 Also put money into our long-term unfunded liabilities. So we put extra money into the retirement systems. We also put money into our reserves because you need to have a rainy day at home. You need to have a rainy day with the state. So those things are very, very good. I think where we missed the boat was in terms of some of the things that we could have done for individuals in terms of toxic waste, for instance, or pollution and dealing with that. Well, so those are certain issues, and we'll kind of talk about those in a second. I really want to really get an overall analysis from you on the health of the state and its fiscal health, and I really specifically want to pinpoint you on this. Bob Bancroft was here saying he's very concerned about the fiscal health of the state moving forward about what's coming ahead of us. And I want your viewpoint as the state treasurer to give us your viewpoint about the health of the state and what you see coming ahead. So in order to have fiscal health, you have to do a couple of things. Number one, you've got to reduce your reliance on the credit card on debt. And so, again, I need to talk a little bit about things we're doing there. So over the last four years, we reduced it 9 percent, and then I believe 8 percent. And this year, we're recommending another two-year biennium where we reduce that by another 7 percent. So we're reducing our reliance on debt, and I think that's extraordinarily important. For me, a structurally balanced budget means that your recurring revenues are sufficient to meet your recurring expenses and to pay down your long-term liabilities. So from my perspective, we've had surpluses over the last several years. So from a fiscal health perspective, we're doing okay. That bottom line is okay. We've put more money into reducing those unfunded liabilities and to lower our appetite for debt. Those are good things. Where I think that we need to take the next step is how do we take that bottom line and translate that into what does it mean for citizens, and how do they share in that bottom line? So I'm going to get back to that. Yeah, because in a sense, it's a double question. It's like, how is the state doing, and then how are the citizen redoing? It's sort of a double-edged question with those parameters. Right. And I'm all for reducing costs for the taxpayer, and I've got to be blunt about that. You need to find ways to do that. So one of the things that we've worked on is our pension programs. And over the years, we have a big unfunded liability, and that was something because we weren't doing the right things in terms of the bottom line from around 1990 to 2007. We weren't paying down our credit card, essentially. We weren't doing that. And now we're paying for those sins of the past to be very frank. And for me, we've done good things there. We're moving forward. We've looked at ways that we can make that more efficient. We've asked employees to assist. We've worked with the legislature. And all in, we're going to save the taxpayers from 2010 to 2038, $1.3 billion. And that's exciting to me. That's part of our job is a fiduciary of taxpayer dollars. At the same time, and this is the innovative things that you can do with smart finance, at the same time, we're able to maintain benefits for retirees. Make sure that when they get to the end of their career, they have adequate retirement. Because that gets back to your comment about fiscal health and more economic health. When people have adequate income in retirement, they buy goods and services. And that's part of the economic generator. So just cutting isn't the answer. But at the same time, just spending is also not the answer. It's a delicate balance of looking at how do you get best value for the taxpayer and best value that is shared by all the taxpayers. So just a reminder, if you have a question for Beth about state finances, you can dial in directly and ask that question at 862-3966. Beth, we'll continue on this light here a little bit. What do you see then as the near term and maybe even the long term challenges that the state is facing that you've alluded a little bit here, but maybe it can be a little bit more in depth that perhaps some of the viewers out there aren't aware of that you're taking a good look at. Well, I think there are a couple of things. One of the things that we do when we're in election season, we talk about what's wrong all the time. And that almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You can't afford these programs. On the other side, you have to invest in your assets. And I think our assets are our people and our assets are our natural environment, our lakes and rivers. So we need to invest in those assets. Put it in simple economics. If you're manufacturing something, we're going to use widgets. I never actually have used the widget example several times. I don't know if the widget actually exists. I have no idea. But if you're making widgets and you've got a machine that makes widgets, you need that machine to be efficient, and you need to invest in it every year to make sure that it continues to make widgets and it doesn't break down. And for me, we need to invest in the things that help grow the economy. And one of them is our natural resources. Right now, according to studies that are a couple years old now, $2.5 billion of economic activity in tourism. If you let your natural resources degrade, that's not going to continue. So for me, investing in our natural resources, investing in our lakes and our rivers makes sense from an economic side. It also makes sense from a health and safety side because about 42% of our drinking water is from surface water across the state. So we need to take a look and recognize that you have to make proactive investments in our natural resources and in our people. If you want to grow the economy, I think that you need to be more positive about the assets of Vermont does have, our quality of life, the ability to find good jobs in this state. They are there. And we have a more diverse economy than we did, let's say 10 years ago. We do have workforce stresses. We need to get the education system lined up so to meet some of those workforce needs. And I think that we're making progress there. And I think people are recognizing that. I hear a lot about our demographics and our aging demographics. We need to see those as challenges that we can address and move forward. If you just look at them as problems and say we can't afford programs, then what you're doing is having a self-fulfilling prophecy in a downward spiral. So I want to kind of speak about some of the programs because you found some money for our lakes and streams and we'll get into that. But I just want to touch base on something here that you just raised here about programs and things like that. Do you think paying people to move to the state of Vermont is a good idea? We see from the Economic Development Michael Shirling's team scenarios like this. And I'm curious if you think that's a good idea. Well, I'm going to be blunt. I have not had the opportunity to look at the data. I have heard from them that they had a lot of economic, I mean a lot of activity and a lot of interest in the state as a result of that. I have not looked at the specifics of that particular program. But to bring individuals to the state, we have to have a message that says we're a vibrant state. We're a state that's growing. We're a state that provides opportunities in terms of health care, opportunities in terms of childcare, opportunities in terms of good wages. And to see that those are investments in our future and grow the economy that way. I think that if you're young and you want to come to Vermont, you want to hear about the attributes that it has that attracts you. And we need to also have an education system that prepares students for the skills that they need in our new economy. So moving on, you have found some money for our lakes and streams and increased water quality. It's sort of a two-prong question in a sense. First of all, thank you for finding that money. And why was that money even there in the first place in a sense? I mean, I think Vermonters want to make sure that their government is operating as efficiently as possible and that this money wasn't just loosely floating around there. Well, we don't have loosely floating money. I can assure you. We're in pretty good shape at the Treasurer's Office and we can account for every penny. So we don't have any loose change under the cushions any place. So this was by finding efficiencies. By finding efficiencies. So just to put the lake issue in perspective, and again, I should say lake rivers across the state because 94% of the state, 94% of the state is under what's called a TMDL, which is a total maximum daily load, which is essentially a pollution budget. And the only part of the state that isn't under a TMDL, a pollution budget with the EPA, is the Bennington area and they have PFOA. So we've got issues across the state that we're working on with that. And again, going back to the widget analogy, investing in your natural resources. We get fees, taxes. I think I heard a number someplace around $300 million in income to the state from that tourism business. So it's an important part of our economic structure and fabric and it also helps create jobs. So in looking at this, I saw it as an investment and we were able to take a look at our capital budget, our money that we have in our capital planning. And we saw where for some reasons that at one time we were able to pull out some of the money that was going to go to other projects, reprioritize some of those projects and find about $50 million over a two-year period so that we'd have $25 million per year that could be used to assist us in creating a bridge to a long-term plan. Now you have also indicated that this is by no means anywhere near enough. Can you speak to about what you think it would actually take in terms of dollars and cents and a year commitment? Certainly. So we did an analysis and this is the great thing about Vermont, collaborative work. We had 23 stakeholder meetings with environmentalists, with farmers, with business people, with local town officials, 23 meetings with about 1,000 people. And so there was a pretty comprehensive study. We asked them what are the different sources of ways to approach this, what revenue sources might be used, what financing ideas you have, what efficiencies you might identify. And boiled that down. We also did some cost analysis, bringing all the different groups together. We worked very closely with agriculture, natural resources, all the state's transportation departments. They were very helpful and very cooperative. The bottom line for us is that we saw that we needed to put in, to meet, there was a total amount, $2.3 billion of needs over a 20-year period. Now some of that is already met through existing resources. So we accounted for that and there was about, I think it's about $1.25 billion that was remaining. We looked at that over a 20-year period and we were talking someplace in the area of 60-some odd million dollars a year. Some of that we called tier one and tier two. Tier one are must-haves, things that we need to do. And tier two were the things that are good to have, been the cost curve, but aren't necessarily essential at this moment. Tier one came out to about $48.5 million per year. Now we also recognize that that's an all-in cost. That's not government cost. That's not just the state. That's local government and that's also businesses. That's also farmers. That's also people that run your local retail businesses and the like. So it's an all-in cost. And what we said is the state should be looking to assist with half of that. So we came up with about $25 million as our target and said that minimally we need to look for $25 million per year. Do you think we're going to find it? Well we did for the first two years and I think that that gave us time to come up with a plan. I'm optimistic that we can do that, but I think it needs some work from the legislature. Frankly, I was a little disappointed last year with both the administration and to some extent the legislature, but all folks involved with this that we didn't get this moving a little further. We've got two years of funding, but in order to stay on target we need to come up with a solution and implement it in this coming year for fiscal year 20. And for me, I'm optimistic that we can do it, but there are three decisions that have to be made. One is how do you allocate that $25 million? Who gets what piece of the pie? And that's a policy decision that the legislature needs to take a look at. We can help with that. We can help in terms of analysis of where you get better bang for your dollar. But ultimately that is a policy decision that the legislature and the governor and the administration are going to have to address. The second is how do you deliver the services? How do you deliver those? And there are different models. We did a 90-some-odd page report with a lot of attachments after that as well. And in that report we identified three or four different types of models. Some type of utility model, local planning model where you do block grants to municipalities and to regions. I'm a firm believer that we need to push this money down into the communities. We do not need to create more state bureaucracy. We need to get that money out to the communities. The third decision is what is the financing or funding source? And I'm okay with using existing resources. I'm prudent and thrifty with your tax dollars. But they have to be reliable. They have to be measurable, predictable, and built into the base budget. It can't be catch is catch can. It can't be this year we'll use this, next year we'll use this. We have to have a system where we're putting a firm plan in place for years. We've got years one and two covered. We need to cover three through 20. And for me, that's a big goal that I'm confident that the legislature, both the House and Senate put a great deal of work into this last year. We need to finish it up. Okay. Beth, we're just down to our last minute. Thank you so much for your time here today. Why don't you just give us a 30-second closing statement about your candidacy and what you hope to achieve for these next few years? Well, you know, I've been treasurer since 2011. I love the job. It's the best job in the state. I think it's just something that I've been doing for government finance for 42 years. For me, there's some unfinished work that needs to be done. Retirement security for those 104,000 individuals that do not have that. We have a program called ABLE, Achieve in a Better Life Experience, which is a program to help individuals with disabilities get to financial security. Financial literacy programs, we've done a great deal of work there. We need to do more. That's important to me. Bottom line is we've got work to do. I'm proud of the work we've done. I think we've been good with taxpayers. We've been good with our citizens in terms of looking at innovative smart financing. We need to do more. Very good. Beth Pierce, my thanks for joining us here this evening on our live candidate forum for the 2018 general election. A reminder, you can go to our website, ch17.tv, for a complete list of upcoming candidate forums. And don't forget that early voting has already begun here in the state of Vermont. You can register to vote and cast your ballot on the same day. Don't forget to join us here Tuesday, September, rather Tuesday, November 6th at 7 p.m. for complete election results. For all of us at Town Meeting Television, Channel 17, I'm Matt Kelly. Thanks for watching.