Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Wendy Harrison, Chair]: Ian, I believe that the type was posted. Okay, we are live and this is still Tuesday, 02/17/2026, Senate Committee on Institutions. And we have the Secretary of State, Sarah Kofler Manzas and Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State. And we are talking still about data management and sharing. It's actually, we just had a touch on IT funding and now for the email IT in real life. So, let us introduce ourselves to you and then you can introduce yourselves and start with your testimony. So, Wendy Harrison and I represent the Windham District.

[Robert Plunkett, Vice Chair]: And Robert Plunkett, that means that. Joe Major Windsor. Russ Ingalls, Essex District. Good to see you.

[Wendy Harrison, Chair]: Good to see you.

[John Benson, Member]: John Benson, the Artist District.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Vermont Secretary of State]: Excellent. Well, I'm Sarah Copeland Hansen, Vermont Secretary of State.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: And I'm Lauren Hippert, Deputy Secretary of State. Thank you for being here.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Vermont Secretary of State]: And we are really excited to be here with you, and I'm so glad that you've taken up this topic because this has been, IT and IT systems replacement has been the major lift and the major focus of my office since I took over as a community state sworn in in January '23. When I came into office, I learned that we had four major IT systems that needed to be replaced basically immediately. So that sent us into a bit of a scramble in terms of figuring out how we were going to, number one, go through all of the vetting and procurement process, but number two, how are we going to pay for it? And so, I'm gonna come back to that concept right at the end of our presentation here so that we can talk a little bit more about my thoughts, our thoughts in terms of how we we plan for the replacement of IT systems. So, we have in the slide here on Secretary of State Systems, you'll see the listing of systems across our agency. Each division has, various, elections, has several, but each of our divisions has, an IT system. And the main focus of all of our divisions really is in, transparency for the public. So obviously, VESARA, you know, state archives and records, we are we are the repository that holds onto these so that you can come back and look at them in the future. You know, with respect to OPR, we are holding on to information about people who have licenses in the state and whether they've had disciplinary action against them. For business services, you know, the ability to look up a business that is a legitimate business that's registered with the Secretary of State is very important. And then, of course, for campaign finance and lobbying, that is really about transparency for the public. So there's a lot of through lines for our IT systems and and what they are intended to do because what the statute tells us we need to do. Do want to let you do that one? Yeah.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: As the secretary said, you can see all of our systems here and the go live date because we did need to replace four major systems, we because we're gluttons for punishment, we added a fifth. It's really necessary. So I'll just go through our systems and approximate costs for our systems and when our contracts are ending because I think the life cycle is an important piece here in the secretary of state IT story. So business services, this is one of our new systems. We went live in December 2024, the December, right before annual report season. Our end of contract is 04/20/2030. Implementation, so we tried to break this into our implementation costs versus our maintenance costs, which is pretty standard IT contract. Then you'll see that we have some estimated change requests. These are things that have changed in the legislature or our policy that we're needing to do something outside of the contract to pay more. It's usually prescribed in the contract, but it's outside of what was anticipated. So we paid 3,000,000 for our implementation of our business services. Our maintenance is 350 k per year, and we have about 300 k in estimated change requests that we're trying to move through. Some of those are related to data feeds, which we'll talk about later. Some of those are related to new functionality that we need, and some of that is related to legislative changes that are already in effect or that we're anticipating will become in effect. Do you mind if we ask the question as we go along? Not at all. I actually prefer that. Okay, go ahead. Does did ADS help you with these? Yes. Okay. Good. Yes. We'll we'll run through a

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Vermont Secretary of State]: little in a little more detail each of the systems. This is the sort of summary sheet that has all of the costs and everything, but but we have a very close relationship with ADS, and and they were critical in helping us with the whole procurement process. Great.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: And we we have to follow the BGS and ADS procurement rules, and we had the ADS team embedded in the implementation of our systems that cost more than a million dollars, and they're on consultation for the other ones. Yes.

[Robert Plunkett, Vice Chair]: What would maintenance look like? Is that mainly employee benefits pay and all that? Is that just what it cost is to maintain it?

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: It's maintaining the system itself. So making sure that it's connecting appropriately for users, that it's behind the appropriate firewalls and has the proper security methods applied to it. It can be testing of the system. It could be no IT system is perfect. Anyone who tells you that an IT system is perfect is lying. And so there's always little things that change or or pop up bugs that come up. It's fixing those small things that should be working that aren't working on a particular day. It could it could be a wide variety of things, but that maintenance fee has is not related to the benefits or pay of anyone on our staff. It's more it's like sort of like we talk a lot about IT, you know, our IT systems are our front door. And and the door to our our system has to be unlocked at, you know, certain periods of time. It has to be locked at certain periods of time. It needs routine cleaning and maintenance just like a building would. That's what maintenance is of the system in a very sort of and crude analogy kinda way. Our system is our front door. The majority of our users come use all of Secretary of State services through our IT systems. Very few people actually walk through the doors of our building. So implementation is building the building and maintenance is the custodial work, locking and securing of the doors and windows in a crude analogy. Did So, that answer your question? It does.

[Robert Plunkett, Vice Chair]: Okay. Thank you.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: Campaign finance, we went live in January 2025. That contract expires in December '9. You'll see that as we moved through the contracting process, we very intentionally did not have all of them expire on the same period. That was the situation that the secretary walked into. We wanted to eliminate that for her, hopefully, she'll be in the same position at those times, but if not her, the next secretary of state. That was a 360,000 implementation, 20,000 maintenance, and we have about a 150, closer to probably 200,000 estimated change requests with campaign finance. Elections, we went live in May '25. I couldn't remember the exact date, so I apologize for missing that exact date. And we end that contract for '31. This was our big one. This was March to implement, and this is just over 600 k in maintenance costs. Lobbying is 100 we went live in January 2025. We expire in December '29. Implementation was just over 600 k. Maintenance is 61 per year. OP yes.

[Robert Plunkett, Vice Chair]: I'm I'm sorry. I I think can go back to elections for Sure. Since that was a a big ticket item. Mhmm. What exactly was the capital expenditure on that? That

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: is how much we spent, was 3.8.

[Robert Plunkett, Vice Chair]: What was that?

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: Oh, to build an entirely new system

[Robert Plunkett, Vice Chair]: Okay.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Vermont Secretary of State]: From the ground up. So your voter registration system that can be accessed by our office as well as the two forty seven town and city clerks around the state, the election night reporting system that allows people to follow along in real time and see as communities are are entering their results. And then, you know, for every for for every election that we have, we have, you know, 300 something different ballot styles, ballot types based on a house senate or versus a senate district versus, you know, a county, you know, like a a the county sheriff or or state attorney's elections. So, each of those, different districts requires the tallying of different, kinds of information because in one election, Bradford might be in Orange County, but for another election, for many years, it was in Caledonia County. So, it's a complicated system, the way all of the data and the and the actual results that are entered by the town and city clerks comes into the system, and thus the complexity.

[Robert Plunkett, Vice Chair]: How long was the implementation?

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: Just over eighteen months. And it has close to 800 users because it's the town clerk's plus the assistants plus our staff. We also have data flowing in from ERIC, which is a data sharing among states of registered voters to make sure that as people move across state lines, their voter registration is being kept up to date. We also integrate with DMC, and we receive vital statistics from the Department of Health on deaths. So there's data coming in to the system as well as people many people in the system doing a wide variety of activities. And the town clerks are using the system for all the reasons the secretary said, but also to affirm that the person is should be registered in their town to communicate with their voter. There's a lot of functionality for town clerks. This is their primary system. When when it's something related to elections, they use our election management system, and that was prescribed by the federal government under the Help America Vote Act.

[Robert Plunkett, Vice Chair]: Thank you.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: I think I was at OPR, which That's we went okay, I'm happy to be interrupted. I just might need remembering, reminding of where I am. October 2017, our contract formally expired. We've been through two different vendors. We had well, we pay Pega, which is our software company. They're sort of like Salesforce, and then we built something on top of that software. So Pega is our software company. Our original implementer was a company named Virtusa. We had what I call publicly conscious uncoupling with them. And then our second vendor is Brazetech. Both of our contracts with Pega and Brazetech expired last year in December. We're currently in a contract extension, and we have an RFI that was out on the street that we've received responses for. Our next step is to put up an RFP. And the main decision for us in response, you know, we haven't finished our analysis of the RFIs yet, but our main decision is do we move to an entirely new system, not in the Pega universe, or do we stay with what we've built, which has a lot of functionality, but with the same vendor or a new vendor.

[Robert Plunkett, Vice Chair]: Can I just say, when I if I ever fired someone, a conscious uncoupling

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: I love that?

[Robert Plunkett, Vice Chair]: I'm going to use from that.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Vermont Secretary of State]: It's agreed to go our separate ways.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: Yeah. You know? The kindest way to

[Robert Plunkett, Vice Chair]: explain it then. Right.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: So, we this has been a big driver of cost at OPR. You can see that the original contract was for 3,000,000. I was in the meeting with Virtusa, and they realized that they had completely underbid, And it was complete shock, which led you know, you wanna have true transparency on both sides before you enter into a relationship. That was probably why we ultimately had had that conscious uncoupling. They really underbid for what we needed. Since we're not in this committee a lot, OPR regulates 53 professions, over 86,000 licensees. We have 157 different license types. And for each license type, there's multiple pathways in. Think apprenticeship, exam, endorsement from another state. Each per each pathway is for each license type, so it's a lot of complexity. We also receive complaints. We investigate those complaints. We do prosecutions. We do criminal investigations. So there's a lot in that system, and that's why it is so expensive to maintain. It also, just as a plug, provides significant public protection to Vermonters. You want to know that your dentist is qualified, and you want to know that if your dentist makes a grievous error, that someone is going to look into it and make sure that that doesn't happen again. So really a public protection mission. And transparency for the consumer. You should be able to look up and make sure that your provider is licensed and qualified to do what you're expecting them to do. And we we handle the majority of occupational licensing in the state, exception being plumbers, electricians, some physicians, some physicians we do regulate, some we don't. And the agency of education. I think it's, is it DOs that you've been working on that. Well, thank you. No, that's really important. So does, how long is that system going to last? Well, that's a really excellent question. We're at the end, either we need to decide to invest more money into it and enter into another contract with either Versatack or somebody else to continue implementation work, or we need to shift to an entirely different system. And that would be a very expensive proposition. Both are expensive, frankly, but moving to a whole new system that may offer long term cost savings, but short term pain.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Vermont Secretary of State]: But we've been we've been in this system for nearly a decade, and that is, you know, several lifetimes in terms of what IT systems can do. And so we are in the process of gathering as much information as we can about the products that are out there and what we might be able to do, just so that we're doing all of our due diligence.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: And Lisa Gobind, who's our IT consultant. So, yes, I was just wondering, so the RFI, are you looking for information about existing solutions and the possibility of

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Vermont Secretary of State]: yeah, to see what people are They'll throw it in asymptote. Perfect. Yeah.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: And is that out there now? Are you waiting for responses, or did you get responses? We stopped the responses and are currently under review. Got it. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Safe at home, this is our project that we added. This is our address confidentiality program. Really important. We were the need for an IT system became really clear when the secretary came into office. This was being managed on an Excel spreadsheet with a lot of manual entry. This is somebody getting the mail, making a label to send it to the correct person. It was a lot of manual work. Took about half a day every day for a person in charge of safe at home. With application of this new system, one, we can automatically print labels. That was like when we had the RFP demo. There was like you could almost hear the hoots and hollers in the building. People are like, what? You know, technology can really make a huge difference in somebody's life. Sometimes frustration, but also a huge difference. We can also communicate back and forth with our safe at home participants, which is really important because, you know, they frequently don't have stable home lives. They have left a home that was not safe for them, could be moving lots of different places. So there's a lot of communication about where are you, where do you want this to be sent, those sorts of things. And I should say that every one of our systems is mobile friendly. We've spent quite a bit of money making sure that every system is mobile friendly. This is in large part because there's this amazing statistics that only about a third of our have laptops, and then something like 86% of our monitors have smartphones. So systems really do need to be mobile friendly. And then at Vassara, we have a product called VT Retain. I put the name there just so that You might think, why ITFSR? VT Retain is for all of the archival digital documents that the Secretary of State has. So we have obviously just records, we have archival records, and then we have digital archival records. And so this system, you can go and search all of the digital archival records. We've had it since 2013. The contract is expiring next month, but it's it's a system that software as a service contract, so we'll be able to renew it. We spent about 63,000 in implementation, and our annual maintenance is 59,000.

[Robert Plunkett, Vice Chair]: So, I just had a quick question, and I'm just curious, we look, 2029 will be the first year that you're gonna hit where several of these have reached their contract period, and I assume you spent a lot of time looking at the different programs that were out there and thinking this should serve us well into the future. So when we reach 2029, I know it's looking at a crystal ball here to project, would you anticipate we would see these major implementation costs again to move forward with those, or would it be just a renewal, or maybe we can save some I'm just curious where you think things will be down the road.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Vermont Secretary of State]: Well, I certainly hope that these systems will be durable and well maintained enough that we can go through some contract in some of these systems so that we're not building fresh and new to the tune of, you know, several million dollars every three to five years. But, you know, the the contract has its terms for a reason, you know, it it so that we can do that conscious uncoupling if it's really not working well, but also so that we, you know, so that we are forced to come back and check and see is this system still functioning as it was designed to, as it was built to, or is it degrading over time? And, you know, that is, that's the unfortunate truth of of where we were when I came into office, that the systems that we had been using were just increasingly difficult to maintain, probably because the person who built them retired long ago. I don't know.

[Robert Plunkett, Vice Chair]: Operating platforms keep Yes. Yeah.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: And I I believe, I would have to double check, that that all of our contracts that we've entered into since the secretary's been in office have had two renewal periods of two years each. So in 2029, we'd be at a place where we'd have to say, do we wanna renew this system again for another two years? And then two years from that, do we want to renew the system for another two years? And then we'd be at the end of the contract term. So then we would either need to seek a contract extension through the ADS path process or go out to RFI RFP. And for some of these systems, if we were in that place, we would go out to an RFI. For some, we would just put out an RFP. None of them, we would just do a simple contract bid on under VGS contracting terms, and I think we'll probably renew the majority of these contracts when they expire, assuming that the two of us are in our respective seats.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Vermont Secretary of State]: So, we can run through briefly each of the systems just to give you a little more of an insight into what they do and how they're protected. The business services system is really sort of the workhorse of the agency. This is registering businesses and nonprofits across the state to the tune of hundreds of thousands of transactions a year. And, you know, this system is essentially built to be the file cabinets. People bring their business registration information to us. There's, you know, if you've filled out every field, you know, there isn't a hurdle that you have to cross other than that you need to give us the statutorily required information. We're not, you know, we're not grading on any sort of a scale here, but this system is, you know, does the bulk of those annual transactions that we do as an agency in order to maintain that business registration information for the public. So, Reframe Solutions was the IT company. ADS was a very important partner. The security level on this system is high, so we have a firewall and geoblocking, and I want to make sure that we all have the same understanding of what geoblocking is because it'll come in handy for you all when we get to the next slide. But geoblocking means that you have to be within an approved geographic area to even be able to get into the system. So I had a friend text me out of the blue a couple months ago and say, hey, I'm trying to renew my business. I can't figure out why it's not going through. And I said, where are you? And he was, I don't know, in Nicaragua or Costa Rica or whatever. Anyway, he was outside of the, the geographic allowable area. And and that is a really important security feature of the systems and one that you should all make note of with respect to the campaign finance system, which I'm gonna let Lauren talk about next.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: So campaign finance, again, we have a high level of security, the firewall, and the geoblocking. Our partners were reframe and ADS. This is candid disclosures, which is contact information, candidate and committee information, campaign expenditures and contributions. This system, everything is public and searchable. We don't have any data that is available on request that's not accessible just in the system, and we don't have any data feeds for that system.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Vermont Secretary of State]: So, the election management system, as we talked about earlier, is the most complex of our systems. It also contains arguably some of the most important personally identifiable information, and it has the highest security level, that that we can wrap around it. And, again, Reframe was the IT company that built the system. ADS was an important partner. The data that's in there is, with respect to your voter file, is your driver's license number, the last four of your social security number, your address, your full date of birth, your voting history. Oftentimes, now we are also collecting an email address or a phone number. Those are important for clerks to be able to call you and say, hey, you forgot to sign your, you know, your your ballot envelope. We need you to come in and secure your ballot so that we can count it, that sort of thing. So we are, you know, the the information that is available to the public is is in a couple of different places within the system. As I was saying, the election night reporting system where everybody who's got a tightly contested race is watching the the results refresh every five minutes throughout election night. But your Vermont voter portal is an important, access point for every single voter in Vermont, to be able to look up their voter registration status, to change their voter registration if they move from, you know, from Winooski to Waterbury, to look up the polling place, to see, you know, what the hours are, to find contact information for their town and city clerk. These are important pieces of access, and as the deputy said before, we we've made sure that these are, mobile friendly as well, because we recognize that people need to be able to check on those sorts of things, from their mobile phone. Your Vermont voter portal also allows you to track your ballot, so you can see when it was mailed. You can see after you put it back in the mail to return it, you can see when it was received. If it was received and was defective, you can see that there. And so this is an important, piece of transparency for voters who are who are voting, either by universal vote by mail or by absentee ballot. So there is some data that's available, upon request. The the there are some specific statutory parameters around which people can have a a copy of a voter checklist. Absentee ballot data is also frequently requested and voter participation data. And a live feed of election night results is, is available to, make sure that everyone can follow along with all the fun and excitement of election night.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: Yeah. I just wanna I mean, this is always been really important and critical and fundamental, and now it's really.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Vermont Secretary of State]: Well, it is, and it's one that we've been giving a lot of thought to this year as we've heard for this past year, you know, thirteen months now, as we've heard different proposals of things that that this administration in DC would like to do to change our election system. For instance, if we were to have a a law passed in Congress that required documentary proof of citizenship, that would require us to collect and maintain copies of people's birth certificates, passports, marriage certificates, adoption decrees. That is a much higher level of of intensity of personally identifiable information than even what we have in the system currently. And in order to do right by Vermonters, if we were required to do that by federal law, I think we would have to build that system to securely maintain images of these documents in perpetuity. And and that is because the way this law is being proposed would mean that if you moved from the town you live in now to the town next door, that clerk would then also need to require you to present your birth certificate, your marriage degree, your divorce decree, your adoption certificate, whatever. So, if we don't maintain those in our system, we are essentially putting, a huge barrier in front of Vermonters each time they need to change their their voter registration. And so, this would be a huge expense and and also, you know, a concern in terms of the function and the mechanics of how we would do that.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: With criminal liability for the person who registers someone by accident because, like, the secretary and I were born in different states, were raised within 20 miles of each other. My birth certificate looks entirely different than hers. Mhmm. And my birth certificate, although I was born in Thompson, Vermont, looks entirely different than my son's who was born in Burlington. So we would have to train just on terms of expense of training people about how to recognize true documents and to make sure they were not fraudulent. Mine is typed on a typewriter, and my son's is was computer generated. So it's just very different. So a lot of concern. And the other piece that I you wanna just note about elections and the federal current the current federal landscape, all of our systems have immense we can see data. There's a lot of people trying to get into all of our systems. That has been true for a long time, since 2016. There are specific countries that are are really targeting our systems and there's countries that are going to friendly countries to try and get into our system. And we can talk a lot more about that, although I'm not an expert on it. But that is what is occurring. What has really changed is our federal partners, and we'll talk about that more when we get to money, but we used to have a very strong partnership with the Cyber Internet Security Administration, which is part of Homeland Security. Elections is considered critical infrastructure. Currently, it's still classified as critical infrastructure, but this administration took that entire division down. So we used to have a team of people that we could call to say, we're seeing an an increase of contact from Iran. What IPs should we block? That is gone from us on a federal landscape. We don't have that security anymore. So what we have now is a group of 50 states that try to work together and try and communicate with each other. We have ADS, which has been a really strong partnership, and we have the Vermont Information Center as part of the state police that have some security folks within them. But we used to have a really strong federal partner that would help us with high level security questions we had with things that we would get alerts about, you've got to watch out for this, or you've got to watch out for that, that just has disappeared. So, that is concerning and has caused us to build some other scaffolding around our systems, both internally to the state and externally to the state because our federal partner is not available.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Vermont Secretary of State]: I'll run quickly through lobbying because I'm gonna let Lauren do OPR, which is next, that's that's for baby because she was the director of OPR for many years. The lobbying system essentially is, is built for public transparency for, for lobbyists to disclose, what they're spending and and what they're lobbying on and for Vermonters to be able to go in and search that database. Stonewall Solutions was the company that we contracted with. ADS was a great partner, and again, this has the same high level of security of firewall and geoblocking.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: The Office of Professional Regulation, that also has the highest level similar to what it shows. There's a lot of DII in this system. Our key partners, as mentioned before, are Pega, Verizon Tech, and ADS. This is occupational license applications and renewals. So that involves education data, social security, criminal history, date of birth, address, telephone number, all of the things that are very personal identifiable. It also has unprofessional conduct complaints, investigations, and prosecutions. I just want to note that we receive medical records, quite a few medical records, video, there in the system. Accessible to the public is a roster of regulated professions that's available for download. There is data available upon request, that's applications and renewals on request with redaction, and then any publicly filed documents related to enforcement. So if we have a specification of charges against the dentists who did an egregious thing, that would be publicly available to anyone who asked for it. But it's not in the system showable to the public, just on demand. We also have limited data feeds right now. This is the space where we have data feeds in process. We are trying to move to an API. Currently have an FST. I think that means that acronym wrong. But we have the the under the baby version of an API. And we are providing those to sister regulatory entities, so like the Association of Nursing Boards. All of our nursing data goes into We their receive data from them. If we discipline a nurse, they're automatically told that we discipline the nurse so that then they can notify other states that have also licensed nurses so that they know, you know, that we have somebody in Vermont who is struggling with drug addiction. We discipline them, the likelihood that they're gonna go move to another state is very high. We also, all of our data goes into the UVM Health Network. They do a draw every morning to double check who's on their floor to make sure that everyone who they have on the floor is licensed, and this is really important to them so that they can draw down MedicaidMedicare funds. If somebody falls out of an appliance, like I'm a PT and I forget to renew my license, that has a huge financial impact on our hospital system because they can't get reimbursed for any hours that I work while my license is expired. So are you subject to HIPAA? Well, we are not a covered entity.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Vermont Secretary of State]: Got it. So you do have health records, but we're not

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: a covered entity under the way that that law is, but do we take responsibility for the fact that we have health records? Yes, 100%. It's the same with FERPA. We're not, we are not required to comply with FERPA, but we do have everybody's educational data. So, we take that responsibility really, really seriously, but we're not covered entity and we're not covered. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Other questions about OPR?

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Vermont Secretary of State]: Alright, well, at Home, we've talked a little bit about. I think the other thing that I'll add to what the deputy said before is that when I came into office to become a participant in the Safe at Home program, you had to either go through a domestic violence agency and have an application assistant help you get into the program, or you had to go to our website, download a PDF, print it, fill it out, and send it back. And so that felt very antiquated to me. It felt like it would be too much of a barrier for someone who is, you know, perhaps in an unsteady housing situation to begin with because they're fleeing, stalking, or domestic violence. And then the legislature expanded eligibility for the Safe at Home program for healthcare providers and recipients of certain kinds of protected healthcare, and then it became very clear that the only portal going through a domestic violence agency doesn't make sense if you are just a patient of protected healthcare and you need to know how to get into the systems. This investment that we made in the Safe at Home program has been to the benefit not only of our staff time in terms of being able to manage vastly improves the accessibility of the program to Vermonters who may need it.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: Right. And that's free. Vermont State Records and Archives Administration, this is Preservica and ADS. This is, again, permanent archival state government records in digital format that are in the custody. State agencies may also have this type of data, but it's until they transfer it into the archives, they maintain it in their own way. This is a public portal, very searchable of all documents that are not subject to public records exemptions. And then if there's a search that someone has, you do it within the portal. And if it's not in the portal, then it's a similar process for any other type of records request that is done through the SARA, which happens every day, all day. But this is a way for people to see the digital records quickly and easily, and it's quite fun to look at.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Vermont Secretary of State]: Alright, so we've talked a little bit about what our systems are when they came online and what they cost to build. I think a little overview of the Secretary of State's office would be helpful. We are internally funded through two special funds. One is solely contained within the Office of Professional Regulation that's made up of the licensing fees and it is intended to cover the cost of operating the public protection mission of OPR. The Secretary of State Fund, which funds all of the rest of the divisions of the Secretary of State's office, is, is funded mainly through business registration fees. And so that is supporting the SARA, that is supporting, you know, the the admin and executive teams, that is supporting our municipal services team who provides support to each of our, towns and cities and and to average Vermonters who have questions about municipal government. It is supporting our, business services team, obviously, and it is, it is supporting in, in large part the elections division as well. The elections division has previously been, been able to count on, about 60% of our funding coming from federal grants. The certainty of those monies going forward has been thrown into question with this current Congress and this current administration. So, we don't know that we will be able to count on consistent federal funding going forward. So, we do have a request into the general assembly this year, and we certainly hope that Congress will do its part. And, you know, states operate state elections, and we operate federal elections. And each time Congress has made laws pertaining to elections, they have appropriated money to help support the implementation of those things. Each of those laws has been for the purpose of expanding the franchise, making sure that people who have been disadvantaged are able to vote. So think about accessible voting for people with disabilities. Think about voting for our military service members who are overseas. All of these systems that we have in place now to ensure that people can exercise their right to vote have come about because there was a federal law requiring it, and the federal government has helped to pay for it. That is unclear going forward. So, we certainly will want to be very mindful of how we plan for the future in this really uncertain budgeting time. The business services bill was possible because we kept the excess revenues that otherwise would have been swept into the general fund. The elections systems bills were possible largely because of the federal grant money that had been sort of squirreled away for a rainy day. And OPR fund is currently running at a deficit and there's way more that we could talk about with respect to why that is and how that is, and I'm happy to get into that if you'd like to, but what I was really hoping we could talk for the last few minutes about is IT capital funds. When I came to realization in 2023 that we were gonna have to replace all of these systems within, you know, basically two budget years, it was sort of jaw dropping and left me with a pit in my stomach, and I don't think we wanna leave that to future generations or future secretaries. And so, as the deputy talked about, we are intentionally staggering the expiration dates of these systems so that they're not all going by the wayside at the same time. But over and above that, I think what we need to start doing is thinking about planning for IT across its lifespan. You know, we know that people access government services from the Secretary of State mainly through our websites. We know that those are gonna have to be replaced every five to ten years. We know that it is a huge expense and wouldn't plan to replace our building when it had lost its useful life without planning for a capital fund to do that. So rather than having the the sticker shock that we had in 2023, 2024, I think it makes a lot more sense for us to be thinking over the course of the next five to ten years, what can we set aside each year into a capital reserve fund so that we can replace the IT systems when they expire.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: So, happy to take questions. Okay. Yes, sir. Have you asked other states how they handle this? Your counterparts in other states? You've asked your deputy friends? One thing that's great about being part of the secretary of state in the nation is that we get together and we talk, so the secretary's at their group, the deputy's at their group, And we have talked about this. Some do have capital funds. Some, this is not even a line item in their budget. It's part of their equivalent of the agency of digital services budget. So the fact that in some states, the model is ABS would be I'm not saying that this is what should happen here, but that ABS would be coming and saying, we need to replace the election management system, the DMV system, the child welfare system, and this is how much money we as agency of digital services need to do that work. Here in Vermont, it's those are part of each individual agency's budget as opposed to an agency of digital services budget. So and so it sort of varies between it's part of an external or semi external agency of digital services budget. It's part of the secretary of state's primary budget or it's part of the capital fund under the control of the secretary of state. I think some of the states that have ABS budget, that's the way that it's set up, that ABS equivalent has a capital fund for those types of projects. It's not all within one year's budget, but Sure. So, for technology services, some agencies that are independent contract directly with ADS. Do you do that or do you have your own IT staff?

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Vermont Secretary of State]: Both. Both. We have a very small internal IT staff and we have increasingly made more formal our relationships with ADS, particularly around all of this procurement stuff, because that is a world in and of itself that you can't expect one IT person to be an expert in all of the things having to do with legal and contract and the technical aspects, but also around security. Because we have lost CISA support. We think it's really important for us to not only have our own internal security eyes, but to increasingly have all of ADS eyes also keeping an eye on our system.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: So, that makes me think of core services. They're covered under core services or because they're external, that would be something else. Right. So, just raising that. We are covered by core services and we have SLA agreements with ADS. Okay. Oh, so your capital programs are Yes. In core services? I believe so, and we have an SLA. They're changing the rules this year.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Vermont Secretary of State]: So, I will follow-up and I'll Okay. You know

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: what Denise said. I will follow-up with Secretary. I believe we're just like every other state entity. The big another big thing that has shifted in large part because of the new accessibility guidelines is we used to have our we currently do have our own standalone website. We are moving our website into the ADS web platform and methodology because the amount of work that we would have had to do on our custom build website was substantial. And by joining the ABS web services, it was a much more economical route for us to go. And I the secretary does have a designee on what court award I served in

[Robert Plunkett, Vice Chair]: that. Okay.

[Lauren Hibbert, Deputy Secretary of State]: Okay. Good. And I would presume that security is good. Yeah. The security, we are we are very pleased with the support that we received from the ADS, and they are connected with CISA and do receive alerts from CISA. We do too, but what is really missing is those election specific alerts in that community. And they are so not to get too technical, we have our third party vendors are watching all traffic on the system. AES is watching all traffic on our systems, and we have someone in house who's monitoring traffic on our systems as well. So and there's a lot of varying degrees of alerts depending on, you know, if we're getting a DNS attack, we're notified that we're getting a DNS attack from Iran. And we work with ADS, our vendor, and ourselves to figure out how we're gonna respond to this. And, you know, the big the big thing is with the federal money is that we used to benefit from the small state minimum. So we used to receive a million dollars every year. That was cut to 275,000 this year. So we lost two thirds of our budget. It costs Vermont about the same to secure from a security parameters our election management system as it does for California. But California has a ton more people as payers and resources. So we really struggle with the fact across all of our systems. This is true with OPR as well. We have to have the same functionality as a huge state with a million nurses in it. We have 26,000. So our revenue is really constrained to that 26,000 nurses' licensing fees, but we have to do all the same things that California has to do with their nurses. And at a certain point with IT, the efficiency is so awesome because you don't need as many people to process the applications. But the same functionality has to be in your IT system regardless of whether you have 26,000 nurses. Or I think the last time I checked California, was somewhere between eight to 10,000,000 nurses. And so they receive 8 to 10,000,000 of licensing fees, but the functionality that we have to build in our systems is the same. Right. And so There's that threshold. Yeah. Yeah. I just think it's important for us to remember, and I guess I like to talk about it, that, you know, we have to do the same things as California, but just with a much different budget. And that's conversation you guys have in this building all the time every day. I know it's not news to you guys, but it is something to remember when we feel like we are limited by our budget, but we have a lot of pressing needs that we need to accompany. Right, well thank you very much. I mean, this is really helpful. Do we have additional questions?

[Wendy Harrison, Chair]: We are looking at procurement. We don't have this committee at least has some ideas. I don't know if we're going be able to get them across the finish line. The house heady committee, do you you might wanna talk to them also and just let them know what you're doing. Mhmm.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Vermont Secretary of State]: We did we did present to them last year on some of some of this sort of presentation, but also pitched them on the notion that, you know, at some point very soon, the secretary of state is going to come to the legislature and ask for permission to create a capital reserve fund for IT.

[Wendy Harrison, Chair]: Okay. Makes sense. And you're going to appropriations? We have. You have. Yes.

[Sarah Copeland Hanzas, Vermont Secretary of State]: We have presented to appropriations with our past here.

[Wendy Harrison, Chair]: Okay. Terrific. Well, I'm really glad you came today. It's very helpful. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you.

[Robert Plunkett, Vice Chair]: Thanks for coming in.

[Wendy Harrison, Chair]: Good to you.

[Robert Plunkett, Vice Chair]: Good to see you.

[Wendy Harrison, Chair]: Okay. And we are adjourned.