 Thank you, everyone. And hopefully we'll be done by 11 so that we can hear the conference. I think it will be an. We have a, we have a good size schedule today. We have first Maria and Steve, they're going to walk us through the, the latest joint fiscal update. And Teresa sent the link that link that brings you to the joint fiscal website to these updates. It's so good. It really, the office has done an incredible job just capturing our where we are with revenues where we are with the COVID-19 money. It's succinct. It's easy to read all thought out. And it's really a go to site that you should send constituents to if they have questions. Thank you. Yes, Steve and Maria, do you want to start with the, with the fiscal update? Or do you want to start with where we are with the joint fiscal committee grant acceptance? The money has come to the state. And in the form of a grant. And there needs to be a process in which we accept it and get it out the door. So. Maria. Where do you want to start? We're going to go over the fiscal committee and then if we have time before the nine 30, Maria will do the update. And then if not, she may come to the update after the. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Maria. Okay. So we need to go over what we're going to go over is the awaiting adoption by joint fiscal committee draft of the grant process. I don't know if you have that three sir. I don't have anything, Steve, should I? I think Catherine's supposed to send it to you. Okay. Let me. Can you just send a text to Catherine and ask her to send it to you. Like, and while I do that, I'll give you an introduction. So. As you may all know, the. Vermont is to was to receive $1.25 billion for a coronavirus relief fund. And the money arrived. The money arrived half on Saturday and half on Monday. So it's sitting in the treasury. So basically the, what we understand from the administration is that they're going to submit a. Basically a grant acceptance request on Monday of next week. And this could, everything is up in the air. We don't really know for sure about dates. And so one of the things that is the issue is how do we accept the grants? How do we sort of preserve the. How do, how does the joint fiscal committee deal with the most, the immediate nature and the unknowns at the same time as. Make sure that the legislature really. Appropriates most of the money from the grant as opposed to having us just accept 1.25 billion and say, have a good time. So. What's happened is there's been a lot of meetings in the joint fiscal committee and. It's leadership and the speaker and Senate president and there's basically. A proposal, not a proposal, a pretty close to final proposal. The speaker and Senate president have agreed to, but. The committee hasn't formally adopted. They would probably adopt on Monday. And I just was going to go over that. With the committee to tell you where things are on that and talk about the run remaining issue. Any luck yet, Teresa. Yes, I finally got it. My, it was me. It was my email was being funky. So just hang on one second. And I'm going to share screen. And stop me or I'm going to count on the chair and. If we have any questions or things like this. So. The first thing is the, as I said, it's a balance between meeting the needs of. From honors and a pretty rapid response and. And also a legislative role, which is we want to have, to go straight to it. Steve may I interrupt just for a minute? Yes. What I want to just ask the committee, I'd like you to, there's three pieces to the proposal. Three different. Funding going out. I'd like to walk through the whole sheet and save questions until the end. Okay. Great. Thanks. And so. So the let's move it up a little bit to where it starts with the top at one. The first. would be to prove it in three essentially allocations. And just the first allocation is primarily to cover the expenditures that the administration has already made and has already got in process and that are extremely time sensitive and that they are authorized to spend those monies and report back to us where they went. I'm gonna come back, I'm not gonna go through my head the other two and then we'll come back to one. The second one is where the, there still is this really health and safety or other emergency response needs. A lot of unknowns, but time is a critical factor and those would be approved by the joint fiscal committee and we'll talk about that in a minute. And the third one is just money for appropriation. The general thinking is at this point is about 84% of it goes through appropriation. The 60 million, which is about 5% of it is sort of this emergency thing and then about 150 million in the middle category. So the first one is just, and if I'm talking too fast, let me know. But the first one is reimbursement and expenditures are always taking place. We know that there's, or bills outstanding. We know that there's been 23 million of excess receipts approved. And some of that will go to this fund, some of it will go to FEMA. There's also the money in the federal receipt account, which is about $20 million to 22 million was essentially used to provide funds for expenditures. And our hope is to replace that back in the federal receipt account once we get this money up and going. And the overall goal in spending this money is to always wherever possible, spend the most restricted money first and leave flexible money for later. So the primary example that is Medicaid match that we got in the bill number two, we got Medicaid match and a increased higher level of Medicaid match. Now that's really flexible because that just says the federal government will pay more and it'll leave more general fund on the bottom line. So we spend that for things that we can pay for out of this money or other restricted money that came along later on releasing a totally free resource that we can use for any other need in the general fund. So part of it is using this money to ensure that we preserve flexible funds while we're using restricted funds. And then again, this whole thing about new and unforeseen immediate needs. So example would be we are using, the state is using UI funds to cover the need for payment before people can get the $600 or the money coming in from UI but the administrative costs of setting that up, I don't know if that'll come out of UI funds or whether that's gonna, we don't know where it's gonna come out of. So we just, the administration just said we need more people online. We need to do more right now. And that would be an example of something that didn't go through an approval, it just happened. And there's some food needs out there. And the other thing we're seeing and I'm hoping this will move to category two in a while is institutions on the verge of collapse and just, are there needs to send out money to keep things afloat when the pressures are fairly huge. So the final amount, the final language in D says this emergency subsection can be increased by the JFC or legislature. And that's just to put a thing there. I think that the overall sense in the joint fiscal committee and the chair can obviously jump in and correct me on this but is nobody wants to stand in the way of meeting the needs of the pandemic and nobody wants to prevent people receiving what they need to receive. So we just wanna leave some flexibility in there that we can move between the categories if there's some things that are really critical that need to happen. So in the oversight on this one, what we're gonna do, and this is oversight is a big issue, we're gonna be setting up a regular reporting we're gonna have the administration report this and we're gonna set up on our website a way that people will know what's spent out of category one and it'll be web-based, everybody can access it and that's probably what we'll be talking about this morning. And that'll come up more in section two. So maybe we should roll up to section two. Section two is subject to review and pre-approval by JFC, the administration could spend an additional 150 million. Again, for time-sensitive critical needs cannot wait for appropriations. And these needs could be things that happened before we got our first BAA out. They could be things that happened once the legislature has done the BAA and the first, we're calling the skinny budget, you know, this is the three month budget and between then and the final budget, there's just stuff that could happen and this gives us a way without calling the legislature back that we can meet those needs as they come up. And it's again, same type of issues. It's unknowns, timely. It can also cover expenditures that we're gonna otherwise use funds. And that's a, you know, this is gonna be a, it's a very strange process because we get new information with every bill. Like the bill that's being taken up in the Congress now and that is in, I passed the Senate is in the house in on Thursday, provided more money for healthcare and healthcare providers. And we haven't really seen how that money is divided and how that affects things. And it may mean that we can use that money as opposed to other money until the sources is gonna change on a constant basis. The other thing that I really wanted to have happen in this bill just passed, didn't, and I'm very, very sad is there was language to allow us to use the CRF money to cover revenue loss as opposed to just expenses that are essential for COVID. And that didn't happen. Supposedly everybody's promised to put it in bill number four but bill number four is probably gonna happen in May but there's this political world which we can, that is, you know, it's on the head, there's this, how do we provide relief? And then there's the other, not getting off on a teeny sidetrack but there's, we're starting to see the politics of do we, you know, keep the medical concern up front or do we keep the sort of job concern up front? And I want to understand the Senate said if they do a fourth bill, they're gonna want to do it in person. And there's some concern about giving relief to states because if they give relief to states they're afraid the states will continue to promote medical as opposed to work. And so that, you know, this whole debate about, you know, what do we do is starting to enter the response issue. So that's, so while I do think the fourth bill will have this in it, I'm anxious because I'd rather have it passed and right with us than waiting. So anyway, we can go down to a little bit lower and the key thing on the number two category is the administration will submit a question to joint fiscal, joint fiscal would be charged to meet within a week, not necessarily say yes but meet within a week to ensure the specific spending needs are addressed in a timely way. Where joint fiscal chooses not to act or determines the proposals to be held, the proposal will be presented for legislative action or basically it goes to the appropriation process. So, or it dies, you know, but I think most likely what would happen in joint fiscal would say, that's not really appropriate for this money. We don't want to prove it. You can certainly apply, you know and see if you can get it appropriate from the legislature as a whole. The key issue here, and this is the one area where there's a little bit of up and down. The current practice and grants is joint fiscal office send materials out to JFC members and chairs of the House and Senate committees of jurisdiction for informal purposes, informational purposes prior to action. And then the thinking here is that, and there's already been discussion among the money chairs and now among leadership about the importance of making sure, you know, making sure the members, all members are aware of this in a greater extent. So part of what we are charged to do in the joint fiscal office and what we need to do today and then get back to everybody is build a website process. So that what'll happen is like the grant process took it's a little longer to build that one. Anytime a request comes in, we would log it onto some sort of system and then maybe have a thing saying we're acted upon, rejected, whatever. But then that would be, and maybe we'll have a, and this is not yet decided upon, but do we just use that to let, you know, either the chairs of committees and jurisdiction, all chairs, or there's even proposals to say, just send out a notice to all members saying a new request has been logged and new request has been logged and let them see it and just how do we make sure the process is accessible and people see it? And that's the one piece that I would say is I need to talk to the money chairs and the committee needs to figure out that still, I think that, and it's the same balance. So, you know, a lot's happening, people only want to know, and just how do we make sure that people are involved? And then there's a note here that says the JFC team may adopt and implement an even more expedited process and necessary for specific expenditures. And this has to do with the fact that joint fiscal could get a request that just needs to happen in a day, you know, a very short time. And so this one, the overall thing is a week, let people think about it, review it, but we didn't want to rule out the possibility that things could happen that require immediate action. And, you know, this is something down the road the committee could hear about because it's becoming a little of an issue, but the Brattleboro Retreat has gotten money. I think that I'm not a hundred percent sure of all the details, but they lost their bank support for a while. And so the administration sent out money to help keep them float when their bank refused to give them any more cash. So things like that happen. And there may be things that happen that are in the large scale of money that need to occur. And then the number three, and that's the all, that's the all the last one is anything else would go to a probationary legislature. And as this is drafted, you take 1.25 billion and you take 160 million in one and two, that leaves 1,090 million of money for the appropriation process. The other thing is that anything that is not used in FY and in one, in the first two would roll down to be able to be appropriated. But it's, this is an attempt to put boundaries on the flexibility, but it also tends to, we want to leave flexibility because of the tremendous amount of unknowns. And so thank you, Steve. So just to recap quickly, and Maria can, Teresa, can you, just so I have a full screen of it so we can see all of it at once. It may be small, but if we have our glasses on it would work. The first, the first amount of money would go out for emergency needs and that would come back in a reporting through a reporting method. Number two is a bit large amount of money for emergency needs, but those, any of those dollars in number two would have to be pre-approved by the Joint Fiscal Committee and the information going out as Steve had talked about. And then the third pot or the number three, which is the largest amount of money over a billion dollars will go through the traditional appropriation process because we feel that it, you know, there's enough time for many of these expenditures to go through the process and they're not as high as an emergency. Peter and then Mary. Peter. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I just, I hadn't tapped my microphone. Steve, obviously we're waiting for the instructions. Those will be good to get, but a question I have, do these funds need to be appropriated by a date certain or else they are swept back into the US Treasury? Well, so the answer is we think so, but we're not sure. We think that they have to be allocated by December 31st, 2020. Okay. But we don't know. And so we're gonna have three chunky times to appropriate maybe more. Wish all you can do in any bill, but I think you'll have the BAA, the skinny budget and the big budget. Okay. And then you'll have other opportunities. Okay. Thank you. Mary. Just to be clear on the second pot of money, which is pre-approved by the joint fiscal committee, the committee or whatever process is established for that money has the ability to condition how the spending is made. Is that correct? You know, it's a little bit, the answer is sort of, you're asking a good question. I think the answer is not necessarily, but sort of. And the reason I would say that is when the administration comes to the proposal, and let's say they need a million dollars to go out to, I don't know, some nursing home or something that's about to close. And then you can say, joint fiscal can approve it. They probably can. They probably can, you know, but there's nothing really, it's not, you're ahead of the development of the thinking. And what's happened in the past, I'm just thinking, what goes to my mind is in the rescission process where the administration will come to a rescission. And we would say to them, well, if you presented like that, we're gonna say no. But if you modify your presentation a little bit, we'll say yes. So I think the answer is yes, they have the ability to do that, but I don't quite know how the form it would take, whether we would just have the administration modify its request or whether we'd actually get in there and take action. I don't know. And so Steve, since it is a pre-approval process, if we don't approve it, the monies don't go out. And so then the discussion. Right, so I think you have the power. Just the question is how you use it. If you could just say, can you resubmit this with the following changes? And they'll probably say yes. But that's different than saying, we're going to accept the condition. So the answer is the process is this is all new and how we actually do it is unclear. So in my opinion, this is an important question because as people have heard me say repeatedly, the expenditure of some of these funds is going to lay the foundation for expenditures that we make in the future. And so the choice to buy green paint instead of yellow paint is going to determine the color of the house when all is said and done. And so I think our ability to say no, we want yellow instead of green is important to how we move forward. So I get the problem, Steve, but as I tried to express at the Joint Fiscal Committee meeting as well as here, I think that's really important. Yeah, although the only thing I would add is that I think in some cases like that, if you think the paint color is the critical issue, you might want to postpone it to appropriation. I mean, I think that there is always the option of not doing it at Joint Fiscal and just saying, this is an issue that the legislature should deal with because I guess I'm being, and this is all in your court, you're at the Joint Fiscal Committee, but there's some sensitivity to not having the Joint Fiscal Committee. This is supposed to be emergency things, things you have to do that are not as you said, hopefully it'll be less what you said, which is building for the future and more for just maintenance of the system. If it starts moving into that question of shaping the future, I actually think those types of things might get postponed to the appropriation process, but that's your call. And I want to add that being too prescriptive may make the process more complicated if we simply approve it, then it has many paths that it can take. It might be just a minor adjustment that we're asking for, or it may be, we're not approved. So then it would drop to the committee process unless something was negotiated. But I think that if we get too prescriptive, we're going to get hung up. And I think the approval or not approval process will determine the path of whatever the expenditure is, whether it's a quick adjustment and if it's not quick, it probably needs to go through the appropriation process. Does that give you? No, it doesn't, but. It doesn't. No. And I don't, go ahead. I don't think it's a rubber stamp, Mary. This is not a rubber stamp of, okay, we're going to approve everything that comes before us. Of course not. And I wouldn't expect the committee to do that. I also thoroughly appreciate the urgency of action, as I've also said repeatedly, but which system we choose to prop up with this money is going to drive the choices that we make going forward. And that's what concerns me. If we choose not to prop up some systems and we know that we're going to have that problem, we don't have enough money. So we're going to start making choices. And that's what concerns me and that I believe the legislature needs to be engaged in. So on Monday, this is not approved. This is still in the discussion phase with the Joint Fiscal Committee. I would bring that concern up there and see if there's language that we all can agree upon. Yeah. So I don't know that it has to be language. I think you're going to see it in action because you're going to decide when time comes. No, I don't want to do that. I want to hold that for appropriations. And that may be, to me, everything you're, the only thing I was just pushing back a little bit, but if it's something that requires, is like you're saying, I actually think you might want to hold it for appropriation and not deal with it at the committee level. I mean, you're raising really good points that those are policy choices. You know, number two really shouldn't be about policy to be about, you know, decisions and even, and there's always gray areas. And I think when you, when you're gray areas, you're going to have to choose to move it to number three. Yeah. Let's, we'll keep talking about it. Thank you. Are there other questions for Steve or our members of the Joint Fiscal Committee who are on appropriations? Okay. Peter. Steve, so one of the, one of the issues that I keep thinking of is if we do not act, what further damage may be done or will be done because we fail to act. So we're going to need to have that information as well. So that, because that has to become part of our decision-making process. Yeah. And I don't know that we know, you know, I think, you know, this is a pandemic which has got a lot of clarity to it. And I think that this is trying to create a process so you can act. It's not really, I just can't even, you know, we won't know until we get there. I understand. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. Thanks. Steve, thank you very much. No problem. Thank you. So we are going to move to the, oh, did you have another question, Mary? I just saw a hand. No, I was saying thank you, Steve. Okay, thank you. Okay. I don't think, Maria, we have time now to walk through. No. Kitty, I have not seen Dan yet. So. Okay. So we can just have some free discussion until he comes on. Dan White from Moody's is coming on Moody's an analysis of states that are projected to fare better or worse than other states, depending on certain criteria that they looked at. Vermont did pretty well in this analysis. And so we thought it would be helpful to have Dan White come on and talk about what factors that they looked at and how we compared to other states and what could we do to even improve our situation and what things are we doing now that makes them project that we're going to do all right through this crisis. I thought that would be helpful for the committee, especially as we make cases down the road to strengthen our position for recessions, health crisis, such as this. I don't even want to imagine what else. Marty, do you have to mute Marty? There you go. Yes, before Dan White comes, I appreciate this discussion about the process of how we would spend this 1.25, how we would, various steps and processes of doing it. But when will we actually have some information regarding what we can spend that 1.25 on? Do we have any clue of when that information will come? Well, it is late coming. We thought it would come before the money. And Steve, I don't know if Steve is still on. Steve, do you have thoughts of when you think the guidance from the US Treasury? Well, we actually checked this morning, and the answer is it hasn't come. It's supposed to come after the 12th of April, which was a while ago. I have a feeling, and this is just speculation that they were probably waiting to see what this legislation had in it. And so I wouldn't be surprised if it comes out in the next few days, but no, I have no, we just sort of checked every day and would hope that it comes soon. Not a satisfactory answer, but call the president. Oh, not a satisfactory answer, not from you, Steve. I meant not satisfactory answer from the federal government, not from you. Your answers are always satisfactory. Peter. So, Kenny, one of the things I would really like to go over, the 21 April joint fiscal office update was very helpful. But I'd like to go over the revenue developments because obviously it's, this is, there's been some adjustments to revenue loss. And I think that we would, I'd like to know why those adjustments occurred where it came from. So at some point in time before we leave today, if we don't go over anything else, let's at least go over that part, please. Maria is going to do that after we hear from Dan White. Great. Is he on Teresa at this point? I have not seen him yet. I'll nudge him. I know he had a meeting like until like almost 9.30. So I think he's just, wait, I've been switching out. That's how there is. Okay. So let's just hang tight. The sun just came out here. I think he's here. Oh, we have a person waiting. I love the doorbell. That's. It snowed last night. Oh, I couldn't believe we had snow, sleet, freezing rain. The dog went out and was like, what? Kitty, you and I are the only two that can hear the doorbell. Oh. I'm listening to jazz, so I can't hear it either. Here is Mr. White. Hello, Mr. White. Thank you for joining us. You're joining out the Berman House Appropriations Committee and our Joint Fiscal Office sent the analysis that Moody's had done about that outlined factors that showed which states were going to fare better than others through the COVID-19 crisis. We're happy to see that we're going to fare fairly well, but I would like to engage in a conversation with you that would outline perhaps what we could even do better. What do we do that other states are not what we should build upon? And how your analysis came to the conclusions that it did. So welcome, and I'm going to let you take the floor. Oh, thank you very much for having Madam Chair. It's been a few years since I've had a chance to visit with you all. I think this is the second time I've had to do this over a video. So one of these days, I look forward to actually seeing y'all in person. But hopefully that opportunity presents itself sooner than we all are hoping it will present itself. I'm going to go over a few things in terms of what we did in terms of our methodology and things like that, but I really would love to make sure that there's plenty of time for you guys to ask questions and have this bit of a discussion. And your time frame is a half an hour. Is that correct, nine? I can go a little over. You guys are one of the more punctual state legislatures out there, but I know what legislative time sometimes look like. So I always put a little 15 minute gap on the end of legislative. We'll make sure we're done by nine 10. Great. With that, Madam Chair, I don't know if you want me to just sneak for a few minutes or do you want me to share some of the slides from the presentation? What would be easiest for you all? I think if you could just give us orally just a quick overview and then go into the slides so that we know how you got to the analysis that you're going to present. Sure, Madam Chair. Tol, can I just interrupt for one second? Dan, I did not receive a presentation. I did not send one, series. Okay, you go ahead and talk and I'll find it. If you said it. No, I didn't. No, I did not send one. No, you did not send one. Yes, so you're not at your fault. So I can send you something or I can share it on my screen whatever is easiest for you guys. I think I need to make you a co-host in order for you to do that though, right? Yeah. Sure. Is it easiest for me to just email it to you real quick or be a co-host? No, you can go ahead now. I made you a co-host. Oh, I feel extra fancy now. Okay, let me share this real quick just to give you guys some background. Sometimes it helps to see a few of these numbers while we're talking about them. So Madam Chair, as you mentioned, Vermont shows up actually very well in this. And I think the testament to the fact that you guys have done a very good job of putting money away into your rainy day fund over the last decade or so. When you mentioned things that Vermont is doing that others are not doing, the two things that really stand out most in my mind are you are focusing on economic scenarios, which is something that all states should be doing, especially in times of crisis like this. And the other thing is you're acting off of those economic scenarios by actually putting money away in your rainy day fund. It's one thing to stress test and do those kinds of interesting thought exercises. You're not actually acting on that and putting money away in the rainy day reserve fund. The next year or two is gonna be very difficult. And one of the things I think you mentioned at the start is the next few years are gonna be very difficult regardless. No reason to make them any harder on yourselves by not doing this kind of analysis and by not having already done a lot of the legwork. So you're already in shoulders above a lot of other folks who were out there by having done that in the past decade or so. It should make the next year or two a lot easier on you than it is relative to other folks. Unfortunately, it doesn't mean that it's gonna be easy. It just means it's going to be easier than what it might be for quite a few other folks. So the stress test that we put out, I know that many of you are aware of the stress test that we put out every fall. So this is an annual exercise that we do. This is more or less an intra year kind of special update to that exercise that we normally do. When we did this exercise in the fall, we found that more states are prepared for a recession than have ever been prepared before. The level of rainy day funds and overall balances is higher than it's ever been as a share of overall budgets. However, in our stress testing exercises, we have never stressed tested a scenario quite like what we're seeing right now with COVID-19. So even the extreme severe stress scenarios that we've used in the past that replicated a lot of the magnitude that we would have seen maybe during the Great Recession, you don't come all the way to the level of stress that we're seeing as part of our COVID scenario. So very briefly, the two scenarios that we used in this analysis and they'll talk about are our baseline scenario. So this is roughly what we're expecting as of April of this year. It assumes that we have a very deep recession in the first half of the year followed by a modest rebound. The real differentiating factor between this and some of the other scenarios that I'll talk about is the timing on the travel and those closures. Really, that's what's driving the train here and as much as we as economists hate to admit this, the virus is driving this train, not the economics. And so we're really kind of captive to when those business and travel restrictions can be lifted. The baseline scenarios, majority of those restrictions are lifted the end of May, probably even early June depending on some states, for the majority of the states that already have those in effect. And that again, those restrictions are what's making the biggest impact in terms of overall economic activity. This is not a normal recession in the sense that we haven't seen demand naturally kind of decline and supply pullback in response to that. So it's not like we've run out of gas it's more like somebody's just unplugged the economy. Now that is really difficult because a huge portion of the economy is all of a sudden gone overnight but there are some upside to that in terms of the fact that as soon as we plug that economy back and a very large portion of that overall economic activity is going to come back very quickly. Not all of it's going to come back and it might take quite some time for some of that economic activity to come back many years but a large share of that initial disruption will come back online as soon as those restrictions are lifted. The difference in the two scenarios is the baseline assumes that those lifts happen at the end of May, early June. For our S3 more severe scenario we assume that those shutdowns and restrictions last into July of this year and in some states as late as early August. Obviously we have a much larger near term disruption as a result of that and longer term the impacts are much stronger in terms of trying the amount of time it takes us to get that economy back. So under the baseline scenario we have a peak jobless rate of about 13% in this quarter. There are monthly numbers that could get much higher than 13% but the average over the quarter is 13% and it probably takes us till about the end of 2023 before we see all of those jobs come back online in terms of overall jobless claims. For some context around that after the Great Recession it took us about five years for everything to come back. So this is a little bit quicker than the Great Recession but again the initial kind of spike in unemployment is much larger than anything we've ever seen. Under the more severe scenario where we have these disruptions last until at least July or August of this year it takes much longer for some of those jobs to come back because there are businesses that may no longer be around after we get through June and July. As a result we don't expect that full employment comes back until at least 2027 in that scenario. So that's a seven year kind of gap in between the recession which is again not like anything that we have seen in our lifetimes and certainly not something that many folks have seen overall. So the real depressing part of this is I'm gonna try and keep, I apologize that this can't be sunshine or rainbows this morning but the really kind of challenging thing and the thing to be sober as quickly was when we took this economic scenarios and we tried to translate them into fiscal stress because they are providing a level of fiscal stress that we have just never seen before in some states. So the average state sees about a 17% decline in tax revenues as a result of the scenarios we talked about, the more severe scenario. But as in previous stress testing exercises the distribution around that average state is really immense. So for Alaska, North Dakota they're seeing 40 plus percent declines in tax revenue because of all of their reliance on oil and gas energy taxes. The good news is for those states they've seen this in the movie before they know how it ends they have gone through very similar declines as this because of falling oil prices before and they have the reserve set aside to be able to handle something like that. Coming out of the great recession one of the things that came off and this is something that Vermont has obviously learned is that there are other states who now have to budget more like the energy states have been budgeting for a very long time because the fluctuations in tax revenues are much larger than they've been in the past. Vermont is in a very, they're right in the middle of the pack in terms of the level of economic stress that they'll see from their revenues but you guys are well ahead of the pack in terms of the amount of money you have set aside in the rainy day reserve fund. So the amount that's left over from that is much less in Vermont and it's one of the reasons why the overall fiscal shortfalls that you have net of your reserves should be less than some other states have seen. Obviously the other kind of side of this coin is not just on the revenue side but also on the spending side. So as part of our stress test we actually stress state Medicaid spending as well. And this is something that really was sobering for us when we look through the arithmetic around these numbers. Surely, you've noticed what we've seen this huge uptick in unemployment insurance claims in the last few weeks like to the degree that we've never seen before and to put some context around that so that this first quarter number or second quarter number here that is what we're seeing currently and this gray dotted line across the chart that is the peak of the great recession, right? So then the peak of the great recession we never saw us adding more than about 600,000 new unemployment insurance claims every week. In the last few weeks we have seen as high as 7 million people filing for an insurance claims all in one week. So this is not something that is gonna be able to dissipate very quickly. Even after we see this large spike and we plug the economy back in there is still gonna be a significant portion of the economy that is kind of residually laid off or residually unemployed. And that is gonna have a major impact on not only unemployment insurance claims but Medicaid and other social service programs for the foreseeable future. We're basically looking at a peak of the great recession for at least the next year and a half which is again, really impactful in terms of the spending programs. So the combined level of economic stress is quite significant. So the map you see on the left side of your screen is the fiscal shop. So this is the revenue numbers that I talked about plus the spending numbers from Medicaid kind of combined into one. You can see Vermont is again, right in the middle of the pack. There are some states out there with the energy states where this is much higher. There are some states that are not energy states like New York and New Jersey, for example, California is a little higher than average that are seeing a tremendous impact not just because of their tax structures. And they rely very heavily on very progressive personal income taxes which introduce a tremendous amount of volatility into your tax code around changes in the business cycle. But they also have a very large portion of their populations that have been exposed to COVID-19 and they're struggling through some of the worst kind of business shutdowns around the COVID-19 shutdown. So the map you have on the right side of your screen is a reflection of how well those states are prepared to meet the amount of shock that they're about to see. And so you can see that again, you guys are in pretty decent shape here. This is basically you're within 5% which means that if you used all of your reserves all in one year, you would have to make no more than about a 5% change to your budgets in terms of spending cuts or tax increases. Now, in reality, we know that it's not necessarily a good idea to use all of your reserves all in one year. And so the actual impact to the budget is gonna be significantly higher than that. But I think what this shows is that the states who have done a very good job of preparing for the shortfalls are the ones who are in green here. You guys are a good example. So Utah is a good example. California is a great example. I mentioned California earlier. They saw some of the largest fixed school corrections after the Great Recession of any state in the country. They were really kind of ground zero for some of those tax changes that I mentioned earlier. They've learned their lesson as well. They have put away actually a little bit more than Vermont has put away in terms of the share of their overall budget over the last 10 years. And as a result, they're in much better shape to handle this kind of fiscal stress and they'll have to make much smaller fiscal corrections going forward. That's hugely important because in a recession like this, nobody wins, especially when the magnitude of this. But there can be significant winners or losers coming out of a recession. And so if you wanna win the recovery, you have to be able to get through one of these recessions without having to make those major fiscal corrections to the same degree that every other state has. And so if you wanna be able to continue investing in your workforce, investing in education, investing in some of the economic development incentives that help to attract more business to your state versus other states, the best way to do that is to be prepared going into the recession. And Vermont is in a very good position to do that relative to other states. The big picture here though, and this is some information that we have shared with others, including folks in the federal government about the actual amount of aid that states are gonna need through this. Because unfortunately, as I mentioned, not every state is in its good shape is Vermont. For example, the folks down in Louisiana, they don't have the reserves to get through something like this and they see a tremendous impact, not only from tourism, but also from oil and gas. It's possible that they have to cut upwards of 35, 40% of their budget as a result of the COVID-19 stress that's coming through, just to get through fiscal 21. That doesn't include any of the impacts after 21. So in order to kind of put some magnitude and put wrap our arms around the impacts of this in terms of what the federal government may need to do for states, this is kind of our more severe scenario. So we've got $203 billion roughly in economic impacts to get through fiscal 2021, which for most states is next June. We're adding about $150 billion of direct COVID-19 spending. That is based on some of the numbers that we've heard thrown around from some of our clients in the healthcare industry and some of our contacts at NGA and other places. That is obviously subject to change depending on the length of the downturn and the epidemiological assumptions that go into COVID-19. But if we compare that, so that's about $353 billion all in in terms of needs through fiscal 21. Just for states, mind you, this has not included local governments versus the resources that are available. There's about $35 billion available from the second stimulus bill, the family first stimulus bill. That's that 6.2% increase in Medicaid spending that came out of that. That's about half of what states got during the Great Recession, which obviously needs to be grown out to be a bit more. That's about $35 billion. The CARES Act, which was the third piece of stimulus spending, that year marked $150 billion explicitly for COVID-19 spending. So ventilators, masks, the emergency overtime stuff, about $110 billion of that is gonna go to states, another $40 billion will go to local governments predominantly. And then if we assume that states only withdraw about half of the reserves, which I think is a generous assumption in some states given the restrictions they have around the use of the reserves, you have a shortfall of almost $200 billion for states to get through fiscal 21 without having to make substantial fiscal changes to their budgets that will have knock on economic effects. And as I mentioned in some of those states, Louisiana being a great example, we're not talking about just layoffs, we're talking about a significant curtailment of the way that public services are delivered. To get through fiscal 2022, which would be the next year after that, you had about $100 billion onto that. So you're looking at somewhere between $200 and $300 billion that the federal government would have to provide to states just to kind of survive the next two years without having to make those major changes. If we throw in local governments on top of that, you're looking at somewhere in the $400 to $500 billion range which is about the magnitude that we have seen be discussed in Washington over the last several days. And so we're hopeful that we'll see some movement on that. But this is such an unprecedented time. I really can't describe it any other way than that. We're running out of synonyms for the word unprecedented when we do our writing. We just, there's nothing like this that we've seen before. So with that wonderful news, Madam Chair, I would be happy to answer any questions or entertain any discussion you have. Thank you very much. First question, Representative Jessips and then Bacon. Right, thank you, Dan. I just wanna also say, I thought your report was really approachable and very readable and that was helpful. My question is focused on the rebound and the fact that Vermont is a state that our economic sector, our structure is largely driven by small businesses and even sole proprietors. And I'm wondering if your analysis has any way of taking into account that sort of difference between say our state and the state that might have a much larger manufacturing base. I know you talked about energy and some other things, but that's kind of what's on my mind. Yeah, Madam Chair, Representative, first of all, thank you for those kind words. Second of all, we absolutely take that into account. So when we put together our regional forecast, so I talked briefly about kind of the US top level scenarios. We run those scenarios down through our 50 state forecasts afterwards and we use the 50 state output to stress the taxes and the Medicaid spending forecast. So we use Vermont specific forecasts to stress those. One of the risk factors that we look at when we've been kind of moving our state forecasts up and down are some of the industry mixes that are out there, some of the COVID-19 exposures and then one of the other things that we've looked at is really the small business exposure because even though that's a really positive thing to have under normal economic circumstances, given the current economic circumstances, sorry, current economic circumstances. I've been talking a lot about this on my apologies. Under the current economic circumstances, that can be a real vulnerability because of the liquidity issues that local governments are going through right now or sorry, that small businesses are going through right now. We expect that the bill that is being discussed in the Senate will be passed very quickly, at least we hope it is. If so, we might have a better shot of seeing that vulnerability mitigated a little bit. However, again, this really depends on the timing of this. So if we get to the end of July, August and we still got some of these travel restrictions and business closures in effect, the small businesses are the ones who are gonna go first and there are issues where the jobs for those businesses may never come back or may take a very long time to come back. And so I think the longer term risks are much more elevated for states that have a very high percentage of their folks employed in small businesses. The near term impacts are probably even out. So if I were to extend those forecasts out beyond fiscal 21 to fiscal 22, fiscal 23, I will probably see Vermont with a larger level of fiscal stress than they do maybe in fiscal 21 to other states. Thank you. Representative Fagan. Thank you, Dan. And what I'd like to do is build a little bit on the representative Jessup's question. What you've got in your presentation, it talks about restrictions occurring that may remain for a longer period in a severe situation than a shorter period. First question is, did you also look at human nature? And the reason why I'm saying that is that I was reading something that one of Hard Rock hotels somewhere in Asia had been open for a solid month, if not longer and they've only got a 13% occupancy as of this week. So human nature may indicate that even though everything is opened up and ready to go, nobody shows up. So in that context, what's sectors? And you talked about the demand returning, but what sector's short term, one to six months should return and what sector's long term will return long term, Q4, 2020 and out? Madam Chair, Representative, those are great points. First of all, it is incorporated into our forecast. So our forecast, and I know a lot of people, if you listen to the NBC or Bloomberg or wherever you get your financial news, the big argument between economists because we're really good at arguing with each other right now, even in crisis, we're really good at arguing with each other. The big argument today is kind of what the shape of that recovery will look like. It will be a V shape or it'll be a U shape or it'll be a Nike swoosh. Our baseline assumes relatively, this is just because we're running out of letters, a W shape recession, which adds, we plug the economy back in so things come back up, but then longer term, we really see a lot of, even when we start to see growth, maybe in early 2021, that growth is very weak because really until there's an actionable vaccine available for COVID-19, the economic activity is going to be under that human fear. A great example that I heard somebody using yesterday was, a lot of people are comparing this to 9-11, mostly because it's the only kind of proxy we have for this kind of exogenous shock where the economy just shut down overnight. And I can remember being on airplanes after 9-11, you'd think, well, the worry was somebody on the plane could be a terrorist and eventually people thought, well, they can't have a terrorist on every plane in the United States and eventually started people started to feel comfortable. But when anybody could have COVID-19 and you don't know where they are or where they've been, that's a whole different level of fear in terms of leaving your house, going and doing even the smallest economic activities. And so there's that actionable vaccine that can be rolled out in large quantities, which the epidemiologists are telling us is going to take probably at least 18 months to accomplish. We are not going to see economic growth return like gangbusters until really we get kind of beyond that point. So even beyond this initial dip and immediate recovery when we plug everything back in, so to speak, there is going to be some residual sluggishness throughout the economy for some time. Okay, thank you. Representative Yacoboni. Yes, thank you. Dan, am I correct? All the numbers, all the analysis you've shared with us, none of it assumes that Congress may at some point allow us to use our recovery relief funds for helping with lost revenues. Is that correct? Exactly, so that last slide that I showed that had the 30, it had $110 billion for COVID specific expenses, that would be explicitly reserved for that $150 billion need for specific COVID needs. The $203 billion that I talked about from the economic impacts, that would have to be covered by the $35 billion from increased Medicaid spending under the second stimulus bill, and the roughly $36 billion, which is about half of what states have put aside in rainy day funds. Anything above and beyond that has to come via an additional aid package from Congress or from state fiscal actions itself. Okay, the way I was looking at it, that may have been wrong. I was thinking, you know, I don't expect you to have access to what our numbers might be, but if we have a billion dollars on the table, it's not yet been appropriated and we could use it for revenue replacement in FY21, we could come out of this without touching any of our reserves. Our total general fund budget is roughly $1.6 billion, roughly, assume we lost half of it, $800 billion, plus the billion they're giving us, we'd have more than what our current budget is. Is that faulty thinking, or am I? Madam Chair, I don't think that's faulty thinking. I think the thing that's unclear yet, and it goes to the uncertainty about that $150 billion that was sitting on top of my needs, I don't think that we've really been able to get our arms around what that need is going to be. And if we get through this and we start to realize that states direct spending on COVID-19, so ventilators, masks, that kind of thing, it's not nearly as high as maybe we first feared it would be, then what Congress will do and what they've expressed interest in doing is releasing the rest of those funds to be used for, you know, general revenue shortfalls and economic impacts as opposed to being explicitly earmarked towards COVID-19. However, that can't happen without additional legislation to be passed through Congress. And it might go until they can really kind of get a better sense of what that is. Thank you. Representative Hooper, you need to unmute yourself, Mayor. Sorry. I'm wondering if you could explore further with us what our liabilities and our assets are as we recover from this, so in the midterm. So what should we be building on? What should we be concerned about? And in part, I'm thinking about our Medicaid program and how large it is, our age or, you know, our demographics, our workforce, you know, so small proprietors, et cetera, but also then our, we're very close to a lot of big metropolitan areas and is that something we can build on? Madam Chair, Representative, I think so, absolutely, we could help you with that. I think the biggest thing that I would be, if I were in your shoes as a legislator, I would be absolutely demanding that whoever's doing our revenue forecast for us is running several different types of scenarios with very explicit assumptions behind those scenarios so that you as legislators can be, you know, properly kind of gauging that risk as you're making these potential policy assumptions. The ability to do that and stay flexible is really key to kind of planning around these types of things. I think that you guys have traditionally done that. It's one of the reasons why you have so much money put away in your rainy day reserve fund. That's one of the reasons why you're at your better position than other states to really take this on. But those scenarios are changing so rapidly around the epidemiological assumptions that incorporating those is gonna be very key in terms of making decisions. To Professor, or to Representative Yacovone's point earlier, your economists who are there on the ground are always gonna have better data than we have. So I would be using our analysis as maybe a guiding post, a guidepost in terms of the overall magnitude, but they're always gonna have access to more detailed data and more detailed institutional knowledge about, you know, receipts and data that's coming in immediately, much more than we are. And so to the extent that we can help them do that, you know, we're happy to their, what we're doing shouldn't be a replacement for the level of work that they're doing. So to the degree that they can be making those very deliberate and specific policy assumptions within their forecast, that's gonna be hugely important. The other thing that I will say too is about Medicaid and some of the things that you mentioned earlier, I think the Medicaid numbers that are in our forecast and the paper that we sent out last week are definitely a lower bound estimate of what potential Medicaid needs could be because it's based on, you know, all the models that we have are based on how Medicaid has historically performed relative to the economy. And that's based off of things that have actually happened. This has never happened before. You know, as economists, we say we're in the tails, right? We're in the tail of the distribution. And so there's not a lot of, the economic models aren't as helpful when we're sitting in the tails because we don't have a lot of useful history to go off of. So some of the risks around the Medicaid program, especially some of the structural systemic healthcare risks that come with COVID-19 that maybe can't be easily incorporated into this forecast, make those numbers definitely a lower bound and the overall spending numbers could be much higher. That's something that is especially important in the Northeast. So I live just outside of Philadelphia. It's something that, you know, we in Pennsylvania are always trying to think about, I wish we were doing as good a job, you know, putting that money away for rainy day as you guys are doing, but thinking about that middle term and thinking about our aging population and what that looks like from a Medicaid perspective is crucial, especially if we find in ourselves in a position where these business closures stay in effect longer. And so the longer-term unemployment and the longer-term structural effects from this downturn play out over a much longer period of time. And we have to think about, you know, let's not worry so much about surviving, you know, just 2021, but let's really think of what we have to do to survive through 2025, 2026 when the economy returns to whatever that new normal looks like. Thank you, Mary. I have a couple of questions. I want to just talk briefly about our reserves. Our total reserves, we've always been shooting between 12% and 18% because maybe as typical Yankee, that Yankee mentality, you put money in lots of couch cushions and you don't put them all in one place. But what should our rainy day percentage be toward the general fund and our overall reserves? And the other question is, in your analysis, you highlighted healthcare and education, that those systems, if they're strong, that that is also a factor in states through this crisis a little better. And we're in a, we have an issue right now that we're dealing with our higher education system. And I'm just curious what your thoughts are on healthcare and education and what we need to have in place as well as money in the reserves. Thank you, Madam Chair. So I'll start with the reserve question first. So normally what we've done, that range that you're in is usually more than sufficient to get through a normal recession. And I think, I mentioned earlier, we rely on top level numbers that we actually get from the National Association of State Budget Officers when we look at these general fund numbers. So their numbers might differ slightly from what you're looking at in terms of your reserves, but they have you right around, I'm looking at the numbers right now, they have you right around 13% in terms of your rainy day reserve fund as a share of your overall budget, your general fund budget. What we have found in past stress test is that should be more than sufficient to get through a normal recession. So I mentioned this is not a normal recession. What we're finding in terms of the fiscal shock that could come from a severe scenario. So the S3 of the COVID-19 is that that share should be roughly about 20% of your budget to get through this kind of an event. Now, obviously this is a tail event, this is not an event that we hope will happen or expect to happen all the time, but that really is kind of a worst case scenario is 20% of your budget. Given the makeup of state industrial structures is one of the things that really plays a role in the level of stress that you see. It's one of the reasons in the analysis you talked about, I think we cited Massachusetts and Pennsylvania in particular as two states that really are heavily into the, you know, the eds and meds, education, medical services. That was really important for the near term. So fiscal 2021, because from a jobs perspective, we don't expect to see and we haven't seen yet significant layoffs in those two industries. They've been two of the relatively immune industries so far, especially when we talk about leisure hospitality and some of the industries that have seen just massive job cuts. That doesn't mean they're going to be immune forever. So especially over the longer term, when kind of the dust settles over this summer and some of the, we go back, kind of we plug the economy back in, there's going to be some major financial issues around higher education, especially private higher education and especially around some of the healthcare providers that they're going to have to go through. And so the second round of layoffs and potential sluggishness in the economy may be in those sectors, but that probably doesn't happen until beyond fiscal 2021, so into fiscal 2022. The one piece of that that really does concern me are some of the smaller private universities and colleges. I know that there are several in Vermont that's something that's very important for your economy. There are some major liquidity issues that they are going to start to go through beginning as early as this fall. But once we get into about this time of year next year, if enrollment doesn't come back and they don't get significant aid in terms of small business loans, et cetera, there could be a lot of small colleges and universities that closed up shop for good. And so the implications of that, not only from a credit standpoint, which is where a lot of our banking clients, obviously are looking, but from a public policy perspective, that's something that will absolutely need to be in the forefront of policymakers' minds as we look towards what policy decisions look like going into next year. Thank you. Representative Yacoban. Dan, I'm trying to see if I have the right perspective on this. If looking at a state's reserves and the quality of their balance sheet is the key metric in terms of a state's health, if at the same time, if a state has been able to build up its reserves, but if it comes at the expense of, and I'm not saying this is the case in Vermont, certainly not entirely, if the capacity of our reserves come at the expense of really inadequate Medicaid payment rates and a large part of our healthcare infrastructure is fragile financially, or if our municipalities have been starved and don't really have the dollars to do transportation, culverts, et cetera, take care of their infrastructure, or if some of the social safety net providers have gone, in some cases over a decade without annual inflation increases, a state may look pretty good on your comparative analysis, but is it? Is the quality of the health at the local level and at some of our key infrastructures, is it really measured by this kind of a perspective? And this isn't a criticism, it's just a question. Madam Chair Representative, I'm gonna give you the only 100% true answer that economists can always get, that is it depends, right? So it depends, I teach economics at the University of Illinois and my freshman, when they come in on the first day, I say, anybody asked you a question and you don't know the answer to it, say it depends. I said, and even if you know the answer, say it depends. So that's a very interesting comment because there is a very tight line that we're trying to walk here, right? So the whole point of putting side money in a ready to reserve fund is to avoid having to put a whole bunch of money out of the economy or a whole bunch of investment out of the economy all at one time. And especially at maybe the worst time that you could possibly do it in the business cycle, right? And so we never want to put so much money in reserve that we're starving other very important programs for economic growth, like education, Medicaid, providing services to local governments. Those are all key. And so the real kind of fine line to walk for that is something I think Vermont's done a pretty good job of is putting that money away over a very long period of time, because if you start to take huge chunks of that off the table and you starve investment into other growth programs, then you won't see the revenue growth that you would otherwise see as you had stronger economic growth in the future from investing in those programs. And so that's really the impetus behind in some of the analysis that we're talking about here because by stress testing and looking at that analysis, you can kind of get a good sense of how much is enough, right? How much do I really need? And I don't have to continue to just throw money into a black hole forever and call it my reserve. If you look at some of the states and the energy states we talked about who are really well prepared, those are states who have been putting money into those reserve funds for decades. New Mexico, for example, I used to be, I used to work for the legislature in New Mexico. It seems like a lifetime ago. They had been building up those large permanent funds since the 1960s. And so they're in a better shape now to be able to get through that. Being able to build these out over a very long period of time into the chair and the chair's point earlier, having a clear idea of where you need to go and making a plan to get there is hugely important to not starving those programs of potential funding for growth. Thank you. And thank you very much for coming on. It's just 10, 11. And so I want to be respectful of your time, but this was very helpful. And, you know, if we have a glimmer of good news, the glimmer of good news is that our work as a legislature has positioned us in a better place than we could have been if we had not made some of these challenging decisions. So... Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. Yeah, any good news we can get these days, if I can bum you out, but keep a smile on your face at the same time that I'm doing my job. Thank you very much and take care. It's my pleasure. Thank you. Okay, so we're going to move now to Teresa and Maria. I always do this. That's okay. I did that with my kids too. At least I'm not calling you my dog's name. Yeah, I know. I've done the same thing. But name the name on the screen. I'm looking around the screen. I didn't see Maria. It's okay. It doesn't, that's fine. So Steve puts together these weekly updates that are very helpful. And so I'm going to go through the most recent one, the April 21st one. And I know it's on our screen right now, but I just want to mention that it's also available on the joint fiscal office website for anybody else who might want to look at the document. So the first part is the revenue developments. And so what we're saying is that the expectations are relatively constant compared to last week, but there is one exception. And that has to do with the education fund. And in fiscal 20, the economic loss has gone from an estimate of 89 million to 69 million. And then the shift of revenues into 21, that estimate has gone from 51 to 42 million. And the reason for this, I don't have a terrifically detailed reason for this, but what I've been told is it has to do with the underlying data related to sales tax and it was corrected. And that resulted in this revenue change. If you click on that live link, the April 17th revenue update, you can see the forecast that has these corrected numbers in it. And then on this document that we're looking at, the sub B talks about now the revised numbers for the FY 2020 shortfall. In the general fund is the same at 61 million down. The education fund is now 69 million. That last week was 89 million. And the transportation fund is 42 million. And that's unchanged. So I can try to get more information on that education fund data change. I've reached out to Graham Campbell and I just haven't heard back from him. That's okay. I just reached out like five minutes ago. So then moving on to sub C is the FY 2021 revenues. And we haven't gotten information on that yet. Tom Kovett and Jeff Carr are gonna be working on a preliminary revenue update. And we're hoping maybe the last week of April, that's almost upon us, but we will give you an update when we get more information on that. So number two is the third stimulus bill, the CARES Act. And Steve Klein went through that as far as, you know, saying that we had received the money. We don't have any information on how it should be used yet. But once we get that, we'll send that out and put it on our website. And I think all of you will receive it as soon as we can get it on the internet. And Steve also mentioned the three pots of money that the joint fiscal committee is considering. So I'm not gonna review that. And he also discussed sub C, the money management. So again, I won't go through that. So number three is the further stimulus bills. And Steve did actually touch upon this. There is this stimulus, I think they're calling it 3.5 or whatever it's referred to that was passed by the Senate yesterday. And as Steve mentioned, that's gonna focus on small business, testing in hospitals. And so now it's gonna go to the house tomorrow. And he, since he talked about it, I think we can move beyond that. I also wanna make note that under three is a live link, this April 17th update on federal funds for Vermont. And that will give you some detail that was put together by our office on the funds that we have been awarded. So if we go down to sub four, that's appropriation issues, what you find here is a list of some of the dollars that have already gone out or that are being considered to go out. And the first one is the $6.5 million that's been paid to Brattleboro Retreat to provide some stability. And also there's conversations with the designated agencies to address the issue of compensation for at-risk employees. And again, we can try to get you some more information on that, those are both issues that I'm sure you're very interested in. So the first bullet is the Department of Health. They were awarded this $4.9 million that was part of COVID-1. And they're expecting some more in this CARES Act that was just recently passed COVID-3. And then also he mentions in the second bullet that Diva has gotten this FMAP increase that for the quarter ending March 31st, it quays to about $25 million to Vermont. And then the third bullet down, it has to do with Dale. They're expecting about $5 million that they will issue in grants for home delivery meals, family caregivers, and supportive services. Now we're gonna go to the fourth bullet which is some other AHS COVID related spending. The LIHEAP program, they received an additional $4.1 million on top of what they had already received under the normal grantee process. So that brings them to about $25 million in their program. There's also this, the second bullet down underneath LIHEAP is this community services block grant of $5.1 million and that's gonna go mostly to the community action agencies to help address emergency assistance. Then below that is this child care development block grant of $4.2 million and that is to help stabilize the child care system and providing healthcare to essential workers, those two things. Then the next bullet is this emergency solutions grant that's $4.6 million and that addresses the homelessness issue. Let's see, below that is a bullet that talks about how the agency of human services is applying for $2 million grant from the substance abuse and mental health services administration to expand mental health emergency services. And then there's an additional grant that they're applying for to the Department of Justice for helping correctional facilities with the medical needs of inmates during this COVID response. Steve did talk about the next issue, the FY 2020 budget adjustment. We're gonna hopefully get something from the administration in late April as that's also upon us next week. And so late April through May, we'll be working on that bill with your committee, of course. And the 2021 preliminary budget that he discussed the three month budget, we're calling that the skinny bill. And then the FY 2021 budget, the complete budget, probably won't be done until April and September. That's the projection right now. Okay, so the next category is this initial claims for unemployment insurance. So in here in this paragraph is a discussion of the surge of claims that Vermont has received. And I think you heard from Joyce Manchester and from the Joint Fiscal Office. I think it was it last week. I don't know, all these weeks are blending together, but talking about the surge in claims. And we did hear the Joint Fiscal Committee did hear some testimony on Monday from Suzanne Young and Brittany Wilson about the progress that they're making on addressing the backlog of claims. So I don't know if, Kitty, if you want me to just review that with the committee. Sure, sure. Okay, so over the weekend, so over the weekend, the Department of Labor resolved about 32,000 of the 50,000 issues that people had that were holding up their claims. That left 8,400 people with unresolved issues. So checks for $1,200 were sent out to these people that cost the state roughly $10 million. Also, I just want to give you this one little additional piece of information. The Department of Labor, they have the new system for the self-employed, which will go live by the end of this week. And they're estimating that it'll affect about 30,000 to 40,000 people who are self-employed. The Department of Labor is adding 70 additional call takers that brings the total number of call takers to more than 200. And just for comparison's sake, prior to the COVID-19 surge of claims, the Department of Labor had 15 call takers. So they've really ramped up to address this huge surge that they've been experiencing. That is all I have to say about the UI claims history. And the fifth item on this document, you just heard about the Moody's Analytics Stress Test. So I think that summarizes what is included in this week's update. And this is just an incredible update that is so succinct and gets the information out to us. And so I can't thank your office enough. And I think, Steve, you're behind a lot of this with help from members, but it's really, really helpful. Dave, you have a question? Yes, thank you so much, Maria. Maria, we met a couple of weeks ago with Sarah Clark. And she was talking to us about receiving some information from the designated agencies. I think by April 6th, they would be making decisions shortly, well, I shouldn't say shortly, but thereafter on what type of interim relief they may provide them. My question is, the word will come to me in a minute. My question is, can you get us a spreadsheet, some type of accounting that shows what AHS may or may not have been able to do thus far in an interim capacity, not just for the DAs, but for all of their provider network, Nursing Homes, Home Health, FQHC, et cetera. I know they've been helping people. I just wanted to get a sense. I'm assuming, which I know I'm not supposed to do, that if they're doing something, it's coming out of the 25 million that you just alluded to in your presentation of additional Medicaid, but I don't know that. Okay. Thank you. So Dave, I will just chime in quickly. Sarah can get us, I think that what we need to do is get what has actually gone out the door because I think that there's conversation still going on about final amounts in some areas. And so as they're negotiating and trying to figure out what the numbers are needed to go out in areas, let's get the numbers first, what has actually been decided upon. I think that if they're in negotiations, trying to figure out an amount, I don't want Sarah to put on the table, I'm putting on $5, but they need 25. Thank you. Thank you. I'm interested though, if they've finished the negotiation of what the ask was versus what the final allotment is. But I agree with you, Kitty, not anything during the negotiations. Go ahead. Okay. Thank you. And it's not so much a negotiation, it's really trying to figure out who qualifies, the number of hours, it's a bit complicated. Okay, Maria, thank you so much. We do, my texts are buzzing, because it's the only way I can communicate. We have a bill that's being referred to our committee. Did I say thank you, Maria, before I jumped into it? Yes, you did. Okay. We have a bill that's coming to our committee tomorrow. It's the Interfund Borrowing Loan. The treasurer can be on the phone in about five minutes. I need Teresa tomorrow. We can't take a position on the bill until we actually have it in committee, but we can review it so we could act quickly tomorrow. At noon tomorrow, if we could schedule, oh, look, we have somebody waiting. It must be the, can you guys hear the doorbell? It's the funniest thing. It's like, hello. It's still ringing. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Beth, are you there? Hello. Hi, this is Ashlyn in the treasurer's office. That should be dialing in momentarily. And somebody has dialed in, but they're on mute still. Yeah. So Ashlyn, I think she may be already on. Can you have her on mute? Yep. I will text her. Oh, I got it, Kay. I was able to unmute her. Perfect. Okay. We're going to hear about the bill that passed the Senate. We're going to hear from the state treasurer because it's a request out of her office for Interfund Borrowing. Welcome, treasurer Pierce. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate the time. I am scheduled at 1030 for waiting means, but I think they're going to try to give me a little room here to move. So the answer we have is to allow us to do Interfund Borrowing for an extended period of time. Interfund Borrowing is something we do already. It allows us to manage our cash flows. As you might imagine, there are peaks and valleys in our cash flow. We are very strong in terms of our cash position. We expect to be able to get through the year without having to do any borrowing. But you always want a backup plan. You always want to have a contingency because things change and these unprecedented times are changing rather rapidly from day to day. So we want to have a backup plan for borrowing. And there are three ways you could borrow. The Interfund Borrowing, which I'll get back to a minute, you could go out and get a line of credit from a bank, but that's going to cost you a few dollars. It's costing you to set up the line of credit or to, and then additional cost if you draw down on it. Or you could go out and issue short-term debt. You could issue what's called a Revenue Anticipation Note. It says that we're going to get revenue down the road and we're borrowing now. The state has not had to do a Revenue Anticipation Note since 2003, 2004. And we do not expect that we're going to need to do that now. So the first item was the Interfund Borrowing. And that is essentially borrowing from ourselves. We have a pool of unrestricted dollars. And we essentially pool our funds. So the Education Fund, the Transportation Fund, the General Fund as well as others, are in a pooled operating fund. And we use those dollars to pay the bills. And each fund has its own integrity within that pool, but it allows us to have some flexibility. So when you have a period of time, for instance, after you've paid the Act 68 payments for education payments that are going out the door, and we fully expect to be doing that, we have a little bit of a cash shortage in the Ed Fund. And rather than borrow, we essentially borrow from our pooled cash, borrow from ourselves. And on June 1st, when those payments come in, that situation is resolved. So we do that in the course of a year. We have also the pooled cash borrowing. But twice a year under current statute, we're allowed to borrow from what's called restricted funds. So they're not in that unrestricted pool, but it's another pool of funds. And it includes funds that typically have some restrictions with the federal government level or in the state. For instance, the medical funds for the state employees, the workers' comp fund, other types of funds. And we borrow from them during that valet, as I said, we have peaks and valleys in our pooled cash. And that's typically December 10th to January 10th. That's when we send out Act 68 payments. And we spent a lot of money in our construction period. And our cash position is a little lower than it is in other parts of the year. And then we also have under the current statute, June 15th to July 15th. And it's really to help sort out the end of the year. What we're asking for in this bill is to extend that June 15th to July 15th period. Instead of having that 30-day period, essentially have a 45-day period around the end of the fiscal year. So from May 15th to August 15th. And what we'd like to do is basically be able to borrow from restricted funds in that period of time and to pay them back by the end of that period. So that essentially we're borrowing from ourselves. And this is, again, standard procedure we've done in the past, but we want to extend the period to assist us as we're getting through some of the cash flow changes as we've moved out the income tax and the state sales tax in the light to July 15th. So I want to be respectful of your time getting into ways and means. And I didn't mean to cut you off. I thought you would pause there. So please continue, I apologize. I have one more sentence, which is that the Interfund borrowing is the most efficient and easiest way to implement borrowing borrowing from ourselves. And there's no cost to the taxpayer as opposed to the other two that have cost. The other two alternatives, it is a backstop. We hope not to use it, but you always want a contingency plan and that's my testimony. Thank you very much. And I apologize. I really thought you would pause there. We have a question from- I don't know. Bob. I just interrupted you. Me? You are, your hand was up Bob. Yeah, okay. Yeah, am I on okay? You are. Yeah. All right. Yeah, but so yeah, there's no interest. It's fast and easy. It's everything. However, how do you predict the ability to pay back with the economic times looking forward at economic times that we really don't know what they're going to be like for some time. So how do you predict ability to pay back? Well, again, the payback period is within August 15th by the legislation or July 15th under the current statute. We have projected out our cash flows and we believe that we have sufficient cash to be able to do that. So we're just waiting to replenish some of those pooled cash funds by the income tax money that was going to get on July 15th as well as any sales tax. We've projected it. We meet twice weekly with the administration. We've been talking with Jeff Carr and I know he's been working with Tom Cavett. We were updating our cash flows on a regular basis. We believe that this would work and are very confident in that. If that didn't work, we could go to a backstop number two which is the lines of credit which I have statutory authority to do or issue a short term debt to take that money out before August 15th. So we have a plan A, a plan B and a plan C. Okay. I should have known you to answer that question perfectly. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much. I don't see any other questions. And so I'm going to thank you for the explanation of what the bill does that was passed out of the Senate on the 20th. And I think you need to get to me if there's no other questions. I don't wanna hold up the phone. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you for your effort on this. Appreciate it. Thank you. Stay well. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. And so we cannot do any action today on the bill. The Senate passed it on a voice vote, not a roll call. And we will take, if Teresa, if you can schedule us tomorrow at noon, if we can check and rate at lunchtime because we're going on the floor tomorrow, we can vote on this bill. Are we allowed to vote on this bill and committee? I don't know if you have voting rights yet. Oh, you must have. Yes, you have voting rights. Yes. You can vote it on stuff already. Yes. And Representative Hagan has the roll call sheets. So you should be good. You have the roll call sheets. Excellent. So we will. I'm joined fiscal roll call sheets, not House Appropriations Committee. Oh, I'll send you that. Diane Lamphere. Diane, Diane already had those. She had mentioned- Diane, that's right. I'm sorry. I'm getting my clerks confused. And Diane, I believe is the Treasurer's Office, your budget, or MEDA's? It's one of. Ada, where are you? It's yours. So you'll be prepared MEDA for the floor. Yay. And so we will check in tomorrow. If you just mark it on your calendars, we'll check in tomorrow. And we will vote on 340. The full bill, you can go online and read it. I think Treasurer outlined exactly what she's doing. There's other questions for the Treasurer before the vote. I need to have those today. Mary, did you have a question? Your hand was up and is down. It went up and then down because I just wanted to know where to read the bill. I'll go online. I can send a link out to everybody and when I send the invitation as well to the Zoom tomorrow. Thank you. And as you read it, if you have questions, get those questions back to Teresa and me so that we can have them answered and so that tomorrow we're not scrambling to get answers for anybody. Linda. We have a floor meeting at one o'clock. Is that correct tomorrow? So we've got to get this our 12 o'clock in before the one o'clock? Yes. Okay. We just want to make sure that everyone's calendars are really full. Because we've got one at nine tomorrow morning too. So. There's something that I've been doing that I shouldn't be doing as one of the hosts. I've been de-raising your hands. And Linda, you just did yours yourself. Everybody, I don't want to get to the floor tomorrow and have any committee members that forget to take their hands down. And because that was one of our jobs as chairs is to make sure everyone knows how to raise their hands and take it down. But I think we're all set in this committee, aren't we? Yeah. I think so. Okay. So we have a bill tomorrow. I thought the testimony from Dan White was really interesting. The strong care and strong education systems are important. But boy, we could, he said in 2022 and we really need to be paying attention to just, we'll wait for the news from the federal government if they inch the ruling and we can use any of the COVID-19 money to replace lost revenues which would be incredibly helpful for a state like Vermont. And we'll go to go for the fiscal updates and we have not an official revenue forecast but a revenue update next Wednesday from Tom Covent. And so it's not official but it's the newest projections that he would have at the time that would help us with our budget adjustment process and with starting to prepare for a one quarter budget. Bob, you have your hand up. Yeah, I just got a quick question that tomorrow we have a 10 a.m. and a 1 a.m. on the floor or 1 p.m., I'm sorry. So what is that, a break for lunch? I'm not sure. Catherine and Mitzi are doing the scheduling. It may be because of other committee meetings. It may be to make sure one piece goes smoothly and then we move on to the next and we fix any glitches. I'm just, I'd just be guessing. Okay. Yeah. Well, I'll hang out and see, I guess. Now I wanna see you take your hand down so I don't get yelled at on the floor tomorrow. Right, right. How do I do that? Lower hand. And I do have to say yesterday was a pretty gloomy day for me and I threw some cornstarch into the sink because I just had it with everybody, I don't know, with the state colleges and with the budget and just home confinement. I lost it for a bit. And then Able walked through the door with a package and Bob sent me a package of Twizzlers and it turned my day around. So my family was really happy, Bob, because at the end of the rope. So thank you. That was a nice treat. And pick me up just when I needed it. Anything else? We can unmute Maria. Let's unmute everyone. God, I'll never get that straight. They have to unmute themselves. They have to unmute themselves. Some of them. So we have dogs that bark half to mute ourselves. That's right. Yes. So it's so good to see everyone. What are we doing? Always good to be seen. What are we doing this afternoon on the floor? Practicing. It's a practice. Oh, it's all over caucus of everybody, right? Yeah. Sits there and listens to everybody babble on. I think we'll get some information too about what we're voting on and procedurally how things are going to. All right, yeah. I think we're also going to get a preview of the bill, right? That the presenters are going to do a walkthrough of them? Could be. Maybe. So, I don't know if you're included in that or not. We just got this notice, but you'll be ready. I was going to check it. Perfect. She froze. She will be ready. She was going to check, but. We know Mata will be ready. So, Mata for there. Are we back? Yeah. Okay. Kitty, I was planning on double checking on the list. Once we're done with our appropriations meeting. Thank you. Thank you. And if I see S3 there, I will have myself ready for this afternoon. So good to see all of you get outside for a walk. It's a little brisk, but there's cheeks pink at least. Okay. Kitty, I'm going to stop the live stream.