 and I'd like to invite Brian Grave to join us at the table. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you for coming in. So, you've heard my call before. Committee members got here to our task today. We're filling ourselves in on the ability to grow these programs in a way that, like I said, we'd like to get a lot more work done. We don't know how fast and how far we can go, so we're just sort of responsible. Sure. Well, thank you very much for inviting me. My testimony is right down the alley, so I'll go right into it. My name is Brian Graves. I'm the general manager of the energy company Vermont. Before joining the energy company, I was employed by Vermont Gas for nearly 30 years. At Vermont Gas, I started in a variety of positions. The most recent is the energy services manager, where I was responsible for sales and marketing, as well as the energy efficiency utility. The Energy Co-op of Vermont is a member-owned not-for-profit provider that delivers fuel oil, kerosene, and wood balance. We maintain and install heating equipment, including cold climate heat pumps and heat pump water years. We provide energy efficiency services, including energy audits, energy coaching, and homilitarization. We have approximately 2,000 members in Northwestern Vermont. Co-op's mission is to help our members reduce their energy use and help transition them to fossil fuels to more efficient and renewable sources of cold heating options. One of the core services central to our mission is to provide energy audits and weatherize homes for our members. Energy audits and energy coaching are instrumental to the homeowner in providing them a roadmap on how to achieve energy efficiency and develop a plan for transition to the global system. Currently, the Energy Co-op has one energy auditor and a weatherization crew, which consists of a crew chief and two technicians. On average, we complete 100 energy audits per year and 60 home weatherization projects. The biggest problem in expanding our weatherization services at the Co-op is the availability of technicians. Air-silling and insulating homes is a tough and dirty job. It requires a certain amount of physical abilities as well as an aptitude for carbon-free and mechanical skills. To get to our current level of expertise and staffing, it took approximately two years. Over that period, we were unable to find candidates that had experience in the field, so we hired and permitted on-the-job training from the ground up. This was an arduous process. We hired multiple technicians who had never worked in the weatherization field. Once they were on the job for a few weeks, they really decided, this is not for me. Again, it's a really tough and dirty job. Fortunately, through this trial and error process, we eventually found individuals that stuck it out and after approximately six months of on-the-job training have become very good technicians. Inability to hire weather-positioned positions is not unique to the field. At the Energy Co-op, we struggle to find qualified in-fact technicians and delivery drivers. The availability of trades-related workforce is essential to our ability to sustain and grow our business. A field, a barrier, a biggest barrier to expanding weatherization services is not the ability to find trained employees, it's the ability to find any employees who are interested and willing to do this type of work. Publicly available training for weatherization tech is available within the state. Building performance institute certification courses are offered by state colleges a few times per year. These courses are very good and go into a great deal of depth. One of these offerings are more geared to an energy-honored here than they are a weatherization technician. Efficiency from our offers pure out-of-hair ceiling and insulation courses. At the high school level, students who go through building trades are carpentry-specific technical training programs receive classroom training on insulating the air ceiling, which provides a good base for further education. Training for weatherization techs is like other fields such as carpentry, plumbing, and electrical, where knowledge is gained through the classroom offerings. But the real training is done as an apprentice working on the job. The learning curve for weatherization tech is shorter than in some other fields. Practically speaking, someone with a building trades background can be a fully functional as a weatherization tech within four weeks. Others with less building trades experience may take four or six months to become fully functional. According to the estimates provided by the Office of Economic Opportunity, the weatherization program currently completes 800 to 900 low-income homes per year. In order to double that number of low-income completions, OEO would need to increase the number of crews available for this work significantly. By extrapolating the energy cost production rate of weatherization project completions of approximately 1.15 homes per week per crew, I would estimate an increase of 13 to 15 additional weatherization crews, which is equivalent to 40 to 90 days. This would be needed to double the number of completions from 850 homes per year to 1,700 homes per year. As noted earlier, there are essentially no trained weatherization technicians available at this time, and a limited number of people interested in doing this type of work. Requiring 40 to 60 ill employees would require a significant time and training. The OEO Weatherization Program is currently delivered to the five community-based providers who hire the trained staff to deliver these services. An alternative to increasing staff with OEO would be to develop more public-private partnerships. Existing private contractors like the Energy Co-op could provide weatherization services to OEO's clients immediately with existing staff. Delivery of services will be ramped up much quicker because of direct access to a trained workforce. The cost of this involved in growing and training that new workforce could be transferred to the product contractors. In the short term, there are 44 private contractors listed by efficiency Vermont under the heading for insulation and air-silling services. These contractors are located throughout all corners of Vermont. In the longer term, opportunities for private companies to expand into energy-related services such as weatherization, dovetails, general lobe, with a decrease in the need for labor in the fossil fuel infrastructure and distribution business. Local field dealers that live and follow alternative business opportunities in the energy sector and a public-private partnership to be a women's and air-silling service for all parties. Thank you. Thank you. In terms of staffing, saying you're acquiring 40 or 60 new employees who require significant time of training and also that it'd be hard to find those people. So what are the obstacles to increasing that workforce? I mean, is it the starting pay or the nature of the work? Are there people going around and letting crawl spaces or hot antics? All of the above, and I think it goes one level further, is the opportunity to find trades related to people in the state that's getting harder and harder. Absolutely. Regardless of it's a service technician or a legalization technician, folks are not looking to get into that business any longer. They're more looking to go to a four-year college and get a degree in one doctor's level, which is five. What's the average cost of an employee? Obviously you're gonna have benefits, salary, et cetera. What do they typically make? What we pay at the call of starting is $18 an hour plus benefits. So the total cost for that employee is about $60,000 a year. So you're talking $3 million of the $4 million they're looking to raise or so, just going to the employees. Which employee were you discriminating? Crew chief of the technician? The technician. Four weeks, if they have bill and trades background. An hourly pay or? Yeah. What's the hour? 18. Our starting was 18. For crew chiefs, that doesn't even. For crew chief, we're talking $24, $25 an hour. And then an energy auditor, right? So there's a couple of components here. You need somebody to go and actually evaluate the whole thing for you now for the organization services. So the energy auditor gives that another $11. And what's the flow of people in, what are the, can you talk a little bit about training? I mean, if you're hired by a private employer, they do their own training. But is that the usual route? Or do you get people out of high school programs, out of tech centers, out of UTC? All of the above. There's not a lot coming through the, from the college level. There's nothing specific in regards to a web operation type education. Mostly it's through the building frames. You'll start off in the carpentry level. And part of that is including insulation in the air ceiling. So it's not a direct education, if you will. Where we're finding folks is essentially folks with no background in the organization whatsoever. And they're taking the complete route of training them. So are the tech centers doing any of this training? The tech centers are doing some, but it's more down that, again, that carpentry line where the solution is just a segment of that. Because one of the problems I see in what you're paying people is that anybody with good carpentry skills is already making more than that. Absolutely. So that's the challenge. How do you, and I think the answer is to work more closely with the tech centers and try to get kids early on that don't have the ability to make $35 an hour because they're a skilled carpenter and steer them that direction. But that's a good starting pay for a kid and they get a lot of experience, which maybe then they can move up to be crew chiefs and train other people and all that. But it seems to me it's gonna be hard to scale this up unless we are actively going after young people who aren't gonna or don't wanna go to college and wanna do something in the trades. One of the issues in today's economy is, at least in the private sector, is the payback on doing a weatherization project can be 10 to 20 years. So it's way out there. And the more increase in pay towards the installers just pushes that out and makes it harder to get people to move forward with weatherization projects. I remember going to a REF conference five, six, seven years ago, the conversation that I had for the lunch was all about tech centers. I think they were talking about Panaford Tech Center and I think that's I think structurally. And that they were, weatherization was part of that program, just exact sort of like a feeder program into this work. I don't know if that is not, as you say, it's just part of learning carpentry and they're really interested in becoming a carpenter who knows something about weatherization as opposed to less straining and thinking that would direct you over just through weatherization. Well, I think Senator Rogers is absolutely right. A lot of the tech center, you're gonna wanna go to the carpentry ground because you could end up making that $30, $40, $50 an hour as opposed to lower amount of weatherization. So I guess it is not easy we're getting up into addicts, then you do need those carpentry skills. And you do a good job at it. You need to be a decent carpenter, or at least a mediocre carpenter with your foreman or whatever you wanna call them. There has to be some person on the job that's a good carpenter. Another piece that you haven't brushed on, but I'm sure you're running into. We heard a concern about being able to weatherize some of the older homes like wet basements and stuff, situation like that, because of mold issues. How do you guys typically deal with a situation like that? Wet basements are not an issue. There's always a way to solve that, but the bigger issue is having the, you know what the term is, the asbestos-related areas, but the ceilings, that is a big job that's way out of our scope and you need to bring in product contractors to do that and it's very, very expensive. And as soon as you find it, most of the homeowners are gonna go, we can't afford that. Absolutely, because it's ridiculously expensive to get rid of that stuff that may have asbestos in it. Yes, so what happens in those cases? Do you visit a site and you see insulation that might have asbestos and you just notify that, you can't go further? We don't have the training or the skills to go further. So what we do is provide them information on the company, is that do, and get them in touch with them and most of them do drop-off because it's a very expensive process. But it's also either unwise where you're not allowed to go ahead and do weatherization work because you're seeing a potential hazard, like you guys can't be in the space or doesn't, I mean, for instance, if it's insulation on pipes, but you're gonna be sealing the sill and weatherizing, insulating the van joist all the way around something like that, whatever. We could do that as long as we don't, yeah, we could absolutely do that as long as we don't make the material airborne in any way. So the bigger issue, the basements and stuff like that, not an issue, it's in the attic. It's blown in that type of way. It's blown in the walls. It's blown in the walls. That's where you need to cover the whole house so you'll see a tent over the whole house so that doesn't go anywhere. That's a very special technology. Inexpensive. And those guys specialize and they make tons of money. Is that asbestos or vermiculite or vermiculite has asbestos? That's the term. Vermiculite is the name of the insulation that contains asbestos. May or May. Depends on where. As soon as they find it. There's no chance to put up with that. But we don't know that. But vermiculite, how we know it's vermiculite, it very well could be or may not. So there's no way to trap the manufacturer where you just have to treat it like it is the problem. And what percentage of homes, I mean I can tell you I probably have it up in our ceiling. Like in my house built in the 1950s when you talk to these older homes having asbestos. That means that this is, is that as much a barrier to otherization as anything? Like is that the, that we have to come up with? Well it's a barrier to those individuals because it's so much more expensive. I hate to, from our perspective, we probably see maybe five to 10% of the homes having that as we get into them. I think for a long time. 10% I think for a long time the state went around blowing that into people's walls to help them insulate homes that weren't insulated. Right? They were, they were weatherization programs where I know they were drilling holes and blowing something in the walls. And I'm gonna guess that's a lot of what it was. And that was going on without the state subsidizing that was just a pregnancy. Oh, 40 years ago. There was a lot of that. There was low income connected and you could apply and I can't remember which groups were running it. But they would come and drill holes in the wall and blow the stuff in and put the plugs back in. It just makes me wonder if we could consider some of this money for asbestos remediation if we're not gonna get a certain level of projects done. I don't even know what that costs. Well, that's, I mean, if you were, if we have a goal to meet so many homes. You say it's deterring people. Yeah, because if you're trying to help a certain income level of people and they can't afford to remove the asbestos, that homes never gonna get weatherized. There's no program, we're looking at homes now. So homes, 10% of homes, so you're never gonna get your full problem solved. You're still gonna have 10% of homes that are gonna have this issue. Unless they review the whole house except for the asbestos part, what I think Senator McDonald's done and others. What would we define that as a weatherized home? Good question. Asbestos or upstairs or downstairs? I think you're totally ignoring that point. You're talking about 40 to 60 people. So is there, are there 40 to 60 people already, is there capacity in the private market already? Crews that aren't doing as much work as they could so that they could be on buffer while you are hiring, some work could be contracted out. My dad tells me that there's not the available staff at the moment, but I feel that we would be able to gear up quickly and bring in new employees to train and get going. If I saw the energy co-op moving into providing some of the services, we would start funding these jobs for our existing jobs while bringing new employees to receive on-the-job training and get them ready to develop a secondary crew and start doubling their production. One quick question is, have you seen in your time in the business the OEOs contract out to privates to do any of the work? Yes, not specifically but for say, should we work with OEO in regards to furnace replacements, types of things that are a little less specific to their tasks, absolutely. There's not in that partnership built. Great, any other questions for Mr. Gray? Very helpful. Thanks so much. Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you for people with experience. I can't ask, invite Ms. Fielder to join us at the table. Good morning. Nice to see you again. Thank you. Thanks for coming in. So amongst the tasks we're looking at is we need the capacity to do more work and we're kind of progressing the obstacles to getting more work done, especially on the 80 to 120% where you need income folks. One of the questions is these things are always cost effective in the end. What are the obstacles to moving ahead? And we're wondering what do we access to money or cheap enough money is the barrier and if you have any other thoughts around that. Sure. Maybe you could tell us about your program. Yeah, sure. So my name is Lori Fielder and I'm the degree program director of ESUCU where state-wide credit union, anyone who lives and works in Vermont can join and we have several programs around financing that's available for weatherization, efficiency upgrades, heat coms, solar. We've done a number of private public partnerships. Actually, energy call for Vermont is somebody, you know, it's a company we work with frequently and we're also a member of the FDA actually and we also run the heat, the V-heat program. So besides financing, we also help provide some alternatives for Vermonters that are purchasing heating fuel and coping and so forth. And chips, you know, and pellets. So the programs that we've been working on in the past four or five years, V-Green's been around since 2012. So we've been in this space a long time. We originally worked with efficiency from Vermont back even before that in the early 2000s to provide an interest rate buy-down program. And then we also worked with solar communities which was a program born out of V-PURG which then became some common. And so through these partnerships, we expanded the program. V-Green is a kind of a full suite of financing options ranging from unsecured to secured loans, for green vehicles, and we have some home equity loan options too. So really what we did is we just have learned from the market, we know we've responded to what our partners, our sort of partners in terms of vendors and contractors that are out there really feel like would be most helpful for their customers but also what our members want. And so now we have loans that go up to $60,000 unsecured which has been a pretty popular option. We also are one of the original lenders for the heat saver loan. This has been a particularly important program because this partnership first with the Department of Public Service and now with efficiency, Vermont allows us to offer discounted interest rates for weatherization, heat pumps, they all have to be qualifying measures. So they have to be selecting that is going to save people money on their heating and on their building operation. And that program's been very successful. We've gone through a number of grant installments, about $380 to $400,000 with the Department of Public Service through March 2018. Starting in March of 2018, it switched over to efficiency, Vermont and that program, they administer the program, they fund the buy down. So while the program capital is BScCUs and there are also two other lenders in the program, they fund the buy down portion. So basically that's the difference between what somebody might have paid for their interest rate up front and what they end up getting for an interest rate. And what's important is that it's tiered by household income. So I like to think of it as picking up where the low income mobilization program maybe it kind of meets it. So for households that are earning below or their household income is below 60,000, they can get as low as 0% on their interest rate if they qualify for the loan. And honestly that is our mission. We are a mission driven, member owned organization, financial cooperative. And so that is part of our mission to be able to make these funds accessible to as many people that qualify as possible. Senator Kim. So I may have missed this, do you have a lot of people taking advantage of these things? Do you have any numbers that you could share with us? Yeah, so sorry I didn't prepare. Oh no, that's okay. I literally found out about this pretty quickly. So from 2014 to March of 2018, we originated 5.3 million in the heat saver program. So that translated to about 500 loans. So the average loan size is approximately $10,000. And that one specifically was the heat saver program. So people would have used those dollars for? They would have used them through the Efficiency Excellence Network, which is the qualified contractors. I believe that's what Brian's alluding to, the 44 unqualified contractors. So they're private contractors, so it's really a market driven email program where we don't do a lot of advertising about it because that's really what they do. And so we're there to fund, to finance the loans, but that's their part. And we've always kind of looked at it that way, like everybody should do what they do best in the partnership. So the contractors do what they do best and we do best in Efficiency Ramont does what they do best, but they form the triangle that seems to work well. And we also have, in the whole B dream program, I mean, so 5.3 million in that period of time, there's a whole B dream program, you have about a $60 million portfolio. So we do a lot of financing outside of that program that we had a lot of experience in adopting the program. So those folks that are under household incomes of $60,000, are you hearing from them also? Absolutely, so 75% of the loans in that 2014 to 18 period, 75% were in the two lower income tiers. So remember that low income doesn't necessarily mean low credit, many of these folks qualify for financing and sometimes better than people that are of higher means. Can you just spell out the tiers that you were talking about? Sure, so the income tier, so it's below 60 and then 60 to 90 and then above 90. And that's household income. So it means, you know, in the flood you consider household income. And so you were just saying, so for the first two tiers, 60 and 60 to 90, that covers 75% of your loans? Yeah, they've adjusted a little bit since Efficiency for MOT took over administration of the program, but they're pretty close to those. So we really find in starting in 2019 of in kind of following what we're seeing, and you know, we certainly could use more uptake in the program because that's the ideas to get the money out there. But I think Efficiency for MOT, and they can speak to this better than I can, is you have to be careful about how much you advertise it because there's only so much money in that buy down program. So it's a balancing act. How much do they advertise it? I mean, we'll finance what we get, but yeah. Do you exhaust the buy down dollars you get each period? We come pretty close. We did in the state program, but that was, so one of the things that was important about how the program changed is in that 2014 to 2018 period, you know, March, that was as low as 0%. And then last year, that lowest tier went up to 0.99, and we did see a slowing down in that, in the uptake. Obviously 0%, it's a pretty powerful market signal. So people take advantage of that. But that's good because those are the people in the vote. Only the people in the lowest income tier are gonna receive that rate, and it's for a loan up to five years. And so what's the total of the buy down dollars you get on annual? So we have a contract, and it kind of depends on the year. And we try to, we work with efficiency for MOT on that. And this past coming year, we're in the range of about, you know, 280 to 300,000. And so you're not advertising that much yourself, right? Right, we certainly have it available on our website, but we don't do, outside of being at events and letting people know about it, we don't do a lot of really, you know, outreach that is targeted, I suppose we could, but we work with efficiency for MOT on that, and just kind of manage. So if we were able to raise more money, and send basically something like 50% more dollars, I think, low income as well as we're talking about trying to increase the middle income, folks are talking about. Do you have a sense of the capacity of your system to take on more money and sort of spend it well, I guess that's always the question for us. Yeah, if there's more money in the program and the overall fund for efficiency than MOT, and they choose, you know, if we go through a selection process and they choose VSECU, you know, we'll be able to meet that capacity, whatever that would be. Okay, so can you say something? I didn't know there was a selection process, how does that work? Yeah, so they, I mean, through their, there was an RFP that was put out, so, you know, they could have financial institutions could put in a proposal to run the program or be a lender in the program. So there's VSECU and two other vendors this year, so it is sort of an annual process. Since you spent a lot of time trying to people qualify for a loan, I'm guessing you have a sense of, what helps them decide to go ahead and do it or not. So can you say something about what, one of the things I think leads a lot of people to scratch your head is when we have something like a zero interest loan or a very low interest loan and their cost of, it measures the cost if I go over time. Why don't more people have a sense of what holds people back? Yeah, I mean, you know, just for full disclosure, I did work for the, well, it was community action for four years, so in, you know, now it's capstone. And, you know, for my, you know, this is just what I see. I think it's a complicated, it's a complicated project. It's not like putting a deck on, you know, everybody knows what putting a deck on looks like and feels like this, when you say I'm gonna do an energy renovation or whether I'm at home, people don't really know what that entails. And like Brian alluded to, there's also sometimes more than one contractor involved. We, many of the heat-saving loans that we process have several, you know, several invoices involved. You know, there might be one from the auditor and then from the phone contractor from the vermiculite remediation company. And we do finance vermiculite remediation. So I think that it's more about public education and, you know, keeping, you know, having, having there be that third party, you know, kind of trust that the consumer has. That's why they like the heat-saver program because there is a process to it. I think they feel like they're getting what they, you know, they're working with a contractor that's certified. It's really important to say you're certified and know what they're doing because it can really mess up your house if you did this, they don't know what they're doing. So I think it's just a matter of public education. You know, for years we used to hear, well, there's no money to finance or fund these projects. And for us, that's not the issue. When we will finance them, if we get those applications and they're qualified, it's more about getting people to make that step. And many times, once they've done one thing, they're ready to do the next. And the heat-saver loan is great because you can borrow up to 35,000 total. So we've done many loans for people where they've done a piece of it. And then a year or two later, they come back and say, I want to do another piece, fine. You know, we'll do two, we'll do as many loans as they would like, but we total for that house for that family loan, you know, it's up to 35,000. Okay. Who's the point of contact for the heat-saver's loan? Is it Efficiency Remount? Yeah. So they are the program administrator. So it would, you know, Abby White would be somebody that would know more, you know, I work, I work for kind of a team of people. From your point of view, or in tone with the people that you're financing, does Efficiency Remount turn out to be for them sort of a turnkey solution? Did they show up and say, oh, well, we know how to, we'll guide you through the audit and find the right contractors? Yes. They've all been played. Absolutely. And we want that because our expertise is financing, you know, we're not building contractors and we're not efficiency utilities. We're the finance piece of the puzzle. And they've been excellent. Their customer service staff is excellent. We rely on them all the time. Sometimes we get a pretty complicated application with some measures we're not sure about because it just hasn't been something we've seen. So we refer the information to them and they help us sort it out and say, yep, this is, you know, it's a $20,000 project but really only 15,000 is going to qualify for the heat saver loan. So then in that case, what we can do is still help them with a regular degree loan, you know, because we have that program separately. So they can do 15,000, we'll do a heat saver loan and then remaining five, we can still do because many people have projects, you know, maybe they needed to, they're really tearing something apart. So they, you know, they can't leave the walls open, they still need to enclose it but the overall project is giving them the benefit that they need to. Because the heat saver loans include things like replacement of boilers? It's funny you should mention that. So the, it has only qualifying high efficiency equipment but that boilers and furnaces, that piece is expiring on March 31st. So that, I don't really know. So that's a fair efficiency to them off but we know that we are accepting applications to replace for those replacements through March 31st. So it does include heat pumps and heat pump water heaters and it does include advanced wood pellet technology and wood stoves, that's new this year, high efficiency wood stoves, which is great because we work, you know, many of our members are, you know, our wealthy people and they're heating with wood stoves just like I do, so they need to have access to that kind of financing. And so we have financed, you know, since January several heat, you know, wood stoves. Okay. And then just say, people often talk about switching, you know, electrification of many things, cars and heating. Can you ballpark the, when someone's doing a loan, how often are they including heat pumps or if they're replacing a boiler or something like that are they getting, tend to get a new boiler or tend to swap over to a heat pump? If they're getting a new boiler or furnace that's what they're getting. I can't say we've never done any, we probably have done a combination, but if they're switching their, you know, resisting heating system, that's what, they're pretty much sticking with that. If people are switching entirely, the heat pump is usually part of a bigger package like the weatherization. So that's been something that they're happy to see as many times because we do track if it's how many measures they're doing. So many times, weatherization and heat pumps are part of the whole package and, you know, efficiency per month is a good job. Really promoting that approach instead of just, you know, throwing it in and not doing that analysis. Great. A few, I thought after a bunch of questions, but is there something you think we should be keeping in mind that I haven't asked about or that we haven't asked about? Yeah, two things. One is, you know, that don't forget about these folks that are, you know, don't qualify for, you know, the low income weatherization program. So I think it's great if there's a way to keep this program going, it's been successful both as a pilot and as a regular program. But also it's important to keep it simple. The more complicated a program is, the less uptake there is. This is already complicated and not, you know, it's sort of like financing a root canal, you know. You're glad the financing is there for this project, but it's not something that, you know, it's not some wonderful thing that you then can show off to your neighbors. So keeping it simple is really important. Yeah, you've done weatherization work, all of us have done weatherization work. Most of you're not seen. Houses can be way more comfortable to live in, but it's an important benefit, but sort of subtle. I think that most people come back to us, we do get, we have testimonials, people come back to us later and say, I'm so glad that this was available and that we had this option available. And, you know, they don't talk about the loan payment. They talk about how much more comfortable they are and how much they are saving money, but it's not always the top reason people are doing the work. Well, thank you very much. That's great. Thank you. I'd like Ms. Huber to join us. And this is my colleague, Cal Barman. We're going to have a lot of technical questions. If you'd like to pull two chairs into the table, we can get you another chair, maybe. I can stand that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We're going to go to the chair. No, I'll get it. See you in a minute. Thank you, Senator Huber. The Frugal State House, you know, we actually swap chairs around between committee meetings sometimes. So I'm Maureen Heeter, I'm the Associate Dean of Continuing Education and Workforce Development at Ramont Tech. I'm Cathy Barwin. I am the project manager for green training at Ramont Tech. Great. Well, thanks so much for coming in. You're welcome. So we can, you know, we're on this mission to help more people get more home weatherized than we're talking about across the board. And one of the things as we're looking at increasing the work in the state on that is we have a training place and the answer is coming back, not clearly. And we're interested in learning more about how we can, if we're going to put more money out into those programs, help ensure that we'll be trained, teched out in the field, ready to take those shots. Wonderful. So about probably several years ago, Ramont Tech embarked on a renewable energy program and from that we created a Center for Sustainability on our campus. And the handout that I just provided has a listing of some of the workforce development programs that we have created over the years initiated through a grant that we received for the Department of Labor. And one of those programs is BPI, Building Performance Institute. And over the years, we've had many people throughout the state go through that program. It is an intensive program, but it is the standard. How long does it last? It's the intensive. It's a week-long training. Week-long training. Every day, nine to five, seven days. Five days. Five days, okay. And when you leave the program, you're certified. No, what you have to do is you have a week-long training and then the following week, the way that we run it, the following week on Monday, they have to take an online exam. You have to pass the online exam and then you have to do a field exam that is very rigorous and then you have to pass the field exam in order to get to the conclusion. And this would certify you to what exam? To be a building analyst or a building envelope professional. We did a dual certification, a building analyst and envelope professional and this past year we've been working with efficiency Vermont and they've said, they've told us that really instead of a dual certification, the Vermont need tends to be for building analysts. And that's to do a global task and do the whole audit. That's a good question, thank you. So a lot of your courses are really incredible. I'm just looking at the civil engineering piece for weatherization. So I represent the Southern part of the state and I guess if some of these could be down there, I don't think, I know Vermont, Texas and nursing staff in Bennington, that sort of thing, which is great. But I don't know if there's even a way to sometimes come down and offer, maybe you do the one week or two week courses because I think there are a lot of young people, all sorts of people that would be really interested in doing these kinds of continuing education things. There are people that, you know, we have a college that's closing right now, people are gonna be doing career changes. I could see these are really interesting important jobs and I don't know if you're down there. So we're actually working with that team, he has a program down there that does BDI training, it's a slightly different program, but we're actually partnering with him to offer classes. So what that looks like, we're hoping to offer in your area, we have a campus in Bennington. Right, down by CCB. So we're hoping that we'll be able to expand that. We do a lot of partnerships with tech centers or in the state as well. Okay, we have a great tech center. And we're slowly integrating some of our technical training into the CTEs, in the past it's been mostly healthcare, mostly the manufacturing, now we're starting to look at renewable energy to take these from moving that way on. Great, so what is the certification program called, how do you take these classes? The certificate for normally it costs $2,800. So it is quite expensive. And you have some of the people that don't have that kind of money? Thank you partner. Financial aid or any assistance? Well, what we did this year that was really exciting is in the fall we partnered, as I mentioned, with efficiency Vermont and they have the grant and they kicked in $1,000 to offset so instead of being $2,800 to do the dual certification program it was $1,800 per participant and then they offered an additional $500 rebate to anybody who passed both of the ACM's. So that was an additive incentive. So that was great. And we also work really closely with BSAF on the non-degree grant program. I just think this is so impressive all these classes. Some part of the work that we're all doing and it's great, I just have to see more of it throughout the state, but I understand. I mean, it's just exciting. In talking to efficiency Vermont, they have something called the, I don't know, it's an EEN program employer excellence program or something like that. And they have partners with contractors throughout the state around efficiency initiatives and one of the things that they said in surveying the folks who are able to do building weatherization audits is that outside of Chittenden County, there is a lack of people who are trained and they're trying to do outreach but you're still trying to figure out the best way to do that, to reach those folks. So in the fall, we ran the training in Randolph. So we were able to sort of cherry pick from the outlying counties. And then in the past, we've also downed in Chittenden County as well. Do you have to know how many people think this program is yours, so can I guess? Yes, nine, we had nine folks trained this past fall. And total right now, we have had 44 people come through the training since 2013. So we usually have between three and nine annually. I think one of the reasons that we had nine come through this past fall is because of the extensive rebate that, so instead of paying $2,800, it was essentially reduced. Are most of those people, can you say something about who are they being sponsored in some way by a company that's sending them for the training or are they often individuals that- Both, yeah, so just more specifically, nine folks who came through this past fall, three of them came from one company and the rest were, you know, they had their own, you know, businesses and so they did the training themselves. So most of these people are already doing some part of this work and now they're just advancing in the field. And they're getting the certifications so they can use that for marketing purpose. It's sort of the house keeping. Do you see folks on the entry level side or is that you're targeting services to people who are further along in some of the training? I'd say though, we've had some people that were used to the field and some that have been doing it for a while and wanted the certification. Senator? So you mentioned that you do some work with the tech centers. I'm interested in figuring out how we get tech centers teaching more of these, not just these skills, overall trade skills, but these specific ones are real important. So is there a way that we can start working with them more, them to focus more kids on this industry so that we don't have the problem of providing employees with these positions? Well, there's a couple of different tasks that we're taking, and Kathy, if you want to speak about what you just said. I'm so excited, actually, yeah. So for gaming training, which is what I do, that has been my big, and I'm relatively new to that in Vermont Tech. I've just been there a little bit over a year. But my whole thing has been, how can we reach down into the tech centers and get some early traction in some of these fields? And so we just barely, one of the things that I do is solar trainings as well. And so we started this new thing this year from the Vermont Department of Labor where we have something called an on the job solar training, where we have a trainer who will go into any business who does any at all solar related and teach them whatever they want to know while they're doing it. It's like on the job solar training. And as a piece of that, we've developed a module, an eight hour module that is done at the tech centers to get every tech center student whose teacher wants them to learn this stuff, some basics around the basics of solar, how solar works. And the new thing is I'm working with efficiency, Vermont, we're talking about how we can develop a module around weatherization, sort of along the same lines as solar. We do building science, weatherization, specific module, a taster is what we're calling it down in the tech centers so that they can, the kids can get a taster, the teachers get a taster and they think how can I apply what Vermont Tech just taught us into our own regular curriculum. So that's in the works is doing a taster around building science and weatherization. We're really trying to build a career pathway in renewable energy. So we have, you know, apprenticeship programs around the state. We provide the related instruction for electrical and plumbing. So all of the students that start at the tech center that's pre-apprenticeship, then they come to us and complete their four years of training to get their journeyman's license. So that's been an ongoing program of about 700 students in the state, like 34 sites around the state and it's growing. I imagine we're gonna have more next year. So that's one piece of it. We're also working on NCCER training which is construction related apprenticeship programs and we're working with a couple of tech centers right now who are beta testing it, trying to develop a pre-apprenticeship program. So students are also getting dual enrollment credit in high school which they can apply to the college later if they decide to go on. And it relates to our construction management. The same with the renewable programs. They get the NAPSTEP certification for solar installer, but they can also use that course for our renewable energy degree program and they decide to go on. Thank you. But I think that is the big push is how can we feed your students into the trades and whatever those are. And I think you have to start, oh I had a big pow wow with various organizations. You have to start at middle school and then you have to then go to high school and high school, the high school pathway is either through the tech centers or through the work-based learning coordinators at the high school. And then what happens, then you have to think about the pathways. So as a child graduates, do they have an opportunity to go into a career then or an apprenticeship program then or are they gonna go into a degree program? So to be very planful about those pathways I think is really important. So that's why I'm really excited about the modules that we're gonna be doing in the tech centers around building science and, you know, and weatherization. And the students don't know what they don't know until they're exposed to it. So we're doing a lot of career exploration opportunities at the middle school level. We did a big program with B-Train in the summer around transportation issues. We've done this with coding, with Rosie's Girls which is a machine learning based. And if we have an entrepreneurship camp that we offer on our campus, we're gonna expand to meet the factoring that's been a little bit more challenging for the advanced states in the last ten minutes and then we'll have to do the last. Do you have anything? So I think getting into schools is great. In the middle school, are you familiar with any schools around their personalized learning plans? Because, you know, we passed this bill a few years ago and it's a way for students again to take ownership in their education and probably get credits for these kinds of projects that, I mean, it's real science, it's real engineering. So I'm just wondering if you're connected to schools or all of these things. So it's very interesting about personalized learning plans. So my, before I came to Vermont Tech, I worked in the public school system, didn't you? Uh-huh. And so, I'm heavily involved in how it all works. Public schools. And personalized learning plans are very different depending on the school that you go to and their take on what that is. And however, that's why our focus has been, or my focus has been to really try to connect with the tech centers and the Work-Based Learning Coordinators because the Work-Based Learning Coordinators in the high schools are, their work is predicated on the PLPs that kids have. So that is a 100 percent. So your staff did great. Thank you so much. That's great news. It's interesting you call them casters, these courses. So this is just to make some of it aware and that the taste is a good taste that they may go on to do more. Exactly. So we have two goals from the tasters at the tech center. And I can speak specifically to the solar one that we just developed and beta tested on Monday Tuesday of this week is to make sure that the kids understand the basic foundational principles of the topic. So with us, it was solar. How does solar work? How does it even work? And then number two is to have them do a specific application from soup to nuts so that when they walk out, they have actually done it, done a solar application. So they understand how it works and that they've actually built something from the beginning to the end, a solar project. Our solar project was to build an off-grid system that would power a refrigerator up in your hunting camp in the woods. So if you wanted to have it averaged in the winter time or in the fall, and the kids were very interested in that. And they designed their own solar. They designed their own solar frame. And they hooked it up and they plugged the refrigerator in. And they did all the electrical. And they designed it in eight hours. They did it in eight hours. And then we surveyed the kids at the end. What you'd be interested in is we talked about solar careers. We talked about cool applications of solar for the future. And then the question was, could you, can you think, do you think you could build your own off-grid application yes or no? And would you be interested in a future in solar? And out of the 10 kids, Stu said, yes, I'm very interested in a future career of solar. So everybody walks away with the skill set. And so we're going to do the same thing with weatherization. So one of the things we end up looking at here is the billions of dollars we export, bringing energy products into the state. How much of that? How many of those dollars? And it's probably reasonable to be looking at $500 to $800 million a year could be spent in state if we were generating more of energy and doing work kind of your time on. So I don't know if that you have a sense of the general public or that your customers have any sense of that there's a bright future in all this because there's a large opportunity waiting if we can figure out how to do it for ourselves. There's a huge opportunity waiting. We just got across our desks. Peck Electric, for example, is doing a massive, massive solar installation. And they were like, we need workers. We need workers. Help us find the workers. Burlington Electric. I've been working very closely with Burlington Electric. I think it's 100% of their electricity from renewable sources. Working with partnership with UVM, Burlington Electric and Vermont Tech to develop a clear training center as well as a research center around the world. We had somebody from the Department of Energy come to us and say, what you're thinking about doing is very exciting. Vermont could be doing so much more and the potential is there. And that's what we're hearing from the field is help us create the workforce that we need. And in as efficient and timely, quick way as possible. So one last question. So we've asked a bunch of questions. Thanks for what you've talked to us about. Is there something we haven't asked about or you haven't heard us think out loud that we should be keeping in line as we try to look for ways to grow this opportunity for miners? What are you missing? Well, I think I have sat in on my town's energy committee meetings. And one of the things I urge them to think about is what are the things that you can control versus influence? And so as towns are putting together their energy plans and things like that, maybe start with four municipalities, especially start with things that you can control. And I would say the same thing at the state level is state buildings, state vehicles, state programs start there and kind of data test that way and roll out might be the only thing I can think of. Because I know in our municipal energy plan, it was like, oh, residents will have 90% of our residents will be driving more electric cars at such and such a point. The municipalities don't have control over that. But they do have control over their own vehicles. And they have control over their own buildings for weatherization and things like that. So maybe start there, work the case out, and move forward. That's just my own personal opinion. Thanks, Ray. Do we have to know that there's a board of their S12 that's already out of the Senate over the house? That's about the state doing exactly what you're saying. Lead by the federal. So we have a good weatherization and efficiency program. And then we just renew it for another four years. That's right. So thanks so much for being here today. Thank you very much. And again, thanks for your work, Michael. Thank you. So committee, we will take a break from 30 and June 30, fix back up again. Weatherization Services, a program of Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity, or CBIO. I'm honored to be testifying for you today on Vermont's Weatherization Assistance Program. I'm privileged to be able to represent the 24 outstanding members of the CBWS team in Vermont's Home Weatherization Assistance Program. The five sub-grantees of the Weatherization Program are tasked with providing weather station services to eligible Vermont households. The primary eligible criterion for the program is that the total household income is 80% or less of the state needing income. CBIO's service area is Addison, Chittenden, Franklin, and Grand Island Counties. Lowering the overall heating, cooling, and electrical energy burden is the critical mission of the Weatherization Network and its partners. Providing a safer and healthier home to each of our clients is an added benefit that is only now becoming truly realized and quantified. Through education, energy audits, and installed measures such as insulation, air sealing, ventilation, moisture remediation, it is our program's intention to do just that. The past year has been a busy and productive one for CBWS. We assisted 206 households in creating safe, healthy, and energy efficient homes. 176 were served in Vermont Weatherization Assistance Program funds and 30 with Department of Energy funds. Of the 206 households, 55% or 113 units received fuel assistance. 55% of the households that were served resided in single-family homes. We spend an average of $8,900 on each home that we serve. Currently, we have approximately 272 households on the active waiting list. That's one and a half years' worth of clients who await our services. Any given day, we have three or four works in place. Currently, 35 homes have been through all the hoops to include the energy audit and are waiting for the crews to start work. This is roughly two months' work for our crews. All of this work is done with little to no outreach to bringing new clients. Our completed clients are best advertising. We as a program, however, can do a lot more to help more Vermont families with low and moderate income. We can be a huge part in helping the state meet its goals for more reliance on renewable energy and sources while lessening reliance on carbon-based fuels. There is an effort to increase the revitalization program's capabilities. CBO and the other agencies implementing the program in the field feel that these incremental increases are quite doable. This will not come without challenge, though. The first challenge we face is a shortage of qualified workforce. As you're all aware, and you heard this week, 2.4% are employment, our industry is not the only ones feeling the pain of a limited workforce in Vermont. To meet the increase in numbers, our network feels that we will need to hire an additional 15 to 25 crew installers, which is four to five per agency, depending on the amount of interest. Five building auditors and three to four efficiency coaches. This workforce development campaign will require a strong, recruit, train, and retain plan. The recruiting portion must understand our young folks about to leave high school, or have left high school, and remain underemployed in how we can attract them to our work. We'll also need to target those already in the workforce who might want to career change or are underemployed. The training portion of the plan must teach basic economic skills and emphasis on understanding how the house and market can fit together or against one another. Our work is not as simple as it seems. We change the way a house works in a substantial manner. There's a highly technical job that takes a year on average to learn, understand, and become proficient at. Our job, if not done correctly, can have detrimental effects on the home and its residents. We are also, by nature of our contract with ODO, production oriented, and the act of training the employees quite frankly slows our production. We do not believe that one strategy will complete the task. We need to utilize existing programs such as resources, weatherization tracks. Hope to bring back Remont Works for Women's Weatherization Track to include, to attract women to our field. This is a proven effort that has worked well for our program in the past. We must reach out to our youth, our older remoners who are underemployed, think of new ways to attract non-traditional trades workers such as women in New America. In addition, we need to have the funding ability to train folks in-house with a dedicated training coordinator per agency who's sole focus is to ensure the success of new employees during the on-the-job training portion. We should explore the use of workforce innovation and opportunity act funds in Riova to bring new employees on for 90 days to ensure that the parties are a good fit for the other and that they're a good fit for the work. We also face challenges finding enough subcontractors to maintain the efficient production queue. This is an issue for all subcontractors to include heating, plumbing, electricians and construction specific contractors. There simply aren't enough of these folks to do the work being requested. We hired an experienced contractor to come and work directly for us as an employee. Our new heat tech performs painting tunes, repairs and equipment replacements. I have a report that this new program not only did this to make us more nimble and efficient as more organization, it reduced the wait time for service for our clients significantly all all around the cost of the program. While we face many challenges throughout the year from providing the service to our remote neighbors, we face them with diligence towards the work we do. Each and every client receives the same level of caring and competence and receives a quality work product that affects not only their wallet but their health, safety and comfort. Often the thing that makes this all worthwhile for us is the hug from the elderly homeowner when the crews leave you on the last day. I asked my employees at our last staff meeting, what do you want me to tell the senators when I'm sitting in front of them? Almost to a person their response was something along the lines of improving the lives of our remote neighbors. Thank you. Thank you. And can you send your testimony to Hugh and then we'll post it on our website? I will, sir. Great, thanks so much. Especially because you have a lot of facts and figures in there, I could write faster to keep up. Can you say again what your average cost per job is? Last work meeting was $8,900 per month. So you, as you alluded, one of the things is you have to staff up in order to do more work. We have roughly 206 households and I think the total number done in the state under the flow of globalization work is on a neighborhood of 900. So you're roughly a quarter of the program? Yes, sir. We cover the four largest, we have the largest service area, most of the five. And do you do any outreach now or not? We do, we take the fuel, the only outreach we do is there in the summertime after we take the fuel assistance list and we send out approximately 400 mailers to those folks that are on the list that have not been weatherized. And that's the only advertising we do. We do do a, every home that we do has a survey. We ask them about the quality of our work, feminists of the crews, proficiency of the auditors and proficient posts, and on the back of that, we ask for two relatives or community members that may also serve and we usually get one, sometimes two on the back of that and we automatically send them out an application. Sure, so if the staffing up that you were talking about, if you were to be able to hire that number of people on all those positions, do you think you would, would you be shy of customers once you burn through your waiting list or? I don't believe so, I mean we, like I said, we have 274 on our waiting list. That's a year and a half with the work at current level and we do no outreach, so it's one of the best steps. And frankly, we don't do the outreach because we don't want to have people sitting on the waiting list not getting served. Even the law of her. Right, and because of the way the priorities, it's called the WAP rank, the Weatherization Program Ranking, that's based on age, financial income, children in the home, elderly in the home, disabilities in the home, we're dealing, those WAP ranks keep us from under the 60% level a lot. I don't think I've done very few in the 60, 80% this year because of the WAP ranks. Senator Rogers. Just a quick point going back to the last conversation, the estimate that we just heard on the average cost to weatherize a home is similar to the estimate a guy I know got on his home to do asbestos remediation. So that shows you what a problem that could be when all of a sudden you got a project and you hit that asbestos and you thought you were gonna spend a year $10,000 to insulate your home and now it's 18 or 20,000 dollars. We spend a great deal, our otters and my associate director spend a great deal of their time dealing with the very problem, vermiculite, as well as other referral issues such as a bad roof. No sense putting in insulation in the attic of the roof that's gonna get destroyed and wet, so you have to take care of that. Furnaces, you know, you have to make sure that there's a safe furnace before you tighten the building otherwise, as I said, you can have detrimental effects. Moisture issues, if you've got a river running through your basement, we have to take care of those first. Vericulite is a great challenge, but there are other challenges as well, and we deal with the 60% and less income level than we are, those challenges tend to be more prevalent. For that work that's not, I mean, important and essential to do, like you were talking about, the moisture problem. So it's essential to do that work, but are you allowed to use, whether it's 18,000 dollars to do that roof or that wet basement? We have some home repair funds within the job. We are allowed to put some of the costs of those into the job if it still can be, it means the savings to investment ratio. We also have, I have some funds from a private donor that I use, and I'm very lucky to have those. And I also use some leverage funds to go into there as well. In terms of finding new folks, you had mentioned resources, weatherization, and Vermont Works for Women. So we were just talking with VTC about their program, and we're interested in trying to make sure that if we step up that there's their programs that can help you find employees who need. Can you say something about resources in Vermont Works for Women that have programs apparently, but no longer do? Resources still has a program, and they have a general, they work at both youth and the middle, not middle age, but above youth, folks that have been in the job market for a while and make a change. They have two different programs for those folks. They have a weatherization track specifically that Chris Parsons is a subcontractor that we use. We supply him with the homes. He's working on a four unit multi in Burlington right now for us, where they use that as a, with homeowners or property owners' consent. They use it as a training laboratory for Chris's teaching hands-on to both youth and adults. They also have a basic construction program where they take Atlas youth that have graduated from high school or about to, and they come out with a national construction certificate that they come out with. We've had very good luck utilizing those folks. I'm most proud to say that when Vermont Works for Women was running their weatherization track program, that we hired three absolutely outstanding women. This was about five years ago. One of those crew members remains on the duty. She remains on the job and she absolutely loves it. Tried to be a crew chief. She doesn't want to be a crew chief because she wants to work. I promoted one of them, Heather to lead my assistant production coordinator. She's been a fabulous job. And then Jeff Girard, the other one, she's helped us rewrite our client intake process to as much more consumer-client-friendly and nobody gets through the cracks. That became, because we had sent an application to a gentleman six years in a row and he never returned the application. So finally working with the mobile home program and another one of the CVOS programs, we figured out why. The gentleman could not read or write. So Deb went over there, helped him go through the process, fill out the application, get it done, get it through and he's now on our waiting list. Those small lessons learned. You're gonna make changes and get it done. And is Vermont, works for women no longer running that? They no longer have a leatherization track and it was apparently because they stopped because they were not enough. She now is interested in our work which can be very, very, not fun work. I say that I send my folks to hell every day. So they're a cold hell working under a mobile home in the middle of the winter or a hot attic in July when the temperatures get up to 130, 140 degrees. But, and they come back smiling and as a community to the mission. Okay. You mentioned a program for new Americans. Is that something, can you say something more about that? We have not had success in tapping into the new American market resources because they have a lot of new Americans starting to come through their program and we hope to tap into that pool as well. I would, on the workforce, I would like to say that I consider myself lucky to be in the workforce that I am in. My four co-directors, Jim Ryan is here, he's from Nido. My workforce issues and challenges are very different than Jim Davis's. So, Senator Pearce. We heard testimony earlier from the Energy Co-op that said they thought total we need 40 to 60 new employees and you're saying 15 to 25? Across the board. Across the board? In 25 new employees who have become the installers and that's just based on the number it keeps changing. I originally said when we were looking at a 20% increase was the first that came out. That was the 14 to 15 new installers. Okay. It's doubled we thought, so I. So is that just for CDOEO or is that system-wide? That's system-wide. I also remember that our auditors and efficiency coaches which are more skilled positions, we try to grow those from within. So some of that is the best. So you agree with the overall roughly 40 to 60 total job system one? I would agree with that. And you know, it's Brian, just talked to Brian earlier in the week, I believe, about we understand that if the program comes through we're gonna have to build our labor force and that's gonna take time. And that Brian and a couple of our subcontractors in my area that I reached out to them to start the process of bringing them in to fill a part of that gap. So if that four million were to come in this next year do you think you actually have the power to actually spend that money? For my agency, I mean for CDOEO only at the moment it would be a challenge but I would use be able to use subcontractors in that to fill in that gap until I could get up. We have used subcontractors in the past a while ago and I don't know if everybody knows this but after GARA and the merger money, we were at a very peak in the lab and then Reg and I started three years ago with CDOEO. We're kind of at the bottom of that and we're just climbing back out of it. And then one other question. I think there's a concept here that we would add there's potential to add more money each and every year and out years. Do you think you could build up the pipeline of talent to continue to add 40 to 50 new people yearly? I've been an advocate from the beginning that this process needs to be incremental and allow us to build to, as I said, maintain professional and quality of the program. Because like I said, if we don't do our job right, call her CO-poison and that's the biggest fear for all of us is that we don't do our job right. So incremental, steady approach, yes. Great. You also mentioned a sort of a 90-day training period or something like that. Can you say a little more about that? I'm not sure I know what that is. When we hire a candidate off the street, it doesn't matter whether they're a brand new employee but that's a little bit. We want them to be able to read a tape measure or all that stuff, that's helpful. But we also, my last three employees have not been in the building industry and they've become very successful employees. It takes about three months for them to understand the how of what they're doing. It takes a year for them to begin to understand and these are general terms depending on employee age. It takes them a year to understand both the how of the job and the why of the job. And that allows them to understand the how and the why they become more independent and they leave less supervision and they become a truly fully productive member. In three months, even under the one where they can fill a hopper with insulation that are being productive, what are they, a fully productive member? Not yet. And that's those are my estimates of what I see from my. So, but are you saying that there's a program that allows you to hire someone in for, what are the concerns I've heard from hiring second-hand players about hiring someone on and training them? What if they don't work out after three months? Now they let that person go. It affects their adverse rating for unemployment and then their employment insurance goes up. So they're skittish about hiring people on that they're less confident about and that seems to create an obstacle to hiring people on that may need a little bit of a break to get into a regular job. That's why I wanted, I wanted, you know, early on I was talking about the yellow funds. I understand now that the state legislature know being over and over the old funds, workforce innovation and opportunity act funds. That's one of the things that we need to explore to bring that on for our folks. I run my office on a certain culture and I believe that we can, and I come from 30 years in the military and often in the military when there was a soldier that was non-performing, it's a given to me, I can do it. And so I believe for quite a coster that I can make anybody a productive member of our team because of the culture that we have in our organization. Well, thanks so much. Any questions for Mr., for more questions for Mr. Kastner? Well, thanks so much for a report from the field. It's always good to hear from the front line. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Alec, I'd like to invite Mr. Ryan. Yes. General, I don't have a presentation. I'm just about to support your argument. Okay, so you've heard the kind of conversation we're having. I think part of what we want to do is make sure that we hear from enough parts of the state that we have confidence if we're moving along that everyone agrees that there's an opportunity whether we're talking about North East Kingdom or we're talking about Benton or we're talking about Champlain Valley. So can you say how your work runs up out of your shop? Well, you have pretty much a new or twice operation. In the end, we'll deal with the Orleans and that's like some Calgary counties. We are the provider there. The program essentially is the same. They have the eligibility, the priorities, the need. As I was telling Senator Rogers out in the hallway, I've been with the program for 35 years and each year I think, well, maybe this is the year that we finally take care of all the homes and the people that are eligible for the program. And here we are starting out of the year and I have over a year waiting list. So can you just, just so how do you keep track of the size of how many homes do you do in a year and how many people on your waiting list? The last year we completed 175 units. Our grant is smaller than twice. 152 of those were state funds and 23 were the Department of Energy funds. Our waiting list, I printed it out yesterday, that's 152. You know, and I'm not really aware of the Department of Energy money. So how does, can you just, I think we've seen it sort of folded into other things. Right. Is that come out of your same grant though from the DCF? It's a good country DCF. So it's folded in. Right, thank you. And sorry, your waiting list is how many? 152. 152. 152. Okay. It's been about a year's work, a year's work. So 35 years is a long time. So you have a lot of perspective on all this. If we, I guess the sense I've had from guess what we've taken so far is that it's been a great program, but on the underfunded side has it always been, well, other than that blast of money that came through with ERA dollars? Is it, would you say it's generally been short of money? Always had a waiting list. There's always been the deed for more money. And I don't see that that will change. Okay, good. And how about outreach? Are you, how do you find your, the homes? A fuel assistance list, we mail out the letters from that list, word of mouth, from a complete a job, a questionnaire with a client asking for any recommendations or any people that they might be aware of that could use the program. We haven't had to advertise. Maybe you can go behind. I'd be perverse to get a flyer to sign up and we should be put on the waiting list to write a little discourageance, okay? So is there anything that, especially given how long you've been doing this, that we're not, you haven't heard us talking about so far, something we ought to be thinking about that we haven't yet discussed in a while? No, sir, you know, as one of our biggest concerns is recruiting help, the workforce gets challenged. Up in the Northeast Kingdom, we have highest unemployment right in the state, but yet it's difficult to find good quality workers. And what's the stream for you? I mean, where do you find your workers? They didn't really come out of a high school tech center or? Occasionally, or we advertise in the paper for help, employees will a lot recommend other folks that they know might be interested. And what's your starting wage? Our starting wage for benefits is 1750. That's why the stuff that VTC talked about is so important, trying to figure out how to keep pushing it down into the tech centers. Because quite frankly, we keep hearing about all these young, and they're getting lost somewhere. They graduate from high school, and then they don't show up on the job rolls anywhere, and where'd they go, and how do we intervene earlier and start steering them towards all these trades so that, as you said, we've got high unemployment, yet you still can't find the workers. And it's about connecting them and giving them that skill, I think. If there are not any more questions for us, thank you very much for coming in. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you very much. I'd like to invite Ms. Phillips. Thank you for coming back. We did discourage you the first time. Thank you. Sarah Phillips, Director of the Opposite Economic Opportunity. You heard from Jeff Lowcock's last week about how the Long-come-home education assistance program operates. He has testimony, I did. We did provide him with a lot of information last week as well, and I did bring copies of a couple of things that you already have, but if we want to look at them together, it can be helpful. Mostly I'm here to answer questions you have about the program as well. I'll accept that, I don't. Yep. Yes, and you have them on the website. Oh, great. What? Left them someplace, but, so just a couple things to note. One, I want to stay on the record that the administration does not support an increase to the field tax. Okay. I know you're kidding. But I'm here to answer questions about how we would administer a republished program, and what the need or demand might be. I know there were questions about when we could like earlier, I'm happy to talk about how we were making right in the program as well. Can you accept my knowledge based there? What you heard was, did you want to correct or comment around that in any way? Sure. I would just start with about 10%, it is corrected about 10% of the homes that we encounter do have vermiculite conversion that we need to address. The average cost of abatement is about $11,000. Sometimes it's much more, but that's the average cost. We, our program, I want to say, is leading the nation in how we address vermiculite in low income home authorization. We have managed through the work of Jeff Wilcox to create a partnership with the Zomalite Trust Fund. So Zomalite is the company that largely used vermiculite installation. And they can contribute up to 41, no, yes, 41, sorry, $4,125 or 55% of the cost, the 4,100 is the max, towards the abatement costs. In addition, we work with V-Lite and Leverton of their funding to cover the cost of abatement and V-Lite contributes up to 3,750. If it's being about the average cost, that leaves a gap of anywhere from 1250 to 2,250. Sometimes we're able to cover that cost in our program, again, because as you heard White speak about the savings to investment ratio or other leveraged home repair funds. So a lot of money for a lot of families to come up with. It is, but largely they are not needing to come up with a $1,100 to $2,000 gap. Largely, we are able to help them cover those funds. Occasionally, if the cost is more than the average 11,000, they may even take advantage of, he'd say very low, and low interest rates there. So at this point in time, for the vast majority of low income home owners facing vermiculite as a barrier to weatherization, we are able to address those and not just to home. So I'm very proud to say that that was not the case a few years ago and we've done a lot of work in our program to be able to do that. That's great, I hear you on that screen. Did you? Income should correlate with how safe your home is. Absolutely, yes. I also want to just state a few other pieces and then I'm not going to answer other questions. In the past 15 years, the low income home weatherization program has weatherized over 12,000 homes. We, this year, worked with the Department of Tax and looked at a few other data sources to identify what is the unmet need in the state of Vermont in terms of homes owned or occupied by low income home owners that would be eligible for the program. We estimate that there are anywhere between 42 to 46,000 homes that we could weatherize that would be eligible for the program. So I know that one of the ways that we look at demand or unmet needs through the waiting list, but as you've heard from both White and Jim, they don't do outreach because we don't want to maintain one waiting list, but I want to let you know that there is a very large unmet need for low income home weatherization in the state. So if we ramp up our work, we're not going to burn through the need any time soon. Yes, I guess, yes. That's correct. I also, my, our read on S171 that directs 75% of the fuel tax revenue to the home weatherization assistance program and 25% towards a new climate energy and weatherization fund. I'm not sure I got the name of that correct, but our read on that and the fuel tax increases in the bill would mean that the boost to the home weatherization assistance program might be approximately 1.4 million. And that, you know, construct was a, that opening position, just to start a conversation about if we raise more money, how do we raise it? Can we support both programs at a higher level? Sure. At 1.4 million increase in the program. So depending, so the questions around workforce and ramp up would obviously dependent be dependent on how much you were asking us to do in addition. 1.4 million is a very manageable number. We did provide at the request of cost energy and transportation, some administrative considerations for what a doubling of the programs would mean. They had not defined doubling of the program. We did, and this is part of what we provided last week that is on your website as a document under just testimony, I apologize, I have to make copies, but that looked at administrative considerations and talked about the workforce challenges, but also looked at the increase in staffing that would be needed. I want to be clear that any increase in funding of more than $3 million to the program would also require additional administration at the state level to support that. Our work is important in terms of monitoring and quality assurance. Anything over 3 million increase in the program, we would likely need to add on FTE in addition to subcontracts for training. I was under the impression that it kept stepping up. So for instance, can you give me some thresholds if you were, because if we're talking about doubling, I guess you're at 11 million total and if we're aiming towards doubling, which I think people really think is that there's able testimony to indicate that doubling is not overdoing. So if we're, can you give us figures for like 4 million more or 6 million more or 9 million more, how does that work? What kind of staffing would go with those kinds of increased levels of effort? So for, I think it's fair to say that for 3 million more to the program, statewide you would add 30 FTEs to the providers, various levels of positions. Anything more than 3 million increase would also require additional staffing at the state office in order to monitor the program. I would say that that's our threshold. More than 3 million would require for us to have an additional FTE to monitor the program. More than 6 million would like the require to FTEs. Part of that is based on the fact that we also audited, we monitor two staff in the field today, monitoring at CVOO. We monitor 10% of the units completed to ensure quality assurance. I think as you've heard, to truly achieve energy savings and weatherization quality is key. And so that's a really important part of the program. We really want to see the energy savings. And if we went closer to Ken. We have three FTEs. When you're auditing, so it's great that you're doing that. I mean, everyone wants to know, program's working well. What kind of rate do you see for meeting, for the contractor to come back in and do additional work? That's a good question. I don't know that I could be. Sorry, did you get what kind of work are they seeing? How often do you see a lapse where you say, well, someone, we can't sign off on this yet. Someone is the contractor needs to return. Return or go back. It's a sort of a pop question. If you can check into it, just a little bit. I don't know that I can give you a rate off the top of my head. I will say that there are times when we ask providers to go back, maybe quickly because it's a missed opportunity, not as different than the measure being installed incorrectly. Most times they just no need to go back, but our network of providers are very good at doing that work when they need to. But I'm happy to get you more of a rate of the line. Excuse me. You also, you came with a lot of information the first time that we didn't have a chance to get to. Could you, I don't know if everyone has access to copies? I don't know if she needs to say something. It starts like this. Yeah, I. Right, I apologize. No, that's okay. You already gave it to us. I did. Right. It would have been here Tuesday when Jeff was here last Tuesday. It would be listed there. Yeah, I'm happy to walk through some of that. Sure, I mean, I'll make sure everyone has a hard copy or, but while you're back with us, if there are things in here that you want to highlight for us, I think that would be very helpful. A lot of good data. Those are two separate documents. So one is, I think there's some kind of confusion about the funding in the programs. I'll just start with there. We do have department of energy funds that flow through our office as part of the weatherization assistance program. That's roughly 1.2 million annually. This year was a little higher, but 1.2 million. So we think of as the base for the department of energy funds. We also, as you're aware, the fuel tax, as it currently stands produces approximately 10.3 million in revenue annually. Of that 10.3 million, some of those funds, 6.6.3 million support the weatherization program. 3.4 million goes to the LIHEAP program. Then we take 3.4 million from LIHEAP to use for weatherization. So that's the swap that you may have referred to. That swap is a one-to-one swap and it creates general fund savings because of the weight of the LIHEAP program operates. Talk more about that, but I don't think it's just remain. So. I have a quick question on DOE money. Yeah. A couple of the directors referred to it as they did, they were saying, those weatherization homes and the weatherization homes. So are there, do you put them out in different awards? We do issue them under separate grants. We generally operate the program under one set of roles. We have one technical manual that guides the work of weatherization. There are some slightly different eligibility requirements around the DOE funds, which are up to 200% of federal property levels as opposed to the state weatherization assistance program with funds up to 80% are immediate income. So there's some slight differences. And so we admit it's under separate grants, but it's really one whole program operates with one set of guidelines. Great. So functionally, if you're out in the field, someone doesn't know that they're getting the DOE weatherization program in place of the home loan. Correct. That was from a client's perspective. Yeah. Thank you. So just so you know, again, what's in front of you. One is house raising means had asked us to speak more specifically to fuel tax revenue as it stands. And so one of the memos is that information that we provided to them on the back side of that. There are sometimes some confusion about how the funding for your programs on the back side of that is this chart at the top that looks like this. Okay. It's sort of a, you might not know that. I have it pretty good. Okay, you have it. So let me do this. I think so. I think we all have it. Looks like this. The ox a little different. Okay, this chart right here is the source and use budget, right? So what this chart explains is there's sort of three buckets of work that we do. One is the emergency heating repair replacement program. One is the core weatherization work and the other bucket is OEO administration. And then it breaks down our three funding sources, which would be the HWAP fund, the fuel tax revenue, LIHEAP because of the SWAP, and Department of Energy money. And it shows the split in how that works. So that is sometimes helpful in understanding where the money goes. It's our effort at transparency. There's a lot of ways that we can slice it, but I sense information that I think this is the most transparent. So I want to point out to you in terms of understanding how the funding flows through the program. Now, it's your, how kind of like that? So one of the things we have been talking about very regularly is overhead. So if I'm looking at a $10 million plus program and OEO administration is 371 year, somewhere under 4%. Yeah, I was going to say 3%, 3%. I'm sorry, what's your concern? Well, we're trying to, when we look at anything that we're working with, granting money out to the field to do work, but it's water or weatherization, that what kind of administrative costs aren't you able to probably have to quote? They're going at 3% versus the 15 we gave in the clean water, but I think that's more efficient. Well, I also should, whether we do pass on it, it's that our providers also get some administrative costs, obviously, for the work out of the field, roughly 10% of their grants is administration. Well, that's somewhat reassuring, in the end, the two of us in the ball are pretty close. Okay, great. And in terms of low people into, so it seems as though everyone has their own way of finding employees. So you have your own employees and then you also grant out to others. Do you have, does your department insist in creating a pipeline for employees, or is that something where CDO and the others are sort of left to defend for themselves in terms of developing your own pipeline of employees? Well, we have three, right, we have three FTEs for the Weathered Nation Program at L.E.O. There's some limitations to our capacity for sure. This is an area of major need and challenge as we think about how to grant up, and it is an area that we are actively involved in conversations with the providers on how we can support them and how strategically the five providers with our office will work together. I'd like to follow up with VTC. I know there's a strong interest in being able to use the tech programs to be, as a pipeline resource for women who have worked well in the parts of areas of the state where they've had a program, and I do think, so I expect that we will be doing more to support the five providers in this area in the next six to 12 months. Is it apparent? Your average across to $8,500 for a project, does that include the administrative cost? No. Yeah. How much was it? $8,500 in their project. Yeah, there's a job, so the job cost average, right, which is the funding that you can tie to an individual job, right? Right, so that doesn't... We create an average as a whole, right? That does not, it does not include administration, and we also, yes, so that's a simple answer. So, leaving aside where the money would've come from in terms of a capacity looking not just at next year, but years beyond, do you have a sense of what rate is sort of a responsible, practical, rate for us to think about if we're trying not just to do it, a single year of adjustment, let's say we're way behind, for instance, on our 80,000 homes for 2020 schedule, how much more work could we do at what rate that seems like kind of a responsible buildup? So that is the other, so besides the memo to House Ways and Means that we've shared with you, House Energy and Transportation Technology, sorry, asked us that, and that is what the other memo speaks to, and we in that memo outlined if we were asked what it would be if we doubled the program. We assumed that double the program meant roughly $9 million more, and in that memo we provided a ramp up that looks like three, yes, that looks like $3 million, $6 million, $9 million. We would, there are some substantial costs that go into the weatherization program in terms of building assets, not just workforce, right, there are trucks, there's equipment, to fully realize the cost effectiveness of doubling a program. It wouldn't, to fully do that, you would want to sustain the program at that rate for at least a few years, right? Three to five years. Not a human bust cycle. Right, otherwise the cost of doing the work is higher, you just don't get the same cost effectiveness to have sort of a one year double to go back down. So that is what we looked at, and that is the way that we would see doing an increase in accelerated or expanded web load from the weatherization assistance program that we think could be manageable in terms of the workforce challenges. Well, that is, I can't talk, it needs my calculator, let's see if I can hear what I can. If we took, say, 45,000, that's the unmet need and divided by your ramped up rate, which is 17.25, 100, how many years worth of work? Oh, it's 26 years. 26 years of weight, or 26 years worth of work. Do you think something of that? I did it at 42,000, it was 24.7, so the after 3,000 is another two years. It's also a cost that the 80, we've heard between 85 and 800, I just used the 8,900 number, because I already started it, added the 13% administrative cost, it's a $425 million tag over that time. I'm 42,000 home, so you gotta add 3,000 more, so that's another 10% roughly, so you're talking about a half a billion dollars, just for low income, that's not middle income. You saw some pretty big numbers when RAP came through, right, where they said take on the whole weatherization thing, I think their figure was 500 million to achieve about 924 million in net savings. Well yeah, maybe you'd have to do it over time so your savings are, so your alternatives are, it'd be more complicated, I think it is. Okay, all right, well thank you very much for helping us fill in the picture more. You've heard some of the conversations in your two visits, is there anything that you think we haven't talked about that we should be thinking about, that we're not leaving some stone unturned in terms of trying to make sure we're really thinking the whole thing through carefully. I think that Jeff spoke to this, and so you've heard it, but I think it's worth saying, again, that the return on investment for weatherization is not just the energy savings or the reduction in carbon emissions, it's also the health quality of the homes, it's also the affordability for folks in terms of their own bills, so I think it just, it's worth, I think, and those returns on investments are highest with low income homes. Because such a large percentage of their income is dedicated to staying one. They experience the highest energy burden, they have the poorest quality homes, and the oldest homes in the state, and for those reasons, you just see a strong return on investment. We are also very supportive of expanding weatherization in modern income homes, but I'm going to speak to what our program says. Are there any other questions for these folks? Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. So is there, we're going to be coming back to this again tomorrow, the focus being on the, are you joining us? I see you on our agenda. 20%. So I'm just going to say, I don't have, I'm sorry. I have, doesn't include you. I was just going to say, is there anyone else in the room who'd like to speak? So we're up to the same mind. I just don't have the right hands of paper. It's very, it's not, it's my, it's my issue. So thanks for coming in this long again. Thank you very much. Karen Lafayette, I'm representing the Vermont Community Action Partnership and the Vermont Low Income Advocacy Council. And the Low Income Advocacy Council has been supportive of the Low Income Weatherization Program for a long, long time. We have also been participating in the Climate Action Groups and especially specifically to their Accelerated Weatherization Program. So today I wanted to speak to the Low Income Weatherization Program and what we've done over the course of a number of years with the tax structure. And also speak to the language in your bill and what works, what doesn't work for our purposes. And then talk about how we wanna participate in the expansion to lower and moderate income homes and what we envision that split of revenues look like. I can also let you know if you're interested on some of the things that are coming out of the house and some of the things that we've done with respect to the tax that they just passed and workforce training, efforts, that type of thing. So. Great, we might as well do one stop shopping, so. Okay. Take it away. So in 1990, we began our own state, we raised our own state tax dollars to support the Low Income Weatherization Program and expand it. For 29 years, the grocery seats tax and now the two cents fuel tax and the grocery seats tax had been dedicated to the home weatherization assistance program. The program has grown steadily and the more fuel prices went up when it was the grocery seats, the more revenues available, the more homes you can do and that's how it worked. As costs went up, people were paying more for fuel, there was more revenues, we could do more homes and reduce the cost. And as you've heard testimony now of the average savings of a home is about 29% and we estimate that to be anywhere from 500 to $700 depending on fuel uses. So a number of years back, we were beneficiaries of the air monies and the GMP merger monies, HWAP, the Home Weatherization Assistance Program, ramped up their services, ramped up their services, added capacity and added a number of units. So we certainly had a high of nearly double what we're doing right now with those monies. And then at the same time those monies went away, fuel prices dropped dramatically and actually we were losing money. So the budgets, our budgets for the Home Weatherization Assistance Program diminished. So three years ago, what we did is we restructured the tax instead of the, at least on fossil fuels instead of that being based on the grocery seats because fuel prices were down. We based that on basically per gallon. So we attached a two cent per gallon cost to the fossil fuels and we slightly increased the, from 0.5 on natural gas to 0.75. So that did stabilize the revenues. And in fact, now that I think we've had a full year of getting those revenues in the door, they have increased slightly. And I don't know the exact, you have to get that from the tax department and there's some estimates from JFO as well. But we have stabilized by attaching that to the number of units and those revenues are growing. I've taken a look, in fact, it's evidenced by the two budgets that you're gonna see in both through the budget adjustment and the fiscal year 2020 budget that the house is proposing. There are additional monies in the weatherization program and those budgets reflect that increase from about 10 to 12, Sarah, that's in those budgets. That's what it looks like on paper that I see that's in the budgets that has been authorized to spend through the budget adjustment and then was being proposed. So I've taken a look at the strike all amendment for S171 and I think there's an improvements in the language, but what we're concerned about is the pooling of all of our original dedicated revenues and then the distribution through the percentages of 75 and 25. We don't think work for our purposes. The percentage structure is not what we envisioned. Our first priority this year was to make sure that we reauthorize the fuel tax because it was sunsetting this year in June. So we want to reauthorize the fuel tax make sure that kept coming in. And the second priority was to maintain the core funding dedicated to the HWAP programs in light of all the talk about expanding the tax and expanding weatherization efforts. And we are happy to be participating that in. We too would love to have part of the increase dedicated to the home weatherization assistance program, but only the additional revenues. So regardless of any increases, the initial two cents on fuels, the 0.75 on natural gas and the 0.5 on electricity should continue to be dedicated to the home weatherization assistance program. In fact, you don't, in your proposed bill and in what you're gonna see coming over from the house they do increase natural gas and they do increase the two cents to four cents. But no one has talked about and we do not want to increase the 0.5 on electricity. But in the way that your bill is structured, at least the way I read it, it would be also putting that electricity revenues into a pool that then would get distributed. So I think- Which revenues? All of the revenues from the existing current taxes and the additional taxes. And we just want to safeguard the core funding for the weatherization program. It was never envisioned that the 0.5 on electricity would be used for other purposes than the home weatherization assistance program. I think Sarah gave you an estimate of- So you're referring to the 0.5, not the 9%? Not the 9%? Which we pay tax on our electric bills. Energy efficiency charge. We had this conversation last year, I think, Senator, I remember very well in center finance about the electricity. I'm just asking you to say the tax. What are you talking about? I'm talking about the 0.5% on electrical electricity. Is that 0.5 out of the 9? Is that 0.5 out of the total 9? That's- No. So one is the energy efficiency charge that appears on your electric bill is separate from the current charge. So just to make sure I'm following, in terms of when you say preserving core funding, are you saying, for instance, if you took all the revenues as they were allocated when it was at two cents, that that would be unchanged. But for the increment, if we went from two to four, that's where you would start to see the split. Yes. That's an acceptable construct. On an increased split, but preserve the core funding underneath it. When we were working with the other weatherization expansion advocates, only the increased dollars being envisioned being split. In the proposal, you received the other day, I think when some of the other advocates were in here and I have paper copies of it, but that was the accelerated weatherization program. And although we wanted to see step increases in each year, what that details, let's see. It shows what the step increase would be, but if you can see the line on the bottom half of the first page, it says existing revenues shall expressly continue to be dedicated to the home weatherization assistance program created in 33 BSA chapter 25. An allocation of additional revenues raised would include no less than 35% to the low income weatherization assistance program, no less than 40% to the programs for 60 to 120% of hot area median, no less than 5% to affordable multifamily units developed assisted through 3D thermal, up to 10% of existing market rate thermal conservation measures and up to 10% for workforce development and marketing for people up to 120% of the median. And as you know, you've heard testimony that although the weatherization assistance program can serve up to 80% of median, often the 60 to 80 folks don't get served because there's a priority list and there's so much need for the folks that are elder, have a disability, children under six and like users that more moderate or upper level of low income doesn't necessarily get served and they can wait longer. So we are interested in having additional funds to also address those folks as well. Can you say something about who, I mean, if we were to adopt such a thing, this is a consensus amongst which departments? It's a consensus against some of these folks that are working on the climate change and the specific accelerated weatherization program. Abby can speak to that as can Joey Miller and a number of others and there's many organizations represented here. So we just want to find some way to safeguard that. I think there's plenty of ways to do that in language. You could say something to the effect of the first two cents on fuel of the first 75 on natural gas and the 0.5 continued to be dedicated to the home weatherization assistance program, the additional two cents and it's split in a certain way. If you want to get into the details or goes to the efficiency fund as you or the efficiency folks to distribute that and then there has been some work on how that is achieved. And those extra dollars flow into their programs mainly been ranging money for capacity market money and now we're getting a third screen. I'm sorry I didn't hear that Senator. Well, so it'll be. My hearing is. Sorry, it'll be a question for Abby for Ms. White tomorrow. Okay. I'll talk about how this would work in their program. Sure. Sure. Thanks. As I said, we have an interest in participating in that. We would love additional revenues out of the additional money and we just want to safeguard the program. It's been dedicated for 28 years to this program. It's worked very well. The home weatherization assistance program is evaluated every year. It has all kinds of accolades. And one of the challenges that she's talked about is the workforce training. And that's why this year in the house, we worked with the house commerce committee. In fact, in their workforce training bill that just passed the house 124 to zero and they had unanimous support on the house floor. There's a specific weatherization assistance program and they dedicated $350,000 as a base to start to enhance the existing training programs for weatherization and details on how that money might be able to be used. But certainly the weatherization assistance programs that assist in the state have met the challenge before. But they do understand this is basically like a pilot project to start for the longterm on how to recruit, train and retain qualified workers in the home weatherization assistance program. Do you have any, so $350,000. Do you know how that compares to the current level in the best way? Well, I don't know if Sarah can answer what the state does for training now. Sure, we do include training and technical assistance funds as part of the weatherization program now. We, off the top of my head, a rough estimate would be about $250,000. So for instance, the BTC, BPS certification program, we do require a certification for energy auditors and they might go, staff might go through that program with the certification that our program would pay for the cost of doing that. Great, thank you. That's an example of how this one's going to be used. So home weatherization assistance folks, they did get together and they have sort of a plan for the future on how to do that and the different components of what that weatherization training program would look to enhance what's currently being done and where they would spend the monies and I can get that detail to you if you'd like to look at it. While you're reminding me, there's other threats to all this, I'm figuring anyone who's done housing programs, new construction, there's a natural fit there that would be the same kind of training. Sure, that would go into building new as well as. There's other things in that workforce training bill that speak to other training areas, so. But it was supported. It's in your Senate Economic Development Committee as we speak, they're testifying on that particular bill. So we're trying to think forward about what it really will take to ramp up and be able to get a substantial amount of money out of weatherization. As you know, you've heard from the RAP report and from everything else that the best bang for the buck is to do weatherization and as Sarah indicated, it's more than just, it's more than just any reduction in emissions or even reduction in the costs to the homes, but it's jobs, it's economy, it's materials, it's local workers, it's health and welfare and safety and comfort of folks in their homes. So that's why we've always been very supportive of it and we supported the increasing the tax even though that is a concern, is that it could cost low income folks an extra $15 a year. We believe the benefits far outweigh what the additional costs might be. I can speak to the house actions if you're interested or you'll be getting that soon enough. As you know, they did pass H439. It includes a two cent increase on the fuels. It includes another, it includes, it goes up from 0.75 to 1.0% and then 1.5% in the retail sale of coal. There was about 10 amendments to that. All of them except for one field and that was the exemption for dyed diesel went through and they not only exempted them from the increased tax but in the current two cent tax that they are currently paying. How many do you want them to pay that? They don't have to, not if that bill is successful. So I don't think the estimate on that was 225,000 for every two cents, so it's 450,000 the exemption. As you know, the H419 is an increase in the tax and speaks to those elements I just talked about, but it is the revenue bill that has not yet passed the house that has the reauthorization in it and also has a clarification of any exemptions that were. When we restructured three years ago, the language that was put in the bill, this is more of a Senate finance, but said the fuels delivered to individuals or businesses, some nonprofits looked at that and said I'm neither one of those so I don't have to pay this tax so they stopped paying what they were paying before and but the Ways and Means Committee in the House side has proposed clearing that up and they would get rid of all of those, any exemptions for nonprofits and municipalities or anybody else who thought they didn't need to pay the tax because they had been paying it up until three years ago. Thank you very much. You mentioned that you gave a dollar figure for saving for household for low income. You got me asking, what was that? 500 to 700 dollars depending on. No, it was like an 18. 29 to 70. 100 to 15 dollars. Oh, 15 dollars a year. Actually, I thought that they'd be paying a year on. For the two cents. For the two cents. 15. Yeah. So I missed that one. The total list, 15 times 27 cost you to get your other. Because there's 27 years of a waiting list. So if you're at the end of that list, it's a pretty expensive proposal for you to get your other. Great you are. Takes two dollars long to get there. Two cents. Two dollars a gallon. Okay, so I missed the 15 dollars. That was. 15 dollars on the fuel price for low increase. On the increase. So, 15 dollars. The extra two cents on the fuel will cause the average homeowner 15 dollars a year. In annual. In annual. The way I understand that they also remove the exemption for municipal vehicles, which means that's going to show up on our local property tax bill. That's right, because that's included in. Yeah, that's included in the two cents. Well, thank you for the heads up. And for the report. Any other, so you've heard the conversation. Anything we've. We're trying to make sure we're not. Anything still unturned on this before moving forward. Anything you've heard us have not talked about. Anything you think they should keep in mind while we're keep working. The only thing I would suggest is one thing I did mention is that the house increase, it is solely dedicated to the home weatherization assistance program. So, it was a pretty heavy lift. And, you know, we have to be thinking about hopefully getting something that can get to the government desk and be signed. No floor amendments to push four more cents on instead of just two or anything. My thoughts on that? No, we're going to. Oh, we're going to have you push it. I'm sorry. Anyone trying to increase more than you said? No, a couple of the amendments, what they wanted to do was, yes, increase it more, but with an income tax per charge. So, and that was $10 million, and it just went to burners over $200,000 to raise 10 million for the purposes, but we get 15 votes. Any other questions you want to get? Thanks so much. Thank you. So, again, based on our conversation this morning, we'll be postponing action on S96. I'd ask everyone who supports the bill to act as an ambassador to answer questions for people in the caucus. And we encourage anyone who has questions to bring to any member of the committee for so that we'll postpone just for a day. Give them a whole heck of a time. See that? With that, we are adjourned. Thanks so much. I go back. We are adjourned. Thanks so much. I go back.