 Good morning. You are with the pension benefit design and funding task force. It is December 1st. Welcome back. It's been a few weeks since we met. And part of that delay was intentional because we thought we wouldn't receive the full actuaries reports until mid November. It turns out that the last batch of them arrived yesterday and so Chris looks like he got some sleep last night so it must be he didn't have to burn the midnight oil in order to create a slide deck to help us unpack what the actuaries brought back for information so thank you Chris for making quick work of that. First up on our agenda is to review last meeting and I don't know if you all can remember what we did in our last meeting but if anyone has any thoughts or observations or reflections on the last meeting we'll take a moment to do that now. I can't remember when it was. Exactly. I believe you are in a little zoom box. Yeah. Yeah. It was the tip. Yeah. I was just glad that we had Graham Campbell come back to speak to us talking about revenue. In general I find Graham's presentations very clear and to the point easy to understand so it's good information to again kind of look at some of those factors we've been talking about for revenue. And to get some more clarity especially on the cannabis and to get some of the information from the cannabis control board. I think that was really helpful to consider. And I think that's one of the numbers to look at there and ones that I've still been running through my mind. I'm just remembering that I think we talked a little bit about the hearings that we talked about the different ideas that people have presented. I think you summarized something and I really appreciated that discussion just kind of going through. I think that was one of the suggestions people have made. That's what it was. The suggestions that people have been hearing to me. Am I not talking. Thank you. I noticed that I think you want to be, you know, within a few inches. Yeah, thank you. I noticed that on the zoom and so I appreciate the reminder. Yeah, I just I just remember really appreciating the suggestions people had made in the discussions that we had around that. Yes, I forgot that we did until that moment. We have observations from November 10. Right. Yes. I'm pulling from my memory here because it has it has been a long time but after what Andrew had mentioned kind of brought something back for me and I know we've wrestled with how we address the new piece whether we include some do it through some sort of appendix and you know I was wondering if we could revisit that topic at some point and if if I think the more specific we can be the better for our long term work and if there are elements that there is consensus around. We would behoove us to explore those and put our report in the best place to be received by the legislature when you all begin your next session work in earnest. Thank you. Next up on the agenda is to talk about the timeline of our remaining meetings. We, we have a goal to wrap up our work by December 15, which means that we have one meeting between now and then to begin to work on the final recommendations and the final chapters of our report. Thank you. Yeah, so I think what what the hold up on that was that we need to be aware that we have a budget for actuarial services. And so, when we finish our day today, we should know, or we should be able to have a better sense of whether we are comfortably within our actuary budget and and therefore would have the ability to request that analysis. Or if we have blown through that budget, we, you know, we need to reconsider or, or, or make other arrangements for having that conversation at a, at a future date, we can't, you know, we can't spend more than the $150,000 that we have our budget for Well, we're going to be working about the day today to, to figure out whether we need to refine any of the scenarios that we asked for back in October. But I always expected that we would right I didn't think that we would be hitting a home run on on our first swing at it that we may, we may need to go back and look at different combinations of scenarios, but many of those possible actuarial are simply, you know, tweak this and run it again as opposed to building a whole new. where your analysis and so the things that we might ask for this afternoon could be easier and less expensive. Chris probably has that information. Sure. Good morning Chris for joint fiscal. So as represent a couple of houses mentioned we have, we are planning with an actuarial budget of about $150,000 for the work. We have been invoiced for around 30 to date for the first three requests. We have not been invoiced for this request for yet, but the cost estimate we received when we submitted it for from the actuaries was it would cost between $50 to $60,000. So the work we've done to date on on working on the assumption that we've obligated 100,000 of the 150,000. So that means we have 50,000 remaining. Whenever we asked them what we did with request five was we asked them to give us a time and cost estimate to see what would it cost to do that analysis. We submitted about $25,000 to do that analysis and and being able to do that was sort of predicated on getting request for done first, because one of the things we're asking them to look at in request five is applying one of the changes they modeled in before to that universe of employees. So right now, you know, and this is again we have not gotten an invoice yet for for request four but if we're assuming we have 50,000 remaining 25,000 of that 50 would be for request five, that would leave 25,000 remaining in the follow up actuarial work. So I think, depending on the complexity of what you want to continue study after this today, we can then submit another request to the actuaries and see hey what can we do within our remaining resources. So if we're making some tweaks to the model they've already built for us, it's probably not going to cost all $50,000, but without knowing the complexity of what all you want to look at in the follow up. It's hard for us to know how much room we have left in our budget. So that's sort of where we are right now. I think, once we have today's discussion done and we have a sense of what else people want to look at, we can send that over them and see how much that's going to cost, and then figure out how much room we have to navigate. I just want to ask a question about that I don't really have an opinion one way or another about that's whether that's the most important thing to send to the actuaries but I'm just wondering about process. Is it something that we agreed to send. And if so, can we have a group decision making process of we're going to make changes to agreement. Honestly, I don't, I don't think it was something that we agreed to as a full group it was a request that was made that we have said right along needed to needed to be made when we know whether we have enough in our budget to do that. Okay, I honestly don't know. I, I, my understanding was that what we talked about was that that would be the final, it couldn't be done anyway until or whatever that was called was, and that we are going to, when Chris goes through the actuarial reports that we got, we are going to have to do some tweaking and ask more reports. So, if we, if that's going to cost us $40,000 to do that we won't have the money left to do that. The fifth study. I mean, it's, it is as simple as that I believe, and the It did say, look at the judiciary and corrections, but it didn't specify that we comfortable. I think that is unmuted, unmuted. That's okay. But, I mean, I think that we should, we should proceed here with our agenda, and then when we do go through the actuarial reports and figure out what it is that we need to have redone, then we can talk more about this because it doesn't make any sense to talk about it now, since we have no idea if we're going to be able to do it or not. So, does that make sense? Is it a quarter to 10? No, it's not. The clocks in this house, I don't know if you know this or not, but are all different. And they're different. I love it because you can leave the lounge at five minutes to one and get to the gov ops room at 20 minutes to one, or you can leave at five minutes one and get there at a quarter after one. So, you just never know. You just never know. But I just wondered if that clock was right, so thank you. What we do to look at the timeline for the rest of our meetings, if we will send in today, looking at the actuarial reports and what we need to tweak and where we need to go. And then we have a meeting scheduled for the 8th time. And then the final one on the 15th and we're going to have to come with a report and recommendations on the 15th. So, everybody's understanding here. And one of the things, I know what acts 75 says 15 September, however, this report is going to go to house gov ops and madam chair is the chair of house gov ops. So as long as we get this report in in time for gov ops to get to take action on it fairly early in the session. We're fine. And so, so what I'm saying is I think we might need a, we might need to be, you know, I don't know how many more meetings we actually have in the, in the bank that we can use I know we have at least one. And I don't know about others, but the week after Christmas is probably a week we're going to have to meet to be able to finalize this this report unless we want to meet on Monday, the first, whatever the second or third of January, which that would not be my preference. No, I, I can't do that. I would recommend that we schedule a meeting for the, for the last week of December to finalize the report. I'm, I'm fine with that. I think that though. I guess. I don't know where everybody else is on that. I don't know when the actuaries do send something to them. How long we'll take them to turn it around. You know, we'll give us a little bit of a little bit of time just in case they don't turn it around as quickly as we might hope. Yeah, and whether it starts in the house or the house. Be. Well, until January 4. I mean it won't be introduced until January 4. And the important thing here is the last thing I'll say for now is that we do good work, not that we do fast work. Yes, I agree. I agree. Anybody else. I mean that's the week between Christmas and New Year's and I don't know where everybody is on meeting that week. That is about the week that we could do it. So available every day. I will be in Chicago for my nephew's bar mitzvah. Okay. I can't do the 27. I think we should see what we come up with during the meeting today. Yeah, we talk about scheduling. Yeah, okay. I think that that makes sense. And then we can also look at it under agenda setting. Agenda item. Okay. So do we want to work a little bit early, but do we want to, I think we have been an impact with us. So let's shift gears. I don't know. I see. Oh, there he is. Hi, Ben. Welcome. Thank you. I'm going to let you introduce yourself. And I don't know how you want to do this. But the show is yours. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you, Madam chair and committee members. For the record, I'm Pat McDonald, president of the board of directors of campaign for Vermont. And today is Ben Kinsley, who is also a board member and our resident policy wonk. I just want to take a moment if I can to recognize David coach, former manager partner of KPMG, who has helped us with this review of the data that we're going to present today and to put the presentation together for you. Unfortunately, David wasn't able to join us today because he would have been an excellent addition. So I wanted to make a few introductory comments summarize the finding of the reports that we sent you, and then turn it over to Ben to review in detail the charts that we provided. The report I'm referring to is entitled the public sector reality campaign for Vermont released it on November 10. And I'm hoping that you all have a copy so that you can follow along over the past months. I'm sorry, you got it. Okay, over the past months of all of your pension discussions which I found fascinating you are doing and very detailed incredible job on a very complicated issue. We've heard claims about the state's non competitive wages. And not that that's not a new statement because when I was commissioner of personnel and in Department of Labor we heard that back back way back then. But we decided to verify those statements. We set out expecting I did particularly to find the pension benefits were unquestionably an asset to recruiting and retaining our public sector workforce and we all we all said it, and no one ever step back and challenge that statement. I was former commissioner of the Department of Labor and twice commissioner of human resources. And I was particularly surprised at what we found in the in the data. There were obviously a number of assumptions that were carried through the years that were just plain wrong. I'm assuming at some point in history, they were true, which is how it all started but no one ever question it till we started looking at these numbers. Because it's been a longstanding belief that the public employee wages were below the private sector, and over the years no one challenged that assertion, particularly me. It's clear in many instances that the exempt or appointed positions were below average for for similar positions in the private sector. I remember the business roundtable did a report when I was Secretary of Transportation, which showed that my salary, because I was in charge of 1000 employees was sorely under the public the private sector salaries that I would have gotten for that job. And I think I think that that concept that I, we knew that the exempt employees were below private sector and I think we all just assumed that it trickled on down throughout the organization. So the Vermont data that we have in the report comes from the Department of Labor, the Agency of Education and other public sources. And we came up with six key findings which I'd like to read to you. And then Ben, I'm going to turn it over to Ben and he's going to go over the charts that support each of these statements. So that you know what the numbers are and where why we can make these statements. So the first key finding is the average public sector employee is in the top 25% of income earners in Vermont, even before you consider health benefits which is another discussion altogether. So the second one was on average employees make nearly $12,000 less in the private sector versus the public sector. The average number three is the average private sector employee makes at least 20,000 less per year in retirement than a public sector employee. And this this disparity likely grows when health benefits are considered once again. Wages for public sector employees have grown faster over the past 20 years than private sector employees. And over the past 30 years as far back as we have data, private sector wages have consistency lagged the public sector. So the problem is going to get worse before it gets better. And we've heard this before as nearly 20% of state workers are approaching retirement. And the last finding was the extraordinary benefits offered to public sector retirees may not be necessary to compete for qualified workers. So I think that was the thing that we've that we found the most stark in. And when we're looking at this data that going forward we may not need to be quite as generous as we thought we did to compete for the private sector. I'd like to turn it over to Ben, who can go through the slides with you so that she can see the numbers and see why we made the statements we did. Thank you Madam chair and members Ben. Thanks Pat. My name is for the record my name is Ben kinsley on the board of directors for campaign for Vermont. One of the authors of the report. And I'm going to walk through a couple of the charts the key charts that are in there. And then happy to answer any questions that that folks have so I'm going to go ahead and share my screen here. Hopefully you'll be able to see some of the charts. Your screen is on that side but hopefully they'll see some of these. What's very big thank you. Mr. That was just curious, as you're going through the charts, if we have specific questions on a particular chart, do you do you mind a question in the moment or would you prefer us to hold those questions until after. Probably, if you have a question in the moment. You know, I'll try to pause in between and allow for questions as we go because I do think it's, it's often easier to ask those as you're looking at it. So, so I'll try to pause to give to give opportunity for that. Thank you I appreciate that. Of course. So the first thing that we looked at it was looking nationally what these numbers look like the Bureau of Labor Statistics has pretty good, pretty good data on what, you know, private sector wages versus benefits look like, and they can break that down on an hourly basis to kind of account for our time versus full time employees. And even, even here we start seeing that there's a pretty big jump between where state and local and one thing I would point out here is these numbers include local which are lower. We can see that in our state level data from from the Department of Labor that you know local government salaries tend to be lower than state salaries and then state salaries tend to be a little bit lower than federal salaries. So, so there is a little bit of, if you pull the locals out of this data would probably be a little higher than it is, it's just that the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't doesn't do that for how they report this. So the first thing that we see here is that wages are definitely higher you can see that in that third set of columns there. There's about $8, 750 or so more per hour in wages alone that state and local governments are paying. And then the other really big difference is going to be in the retirement health care and insurance benefits. Those are two to three times what the private sector is offering. Again, this is national level data. So kind of the next piece to this we're like okay so this is what's going on nationally and then we started digging into some of the state level data. One of the first things that we found was that for teachers specifically, you know, the Vermont's pretty, pretty close to the national average almost right on the national average. We're also higher than some neighboring states like New Hampshire, our teacher salaries are a little bit higher. And again this data is actually from the, it was reported by Ed Week but it's actually NEA data is where they pulled it from. And one of the other side notes here that we discovered as we were kind of looking into this, like how how competitive our teacher salaries nationally. We also found that our student-teacher ratio is one of the lowest in the country. It's not necessarily a new finding but a lot of the states that pay higher for example California is more like a 25 to 1 ratio whereas Vermont's basically a 10 or an 11 to 1 ratio. So there's a lot of those states that are, you know, paying higher salaries are also have a lot more students in each classroom. So pause there in case there are any questions at this point. Hi, my name is Kate and I'm wondering does teacher data for other states include just certified teachers? So I believe it is looking at, I believe it is looking at just certified teachers. I'd have to go back and look at the data reporting standards for exactly how that's being calculated. I'm from the National Education Data Archive, which is a federal government program. So, so they're consistent reporting standards across all states. I believe it does only include qualified teachers though. And do you know school nursing staff are included? I'm off the top of my head. I don't. I'd have to go back and look at the data standards for what they're reporting. On the chart there it lists that Vermont is the 16th highest out of 21 states. There's only 21 on there has the chart been truncated. Yeah, the chart is truncated. So we included the top some of the top states and then some, for example, like that are similar to Vermont like why Wyoming, New Hampshire. So like California, Massachusetts are the top ones. DC is right behind them. So trying to show like what the range is a little bit because it when you put all like 50 states on a chart like that it starts getting hard to tell exactly what's going on so it is truncated to show some of the highest paying states and then some ones that are sort of in the same ballpark is Vermont and then Mississippi is the lowest so we put that on the chart as well. And I have a follow up question. Has the chart been adjusted to reflect the cost of living in each state? No, it is not is not inflation adjusted or CPI adjusted. So again, this is straight from this is 2019 data from the National Education Association. Just a quick comment. Thank you. So if you're looking at this electronically at the bottom of this chart, you can click on the live link, and it brings you to the a little bit down it brings to a estimated salary for all 50 states for 2018 2019. So it's got all. Yeah, yeah, if you're looking at the digital version the link does go to the full the full chart and this in the source. Yep. Yeah, it's actually it dovetails very well with that. So I did click through to the that that supporting link. And, you know, you feel free to follow up with us after if you can't answer it now but it's a little unclear to me where I mean I see the data, but it's the sourcing of the data is a little unclear to me. It's referenced as NEA, but if you could follow up more specifically with the source data, I think it would be helpful. Yeah, yeah, we'll see if we can track that down. That down for you. Thank you. Oh, John has an answer. If you actually look at the document that you're referenced. There is a link in it to the NEA research that was done. Okay, now Molly is. Hi, my name is Molly Stoner. I just wanted to point out I know you were referencing one of your comments was about Vermont relative to New England states. I just for the record want to point out New York, which is our, you know, Western border and one of the competitors for teachers and I want to point out the discrepancy in average salary between New York state teachers and Vermont teachers. Absolutely. Yeah, and something, you know, there's a there's a lot of other things we'd like to look at that we we kind of came across in the report. And one of them is to look at, you know, New York is tricky because you have, you know, the city and the surrounding area kind of pulling up the average across the state. So what happens in Vermont to you have, you know, teachers in the Northeast Kingdom that are making 45, 45, 48,000 a year compared to South Burlington that are making almost 80,000 a year. You know, we have some of that going on here too. So, you know, to compare Vermont to like New York City is probably not the best comparison really kind of need to compare it to upstate New York and that was kind of outside the scope of what we were trying to do in this. This particular report but I think that is worth looking at is, you know, what is how competitive our, you know, teacher teaching positions in Plasberg, for example, compared to Burlington and that sort of thing. Okay, just a quick follow up anecdotally not anything other than anecdotally but I do know that 12 years ago I was vacationing with someone who happened to be a upstate New York teacher. And at the time their top end salary in the Adirondacks was 25,000 higher than the top salary in the district where I work in Vermont, just as a anecdotal point of reference. Yeah, it's good to know. Yeah, I think I think that would be worth looking at to kind of know what that what that is because again, you know, we're not we're not necessarily competing with New York City for workforce we're probably more likely competing with upstate New York. So I think that's that is worth something worth looking at. Thank you. I think we're questioned out on that one. I guess not. Sorry, I'm just exploring some of the links that are in the document there. I think it's from the ed week article where it talks specifically about regional cost of living differences, and that there's a study in there that shows that the rankings change significantly when cost of living is taken into account. So just a quick look here. When you consider that it looks like Vermont moves to 36 out of possibly 51 that are listed here as District of Columbia. Yeah, and, and so I mean you can do that cost of, you know, for our purposes of comparing, you know, comparing public sector to the public sector private sector, the cost of living in Vermont, presumably is going to be the same regardless of what type of employer you have. It's significant when you're looking at how you compete with other states but that's not exactly what we were looking at here we were looking at how to how is our public and private sector competitive with each other. And in that case, you know cost of living is sort of sort of irrelevant in that for that question. Not that it's not an important question to ask, but for the purposes of comparing our public and private employers in the state and how competitive we are with each other. I think that cost of living is sort of the same for both groups. That that that may be, you know, your broader point but in fact the data chart does compare other states. So to not account that critical information. You know I think that's questionable if that's where I mean, yeah, the cost of living piece of it was sort of we weren't we weren't trying to say how competitive, you know, Vermont is with other states I think that is worth looking at. It's really, you know, how how competitive are wages. And then how, and how do the overall picture of wages and benefits compare between the public and private sector here in Vermont. So one of the this is probably the chart that kind of lays it out the cleanest. So what what's going on here is we took. We added both the median and 70 75th percentile metrics from the Department of Labor to reference points to kind of understand like what the range is here because one of the things is we start looking at salary ranges particularly in the, in the private sector, there's a very large range, compared to what's happening with private sector of a narrower salary band. Pat got to that a little bit with, you know, some of the some of the research that came out in the late 2000s around, you know, executive positions and state government being under compensated compared to the private sector. And that's almost certainly true, because they're they're still the top income earners but they're making less than, you know, an equivalent position in the private sector, but the floor is also higher. So like the entry level salaries for for the public sector is is higher than the entry level salary in the private sector. So, you know, she's a narrower salary band when you start looking at that. So, so that's why the medians in the 75th percentile are in there to kind of help us understand where those where those fall private sector salaries, you know, 48,400 is the average. The through all workers in there which includes private and public, just kind of again, give another data point for comparison purposes. The average state employee is and this is the end 2019 data 60,000 565 and then average teacher salaries are right there as well at 60,200. And both of those numbers interesting, you know, when you start looking at 75th percentile, both of those numbers are very close to being in the top, top 25% of income earners so that was one of our, one of our most interesting things off the bat when we started looking at the DOL data was that, you know, on average, teachers and state employees are both making, you know, more than, more than 75% of other workers on average, which is, which is interesting. So, I think that and also $12,000 more per year on average in the private sector now there are some differences there with, you know, what we'll get into here in a second, but any questions on this chart before we kind of dive into that. Let me again this is Molly. I just wondered if you had a juxtaposition we could look at with this chart that has to do with education required for different positions. Yep. Yeah. So I do have, we do have a slide that looks specifically at teachers because we recognize that there was going to be a difference in the education levels required for teachers as opposed to other types of workers. When we start looking at state employees, it gets difficult because there's often not comparable positions. You know comparable positions between state government and the private sector. So that that starts getting difficult to compare. That is a piece of piece of this that we'd like to dive into further as we work, you know, there's probably going to be a phase two to this project. So we would like to look at a little bit in a little more detail but but looking at the Department of Labor data. It's really kind of difficult to compare, you know, equivalent positions and the state government to the private sector. Just to follow up. I'm sorry, I thought I heard you say yes, you had done that with teachers. Can you direct me to that? Yeah, it's, I think it's going to be slide six or seven. Yeah, slide six. Yeah, figure names. Do you know the figure name? Oh, there it is. Yeah, it's going to. Yeah. So we'll get to that here in a second. Yeah, so again this is looking at 2019 data so we, you know, looking at this or like okay well, you know, we were, you know, we pat and I both thought and other folks that were involved in helping putting this putting this data together. It's like, you know, that's not really what our understanding was that, you know, that state employees and teachers are actually making more on average than the private sector. So we decided to go back as far back as we could looking at the DOL data. DOL data goes all the way back to 1990. So we didn't put all, you know, all 30 years on the chart here because it starts to dilute some of what is happening over the past decade or so but that is I think all that data is in the full report. And what we found was that at no point in the last 30 years as far back as we have data have private sector salaries exceeded the public sector salaries on average. You know, there's, there are going to be individual positions like we talked about like executive level positions that are going to be underpaid in the, you know, in the public sector, even plate things like like it for example maybe underpaid in the public sector versus the private sector. So there are some like specific job categories that may be less competitive, but looking at the overall picture. You know, the overall picture is that, you know, the our state state jobs paid pretty well in terms of wages because again, this is just wages both of those charts are just wages are not looking at benefits and either of them. A couple things that we do notice here is that over the past 20 years, you know, state employee wages have grown 5% faster than the underlying economy and I've even outpaced industries like healthcare by 10%, which is interesting. So, so there is, you know, there are there are even with some somewhat similar industries, pretty competitive wage growth, and the wage growth is outpacing the public sector. One thing to note here that is interesting and probably worth sort of outside the scope, maybe of what what this task force is looking at, but what would be interesting to understand is that since 2010. Teacher salaries have have started to come down a little bit or grow less fast and say they come down they've started it that the growth, the rate of growth has decreased for teacher salaries that's likely because of, because of shrinking student populations are causing budgetary constraints. So budgets aren't growing as fast. That would be my assumption, but it's just kind of an interesting thing to note, we've actually saw in 2019 is the first time in the data that's available where where state employees actually caught up to teachers for average salary. So, interesting data point, I'm not sure how relevant that is for the work that you guys are doing but it's something that probably work. That's probably worth looking into more at some point. I'm glad you, you highlighted the difficulty of comparing across job groups. If you go into source one, and you look at the job codes. There's an incredible amount of disparity between the number of jobs included in the private sector versus state government federal government local government. I just be I'd be curious as to how you defend statistically, rolling all of those disparate job positions into one and averaging them out as a meaningful comparison. Yeah, I think, I think it's a meaningful comparison because, you know, a worker who is qualified. And they're looking at, you know, a job posting for state for a state job versus a private sector job chances are the, you know, even with the wages alone chances are that that, you know, the state, the state wages on top of, you know, whatever benefits are being offered. So I'd highlight free code number to 92, which is public administration, which includes, you know, public safety employees. How do you make a meaningful comparison to a job group like that to an average of private sector that is so meaningfully different in it and how you carry out the job and the risks associated with that position. Yeah, I think so I think that you know we can get into details like that I'm happy to answer individual individual questions like that I think that. I think that it's like I said in the beginning it's very difficult to compare individual job roles from the private sector to public sector which is why we're looking at averages and medians because that gets at, what is the collective experience of this group of employees versus the collective experience of this group of employees or that's the, that's the comparison we're trying to make. You know, and an individual job titles and individual job roles are difficult to compare even within the private sector, you know, a title a job title and one company is not necessarily translate to the same exact job and another company. So even in the private sector it's difficult to compare let alone trying to compare private sector job roles and titles to a public sector one an individual level. Those types of comparisons are, are tricky and difficult to do, which is why we're looking at averages and medians. I'm just making an analogy right now in my head that that doesn't work for me what you just said I'm thinking about another task to the legislature is taking on right now which is student waiting studies. And we're looking exactly at how you have to pull apart those averages to understand the, what's actually going on in a situation. So, for example, you could say students in, you know, Burlington have much higher amounts of money needed to support your students. You can compare that to somewhere else in the state where it's very different. But when you pull those numbers apart, and look at the details, you see that there are many more students who are English language learners in the Burlington area and therefore the needs are required. And so, I don't actually agree with you that the averages give us the better data. Yeah, so I think that you could do an in depth analysis of this that's a, you know, to look individually at job levels it's, I'm not saying it's you shouldn't do it. I'm saying it's difficult to do and you know if you don't do it well, it doesn't give you meaningful data. And so that was that was beyond what we were able to do in this report to be able to dig into individual job roles and compare them was was a larger scope than we could take on in this particular report that is something that the state probably should look into this is something that I would encourage, you know, the state to look at how competitive our individual job roles within state government compared to the private sector. But what we're trying to do is kind of give you an all overall picture of what is the collective experience of our private sector employees versus the overall collective experience of our, our public sector once. Well, I think one of the issues with what you just said is giving an overall experience with we're telling, we're saying, you can give an overall experience of public sector first private sector, you don't break down education etc. This is sort of like, because I need to say in your report the verdict, we say, we're saying that the Vermont in your earnings from 2019 they're stating this for Vermont state employees versus the private sector. It is literally comparing the Apple store and just, hey, by the way, but I'm going to use it, because this is given, you know, the title report the public sector myth, that's basically saying we already have all the facts. You don't have all the facts, you haven't crossed out all the data on the different types of jobs and private sector and public sector. So I feel like this part of the report, if that's what you want to call it is very, very, very, and I just want to put that out there. You don't break down the different jobs. What I do in the education I had to obtain is completely different from whichever average of the private sector you are comparing my job to. And that's for everyone who works upon a public sector job. No. And by the way, I'm not putting down anyone who works at a class who restaurant but that's a different education level and experience levels in a public employee who has to go through a rigorous process and has to have a level of experience before they can have that job. So I'm just putting that out there that that is a highly valuable part of this report. Yeah, there's, there's going to be individual comparisons that, you know, don't make sense, you know, and comparing a state employee to a, you know, to some working at McDonald's. You know, doesn't necessarily make sense, because for a number of reasons, but not all private sector employees work at McDonald's. So and also not all, you know, public sector employees are executives. So, you know, again, there's a range of experiences within that, you know, what in within that average. All right, so I, there was a question earlier on comparing, comparing individual job roles. And we were able we did do that with teachers because teachers in particular have a higher education level. So, two things that we did here is we looked at, at three things really we looked at what the hourly wages and benefits for teachers are. We compared that to, and teachers specifically that worked for, for public employers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't break this out for, for private teachers private school teachers. So, but they do report all teachers which includes both the public and private employers. We included those numbers here to show that, you know, the ones in red or the ones that are just public school teachers employed by public school and then, and then green is all teachers. We can see that when you include the private school teachers in that in those numbers that actually draws the average down, which would indicate that private school teachers are paid less than our public schools. We don't really know. We just know that when we include them in the numbers it pulls the average down and that's true for both wages and salaries. So we kind of we stacked those in the bar chart here to keep it to illustrate where some of those differences are. It's not a huge difference but again we also have our, we have a lot more public school teachers than we do private school teachers so you know so there's some information that can be gained from that. We also compared, we compared teachers to to nurses because, you know, nurses have a similar level of education requirements, you know ongoing certifications and things like that similar to what teachers have. And you can see even, even with nurses, they're still teachers still making about $7 more an hour. All of the benefits are fairly, fairly decent for for nurses health care tends to pay better benefits than most of the private sector. So those are somewhat comparable with what with what teachers are seeing. So any any questions on this particular chart. Thank you. Thank you. Ben before we left the, the idea that averaging and mediums are meaningful comparison. I wanted to highlight that accommodation food services are a and retail trade are the second and third largest sources of private sector employment. They also happen to be lower age fields of employment, and there is no government equivalent. So I have to challenge the notion that drawing anything from the average or median is is really meaningful in any way. Thank you. Did you want to respond and then Kate has a question. Yeah, you know, so food service food service certainly is but I mean you look at, you know, things like construction and road and, you know, road maintenance and things like that. Which are fairly low wage jobs in the private in the public sector. And, you know, there may not be a perfect comparison to, you know, to the public sector in those in those types of roles things like flowing for example. You know, maybe they're not really a perfect comparison from from the private sector to the public sector so you know they're that can sort of go both ways but you know to your point. So food service. There, there is some limited employment for food service in state government but it mostly it's contracted out. I mean if you look at an ISCS code 72 and 4045. There is there is no comparison. It's not whether they're perfect comparison or not. They're just simply is nothing to compare to. What's the largest sources of data that you're utilizing in your analysis. Yeah, and we looked at a number of those that are compared that are, you know, there's maybe a dozen or so of those NCS codes that are that are comparable or there are comparable. You know direct comparisons between public and private sector, and most of them are are right in line with each other. So we did look at that. And that are directly comparable there wasn't a huge difference that we found between the comparable ones in the, that were in the data set. So, I think that bears further investigation. And that's something we would like to look at in what probably a phase two of this report. Did you have a question. Yeah. Your report compares to female dominated the presence nursing and teachers, and there have been years of studies on the issue of gender inequality. Isn't it true that these reports conclusively found that female suffer from a gender pay gap, such that men with similar degrees make more than women. That was certainly true nationally. Something we did look at in some of the data that's available from DOL is the wage gap between men and women and they do break it down in some industry level not at the job role level that we've seen on this particular chart. But Vermont is actually done some great work in this area where our pay gap is less than significantly less than national average. And, you know, we're, we're pretty competitive. When it when it comes to that like we're. So there is that is a factor certainly, but, but it's probably less of a factor in Vermont than it is in other states. Isn't it true that by cherry picking to female dominated professionals you're highlighting the pay inequity between men and women, and hiding the fact that men make more than women merely because of gender. I think we were trying to do is compare to professional professional occupations that have similar education requirements. I'm just, most teachers are far more educated than nurses. And so I'm wondering shouldn't you have compared them to other highly educated male dominated professors like engineers lawyers or doctors. The information that I have in front of me says that about 95% of secondary teachers which I am a secondary teacher may have a bachelor's degree or more. And then as far as registered nurses we're looking at maybe, maybe 65% compared to 95%. So we're specifically looking at new hires, pretty much all hospitals require bachelor degrees now the ones that don't the nurses that don't have a bachelor's degree, likely have been practicing for a number of years. And, but they're really hospitals are not hiring people at this point that don't have a bachelor's degree. Even still we've in secondary school teaching that's where where I am we have 56% have a master's degree or higher. And as far as the registered nurses data that I have we're looking at about 12%. Yeah, if you can send me those numbers that'd be great and be happy to look at those. I don't think comparing teachers to doctors is necessarily a good, a good comparison doctors usually have eight years of, of education. Not that the teachers don't some of them some post secondary teachers certainly do but but that's not a great perfect comparison either. So, I'm going to remind us that we have about 15 minutes left to get through this report. So, just a reminder, because we have all of our actuarial work to do after this and that's pretty heavy plowing so perfect well we'll wrap this up here so I think, you know, what some of the some of the high points that pat touched on in the beginning. When you're again looking at averages, you know, private sector is about $12,000 less per year than public sector. The public sector is top 25% of income earners are in the top quarter. They've also seen more sustained high wage growth over the past two decades, grown faster than the underlying economy and faster than private employee employment wages. And where we, you know, where we come out of this I think we don't have necessarily specific recommendations about how you, how you solve this, you know how you address this from a pension perspective. I think the main takeaway for for us is that, you know, where it comes down to the, you know, benefits and how benefits factor into the, the competitiveness of our of our private sector or public sector workforce. You know, we're, we're already seem to be pretty competitive on wages. And what that may mean for for the pension discussion is that those benefits that we offer that are two or three times what the private sector offers may not be as necessary as as we thought it was. And that's the main takeaway here because wages are actually more competitive than than we might have thought previously. So that's, I think the big takeaway we have a couple points that I want to reiterate even, you know, to, to what our recommendations around this and so Ben is, we need to keep our promises to two existing state employees. You know, they, we made those promises we need to keep them. And also, another concern is that this is going to get worse before it gets better Pat mentioned that we have 20% of our of our state workforce that is eligible to retire now or within five years that's a large. percentage. We've already seen this sort of happening with teachers over the past 12 to 18 months. We've had a lot of retirements for for teachers. And, and we're likely to see a lot of retirements in our state employees as well so this is going to drive, you know, drive some of those pension costs that we've been talking, you know that that everyone's been talking about. That's concerning so we've got to figure this out. And I really appreciate all the work that this this task force is doing it's important work. And we need to, we need to get these, these pension plans and their healthcare plans back on sustainable footing so that we don't risk the future retirement promises that we've made to these state employees so I think that's the overall take away. And, you know, I would we would encourage the committee to look at, you know, what benefits are necessary for new hires specifically to see what we can do there. Because, you know, what I think this data is suggesting is that wages are already pretty competitive. And so we don't necessarily need to be as afraid of touching benefits for new hires as we might have been previously. So, any, any questions on that. Yes. So, to address the nature that Leona had had brought up of this kind of apples and oranges comparison. Are you familiar with an article that Phil Kessling wrote entitled what a public employee really costs. No, I'm not familiar with that article. Okay, well, Mr. Kelsing points out that the study sitting this is in reference to the BLS that that your report is on. The study simply calculates the average cost of wages and benefits for all private sector workers, then pairs them to all state and local government workers. It's a bit like comparing the Green Bay Packers to the San Antonio Spurs and exclaiming spur on average are 45% taller. They're different games and different world. Overall, government has virtually no minimum wage fast food workers, and the private sector is pretty light on firefighters and K and 12 K through 12 teachers. I'd also like to highlight a report at the National Institute of Retirement Security, authored entitled out of balance, comparing public and private private sector compensation over 20 years. I would like that to be the committee to enter that into the record as well to be provide both aspects of the view here. I have a, I have a question getting to compensation maybe not needing to be where it is. There's quite a lot of vacancies in state government at the moment. Compensation was as rich as you suggest. Why do you think that why do you think that exists. So this is there's an analogy to this that I just saw recently. That's interesting. You know, so yes, there's a lot of vacancies in in state government. There's a lot of vacancies in in the private sector as well. Many businesses are struggling to find employees across all different salary bands and, you know, one of the one example of this I just saw there was an article this week. I think it was in digger on superintendents that were having a hard time hiring teachers and the analogy was that, you know, they used to have two or 300 applications for a teacher opening in Burlington. And this year they've only got whenever they have a teacher opening they've gotten like 50 applications and talking with with private businesses. They would love to get 50 applications often they get zero or, you know, or a half dozen applications for an open position. So, so this is an experience that that ever all employers are facing right now. And, you know, I think that I think that the state is still more competitive than most private sector businesses when it comes to hiring thinking about the analogy and the point in Burlington which is one of the higher paid districts in the community and considering that significant drop in applicants there. I work in Waterbury and 10 years ago when I applied for my kindergarten teaching job we had over 200 applicants for multiple two positions. This past spring we had to open positions we had five applicants. Yeah, and I'm hearing a lot of those a lot of that same. I mean, private sector has never gotten 200 applicants, unless unless it's a really highly competitive business but but I'm hearing a lot of the same things from from private sector businesses about, you know, getting a half dozen people that apply, even to jobs that a few years ago would have gotten 10 times that so we're talking about public sector and teachers not private sector. We're trying to focus that conversation. Yeah, Molly. I was just going to echo Andrew, I noticed that many your data about teacher salaries and things are from south of nine I worked out in the southeast corner of the state. We've had zero applicants for some open positions. And, you know, it's just it's been really challenging 50 is by no means any kind of average right now. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's, you know, Burlington would be considered highly competitive in that in that space. So my point is though that the workforce problems are broader than just our public employees, they're being felt in in both the private and the public sector was was my point there. Maybe the comments or observations. Whoops. That's okay. You know, in my committee you would be required to take us all to Sergeant. Yes, and, and our, our spouses are dates or whatever. Yeah, so. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Mr. Kingsley, if I understand correctly, you're relying on the average and the media to draw these comparisons. Do you adjust for education training and experience in any way. We we looked at that for teachers. Yeah. And we did look at it for a little bit for state employees as well. And again, that those comparisons are really difficult to make because often there is no equivalent position between the public and private sector. Any, any other comments or wrap up. So, thank you very much for doing this and coming presenting it to us. Do you have any final words for us. For observations. I think I think the only thing what I would leave you with is that a we really appreciate the work that you're doing this is not easy. These are not easy conversations to have. I think our recommendation given this data is to look at. At the benefit plans for new hires as much as possible. And, and trying to keep the promises we made to existing employees. I think that that's our main recommendation given this data. Pat, do you have anything else to add to that. No, I agree with you totally been you really summarized it really well. The committee's primary focus is to safeguard the long term stability of our pension funds. And I think that this information will will help you make those decisions on the pension side. Salaries are another discussion all together as far as individually but collectively. We have to look at the pension funds and keep our promises so thank you very much for this opportunity and we'll be back to you with phase two. Thank you, thank you, I hope we'll be done with our work before phase two. I think this is going to be an issue that's going to be discussed. For a while. It is indeed, but I think this task force helps to be done before. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome to say so we have on our agenda now a 15 minute break. Before we break. Sure. I just noticed on the agenda in the afternoon that there's a time for break out groups. And two questions about that. I don't really remember the agenda setting but when I thought about the breakout groups. I remember the first time we did it when the public couldn't hear and we got a lot of feedback about that, which concerns me. And I also remember coming back to this group, and a number of us felt like expressed and felt like, oh, that's a good idea I wish we had thought of that and we didn't have time at that point to process. And I'm wondering if the group as a whole might reconsider that idea of small breakout groups and instead, stay together for those discussions. But what we've done is we have, we've found three rooms where we can have three separate zooms and streams so it will be open and accessible to the public they'll be able to tune in and watch and, you know, may not be a camera on each individual but the audio from the room should come through just fine. And you'll notice that there is time in the agenda this afternoon for us to share our design scenarios so that we can come back and and share those ideas. If one group sees something that another group did. You know, you can certainly share those I think. I don't know about you but I also talk with other members of the task force during lunchtime to so if there are things that you see in the actuarial analysis that you think you'd like to learn more about, you know, perhaps you can have a lunchtime chat as well. Yeah, I'm happy to hear about the multiple technological solutions. I'm just wondering how others feel about the small group versus large group. And I appreciate having some time to come back I remember last time we did share, but it was in that sharing where we were like, Oh, I wish we had had to chew on that and it's the chewing on it. You know I'm inspired by the thinking of others around the circle. I don't know how to speak about that. I, we can hear how others feel about it I think that because they're the, the results of the first round are so starkly different from the different groups that the conversation will be very different in in the different breakout groups. Different concerns. So I think that having trying to deal with all everything in the large group is. I thought a lot about this and because I was on your thought wave there for a long time but I think that when we hear when we hear that the report from the actuarial actuaries. I think that we will see that probably is a need for some breakout sessions, whether it's that long or not I don't, I don't know but I think that we'll find we'll hear that this when Chris gives us walks us through those. And I'd love to check in with you. I understand your challenge of mine. I just, again, I agree, I agree with Molly I think at this point, it does make sense as the group maybe to look at each. Each thing individually. Maybe it makes sense to let's just say an hour group of an hour on teachers and hour. But at the very least, I would, I would request and I think it only makes sense at this point in time that I, whether it's this john and I again that's that we joined with Eric and we own them because they do have members that are part of groups. And I think that's a point to a point where it wouldn't be, in my opinion, just for, for just one of, you know, just the troopers associations me make making decisions for the SCA members. So at the very least, I would make that request that we at least join them or have some time to sit down with them and go through all of that together. I think, I think that happened last time too, because I think that you finished up rather quickly and then joined. We did but we didn't have, in my opinion, we didn't really have a good chance to sit down with Eric. But now I wanted to say, okay, what do you guys think about this. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Good. I think that's a good suggestion.