to know work. Some people have suggested that maybe, some of our members have suggested to me that maybe we rethink the academy and the length of the academy, and maybe we should have more on the job training, people being deployed in the facility they're gonna work in, and working side by side with seasoned correctional officers to see what it's really like, less of an academic approach. Maybe continue some of the training that's happening at the academy, you know, at the facility so that they can also work. It would also get people on the schedule faster and try to bring some of that over time. Yeah.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So just a question. So is that something that or I guess the corrections or department would have to do that? That's Yeah. What think they would have to do

[Steve Howard (Executive Director, Vermont State Employees’ Association)]: They would have to do that. So we also provided the Joint Justice Oversight Committee, I think it was 2024, a list of data points that we think would be useful to the committee to request and to get updates on. And I don't think it has been I don't think the committee actually did follow through on it because it's sort of the end of the year before the session started. But, you know, what was the c o one, c o two turnover rate? And we were suggesting at least the last five or six years because that's when the staffing crisis has been forced. What is the c o one, c o two turnover rate separated by job class? What's the vacancy rate separated by job class? How many shifts did workers did the correctional workers have to work in excess of twelve hours? How many correctional officers were called in on their day off because of lack of staff, how many people volunteered to come in on their day off, given the lack of staff. Just to know, this is sort of important for people, you wouldn't know this unless you talk to a correctional officer, but our members volunteer often for overtime because they see the schedule, they know they're gonna be ordered in. And if you volunteer, you get to pick your post. If you're ordered in, you go with Italian. So in order to get the post they want, they'll often volunteer. So what you may hear from management is say, Oh, don't have that big a problem because all these people are volunteering.

[Russ Ingalls (Member)]: I can know if they I can I gotta just stop you a little bit? I apologize. I do. I asked you one time before, probably twice I've asked you, is there anything good that the administration's ever done? And you've said no, you couldn't tell anything. But when I talk to my people at the facility, which 95% of them vote for me, they love their job, they love it. Oh yeah. They love being in there, they love the overtime, they love the money. I've got a good friend of mine, Brad Urie, just retired after twenty five years. I've got another guy retired after twenty years. I've got another guy retired after twenty five years. These were people who had nothing in their lives. Were builders, they were laborers, they were whatever, and they worked there now, and now they have a retirement, and they have a pension, and all of that stuff. So to be fair, I'm just being honest, it's hard to sit here and hear where my friends have really spoke well and be proud about where they work to hear you tear it down. It's very troubling at times, Steve. It really, really is. Because I don't hear the same things that you're trying to tell us. Sure. And I don't.

[Steve Howard (Executive Director, Vermont State Employees’ Association)]: Yeah. I mean, I I I think it's important. First of all, our members are very proud of the work that they do. They are important parts of the public safety infrastructure. That's absolutely true. You saw the statistics at at Springfield, 94% say in the survey, not enough resources. So what has the administration done that was good? So Jim Baker was was the commissioner during COVID. We we worked with him hand in hand and negotiated a side letter agreement that brought the overtime down to almost his successor walked away from that agreement in three months, and the overtime

[Russ Ingalls (Member)]: Well, just be honest about that time as well. There's less people going to prison. There's less people in the prison. There was less need for the overtime. There was less people moving around. They only had to be at one place or another, so it was a different time. And you also have other things available to you. You can take a 150 prisoners right now, people who did not that weren't from Vermont, aren't from Vermont, and if they're independent of Vermont, you can ship them to the Mississippi. So you could you, by yourself, could lower the amount of pressure that's in these prisons by saying by advocating for that. And I get why you don't wanna do that because that takes works away from your members. So you can't have it both ways sometimes. You really, really can't. I mean and and, again, 91 $97,000 per prisoner here, think, is the number maybe it's up over a 100 now versus $18,000 in Mississippi. It would be a lot better for the state to ship them down there, especially the people that weren't from Vermont that that offended here and don't have any ties to Vermont. And we don't really have any obligations to those people. So, you know, it's just again, it's it's it's it's a little tough sometimes.

[Steve Howard (Executive Director, Vermont State Employees’ Association)]: Yeah. I think our our opposition to private prisons isn't based on demand in the facilities. It's it's based on our analysis that the private prison industry is more immoral and corrupt and not doesn't live up to the values of Vermonters.

[Russ Ingalls (Member)]: If they're not from Vermont, what's it matter to us?

[Steve Howard (Executive Director, Vermont State Employees’ Association)]: Well, I mean, that's a broader question, I think, beyond something I can answer, but I think it's important that you're held to account in the state where you in a place where you can do damage, where you have made you've caused harm for the community. That's a different discussion that the SCA is not really has really delved into, but our belief in the time during COVID, there was an effort to release many people. As you may recall, the job responsibilities during the COVID pandemic grew substantially, and our members were outfitted in garbage bags and told to go into the COVID facilities without proper PPE, and the union fought for proper PPE. Now that wasn't necessarily the administration's fault. The whole nation was found unprepared for this pandemic, and the leadership at the time was slow to respond nationally, not just in Vermont. But if I think the key thing that I hear there's two sort of two things that I hear from our members, pretty consistent, and I hear from them a lot in Newport. Really, I spent a lot of time in Newport. I was just out there last week sitting in the break room. We aren't paying our correctional officers enough as you compare it to New England and as you compare it to the nation. We're not we're below where we need to be. We have to change the culture of the department and how management interacts with with folks in facilities. There is, as I think I've said in this committee before, a pretty pronounced disaffection with central office from the management in central office. Not the front line said, I'm central office, but there's a feeling you saw in the earlier print reports, they asked the question, Does the management understand my job? No. Does the management insult me? No. Seeing numbers, key, 90%. And so what we hear from our members is that decision they call central office the Crystal Palace because policies come out one and the other and the other, it's made absolutely no sense to people working on the front lines and nobody bothered to ask them about it. And with that, is it in the field and in the facilities or Pretty much. Pretty consistent. So one of the things that we've suggested, going back to commissioner Bernard, which goes back several years, is that the in a time when we had a crisis as pronounced as like the one we had in Newport and in other facilities, and you see it in Springfield, is that managers who have been trained in taxpayers, taxpayer spenders, they've gone through the academy, they've worked in facilities, and now they're working in central office. We have asked commissioner, a commissioner, a commissioner to assign those managers to the hotspots and not just in the facilities, but in the field. So one of the things happening in the field is, in in addition to the work supervising folks in the communities, when there is hospital coverage, somebody has gone to the hospital, there has to be a corrections presence in the hospital. And for a long time, it was just being picked up by our probation and parole offices, in addition to everything else they had to do supervising people in the community. And when they weren't in the hospital, they were on standby, which means they can't they had to move in an hour of reporting to their to the hospital. They cannot drink. They can't do anything. They have to be ready to work. They're paid a little bit for work. They had a fifth of their salary to be paid. Not enough to really break away from corrections for at least a day or two and replay your life event. So we could have managers do that in addition to probation. The point would be to say, we're all in this together. All means all. And the practical piece of that is relationships will be built, relationships will be repaired. Managers could see what the practical application of their policies really is on the front lines. Some of that divide that exists could be shrunk. I've advocated for it not just as a means of trying to stabilize the schedule, but as an opportunity for managers to learn how things are really working in the real world outside of outside of what what they see in central office. A lot of times and this commissioner, you know, I've run into him in a few facilities since he started. But a lot of times what you see with the leadership of the department is there's a dog and pony show organized. You know that legislators are coming or you know that the commissioner's coming, and so they clean everything up and they get everything organized, but you only see what they want you to see. And often you see Nobody talks to the frontline folks. They see them come in, go through, they see them talk to the management, they see them leave. It's They call it a dog and pony show, like, sort of set up for people. They don't see no real opinion. So just to get back to some of the data that I think really would be helpful to you on recruitment, looking at quarterly and annual recruitment numbers. We recruit a ton of people. It's like $10.15000 of hops, send them through the academy. What do the numbers look like in terms of retention? That's a lot of money to train somebody, give them the, put all that money into them, and have them not even make it the first year of service at the facility. How many people completed their probationary period? How many people lasted one year, two years, five years? Like really important metrics to look at. In the PNP area, probation and parole, how many people, what's the quarterly and annual number of hours people were on call, either for the facility or for hospital coverage? How many, what's the quarterly annual numbers of hospital coverage call that's performed by T and P officers? So how many were called in from their days off and how many were called in during this workday? I think those are pretty important metrics to look at. And then getting out of the services to the offenders. How many times has a facility been locked down, full lockdown, partial lockdown? How many times have educational opportunities been canceled? How many times have recreational opportunities been canceled? How many times have a correctional officer not been able to get a bath over, which does happen? And then to look back again for a five or six year period.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Now isn't that something you can do with PRIN? Get those

[Steve Howard (Executive Director, Vermont State Employees’ Association)]: Could that? Could the PRIN

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: committee Oh, the process, yeah, or just a committee.

[Steve Howard (Executive Director, Vermont State Employees’ Association)]: They could. I mean, it I mean, you guys are committee jurisdiction and with oversight responsibility could request it directly from the department. And our suggestion is that a lot of it go to JFO and have them analyze it. I mean, especially the schedules so that you can see the actual schedules. So what often happens is, at least has happened in recent years, administration will come in and testify on staffing numbers and say, Oh, isn't it great? And often they're including all the staff in the facility and the staff, you know, not the CO1 classification or the CO2 classification, just they include all, anybody. And we've had real time, our members say, What they just said about the staffing number in this particular facility isn't what I see on the schedule here. So there's a disconnect between what they're reporting to you and what was on the schedule. That's why I thought, oh, it'd really be helpful if you got the schedules from each facility, JFO analyzed it, showed you what the they know reported to you what what they tell you. We think if as as to the extent that exit interviews exist from c o one, c o twos in particular, all maybe all classes, but at those particular, we'd ask that you to get get ahold of those anonymized exit interviews and see what people say about why they're leaving, whether they're previous you know, people have already left or people who have are just recently leaving. I think that's an important know, it's a lot of taxpayer funds being spent on training people for this work, and it is an important part of the public safety configuration that the public is demanding more of. It seems like that, getting into this issue, doing a deep dive into this issue is something that would be worthwhile on behalf of the taxpayers. Let's talk about already those managers being assigned. So we see this as a real opportunity. We think we have a chance to work. We don't know if if and I guess the commissioner is an interim commissioner. We don't know if he's gonna be appointed permanently, if he is. You know, we don't work as basically, what BSEA's position is is that we will work with anybody who is willing to help us solve this now six year long stabbing crisis. Good. This has been I started thirteen years ago at BSEA. When I started, the biggest complaint was we had too many people lined up for the correct officers. Now we have, please help with this over time. Please do something. I'm desperate, I'm desperate, I'm desperate. And that's in all six facilities. It's a little bit less in some of the, you hear a little bit less in some of the smaller facilities, but the bigger facilities are really Newport, Springfield, other hot hot spots for for not having enough people to have to adequately staff. And safe reading is the keyword. Safely staff for facilities. The other thing I think is really important. Correctional officers don't just keep other correctional officers safe. They keep other offenders safe. They keep the offenders safe. The vulnerable offenders are have saved by our members. And we've had, in some cases, testimony, for instance, testimony, but just sitting in the break room talking to correctional officers in Marble Valley, the Honor Unit there, inmates that don't want to go into the Honor Unit, and the concern about the presence of gains in the honor unit and the lack of supervision by correctional officers. Evidence of bruises and looks like somebody got beat up in that unit, and, you know, of course, people aren't gonna say that for their own safety. They're gonna say they fell or they something happened, but correct officers, season ones especially, no one really happened. So it's not to say that's a totally bad concept, if it's in Springfield, it works a little bit better, but I know that that's what I heard repeatedly, just sitting at a time facility over the last six months. That's my testimony.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: All right. Thank you for your testimony. And you provided this information in your recommendations to the House Committee,

[Steve Howard (Executive Director, Vermont State Employees’ Association)]: correct? Yes, and I believe you emailed it to the committee yesterday too, so. Okay. That's that's we decided to take the approach to not just say, well, here's the problem. We figured you understand this problem. What we thought is, okay, how do we help how do we get to a how do we advise the committee from our perspective, the legislature from our perspective, on how they really truly can understand the depth of the problem? And this is some of the data points that our members suggested they would be able to give any look at.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Right, good. I think it was very clear. I think I think your recommendations are very clear.

[Steve Howard (Executive Director, Vermont State Employees’ Association)]: Excellent. Alright.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Any questions? Any other questions or comments? No. Okay. Thank you very much.

[Steve Howard (Executive Director, Vermont State Employees’ Association)]: Take care.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Alright. It's also at 02:00, maybe. Sure. Almost adjourned. I just wanna talk about tomorrow. And we have an update on the implementation of. That's right now, that's the only thing on the agenda. I'm fine with that. Anybody have anything else you want to talk about or any? I mean, try to talk from yesterday and we probably should have a conversation at some point. We can have it at 01:30 tomorrow unless you wanna do And it a different that's fine. I'm not in a rush.

[Russ Ingalls (Member)]: Chat at the end of the day.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Okay, so right as of this point in time, the next time we meet will be 02:00 in New York. Okay, okay.

[Russ Ingalls (Member)]: Is it? Are the chairs set?

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Okay, okay, good. So then we'll keep it that way and we are adjourned.

[Steve Howard (Executive Director, Vermont State Employees’ Association)]: Thank you.