 First, thank you for inviting me, whomever did, but not here to opine about what you're already doing. The request was, could I offer comments on one aspect, which I don't think is already on your agenda, but I would argue could or should be. And that is of all the options before you, raising taxes, cutting benefits, getting better returns on the corpus and so forth. There's one leg of the stool missing in my view, and that is in the context of the nature of the problem, which is generational. You don't have to solve it to you'd love to, we'd all love to, but you can't wave a wand at this one. So to the extent you're interested, and this is entirely up to you and your colleagues, I happen to think that there are opportunities with state government to save money, significant sums of money, if you add it all up. That's hard. It's hard work. But we have identified some of those in the course of our work, and I'll share those with you, and then you can get back to your regularly scheduled program. So the first one, these are, I think kind of in order, I collated them by hand and missed those little rubber things that old, you know, in 50 years ago, people used to do when they collated by hand. I didn't have those, so I hope it worked out. We did a job a few years ago, which was just a lark, in effect, on my part. I was curious about the cost of public safety in Vermont, because as you know, not all of it is in the budget in the same place, corrections is in AHS and so forth, so you never really see it holistically. So we did that, and that's the first graph. Look at the number, $574 million in one year. Now I can't honestly say whether that's not enough, just right or too much. I'm guessing that smart people could identify redundancies and inefficiencies in the system and save a few bucks. You know, 1% of $574 million is by definition $5.4 million, a 1% say, now this is a big deal. You know, this system has evolved over time, and there are vested interests everywhere. Some of them are probably right behind me. So it's not an easy thing to even contemplate, let alone do. It would take time, but it might even be for the better, regardless of the fact that you're looking for money under rocks. Anyway, that's a big one, and you know, to make 3%, that's $17 million, it's a lot of money. Second, as you know, our well aware, certainly GovOps and others, stayed over time. Has grown 39% since FY 16, and in 20, it was $25.4 million. Now, there are lots of reasons for this. We know many of them, some of them are in the short term unavoidable, they're a great deal of work to make this look very different. Nevertheless, I don't see a group like you having been organized to address that particular question. Maybe it's time. You know, at 25 million, a 10% say, again, $2.5 million every single year, because this is just going to keep going up if we don't fix it. The next one is something that really appeals to me. We're working on a job right now, the report will probably be out in a few weeks or a month. A number of years ago, a former employee now, CFO attacks Andrew Stein, I talked about the fact, we knew this, but we hadn't seen the data, that the same procedure at your hospital might cost $4,000, at your hospital, it might cost $7000. Now, thank goodness, state employees don't have to worry about that. They have a platinum health care plan and most of it, and a lot of them are not all. On the other hand, over time, as deductibles have grown, small businesses are often the self-employed and many others like the state just pay for this stuff. Now, that's a problem, that's a big problem that you can't serve to solve today or tomorrow, but there's something the state could do. Last year, to HR's annual report, the state's share of the health care cost for such employees and their families was $107 million. Here again, you save 1%, it's a million bucks. We have something in mind that has been tried in other parts of the country now for a number of years. A couple of Fortune 500 companies that are insured and have tens of thousands of employees said, if you have a heart problem, you're going to Cleveland and we're going to fly you there and put you up with your wife or husband or whatever, because they can save so much money. Now, as I said, as I understand, state employees don't really have a need for that. So the question is, could we develop an incentive for them and literally pay them to go to your hospital instead of yours? I don't know. We have some data that I hope will be compelling to you guys. It's an interesting subject. And there are other ways to get about it, not just the incentive approach. The next one is something I've brought to your committee before, which is something we discovered when we did a couple of audits. There were two parallel at the time about employee misconduct, how the state handles that. We knew nothing about it. Oh, hi, Michael. And it involves, as you know, the investigative process and that those results are forwarded to the appointing authorities and so forth. And then a decision about what, if any, discipline is required. What we found is that while the system works pretty well at the margins, it's very slow. And there's a cost to that and a very significant cost on the order of one point eight million dollars a year for relief from duty. I have no problem with the system design. It's appropriate if you as a supervisor think that I shouldn't be in the office while my case is being investigated, fine, no problem. But if it goes on for six months or a year, that's a problem. If you get the report from the investigators and don't act on it for months, that's a problem. And that's what we found. And that's what one of the things shows you the timeline for the investigations themselves, just the total process. So that's an opportunity. And that's not big bucks. But if you could save a third, that's $600,000 a year times 20 years is more than a nickel. We did a job a few years back on BGS management of capital projects. We looked particularly at nine whose estimate cost was $92 million going. We found that for a lot of reasons. I'm not pointing fingers. It's not about bad guys, but they were $24 million over budget. Now, I was talking to the former IT guy from JFO, Dan Smith, the other day, real nice guy. And I mentioned that to him and he said, that's an IT world. Well, that's a shame. But nevertheless, that's the kind of thing I have no reason to believe that Chris Cole, who had come over from AOT and said, we have a better system to make progress on this and his successor. I expect they've done just that. I hope so. I see no reason why not because it's in their interest as well. But these things, that's a lot of money. $24 million. And then I slide in here about the projects we looked at and the extent to which they were in terms of dollars and percent. And in some cases, the problem was poor planning. In some cases, the legislature changed it six times about what they wanted from them. There's a whole bunch of moving parts. But to the extent you can make that process more streamlined or effective, less likely to be affected by all those variables, the better. We did a job. Now, this one's not, again, not big money. I don't know how much savings there are there, but between BGS and AOT, of course, a different fund. It's not general fund. I have to believe there are ways to save money when you're spending that kind of money. The next one is one job we did because I had always been interested in this curious issue of the state's lease of high elevation lands. I mean, that's obviously extreme land. We don't think of it that way, but it really is to that. You can't have a skier unless you go to the top. Not going to be very attractive skier. So, you know, these leases and their terms, as we pointed out, were adopted at a time when the ski resorts were your grandfather's ski resorts. So not the ones that we have today. They're mostly more for season. It was all about lift ticket revenues, only on lifts that were on state land. So for now, obviously, a big part of their business model is well, with those million dollar or two million dollar condos at Spruce Peak, it's still be worth that much if it was for their high elevation scheme. No, of course not. So we are getting money from all the sources that generate revenue in tourism. No question about it. Sales and use in meals, property tax transfer and so forth. And that's a good thing, but the lease payments have not kept up. And when we brought this to your attention, the response within a nanosecond from the industry lobbyists was, we'd really rather not discuss that and there was no discussion. So the problem is, and I don't know how you become this, but the lease have term say they cannot be revised or amended without the permission of the skiers, rather clever of them, I think. So that's a good one. There's some opportunity there, I think. We did another job that Andrew found torturous, but turned out to be, I think, a really good job on soul source contracts. The question was, to what extent, several years ago, was the state proving, you know, the process, of course, if you write a letter for a job, it's over now, I think, twenty five thousand to the. Secretary of administration, they can approve a soul source if you demonstrate to their satisfaction that there's no other way. And of course, there's lots of reasons why they're appropriate after Irene, we didn't have time to play our piece. If you buy a product or a service, it can only be provided by one entity. OK, you knew that going in. You had to re up with them. So. But we found an excessive amount of soul source contracts. It was sixty eight million dollars worth from only five entities. The big ones are. And, you know, there are people, unfortunately, some of our neighbors who did state government's right within competence and corruption. That is not the case. And I hate to be the guy who they look at and say, see, he told us. It's just that it was a lot of reasons for all those soul source contracts. And a lot of people think have addressed that. If I'm not mistaken, the fifth floor, this governor took that very seriously. And we haven't gone back to do it again, because it took forever. But I think they've made progress in that regard. So that's a good thing. But it's the kind of thing that you should check periodically and see how they're doing. A couple of other things that are not quite like, you know, inside baseball are more programmatic. We do have some programs, as I pointed out in a report several years ago in the agency of commerce that cannot. We cannot quantify the return on investment on these programs. And I would hope that you would agree that if you're funding a program and you can't determine the extent that you're getting return or how much then why do we have the program? Maybe we should think about how else to allocate those resources to some in some way where we can determine its ROI. And one of those was in the paper the other day. And that's veggie. You know, we have a council that just awarded six million dollars to a guy who was coming anyway. And I just did a report last year looking very closely, scrubbing the otherwise confidential information that you can't even see on a group of samples, sample applicants whose materials. And I hate to say it, but there is virtually no due diligence. They basically say, you told us that without this incentive, you'll go somewhere else. That's good enough. Frankly, that's not good enough for me, state order, but I can't get anybody to listen. The bottom line is there's a guy named Tim Bartek, who is unquestionably the most respected researcher in the country on these general issues and has been working on it for 25 years. He waited forever to do a job on the but for. The but for is the heart of this program, as you know. So he finally did a couple of years ago, which was great timing for me. And as I was working on this other stuff and his he looked at 30 but for studies done by other people who he respected sort of analysis of all they had done. And he said the takeaway is pretty straightforward, at least 75 percent of the economic activity, supposedly incentivized by the programs would have occurred anyway, sometimes as much as 98. So in the face of that, I don't know why we don't have a conversation about how else we get back. Now, here we're talking about using the money for pension. So that's a different thing. In any case, that's one. The other is one that I know is close to everybody's heart. I think particularly those who come from those counties and districts. But we spend it's not a fortune. It's only about three million dollars a year. And by the way, the veggie money doesn't seem like a lot. It averages about three or five million, although because of the Marvell in 19, which was five million, which I did a small report on and the beat the MTX one the other day was six million. So the annual is going to go up pretty soon. The other program and we've talked about this before, particularly because tourism and marketing regularly comes to the legislature and says, why don't you give us a percentage of the increase in the rooms and meals tax that will help boost our available funds and we can do good things. The implication is that there's a causal relationship between what they do and there is no such. There's not even a correlation, let alone a causal connection. I've talked about this. Tom, that is published in some of his fiscal notes about this. You know, there are times when the rooms and meals is going this way and you've cut tourism and marketing. So there really is no connection in this report that I mentioned from a couple of years back, we looked at the peer reviewed literature on this and a whole bunch of other economic related subjects. And there isn't much out there on tourism and marketing. Almost all the work done is done on behalf of states who hire a small number of firms that almost every state uses. What a surprise, they tell them what they want. And that's what some of the research points out of opinion. Anyway, the point is, and even more importantly, that is that not surprisingly, many of the players in this field are big players by our standards and scaries and so forth. They have to invest in advertising and marketing. That's the nature of their business, their fools, or they won't be in business long if they don't. The economic census tells us that they spend 80 to 100 million dollars a year in Vermont on marketing and advertising. There is no methodology available to tell us what the effect of our three million is compared to that 80 to 100. It can't be done. Having said that, that doesn't mean that there's no value in the freeway. But I don't know what the value is. Should we spend twice as much or nothing? I have no idea. Again, it's a program that we are independent, objective people can't quantify. That's about three million dollars a year. My good friend, Michael Sorotkin, wouldn't be surprised to hear me say that the new worker grant program also suffers from some of these problems in terms of estimating its value. It has an unwritten but that we learned in the little work we did about the first the remote worker grant program. A number of people weren't shy about saying we were coming anyway. My wife had a job, so that kind of stuff just too bad. A couple of things from the early days of my tenure are not big dollars in and of themselves, but they are indicative of the fact that if you look underneath stuff periodically, you'll find stuff. One of them was the subject of the first piece of audit art in my tenure. A team was looking at the company that was providing medical services to the prisoners and they were I think they were in the Chittenden facility and they were waiting to meet with someone. And one of my senior auditors noticed a box sitting on the floor and you'll see it there. I think it's the last page and in it were all these blister packs of medication and they were being discarded. They were either from an inmate who had been released or died or whatever the case may be. As it turned out, we looked into it and there was a clause in the contract with these folks that said, if you don't use it, return it and we'll give you credit or cash and they weren't doing that. They had no inventory control to speak of. So at our suggestion, they did that and 15 months out, they'd say four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. You know, that doesn't compare to the thing about public safety, but state government is a big enterprise and I don't care how good the people are. It's impossible to catch everything where human beings and the systems are complex. We're all busy. So that was a fun one. Another early one was related to cell phones. I was curious about that because I'd been hearing that some departments at that time in 11 and 12 had started buying a lot of cell phones. And I thought, OK, what do I know from cell phones? So I said, let's look at it. So we picked five of the biggest enemies and said, how did they do? Well, they didn't do so well because, you know, AOT is good at transportation. A&R is good at what they do. They're all good at something, but they're not very good at cell phones. They weren't that. And because of the decentralized nature of much of state government, they were given the authority to decide how many cell phones to purchase and whom to give them to and which plans to buy. As it turned out, they bought plans that provided for 11 million minutes. They didn't use five million of them. Nine percent of the phones they distributed were never used, and 20 percent were used no more than 100 minutes in an entire year. So again, that doesn't make them bad people. They thought they were doing a good thing and the right thing. Oh, so that's the way we got to go. And they did that. They just didn't do it very well. And we were told that there were hundreds of thousands of dollars to say things if they just got a better plan. And by the way, that's an interesting sidebar. Well, you know that, of course, that doesn't have to have purchasing person in the way at the time. She learned how some of this stuff works. If it's a highly technical and complicated subject that's already done in 27 other states. And Vermont says, oh, my God, why should we reinvent the wheel and come to an RFP about technical stuff? We don't know that much about. They say quite understandably, oh, those guys already did that. Let's jump on to theirs. And there were provisions that allow you to jump on in some case. You don't always get quite the same deal and so forth. So that's what is done periodically. And it seems reasonable on its face. On the other hand, those states may not be like Vermont. There could be a lot of reasons why it's not a great model. It's a great model for Dev and her staff, because they were already overworked. But there's stuff like that floating around that we don't have enough staff for resources. I'm not asking for more. We don't have enough staff to do all this stuff all the time. These are just some examples. And every guy who comes in says, you know, we can save this much. And I know they mean it, but you hit the ground and you have 27 fires to put out and big stuff happening. You can't get to all this. So that's just an example of what we've done and the things we've identified. I happen to think these savings, some of these, if you all committed to it, could be achieved in a reasonable period of time and add to your or add a bucket, a whole bucket conceivably to the money you're trying to raise. So I'm going to respond and have a response to this. You know, I love your reports. Well, thank you. You also know it's a great exception to the public safety report. Take exception to quantifying the costs. We just counted the dollars. Senator Lee, we're going to have this conversation in gumbox next year. Big time. But anyway, I appreciate the reports. My concern with this is that we do have an issue that needs to be solved. And we need to put more money into it. Are you suggesting that we wait until we find savings here? Because we're not necessarily talking about new funds to go in. I know that we might be, but we're not necessarily. That's one of the options. So if we if we just wait, if we say we need to put 30 million dollars in, if we wait until we find 30 million dollars here before we solve the pension issue, it's going to keep getting worse and worse. So are you suggesting that we not do anything now? And actually, these aren't within our purview at all. Well, you is in the purview of the legislature. But we're not. I understand that. But to be clear, I did not say don't do anything. Did anyone hear me say that? No, I said we need to be solved right now. No, no, but that doesn't mean you can't identify parts of a solution now. If you so, too. Those are the recommendations you all agree to make to the legislature. This is what I think is another potential leg of the school. That's all potential for money. Yes. OK. I guess I have a couple of questions. How much money does the state of Vermont spend on the education every year? Pardon me. How much do we spend on public education every year? I think the fund is one point eight or thereabouts. So we can make the same generic. Say that we just say one percent. No, you can't use that money for this purpose. You could use it for teachers, but not for state employees. That's why I'm talking about that. But we're still talking like the simplicity. I think we're the senator. One of them is going is we hear out of time. We hear what you just say. One percent of the five hundred seventy four million. It sounds easy to find that five point seven million dollars. But when you start dating into each program, you realize their employees are overworked, they're understaffed, all these others use the same conversation. I mean, you're like looking at the teachers here. We said, don't understand your school budget. No, I'm talking about reorganizing the entire system. Right. We could. That's a much same thing on education as well. So I think it's just I think it's over simplification of finding those costs from my perspective. OK. Are you talking about over simplifying the state government or over simplifying our pension system? I'm not talking about oversimplifying anything. I don't know where this is coming from. No, he did. I'm saying if you and your colleagues believe that five hundred and seventy four million dollars for public safety in the state of Vermont is a good number, then forget about it. I'm saying if you don't, then it's worthy of a conversation because it's a huge amount of money in the state with six hundred and thirty thousand. I'm going to interrupt you and step back once. There are 13 of us out here, only five are legislators. This is not a legislative committee. I know that this is a committee that's supposed to look at solving the issues of our retirement system and our pension. And and I just am. I don't be honest. I don't want this any looking at the public safety, the same money and the public. I didn't ask this committee to do that. I didn't ask you to do that. This committee is going to make recommendations. Yes, about how to address the problem that's been put in your lap, right? That involves finding a bunch of money, a whole lot of money. This is one place to look for money in making state government more efficient. OK, so that's all I'm saying. OK, and I and I would hope that they're all interested in my mind. I see not again. If we if we suggest that we can make a list of where to save money. We but that's not going to be our primary concern. Why not? I mean, if you need a hundred dollars and you can identify sources for 20 over here and 30 over here and 40 over here and you come up short, you could say, you know, we can take a little time on that piece and here's some places to look. That's my point. That's all I'm saying. I think. Just have a little analogy that's going on in my head sitting here as a teacher, because of the teachings of society, and right around two thousand ish, we have a no child living on an act pass. And what that did for education. Those of us is it asked us to look always for education, but I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm used to it. I know how to stop and wait for the time. OK, I need to. I just I've got another try to ask you are you going to say what you like is a whole class. Just don't. What do you see? Like this again, in about 2000, I'll look behind one of the things that it did on, I think, the positive end for our industry is the vastness to look at ourselves. And we had to start looking at the things we were doing that didn't necessarily go for the outcomes we thought they, you know, they would deliver. And so we had to start looking at research based curriculum. And we had to start analyzing our industry through the lens of are we getting where we want to go? Is what we're doing effective? And that's what you asked me. And I think it's a valid exercise. I hear what you're saying, too, Jeanette, that like, OK, the purview of this group is that we need to do what we are here to do. And I get that. But I really love this perspective because I think it's a really valid exercise. Say, are we getting for our money? What we want to be getting for our money? And I would hope that just like them to vote resources to do that. I don't have the solution of how, because I don't know how you all do. All the other workings and people that were asked to do that. I mean, I don't mean to tell them. And yeah, so I just appreciate you expected thinking about how I feel in my 30 year career. I've become so much because I did that selection and I was fighting it at the beginning, man. I wanted to do all my with all my centers, exactly how I always done them. But I'm a way better teacher now for that analysis and looking at where I thought. What's the difference? Oh, I don't like that. You know, it goes to me where it does. Here's an interesting guys, too. I just I'm so aware that we have so such limited time here that if we start looking at any of these and we have the radicals so quickly that we get to where we need to get by the end. And we can make suggestions for that. This is someplace that the legislature could look for savings. I don't think that we are the ones that we can make those suggestions, but it's up to the appropriations and the finance and the institutions. What are those things are deal with those issues to come up with to take make the changes in the policies and the procedures. I'm aware of the process. Yes, my point was to say savings is an opportunity for all of you to mention to your colleagues, because that's where the report's going to go and not just limit yourself to cutting the benefits or what you're talking about. This should be an entirely separate bucket in my view. And it solves problems. You do it. Twenty five million dollars last year in overtime, you know. Andrew, I'm rich kindergarten teacher in Waterbury. I really appreciate you coming in today. You know, hearing about MTX coming to Waterbury is really exciting to me, thinking, oh, we have the opportunity in five years to potentially have two hundred fifty new people that means families. That means, you know, employment for new teachers. Hearing the tech CEO say that six million dollars was really a thing our entire district got less than six million relief funds. And you think, here you go, check out me or six million dollars. I think it's worth investigating these things. And I think your point that not having to solve every single thing right now is a really important one. This is something the pension is not going to collapse in one night. So why not take the time to investigate some of these savings? And doing hard work is important. Looking to those things is important. Thank you. My feelings, exactly. You know, I hear what you're saying. I think that getting too far into using some of this stuff like beyond our purview. But at the same time, we talked about, OK, maybe. Maybe this amount of funds needs to come in and make some suggestions of where that might come from. I'm particularly interested in the these payments questions, because I think there's a president of Colorado with the inputs there and the payments and towards their own fund of life. I would just want to explore and look at this. Issue. Did you look at what other states were doing? We looked at what the feds do, because the feds lease a lot of land all over the country. And here, there are almost as many ski areas that lease federal land as the state land. And their leases are much more generous and able to be modified over time. Ours or not, that is the key for us. And that lobbyist for the Ski Area Association knew exactly what he was doing because the leases were written to their advantage. And even if he hadn't said what he did, the legislators themselves would have been in an awkward place. Well, we'd like to look at how do you do that? It takes a commitment from a governor and a legislator and some very creative lawyering. We didn't see a pathway through that. That wasn't our task. We're just looking at how how are we at this place in time where the ski areas, in particular, many of not all many of them back then were succeeding and growing wildly. And as I said before, seasons and real estate everywhere, but the lease adjustments for inflation were going down. We now understand the structure of the lease arrangements and basically said, you guys could look at this, but it's going to be challenging. It's not a lot of money there either. It's just one of those many little things. I mean, we're only a small staff. I had twice as many people. I'd have twice as many adjustments, but I don't. And there were others I didn't bring up today because it's not only that they're modest, but they're very, very challenging. We did a job on the judiciary. And they are required in concert with the tax department at the end to get, you know, when come folks who are arrested to get them a turn and a judge and a clerk decide in the first instance, whether they qualify or something, they fill out and that's that. And everybody is assumed to have to be able to pay 50 bucks. And then it depends on what what you're because up to a felony, then they can charge you more and blah, blah, blah. Well, the judiciary wasn't doing anything, much of anything to collect those funds. Because they wouldn't go to them. They went to the defender general and the tax department had a small role to play, but they weren't doing anything either. And, you know, it's hard to get money from really low in people who've just been accused of. I admit, but the system could be improved. And then we found in reviewing some public assistance programs that there were parents who were cheating the system. And my good friend, Ken Schatz, who is now retired, said, Doug, you know, what you're asking is for us to do something which is my thought was, why don't you make the parents be accountable? That would just hurt the kids. You can't deny that. So some of these things, that's why I didn't include them, because there's no simple way around them. But these are things that the state should look at anyway. And I know, Michael, we talked about this recently. There was an effort made years ago. So anyway, to be clear, I wasn't suggesting your committee dig into the issues. That's what we did. All I'm doing is saying there are there are reasons to believe that state government can be made more efficient in a number of different ways. And that's not your charge. That's your charge, right, as elected officials. That's not something that can be done in the term. I know that there's a lot of reasons why things don't get done quickly. Here you are looking for money. This is an opportunity. That's all I'm saying. And I appreciate that. And I want to again apologize for naming the hybrids. This one was the first one. And I have a particular emotional reaction to this one. So. Oh, it's clear. Don't thank you. That's all I got. Thank you so much for being with us today. It's always fun to explore some of these. Some of these projects that you and your staff have done. And I appreciate the care and attention that you put into giving a giving your clear assessment of, you know, where there may be inefficiencies in state government. So being a choice is a change. Well, I should be clear when we complete reports and make recommendations, as we point out to you every year, most of our recommendations are adopted on the big issues. That's a lot harder. This requires you dealing with competing interests and so forth. That's a simple thing. I get it. But I happen to believe that any six billion dollar entity can find savings here, whether it's public, private or in between. Yeah, clearly. All right. Thank you. Thank you so much. So task force, we have a few moments. We want to take our break early and don't have an afternoon break scheduled here. So let's take an eight minute break and let's all try to be back here.