 All funds for fiscal year 2021 was 33.381 million, so minus 2.6 million goes down to about 31 something. 31 million for this coming year? 31.7 million, thank you. And then for the current fiscal year and then total pay act for year two. I don't think changes. That would be 36 million. 36 million for the second year. Yeah, is that actually if Harold Schwartz is on is that correct? I don't think it does. Harold, go ahead and unmute yourself. We would love if you have those numbers in front of you. The. Yeah, for the exempt, so it would affect the second year. Because of the step piece. So we have to calculate that. But the numbers you were talking about also were all funds, not GF. So I just want to make that clear. I mean, however people want to get the numbers, we may need to go back and come back to you guys later with the, with the splits, depending on what you want. It's kind of hard to do it on the fly. Jim, how do you want your information? No, I think at some point it would be good to have a breakdown. I think, you know, obviously we have to look at the total amount and, and work with appropriations as to. We can pass anything we want, but appropriations has to find a way to fund it. So. I think that might be a conversation with them and, and how they break it on to the various. And I think that might be a good idea. I think that might be a conversation with them and, and how they break it on to the various funds, whether it's education or whether it's general fund or transportation fund, whatever. We don't, well, we don't have anything here then on judiciary as part of this. Is that, is that correct, Beth? I have, I can share with you kind of our estimates for judiciary. And we'll see how we, how we've, how we've broken it out, but we would definitely want the judiciary to confirm those numbers, because we haven't really have the judiciary on the call and we'll hear from them in a few minutes. Any other questions? Yeah, one more. Beth, the, the skinny budget for the first three months, supposedly has a, you built in an 8% reduction. Does that include any staff reductions anticipated to get at that 8% reduction? I think that's a question for each department on how they are going to try to get to that 8% reduction for us, for our Department of Human Resources. I mean, we definitely have money. We're doing a lot of work to support the coronavirus relief. So we do have some fund that will be there that will help us for that budget. But it was really presented to us, is that this is our funding to continue running our government. And we haven't done the full look to see what our full fiscal year will look like for 2021. So there may be, some departments may have some staff reductions in there. I'm not aware that there are any in there to make their actual first quarter budgets. I don't have any. I do have vacancy savings in there. We do have a hiring freeze. So there are the vacancy savings that are in there that are included that are going to help us get through that first section. And so that's really where we are right now as far as personnel constraints for people to close out fiscal year 20 and to get through the beginning of fiscal year 21 until we really know what we're going to be budgeting for the full year. Thank you. Thank you. John Gannon and then Bob Hooper. Thank you. And thank you, Beth, for testifying today. Quick question. I believe you said that there was additional savings beyond the governor's staff and the auditor and AG and the lieutenant governor's not getting pay raises. Is there other savings that you've identified? I don't think that I did say that, that there were other. It's if there are other places that the administration, so there are other, there's a lot of people whose salaries are set in pay act. So if you took into account people whose salaries are set in pay act and the legislature decided not to increase those salaries, that could be additional savings that really are impacted by the union contracts. So that's another, that is another way to get savings other than just the kind of the appointed salaries. Also we have in the non-salary pay act, we have a line item for paid family leave that's in there that we're in the process of, you know, getting a provider for that. And that project has been suspended because of the COVID. We were aware that none of the providers would be able to put a bid together and would be able to meet our timeline because number one, they are really implementing their plan in Massachusetts. And then number two, they just didn't have the time to put any of the work together that would be needed to kind of go into this new innovative approach. So in fiscal year 21, we had originally planned, I think that that would start the FML, the paid family leave would start kind of towards the second half of that fiscal year, but doesn't look like that's going to be, that's going to be needed for the fiscal year. And that would wait till fiscal year 2022. Thank you. Bob Hooper. Hi, I did recognize you in the store, but didn't think you might have recognized me with a yellow beard. I'd like to comment that Steve Howard better get a battery for that clock. It's been the same time, the last five times he's appeared here. And Joe McNeil is looking much too comfortable in the front porch there. Beth, is there any, how Harold mentioned the funds before? And Jim then followed up with what state funds? We're talking about a combination of federal funds and state funds that are coming forward. There's at this point no reduction on the basically contractual component of the federal funds that will be coming. And in fact, federal funds actually come with a bonus for personnel in an administrative fee. I'm not really quite sure of the question. The pay raises are kind of spread across the funds that fund each employee. So if their job is funded, mostly federally funded, then the amount of their pay raise would be mostly federally funded. So if that was your question, is that your question? Yeah, and then there's a tip built into that for lack of a better word when we do better. Yeah, it's not just salaries. They're paying for a portion of the benefits and the retirements, the whole salary and benefits component of each employee is charged across the funds that that employee's job is charged to. So for the total package of pay act was as originally just a fiscal year 21, this is the original. So our estimate was $33 million, but the general fund portion of that was about $14 million. And then if no exempts, just as a rough estimate for no exempts or elected officials, the total savings would be $2.25 million with a $1.43 million general fund savings. So that kind of, does that help? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's one out of three down. What do you, I mean, there's a lot of discussion on federal basis about relief funds coming to help state and local governments. Are you anticipating any of that and giving consideration to it in any of the proposals you're making? Not with respect to pay act, no. Well, that leads into number three then. The 8% reduction that was mentioned before, we have a, I mean, everybody, I think, recognizes that the biggest expense in government is personnel costs. We have a pretty well-documented history of that being the first avenue we go after. One of the lessons we learned from the UI experience in the last couple of months is people really make the difference. How flush is our personnel pool at this point that we might even consider that as an option? It just seems like, one, it's a bad thing to say you people got us out of a big mess in the last couple of months, and now you're getting laid off. But two, people make government work. So I'm just kind of throwing that out there as a caution, I guess. Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting because it's different. This particular crisis has impacted different departments really differently. So for example, like the Agency of Transportation and maybe Agency of Natural Resources and typically in past crises like Irene, they're really busy, and they're the frontline workers. And in this case, it's been the Emergency Operations Center and the Department of Health in particular and the Department of Labor have been the ones that have been really highly stressed and had to step up more and more and also a lot of the administrative departments. For example, buildings and general services, all the work they had to do in preparing and looking to set up new sites for COVID relief in my department, just supporting all those other departments with trying to get temporary employees on and just trying to administer different kinds of leave. So we provide some paid leave for people. We had to implement a new federal law as a new paid leave program. So a lot of that work and still I would say 90% of my time and the same as the deputies and our directors on a lot of our work, high percentage, if not all, is going directly towards supporting that COVID relief. We've heard about the pop-up testing sites for around the state for people who are, you know, they don't have symptoms, but they still want to be tested and also for health care workers. Well, that you wouldn't think would have anything to do with the Department of Human Resources, but we have a really good system that we use to schedule our biometrics trainings for employees, and we're using that to schedule those pop-up clinics, which also means so, and that scheduling takes a lot of time. So we're doing that as well as answering all those calls. So the calls that come in that say, I can't schedule this or cancel my thing, that's also going through the Department of Human Resources. So I think every department is really pitching in whether they can to help. And I guess I'd be remiss, especially with this committee, not commending the efforts of our employees and also talking about the support and the cooperation with the State Employees Union and the Troopers Association as far as just working together to try to get communications out there and to try to make sure employees are taken care of. So I think we've all worked really hard to try to make this as less, as possible, as less stressful for employees as we can. I know it's stressful. Thank you, Madam Chair. Sarah, you're not on. My apologies. Rob LeClaire has a question. Thank you, Madam Chair. Good afternoon, Beth. Can you tell me, have we had anybody laid off since this thing and has anybody suffered any loss of pay during this state of emergency? No. Thank you. That was quick and easy. Is that all your questions, Rob? It is, Madam. I'll lower my hand. OK, sounds good. Beth, did you want to kick anything over to either Dan or Harold, or should we move on? No, I think they were just here in case you asked questions. Dan in particular has been. He's been working with the state emergency operations center a lot. So he's been working hard on that. So in case any questions came up on COVID, that's really why he was on. And Harold's obviously the numbers guy and also have John Burrard listening in in case any detailed questions regarding union contracts came in. But I don't think that they have probably taken up enough of your time, unless you have questions that I can answer. Well, stick around. We may have more questions. So I'd like to go now to Pat Gable and ask Pat to share with us the status of the collective bargaining agreement and the pay act is from the judiciary perspective. Go ahead and unmute yourself. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. And hello, everybody on the call today. One nice thing about Zoom that I don't think we figured out on teams is that you can actually see everybody who's on the call or most people. And that's helpful in this time. I think because there are so many things about the contract status that are similar to the executive branch, I'll just point those out. Just as in the executive branch, we are here, the judiciary is here to support the full funding of the collective bargaining agreement that's been reached between the judiciary and the VSEA. I'll talk in a minute about what the numbers will look like. But we hope and expect that the legislature would do so. Just as with the executive branch, if the legislature chose not to provide the funding, then we also, under our contract, would go back into collective bargaining. I think one area in particular of concern is because that first lump sum payment comes at the beginning of the fiscal year, we are in the same position that if that was not funded in time to make that payment technically in any event, that would put us back into collective bargaining with the union. And the judiciary bargaining team and the VSEA bargaining team worked very hard this year and put a lot of time and energy and effort into reaching this agreement. And I think similarly with the executive branch, they've also successfully worked out a number of additional side letters to cover the judicial emergency period. And so both of those teams have worked very hard. And I'm sure they would appreciate it if the contract was funded and they didn't have to go back and do that work again. In the, as in some parts of government, it's already been mentioned that payroll is always the largest part. In certain parts of government, such as that something is crashing at my house. I don't know what that is. In certain parts of government, payroll is particularly high. And in the judiciary, we are predominantly payroll. Unlike maybe some of the other branches, the number of positions with the pay act as a part of what statutory salaries as a part includes 62 judicial officers. And so out of our total 350 positions, 62 of those have statutory salaries under the pay act. In the event, and now somebody is mowing the lawn at my house, but I'll try and ignore that because I assume you can't hear them. In the event that the entire payroll of the judiciary had the same increase as the collective bargaining agreement, the total one year cost of FY21 would be $1,173,305. In the event the legislature chose not to fund the statutory salaries of judicial officers or the seven exempts in the judiciary, the total one year cost of that proposal would be $872,330. And so I think the difference there is about $300,000. The total second year costs, FY22, assuming that those were fully funded, the total cost of that would be $1,258,759. And so in comparison to the total payroll, of course, it's a small amount, but of our, as I said, of our 350 positions, approximately 70 of those would be not receiving raises if the pay act is not being extended to the people who have statutory salaries in the government. And I think the Supreme Court and the judiciary are very interested in understanding where the interbranch consensus lies. Obviously, we consider ourselves in collaboration with the other branches during this difficult period. And if the legislature chose not to fund, not to increase the payroll of the statutory salary and not to increase payroll for exempts, then we would be willing to participate in that. Thank you. I appreciate that. Any questions from committee members for Pat Gable? I don't see anybody diving onto the screen to tap their hand button. Great. John Gannon. Thank you. Pat, it would be good to get from you at some point just what the details of the collective barting agreement are. We have the administration the details. Are there differences between the jurors and the? There will not be differences in terms of the compensation side. There are differences in terms of the non-compensation side. We do not have some other provisions the executive branch has, and we do have other provisions that the executive branch does not have. And so we're happy to provide that detail to the committee and writing. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. Any other questions from committee members? All right. Thank you, Pat. Please stick with us. Next, I think I'd like to just invite Annie Noonan if you have some thoughts to share with us, help us understand where you are in readiness for pay act. Good morning. Committee members, it's nice to see all of you. Thank you for bringing us in today, Madam Chair. We are glad to have signed last night a tentative agreement with VSEA. Gary Holdle, chief negotiator for the VSEA. And on this contract is with us, as is Joe McNeil, who assisted the department in the negotiations. So I want to obviously call your attention to the fact that as the three chief negotiators on this contract, I think we work very well together and very collaboratively together. And I want to remind the committee, this is the first contract for the VSEA and the state's attorney's office's bargaining unit. So in essence, remember that as a new contract, this is basically building all of the costs from the ground up. So year one of the contract will obviously have more expense, because it's not as though we're just adding to an existing benefit for which we've budgeted. Everything here is new. So keep that in mind, and we are working fast and furiously to put together our numbers. I also want to point out that Steve Howard, the executive director of VSEA, is also on the call with us today this morning. So because we have just last night signed the tentative agreement, the details of the provisions of the contract are not publicly available. So we can say to you today that we think we've reached a fair agreement. We are very confident that the ratification through the membership will be successful. I can tell you that the state's attorney's executive committee, which is in essence had reviewed this and reviewed sort of where we were at progress-wise and then did review the tentative, voted to support this unanimously, voted to support the agreement. I believe that we have costed this out for year one, and we will cost out for year two. We're close. And I think that it probably would be fair to say to you that in terms of the pay adjustment that we will we are lining up with the executive branch for that purpose. There are other provisions that are salary-driven benefits, which go into the pay act. The pay act is whatever is driven by the salary cost. So those specific provisions, we're not really at liberty to speak about today because it would reveal actually what the terms of the agreement are. And I will let Gary talk about the ratification process. But we do have a we can provide the committee with a spreadsheet just sort of with a general cost estimate for year one and probably for year two later on this afternoon. I would want to also point out, Madam Chair, that the state's attorneys, the 14 states attorneys, and the 14 sheriffs are taking the wage freeze. I think Beth may have said that, but they are planning on being subject to the wage freeze, as is the executive director of our department, myself as an exempt fully exempt employee. I probably shouldn't say this, but I could yell downstairs and have him weigh in, but I think the Secretary of State also has, if he hasn't had a chance to talk to Beth, I know the Secretary of State is also planning on taking the wage freeze and as will his exempt employees. So that you can add that to your tally sheet, Beth, if that helps you out at all. If you need confirmation, I can whistle and see if he'll come upstairs, but I make him go downstairs because we cannot work on the same floor because he's too loud. Okay, I'd like to see if Gary, if Gary wants to weigh in sort of in terms of the process, and then I think we can both and Joe can take questions from the committee. Thank you. Gary, what can you tell us about the ratification timeline? So thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to your committee. The membership is just being notified that the bargaining team has reached the tentative agreement with the department, and that notice is going out today. I need to speak with the rest of our staff to prepare the documents that need to accompany the ratification ballot. The anticipated timeline for that would likely be in the next week that we would prepare the ballot and submit that to the membership. Steve, Howard may have a better recollection of what the timeline is necessary for members to return those ballots, but we will be doing electronic balloting, so it should be fairly soon, but it needs to be done prior to July 1st, obviously, to be able to complete the process of having a negotiated agreement. And I'll just say now that the negotiation between BSEA, those, the new bargaining unit and the department of state's attorneys and sheriffs was one of the best negotiations that I've done, I think in my 26 years at BSEA. It was very cordial. It was positive. It was developing answers and solutions to issues that existed. And the members of this new unit, I think are very pleased that they now will have the same opportunities in a lot of areas that other state employees have. So the relationship during negotiations was certainly very positive. And I expect that to extend throughout this two-year contract. Thanks, Gary. Committee, any questions for Gary on the bargaining process or ratification timeline? Jim Harrison. Yeah, thank you. This may not be for Gary, but he may know the answer. If not, Annie would know the answer. Assuming it's ratified in short order, did we get a cost estimate for each year of the contract? I can, Gary, let me take that. Yes, Jim, we do. I was preparing it last night and this morning. I think I just want to run my numbers one more time. I think I can provide by later this afternoon the cost estimate for both year one and year two. And again, I just want to point out that some of what you will see will be salary-driven benefits that are brand new. So I don't want to say that as though I'm scaring any of you that this is going to have a huge price tag, but of course as a brand new contract, there are new benefits that will be incorporated here that once we have this contract in place, Jim, then we are able to, for FY22, to budget for some of these expenses. Where right now, for the FY21 budget that we've submitted, we were unable to budget them because we didn't have a contract, we didn't know the terms of the agreement. So I think that as we go forward and we're able to put some of these in, our provisions of this contract governing about 107 bargaining unit employees will not look tremendously large. Okay, thank you, Annie. And I know I'm sensitive to your not wanting to go public with the details of the contract until it's ratified, but can you tell us if it contains a similar provision as with the state at large with a kind of a one-time increase, base amount to everybody, and then the step increases? Is it kind of the same format or can you not tell us at this point? I would say that we can say yes to that. Gary, you agree that we can say yes to that? Yes, many of the provisions will mirror the executive branch contracts. And also I should have said, representative, the effective date of this new contract will be July 1st. So the two-year agreement will have the same timeline or effective dates as the executive branch contracts. Okay, thank you both. Committee, any other questions? Okay, well, this is only round one and due to our technical challenges, we got a bit of a late start, so I appreciate everybody's patience as we made sure that we could stream this meeting live in order to keep our open door policy on committee deliberations. So we will come back to the issues around the pay act at our next meeting. We need to hear from the SCA and we also would love to have Annie come back and maybe share with us the spreadsheet that you said you may have finished by this afternoon. And so stay tuned because Andrea will be in touch with you to schedule further conversations about pay act. I wanna again say thank you to committee members for your flexibility and patience today and a big thanks to our IT folks who've been scrambling to make sure we can continue to conduct our business despite a few snags with the technology this morning. So that is a wrap for today and I think we can go ahead and adjourn this meeting and we'll see you again soon. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair.