 I just saw a flurry of emails this morning having to do with the plastic bag ban and paper bags and why don't you fill us in as to what the problem is. All right, thank you Madam Chair, again for the record Doug Farnham tax department. So this is actually something that the department started to take notice of back in February but with to be honest with COVID and with all of the other priorities we've been balancing you know the communication just never happened on identifying this as a potential issue. So the plastic bag ban that goes into effect in eight days on July 1st essentially says you know you're not supposed to use plastic bags anymore I guess you can use some if you have them in stock so you can use up your existing supply but then from this point forward retailers and grocers must use if if a bag is requested it has to be a paper bag and it has to be for a minimum charge of 10 cents. Now when the committees were discussing that bill it was discussed as if it were a fee it was called a fee in committee. However in the legal structure it is not a fee because the the 10 cents is retained by the retailer or grocer and it has no restrictions on use so they're just required it's a price threshold similar to what some states do with cigarettes so the retailer keeps that 10 cents and the current state of retailers and grocers is that they would pay the sales tax when they buy the bag so they pay the 6% on whatever the purchase price was or they would pay use tax if they bought that with a resale exemption and then instead used it to package groceries to send home with a customer so they would owe that money that 6% on the wholesale price essentially so we're not talking about a big difference here between the 10 cents. Thank you McDonald's got a question before we go any further Senator McDonald's. If we were to clarify this situation would it be best to would you do you wish commissioner that you've done that on the miscellaneous tax bill? Yes because perhaps that would be a clarification of the retail sale definition. This senator would be much more supportive of trying to resolve that were to be a floor amendment on the miscellaneous tax bill and that would sort of prevent any other monkey business from possibly going on. Yes by intent would be that we would do this as a floor amendment on to miscellaneous tax. I want to wait for the other body to do it and send it back to us and from what I've heard if the miscellaneous tax bill goes out the way we've sent it out it's coming back so it doesn't really matter where we do it. So I'm now eager to more even more eager to hear the proposal how to solve this problem. We've done away with the hanky panky that only senator McDonald's has figured out so far. Okay Doug you can continue. Okay so the legislative intent on passage was not to have sales tax applied to this this 10 cent charge. We definitely confirmed that with at least the committees that discussed it with the EEC with the Grocer's Association and so the tax department proposes language that would exempt basically say that sales tax has to be paid on the initial purchase of these carryout bags as defined under the the single use plastic or the single use act and so the six percent as it's being paid now would be paid then so this is revenue neutral and we would not expect that subsequent it excludes that subsequent activity that's 10 percent charge or 10 cent charge from being considered a resale under sales tax law and yeah so we think that that's because it's to deal it's dealing with local activity it shouldn't be a streamlined sales tax issue because it's not going to be you know a definition for internet sales purposes it's more of a if you're buying these for this purpose you can't use a resale exemption if you're a local vendor leave that Doug the wording um yes I was just trying to locate that language I apologize for the last minute nature of all this no this is all it's the way it goes the last week is it okay if I email that language to face yes yeah and she can get it out to us all right apologies madam chair I just sent that um the proposed amendments to title 32 fastest thing be to put it up in the screen faith as soon as you get it all of us might not have two or three screens going here madam chair um I I in order to be ready for miscellaneous tax um may I just ask Doug um or abby is can you remind me is there anything in here that's vital for to be in law by July one this one is so aside from this provision senator uh July 15th uh some of the extension provisions the automatic or recognition of the federal extension those would be nice to have in by July 15th but uh we feel pretty comfortable telling taxpayers we're going to accept um federal extensions for uh for this year's personal income tax filing we also don't have time to change the forms anyway because all of our forms were published you know this spring um so uh the short answer is is no other than this there's nothing that is is um going to cause serious harm by not being in effect July 1st to the department thank you I would just point out um there is the technical change for the current use clean uh subordination that actually will be repealed July 1st so that um is it it could still be fixed retroactively it would just have to be added back into the statute so it's not essential but this is the cleanest fix is to have it passed before July 1st what section is that abby I'm just pulling that up now that was one of the new sections that were added in at the end it's section 27 on this one paper bags question are we is this acceptable to do to everybody question question yes so this is the language that's being proposed now by the tax department right in 9701 5 is that just does that mean that all the grocery stores have to pay a sales tax on the their their stock of paper bags uh senator this would cement the current state essentially because current law says that they would have had to pay that sales tax or may use tax if they take it out and use it for something else because paper bags are subject to sales tax um so it would not it's it's this is it designed to be revenue neutral so that it doesn't cost the edge fund anything and it doesn't generate any additional revenue so right now a grocery store has a supply of paper bags on hand to give to people they pay sales tax on those bags and the consumer doesn't pay any tax on those bags right right correct senator okay thank you how about the plastic bags that were used throw away bags that were used previously were those subject to a sales tax yet senator okay thank you so committee i guess what we need is someone to just ask to have this crafted up as an amendment and present it on the floor and we can do the you know members of the committee can sign on i would normally do that but i have another amendment and i don't want to get things confused so i need someone to volunteer to just get this up and get it up to senator bloomer and i think we can assume the unless somebody says they don't want to be on it can we assume that the whole committee would be on it i don't mind i'm the presenter of the underlying bill so does it make sense for me to offer this with as the lead yeah i don't want to do that yeah i think that's fine abby while you're listening uh would all uh five of the other senators minus the chair be willing to join me i'd be willing to join on it i just don't want to have to present it on the floor that all right with everybody so right with me mark mcdonnell this will kick up a little bit of a hornet's nest on the whole issue but what are you going to do actually it's a good question senator mcdonnell as our our veteran member if we pass this amendment does that make the bill germane uh for a a motion on the plastic bag question i would say no because this is tax policy and that is miscellaneous tax policy it's not a environmental thank you so abby um great question thank you do i um what do i have to do i will put that into amendment format so for all of the senators present is that correct including senator ballant yes yes yes um i will i'm just getting up to speed this is the first i've seen the language so i want to make sure that all of the references are correct um i will if you don't mind i'll work with dug to make sure i understand um what they're trying to pull in and then i'll get that back out to you i don't know i'll get that to you this evening so if you could get it to if you could send it to bloomer and copy me that would be the way to go because we want this ideally on the calendar for tomorrow i'll alert him right now that we have that coming um but uh you know it's already 4 30 so madam chair if this is if this is not changing existing policy at all what is i'm not understanding the need is this the clarifying language of some sort yeah it technically i think dug correctly that it is right now because we didn't want we really wanted to encourage people to bring their own bags reusable bags so we didn't want posters just switching over and giving away paper bags which to generate you know compost faster than plastic but not right away so we told them that and we wanted to encourage people to remember their bags so we told them they had to charge 10 cents a bag right okay so they have right now they give them to you they have to charge you but if they charge you technically you owe sales tax buying a bag okay i got it now thank you could make a lot of money if we made them buy the bags that's a lot of bags i i think they are going to make some money well they're getting we get the revenue when the store buys them the question is the resale correct well we're getting that now these won't be for resale right okay so we are back if anyone wants to do it to broadband and let me find senate finance the next we we have an open agenda believe still tomorrow we're not sure when we're getting off the floor um faith i know you were trying to get i'm just trying to figure out if we want to keep on going now or if we want so i scheduled june tyrney for 230 and the two gentlemen that senator brock recommended for three o'clock okay so we have testimony tomorrow and i think testimony with commissioner tyrney might be somewhat extended but we're going to have to make some decisions um so you're talking about you're referring to the bill that we worked on earlier today yes broadband well it's not a bill the bill is in approach this will be our recommendation don't intend to write 35 pages like we just did in health and welfare i intend to give them a list but um i think we have suggestions from the house of buckets of money one that goes to communities ones that go to individuals and one that goes to providers but providers only for cable um we need i think we can either use those we can talk about and we can talk with commissioner tyrney about leaving i believe it is the biggest now i've got an agenda i've got to go back and find my i need a fourth computer here um a fourth bucket i'm just trying to see section by section all right 43 000 okay so that is the um that's the first bucket which goes to it and utility rate pay or assistance allocation so i'm going to have to read the whole wording of that i think by tomorrow that's the individual assistance to get hooked up so i think our lobbyist that's got four one and lives a mile from the line coming out of Montpelier could use your three thousand dollars to run that line a mile or talk to a couple of our neighbors everybody chip in and run that line a mile or maybe if there's neighbors further up i've got others um these are not poor neighborhoods these are suburban Montpelier and Waterbury they have 35 and there's the community resilience section and the line extension which is only two million okay the 800 000 was going to the cud's for planning and then 35 000 i'm not sure where that one's going oh i guess that's dividing up the 43 and then the 800 so anyway take a look at all of that decide those are the buckets we've got to set criteria so when they write up next door we need buckets and then criteria within each one which will tell the department or whomever we end up with administering this how they are to evaluate because the bulk of this is competitive grants how they will evaluate those grants so if we want them to give preference to cud's if we want to give cud's veto power is it total veto power only veto power if they're not going to get any lines up for two years and somebody else says well they can hook up 50 homes in five months how do we you know the the kind of the waiting criteria that will go into deciding who's getting what grants so it's the buckets and we can change those it's what the buck you know and then it's somebody's gonna have to distribute the money within the buckets and under what criteria do we want them to do it and i don't know how much time we're going to get tomorrow because i don't know what the senate schedule is going to be um ended like uh the pro 10 was going to try to get us on the floor at noon at two noon noon at 12 noon yes we're on at 12 at work but he had talked a couple times today about having late afternoon sessions that's right which cuts us off in the back end i haven't seen an email to that effect i haven't seen one but i'm bouncing between screens so it may be there that i haven't seen it um madam chair we don't usually morning committee sort of during this time have shut down right that's what we're normally they have i'm hoping at my noon meeting the two bills we voted out of health and welfare that that ended it but i doubt it but we may you know at some point have to shut down some other committee so that the the money committees can get these bills out especially if someone wants us to go home by friday or saturday well and i did hear that health and welfare is meeting for july too right oh i don't even mention it if it's possible we will it was unusual we've worked to do this minute um distribution of funds for at least six weeks and they came in two days ago had a work session and said no you need a couple of big tranches and six weeks worth of work went into three big buckets so that's where we are but i think it's still a 36 page document um i'm going to try and have this be much shorter than 36 but go home read make some notes and then be ready to talk to the commissioner we had questions and irv tome sent me an email saying there is no federal kind of regulation over um lifeline for broadband so i think we're going to want this and he had sent out some things maria maybe you know he sent out some some emails trying to confirm that but i i just sent i have sent out a response to him okay broadband so he may unless there's something else he's talking about i don't know all right mom so we uh but i think we want to ask the commissioner those questions about running the lines and having people run the lines to them their houses and then not be able to afford the service and does that how does that play in and what's there to make sure after we invest all of somebody's tax dollars that there's an end product and if there isn't um and then that goes to some of this money may be able to be used i don't know can it be used to pay people's fees to get them on i especially coming out of the crisis so senator mcdonald's isn't there uh nine hundred thousand dollars in in money that we that's being held by uh yes i got three copies i got three copies of the capital bill and finally a letter from catherine bennum there is not quite but a hundred nine eight hundred ninety nine pretty rounded to nine hundred thousand in money from the capital bill that was put in about venue coverage co and it's sitting there available for a connection so i would it would be it would have that's a good question maria can you is that you or it's capital money so i got a whole lot of respondents about this over the last several days involved day of bow and senator benning from institutions as well as appropriations that i think answers many of those questions and i'll i'll try to cobble those together and send them out to the committee today i'm still gathering information because it's still partially elusive thank you it sounds like it's in good hands mr chair it's somewhere yeah it would have to be a capital investment because it's bonded money right um but uh i'm assuming we're hoping that the polls and wires last 20 years i know we can't buy computers with it generally because they don't if i i think mad chair that senate rock is looking at with with the hopes that um if we build out um connections to pass people's houses and we need to hook them up to qualify for federal money that maybe that 900 000 would do the trick to assure that people were getting connected and validate the rest of the federal expenditures well it's getting them connected and then it's it's affording the fee to the provider my provider's somewhere around a hundred dollars a month um so i want to know about lifeline if we get them connected could we do lifeline or perhaps we could reserve that 900 000 for the cds i'm well i'm eager to hear what senator brock has the work that he's been doing and how that might tie in here right when well when he was ready original question where i started asking the question uh some weeks ago was looking at whether not any of that 900 dollars could be 900 000 to be purposed uh to do uh some portion of the 10-year telecom plan so that's where i started and it's it's still you know somewhere in the rabbit hole as the material that i'm sending out to you i think we'll see and i've got a further question back to the department of public service that may be able to shed some more light on it and i've sent out there were two additional memos from our consultant on things to consider one was why are we doing a 10-year plan when things change in 10 days um maybe we want to reel that back in but also it's some good questions to think about as we set up this like how does it fit in with our long-term goals and though one is having the cud's really be in the forefront of providing service and the other is the level of service we want because the chances of getting 100-100 out there to a lot of people by December is not really great um maybe e-c five e-c fibers up they're running i'm sure they can find some you know roads they could run up um i have a feeling cv just because i know they've been working with e-c fiber and getting connected up in rocksbury which is a telecom and telephone hole they may be ready to do that limited service area i i don't know i i guess northeast the northeast project is up and running and may be in line but most of the other ones are still in very formative stages they aren't running stuff santa pierce and i'm chair when when we adjourn um i'm hoping that sarah brock and i can get our heads together um as we try to advance this uh mumble or this sort of slightly chaotic assembling here so i wonder to that end if um um uh if senators sort of had one or two principles that were important to advance i mean we've had a wide-ranging wide-ranging conversation here i've done my best to keep track of different points but what does success look like to each of you so that we can have that up front and do our best to incorporate it into our thinking yeah and madam chair to your question about why do a 10-year tower communications plan the answer is because it takes us five years to produce one it's probably true uh wow so is senator i'm sorry senator pierce and looking for us to all go around right now yeah and think about i think i would like to target school districts that have a lot you know have a higher percentage of kids they that are unconnected um and i'm fighting commissioner tyrney since we've been told that the department is that the school superintendents or principals that they're all collecting this information and that the department event has been sending it over to the public service department so i would like to know what they've got but if we could find a couple of school districts that are severely hampered because and that my hunch is that'll probably be somewhere up in the north maybe down in the mountains it'll be in the central rib um that we target those areas um so we can you know really help out a couple and they're probably poor struggling school districts but um i'd like to do that in that vein madam chair the i'm i'm not speaking and trying to get ec fiber built out in ec fiber territory there must be plenty of places in the state that have yet to that we should use as much of the money as we can to build fiber out to then connect very types of districts or areas that the chair has just mentioned and those buildouts should be should be compatible with the future buildouts for the loops that fiber would eventually have um they don't have to be the whole loop it just needs to be a section of the logical loops for building fiber out and that we connect them to the very districts that the the the chair has just mentioned and and try and do it proportionately around the state um because a preference for fiber but or if we can't have fiber then what not precluding fiber in the future the every time we extend far far out with stuff that isn't fiber we reduce the eventual acquisition anytime we can move fiber out and then have it part of what would be the logical loops that fiber would have in the future and we connect them um now to um with with copper or with um local um temporary um wireless buildouts for regions that that would be the best use of the federal money because the fiber would be in the long term interests and the temporary um copper or whatever to be hooked up to those areas would qualify us to use copper is least preferred excuse me is copper the least preferred copper is trinkets and beads copper dsl madam chair may i yes all right so for me it is also i mean it's turbo charging the cud is what i want to do at this point i mean let them work to fulfill their mission which really is universal coverage of future proof technology um and i think that's what i think that's going to be the best use so that's that's what i'm going to be looking for and of course also which serves the most underserved and low-income vermoners advantage the cud is as allowable by federal law i'm sorry did you just yeah this has to be right i mean right i mean is allowable under federal law which yeah on this one but let's turbo charge these folks so that we can really um you know and really move toward technology uh you know technology future technology future really good so whatever i was you can say there future proof technology is i think the order i want those three words for the record had the previous speakers have spoken my mind okay great kids just arrived with dunking donuts so i'm leaving nice they've gone to their room wearing their masks we're wrapping up okay are you ready to start getting um so i guess the thought that i had goes back to conversations we had probably a week ago or more and that was the idea of using the money to go out as far as possible to a household that would qualify for uh for CARES funding because sort of a health condition education or remote work and then have the benefit of that line all the way out there there for future development by Vermonters that presently don't have uh fiber uh or cable uh so i don't know how you do that but that's sort of uh i think it's sort of a multiplier effect and even though it would be state money perhaps or whatever consumer money down the road next year at least a lot of the work will have been done on the federal dime of the CARES funding i don't know how you write that or how you get that concept in there the second thing which what i would like to see in which i think i like to see in all of these things is these federal dollars are going to help businesses that are in these industries to make progress with new customers or retaining existing customers and i think that a program if it could be set up that prioritizes those business to put some resources in themselves i think that would be helpful so in our committee in the economic development committee even tomorrow i know we're going to be looking at rent assistance but i'm going to be arguing that we give rental assistance to rental loans that otherwise might not get paid that on the flip side they agree not to evict somebody for several months uh i'm obviously could evict something for non-payment but there shouldn't be any no-cause eviction for those people who are taking the rental assistance money so i think it would be consistent here so that's all i have to add to thoughts for chris i'm not hearing any are we on still yes i yeah on live still um i think everybody is about grain so i'm going to adjourn we can go off live and go home and read broadband studies ending live stream now