 Hello, everyone. Welcome. What a beautiful, beautiful fall day. We'll take it. So my paycheck previously served six years as a commissioner of the Vermont Department of Financial Regulation, DFR, where he was first appointed by Governor Peter Shumlin in 2016 and reappointed by Governor Phil Scott in 2017. By the way, we all know who he is, right? Didn't we watch those conferences? Yeah, see, we know. Mike also served as deputy commissioner of DFR security division where he led the division's investigation into the JPEG eBay Five projects. While at DFR, Mike served as the president of the North American Securities Administrators Association, a member of the SEC advisory committee on small and engineering companies and member of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. He previously practiced at Downs-Rackland Martin in Burlington in the business law group. He should. He grew up in Brattleboro and graduated cum laude from Union College with a degree in political science. Is that right? Yes. He received his law degree summa cum laude from the University of Miami School of Law where he served as editor-in-chief of the Miami Law Review. Please welcome Warmly Mike P. Chack. Thanks, girl. Well, thank you very much, Carol. It's a pleasure to be here with everyone. I'll say when I was doing those press conferences during the heart of the pandemic, my mom, as only a mother can, would give me advice and say, you know, you really should smile more during those press conferences. And I do smile a lot in my real life, but I told her, mom, how am I going to smile more during those press conferences? And she says, well, Dr. Levine does it. So I could not quite pull off what he was able to pull off, but I'm sure he did a great job when he was here. And, you know, he's always he's a great colleague and someone I really enjoyed working with during the pandemic as Mike Smith and as the governor to, I think, governor put together a great team. And I always say though, when people talk to me about that period that I thought Vermonters were the magic ingredient in our COVID success, that Vermonters really were paying attention, willing to consider the science that we were providing, the data that we were providing, and then understood that the policies we're implementing, you know, really were designed to protect us and protect our most vulnerable. And, you know, I think we had the best, if not one of the best COVID responses in the country and the governor, you know, to his credit, just to sidetrack for a second, you know, the first moment I got involved in COVID, he called me to a meeting and I hadn't been working directly on the response yet. This is like in mid March. And there was Mike Smith and Dr. Levine and other people had been working on it. And we sat down and he walked in and he said, Mike, you might be wondering why I asked you to be here today. And I was a little bit. But he, you know, he had a list of things that he was worried about. And at the top of the list was the fact that Vermont was an older state. And he said, how will this impact Vermont more than other places? Do we need to make sure we're prepared for it? And I think even from that first early moment, that sort of set the tone for how we were going to respond to COVID, that we're going to take it seriously, do everything that we could to protect the Vermonters, and then do everything we could to get people vaccinated. And not only do we have a great response, I feel like we've come out of the pandemic with a great economic boom as well, which is the reason that we're here to talk today. So I'll get a little bit into that conversation. But, you know, I got elected treasurer just about 10 months or 10 months ago, I took the job elected about 12 months ago. And it's been a great job. I really enjoyed it. I've always been fascinated with all things Vermont, but particularly the Vermont economy and Vermont, the Vermont budget and the finances, because I think if we figure out those things, you kind of know the direction of our state and you know what needs to be fixed and how you can best help people and where the resources are to help people. So it's been a really great and enjoyable experience. And, you know, both during the campaign and then in these early days as treasurer, as part of that work, I really wanted to dig in and think, you know, what is the most important challenge facing Vermont? And, you know, what is the most important economic issue, you know, facing our state? Because, you know, if you're not sort of identifying those challenges and you don't know where to spend your time and where to put your resources. And part of that was informed by, you know, the campaign. And we went to every single town in Vermont, 252 towns. I was joking the other day that they even created a town while we were campaigning. So, you know, that was a challenge, but we got there and we had conversations in every town. And I really am glad we did this because I mean, it was my first time running for office and obviously the first time holding a statewide office, even having grown up in Brattleboro, there were a lot of parts of the state I hadn't seen before, or certainly a lot parts of the state I haven't had conversations with people that were from there before. And they were really meaningful, but the conversations had a very similar tone, whether it was in Southern Vermont or Central Vermont or here in Chittenden County, you talk to a town clerk and you'd ask what's going on here in town. And they would say, I'm so busy, everything is just so busy. And you'd say, well, is that because of the election? And they'd say, well, partly, but mostly I'm busy because I'm doing so many real estate transactions. And you'd ask, oh, well, can you explain a little bit more about that? And they'd say, yeah, there's more transactions than we've ever seen before. And people are moving from out of state into Vermont. They're moving and paying in cash for the homes. They're paying in cash well above the asking price for the homes. And they are having a remote job and they're bringing their young families here to Vermont. And I'd say, oh, that's interesting. That's sort of what we've been trying to do for some time. And then you would talk to another town clerk and they'd have the same story. And depends on the size of the town, but in some towns where there's only a few hundred people that live there, when they say four or five or six families have moved there with that sort of story, that's really impactful for their local demographics and their local economy. But then you also talk to business owners and you talk to principals and hospital executives. And they would say things like, well, I can't hire anyone for my business. I would normally have 15 people working at my grocery store, but I have four or five. And that's a real challenge for us. Or you talk to a business that would say, just one yesterday morning, I talked to someone that said they would like to hire 40 more people with jobs that would be $100,000 or more each if they could find the people. And you talk to again, principals that said we used to have hundreds of applications for a teacher position and now it's only a couple. And again, you ask those folks, what is the challenge from your perspective? And they'll say housing. So it ties back to this demographic change that we've seen in people moving into Vermont. That's something that we've been wanting for some time, but that pressure has really made it quite challenging for employers that want to retain staff, employers that want to expand. And not just employers though, in terms of the private sector, it's made it challenging for school districts and for not for profits and for hospitals. Medical wait times, I don't know if you've all had challenges with that, I'm sure. We did a report on it before I left EFR and we looked at medical wait times and they were longer in Vermont than counterparts in other states. They were longer in Vermont than the national average. But again, you look at, you talk to hospitals and they say we want to hire a general practitioner, we want to hire a specialist, we have hundreds of nurses that we need to hire, but we offer them a job and they accept it and then they try to find a place to live and then they end up taking a job somewhere else because they can't find housing. So as I've done this sort of analysis and taken in all of this sort of anecdotal information, we then sort of put data to it and said, well, these stories, what we're seeing play out in the data. And in fact, they were as what I was finding, that we did see inbound migration, we did see benefits from that, but that we also saw significant challenges for our economy. And for me, I can talk more about this in a bit, but housing is the key. That's the thing that sits at the center of all of the other issues that we're facing, whether they're on the economic side or whether they're on the social side. We had a professor come in and talk in Vermont virtually called Greg, his name is Greg Colburn, and he wrote a book called The Homelessness is a Housing Problem. And he looked at a whole bunch of different variables, like, you know, does your city have more homelessness because it's more impoverished? Does your city have more homelessness because it has a more generous benefit structure? Does your city have more homelessness because you have increased mental health or substance use issues? Does your city have more homelessness because it's in a warmer climate? And all of those things weren't borne out by the data. None of them made sense. They didn't correlate at all. The only thing that correlated was, does your community have a high median rent? And does your community have a low vacancy rate? So the higher rents and the lower there is, the vacancy rate, the fewer homes there are for people to live and the more homelessness you see relative to other parts of the country. So it ties back to those issues, you know, as well. And again, we'll get into it, but we're making great strides on housing, but I see that as our biggest challenge as we look ahead over the coming years and the coming decades, because it's not something that we'll solve immediately. You know, it's a challenge that sort of has built up over the last 15 or 20 years. But we will, you know, we'll solve it, no doubt. I'm more optimistic about the Vermont economy in the future of our state than certainly I've ever been, I would say, in my adult life or even as a kid growing up here in Vermont. When I was a kid, you didn't think there were opportunities to work at a place like Beta Technologies, which you'll see, you know, in the coming weeks. And now that's just one example of many exciting and interesting businesses that are here in Vermont. But I think the other big thing that's changed is, again, COVID-19, the fact that we've been shaken loose from having to live and work in the same place has dramatically changed the way we think about our lives. You know, you used to hear stories about people that would move to Vermont for a job. And they would say, my spouse can't find a job in Vermont. Or my spouse did find a job, but they didn't like it. That trailing spouse problem is what they would often refer to it as. It doesn't really exist in the same way anymore, because that trailing spouse most likely can retain their job, even though they're moving here to Vermont. And that other individual might very well move to Vermont, because they want to live here for lifestyle reasons. And they can retain their job wherever they're moving from. So breaking those sort of geographic bounds of needing to live and work in the same place. And the moment that COVID provided of everybody rethinking, you know, how they wanted to live, where they wanted to live, what kind of lifestyle they wanted to have, really provided a real moment in time where there was just a total shakeup of society. And we are benefiting from that here in Vermont. And we can continue to benefit from it, you know, if we have the right policies in place. And that's why I say, you know, I'm more optimistic now than I've ever been. But I think we can get into the slide presentation here. And we'll just run through some of that data that I mentioned. You know, myself saying, I think maybe David, it went on, may have went on sleep. So I talked too long. Sweet. Thank you. David Cunans, our outreach and communications director at the treasurer's office. So he always does a great job in helping me make sure I stay on track and figure out technology too. So thank you, David. So, you know, you'll see here sort of these highlights that I put together in terms of where we're heading, you know, improving demographics, increasing private investment and improved state revenues, a decreasing pension and OPEB liability, and then prudent fiscal management of the state. So those are sort of the areas that I just want to touch on when we talk about sort of the Vermont economy and where we are as a state. But that improving demographics is a really critical one, because if you're thinking long term about our state or any other state, you know, the financial firms, the rating agencies, they don't just look at how are you today, they're looking at where are you heading. And in Vermont, you know, as the governor pointed out during COVID, we're an older state. And if we don't have younger families with younger children, then where are the workers of tomorrow going to come from? And if you don't have workers, then it's hard to have revenue. And if you don't have revenue, it's hard to pay your bonds and bills and all of those things. So that's why the rating agencies in Wall Street care so much about this issue of demographics. Now, there are other states like Florida, where they have some, you know, outrageous number of people moving there every single week. But they have their own challenges, you know, relating to things like climate change and insurability of their state and their homes and their businesses. So they're seeing the benefit now of dramatic population growth, but their long term challenges, how are they going to sustain that in the environment of rising sea levels, more frequency of storms, stronger hurricanes, more frequent hurricanes. So I'd much rather have this challenge than that challenge, because I think that's actually going to be a benefit to us as individuals continue to move to Vermont as a place that is relatively safe to climate change compared to other places. We saw the impact of climate this summer, no doubt, but that does not, we still benefit from not having horrible wildfires and lack of water and sea level rise and some of these things that places are really struggling to figure out. So we've had improved demographics, improved private investment, which we'll get into. And then these are more in the financial metrics, decreased pension liability and strong fiscal prudence. So this age demographic that I'm mentioning, you know, this is an age distribution of our current population, and you can see it sort of by these five year bands. So 22% about 21.6% of our overall population is in this sort of 50 to 64 age band. And when you look at who's over 50, it's obviously a much more significant percentage of our population. But I point out that 50 to 54% because that is a population that over the next 10, 15, 20 years, you know, has their sights on retirement, and we'll get to that again in a minute. So Vermont's demographics continue to be a challenge for us in terms of our long term economic success. Because again, who's that generation of the future, that workforce of the future. But, you know, from the pandemic, we have seen some improvement. So this is from the IRS. This is IRS data that looks at net inbound migration for tax filers. So if you file the tax return in Vermont for the first time, it sort of tracks that data. If you have left Vermont, you know, and you filed your tax return somewhere else, they sort of follow you to where the new state is that you've moved to. And we just put three years of data up here. These are the three most recent years that we have. So 2019 free pandemic 2020, and then 2021. And I'll just mention, this isn't a perfect data set, I don't believe like, you know, it's quite possible that we are undercounting in some ways. It's quite possible we're overcounting in some ways. Like if someone's 18 years old and they're filing their first tax return, even though they've lived in Vermont their whole life, it might include them as a net tax filer. But I also don't think we're picking up all of the individuals that are in Vermont or have moved to Vermont, some of them might not yet be filing their taxes in Vermont, even though maybe they should be. You know, but it's not a perfect data set. Some individuals might not need to file tax returns, depending on their situation. But the important thing here is that we've seen really in dramatic increases for Vermont in terms of net inbound filers 3,100 in 2020, 3,043 in 2021. And in terms of the history of this data set, it goes back to 1993. There's never been a period in time where Vermont has seen that dramatic of an increase in population. This sort of is like off the charts as it relates to the Vermont data set. So whether this is an overcount or an undercount, as is relative to the entire data set that they have from 1993, it's a significant increase in what Vermont has experienced about 6,000 individuals. And we're eager to get the 2022 data. It's not available yet, which we'll see if this sort of trend continues. So that's one side of the equation is that there's more people moving here. But then it's interesting to think about who are these people and what are they bringing to the state. And one way to look at that is sort of the change to Vermont's adjusted gross income. So you can see in 2019, you know, we had 1,300 filers leave the state. They took with them about $28 million of adjusted gross income. But this 3,100 came. And not only did they come, but they brought with them $448 million increase of adjusted gross income. And then similarly, the 3,000 people that moved to Vermont, just about or just over $365 million of adjusted gross income. So significant amounts of income and wealth moving into the state. And then you dig down that a little bit deeper. And you say, of those 6,000 people, this is the age band here. 84% of them are between the ages of 26 and 44. So that's the exact demographic that we've been talking about wanting to target younger people with young children in their prime working years that are establishing themselves in Vermont are going to be long term taxpayers in Vermont going to be contributing to the Vermont economy. And then you look at their individual incomes. So we looked at it sort of as a total of the adjusted gross income change. But when you look at them individually, you see that 77% of the 6,000 plus individuals that moved here are making over $100,000. Some of them a pretty significant portion about 2,800 are making over $200,000 a year. So they're younger and they're wealthier in terms of the individuals moving to the state. And then you say, well, if there's so many more people living here that are wealthier that must impact our state revenues, you know, that's sort of the next logical step that we wanted to take a look at. And in fact, that's what you're seeing. Here's the fiscal year at the bottom on the left for personal income tax revenue for the state of Vermont. And this is the biggest single revenue source for the state of Vermont is our personal income tax revenue. And you can see back in 2017, 2018, about 750 million, 832 million. But now for the last two fiscal years, it's 1.2 billion. And for fiscal year 24, which is the year that we're in now, our expectation is that it will be another year of 1.2 billion. And we are about 5% ahead of our target. So we're doing well in the moment as well as sort of the last few years. But that's a significant increase in revenue. And we did not increase the revenue, you know, point that out, we didn't increase the taxes, we just increased the number of taxpayers and those particular taxpayers happened to be high income earners, which really shot up a revenue. And then on the corporate side, you know, there's a very similar story, we've seen a significant increase in the amount of corporate income that we're receiving now 281 million. And the other great thing about that is that it's a more diversified pool of companies that are paying Vermont. So in the past, it might have been 10 or 15 really large companies that we recognize by name. But now it's a much more diversified pool of 1000, 2000, 3000 companies that are making up a much more significant portion of that revenue. So for me, I see that as a really good sign that we're not dependent as much as we have been in the past on a particular employer to make sure we're hitting these revenue marks. So I would expect that they're here to stay and we'll get into a little bit about why that number is going up in a minute. But this is just a slide of sort of the total private sector employment by industry. And it's really small in terms of the type. And it's not all that important to look at any particular area, although I will point out, of course, healthcare is about 20% of that. And that's why often you hear people talk about healthcare being 20% of our GDP. It's a significant portion of our private sector employment, and a significant portion of our GDP as well. But the point here is that, again, we have a well and increasingly better diversification among the different employment sectors, which is what you want to see in an economy. You don't want to have an economy that's too focused or too dependent on one type of industry because that industry can come out of flavor for a whole host of reasons. So Vermont has a diversified employment sector. And that has been a trend toward diverse diversification and towards what I would view as a more resilient economy. So these are the top employers in Vermont. The reason I wanted to show this slide is because everything we've everything I've been sort of talking about is is favorable positive news. Not that this isn't positive, but the one thing you'd like to see, I think, in an economy is not necessarily to have your hospitals and your universities as the top employers in your state. The state of Rhode Island also has this challenge. There are hospitals and universities are at the top of their full-time employment ranking. We have other significant employers. Global Foundries is one. Ben and Jerry's is on there. Still GS Precision in southern Vermont. Beta Technologies will soon be on here there at about 600 employees with about 450 in Vermont. And they're planning to add hundreds and hundreds of employees over the over the coming years. But we really need to see that sort of private sector employment growth to sort of, I think, sustain the kind of population that we want to see, not the explosion in population, but a steady growth to make sure that younger people have the opportunities to live and work in Vermont and have an employment right here in Vermont. So that sort of gets to this point about investment in our state. Before the pandemic and 10 years ago when I moved back to Vermont from New York City, we had a pretty limited, what you call sort of like a capital markets, pretty limited supply of people that were investors looking to invest in businesses. You know, there were a few of them, but it was a pretty small segment. And one place you should plan to visit at some point is Hula on the lakeside. If you haven't already, I'd encourage you to do that individually, but I'd encourage you to do that, you know, as part of your group here as well, because they're really creating something special in Burlington that is having a profound impact on the entrepreneurial community and on our state's revenues and economy. So this is venture capital investment in the United States for 2022. So it's looking at the entire year, where did venture capital money go in that year? So where did, who did venture capitalists invest their money into? And they're looking at it by something they call partial employment areas, which I just think of as metro areas. So you can see up there in the corner, sort of this large sort of Burlington metro area, we had $550 million of total venture capital investment into Vermont in 2022. So when you look at all of these other places, these places that have gray areas, they did see some investment, but basically they had nothing. It's not that they're grayed out because we didn't have data for them, they just had such low investment. So look at all of those rural areas of the state of the country, rather, that maybe are similar to Vermont in terms of our population density. Maybe they're even more densely populated than us. But look at that green that's up there in Vermont. We rank 30th of all of these areas, 400 and 13, 413 metro areas. Vermont was 30th in the country. And that's not on a per capita basis. So that's not saying, on a per capita basis, we were 30th. That's saying in an aggregate basis, we were better than in terms of attracting capital than about, 370 other locations. So that's really significant. And then you look at what that means since the pandemic, $1.1 billion invested since the pandemic in 2021. And in terms of the increase, that's a 442% increase over what we were seeing prior to the pandemic, which puts us number one nationally in terms of the growth of that type of investment in Vermont. So these individuals are investing in things like beta technology, but they're investing in dozens and dozens and dozens of other companies based in Hula, affiliated with Hula, that are based in Burlington at Beeset and other sort of incubators that have nothing to do with Hula. But Hula is the foundation of that core of creating the sort of ecosystem of attracting capital, providing support, mentor services, resources to small businesses, to entrepreneurs. And it's really starting to have some significant momentum, you know, as we can see. And I think that is having some impact on our corporate revenue increase that we saw a little while ago. But I think it's just at the beginning, I think we'll see even more of an impact down the road from all of this investment that's being made in Vermont. So these are all of the different venture funds that are in Vermont now. And the reason I put them up is just to show that there's a great depth at this point. When I moved to Vermont, I would often think about fresh tracks capital, which you may or may not know, which is based up here in Chittenden County. They were sort of thought of, and they still are as one of the most significant venture funds in Vermont. Only at that time, they were basically the only venture fund that was looking specifically at Vermont. But now you have many different entities that are bringing their own capital to invest in small businesses in Vermont. And they're attracting capital from outside of the state as well. So this is a significant development that we've seen, you know, in the last five years or so. We've also seen some of our traditional industries that have had some really great success. I don't know if anyone is familiar with this captive insurance industry that's based here in Vermont. So the captive insurance industry is doing better than it's ever done in Vermont. They have over 650 captive insurers that are domiciled here. We just passed Bermuda and the Cayman Islands to be the number one in the world domicile for captive insurance. Those captive insurers have $200 plus billion assets under management that they manage for their captives. There's about $40 billion in gross written premium that flows through captives in Vermont. And then most importantly, they contribute about $31 million to our state's general fund in terms of premium tax. And they also support about 400 plus jobs with an average wage of $91,000. So this is an industry that's been in Vermont since 1981, but it continues to outperform its peers across the country. And we're starting to outperform our peers across the globe and continue to see real strong benefits from this, both in terms of the impact of the general fund and the jobs that it's supporting directly here in Vermont. And then there are a couple of new revenue streams that I wanted to mention here that are coming online in Vermont. One is the cannabis tax that comes from this new regulated cannabis industry that started in October of 2022. So you can see since October of 2022 through May of 2023. So this is not updated through September, but through May, just about $50 million in sales. So in terms of additional revenue to Vermont, $6.8 million in excise tax paid to the state, that's a projected to be about $12 million in a full fiscal year. And then legalized sports betting is something else that is coming to Vermont in January. And when that is established, it's expected to bring in an additional $10 million of revenue when fully operational. So when you combine those two new revenue streams, that's about $22 million of new annual revenue that the state of Vermont will be collecting that we weren't just two or three or four years ago. And then the last thing to mention about our economy and one of the things that's really booming is the outdoor recreation industry. So about $1.5 billion in Vermont based consumer spending occurs in this outdoor recreation economy. We used to think about outdoor recreation as maybe just skiing, but, you know, mountain biking, you know, fishing, ATV, there's many ways to get outside and there's many other industries other than skiing that are seeing dramatic increase in jobs and revenue. So the outdoor recreation economy now makes up about 4% of Vermont's GDP. And in terms of the entire country, the Vermont percentage that makes up outdoor recreation that 4.1% is the third highest in the country only behind Hawaii and Montana. So that's a real growing area for us. And there's a good synergy there too, because a lot of the people that are moving to Vermont will cite our outdoor recreation as a primary reason for them wanting to be here, the beauty of our state, the ability to get outside, the ability to take advantage of our natural resources. So this gets into the employment numbers that we're seeing in the state of Vermont. So all of the data again has been pretty positive that we've been showing. One of the areas where we're lagging behind other peer states is building back our workforce from the pandemic and growing the size of our workforce generally. You can see that dip there. That was in March of 2020 when a lot of people were facing layoffs and a lot of businesses were closing. And then you can see that long, slow progression back to sort of a normal baseline. And we're about 92% recovered from that sort of top moment back in 2020. So we still have a little ways to go to get our workforce back to the same level it was at before the pandemic. I do personally think that they are probably not accurately capturing a lot of remote workers that are in Vermont. But those remote workers aren't necessarily contributing in the same way as a retail worker or manufacturer or restaurant worker. So they're not helping people necessarily in Vermont. But I'm thinking that we probably have more people working in Vermont than this number accounts for. But that still is a challenge for us because to see the kind of the kind of sustained revenues and the sustained success that we want to see, we need to make sure our workforce continues to grow at a pace that's sort of equal to the population growth that we're seeing. So at the same time, we've seen a really low unemployment rate about 1.9% and it sort of hovers around that just under 2% area. So the employment market is very tight. If you're interested in finding a job in Vermont, you are in a good position because there are a lot of jobs available. There was a statistic that said, I think it was about 10 years ago, there were about two jobs available in Vermont for every job seeker and that data has flipped. So there were two jobs for each individual. Now there's, yeah, thank you. So it just shows you the tightness of the labor market. And then we get to that main issue that I was talking about, housing construction. So in the 90s, in the 80s, Vermont population did see sort of regular sustained growth and we were building at that time about 3,000 new housing units a year. And that was generally keeping pace with the population growth that we were seeing. However, you can see here the earliest year on this chart is 2012 and then it goes into the future with the projection of 2025. But in 2012, we were only building about 1150 new housing units. So we used to have about 3,000. Now we're only building about 1144. And you can see for that five year period or so, you know, it was right around that area was growing slightly got up to 1500. But even still 1500 housing units in 2016 is about half of what we were building in the 90s. And then you get into these sort of COVID years of 2020, 2021, 2022, the current year projected out into the next couple of years, we're back up to about 2000, just over 2000, and hopefully heading toward 3,000 new homes a year. But again, if you think about that population growth that we saw in the last couple of years, it really explains why the housing market is so tight also and why the labor market is so tight. People are having a real hard time finding a house and finding a home to accept a job to live in Vermont. So we're building more housing, 24% more housing units are being constructed in 2021 through 2025 compared to 2016 and 2020, 63% more housing units being constructed in these five years compared to the earlier part of the decade. So we're making progress. And we've also made some legislative progress in terms of reform. There have been some reforms to act 250 to allow for growth in certain designated downtown areas. There's also been municipal regulatory reform that allows more duplexes and triplexes and quadplexes to be built basically almost anywhere in the state, certainly as it relates to duplexes that can be built anywhere in the state, more accessory dwelling units that can be allowed, a more of a focus on infrastructure and supporting towns and villages to have the wastewater and water that they need to be able to support more housing. So we've made some real important strides on the regulatory side that I think will set us up for success. I think maybe there's a little bit more left to do in that regard, but we're focusing on smart growth, more densely populated towns and cities and villages protecting our natural environment, putting housing more clustered together so there's less need for transportation, less need for CO2 producing cars, more resilient communities, communities that are healthier because people are not just walking but they're socializing with each other. So I think we're we have this vision that we're sort of heading toward for all of our towns and cities and village centers. And it's starting to take shape, certainly it's taking shape here in South Burlington with the new city center that they're building just down the road. And again, a reason why this is so important, this focus on housing, we talked about people wanting to live here, certainly climate migrants are going to want to come to Vermont, we've already seen that. But again, back to the Vermont labor force by age, about 100,000 people in our labor force are over the age of 55. So 100,000 people in the next five, 10, 15 years are going to be approaching that time period where it's expected that you're going to be retiring. If you look at the top line here, we expect about 88,000 retirements by 2030. So that's just about six years away from now. And we expect 88,000 people to retire out of our workforce. So not all of those 88,000 people are going to leave Vermont, you know, they're going to continue to live in Vermont and retire in Vermont. So if we're going to replace them in the workforce, there's almost no way we can do that unless we build more housing to support more people coming into our workforce over the next five to 15 years. So again, that's why I say it's such a critical issue for us to focus on now. We have challenges right now that we're trying to solve with housing, but it's going to continue to be a pressure point for us five, 10, 15 years from now. And one of the things that we need to support more of is safe, secure, affordable senior housing as well. David and I are on our way after this to a groundbreaking in Virginians that our office supported with this new program that is called 10% in Vermont that we expanded. And we made a $5 million low interest loan investment into this project. And they're going to be adding 65 more assisted living beds. It's for moderate and low income Vermonters. But our point is that those 65 new beds, individuals are going to be moving out of their homes. And when they move out of their homes, that's going to free up a home for a family. And then that's going to free up a starter home for a family. And then that's going to free up a rental for somebody and so on and so forth. So one area of focus that we need to have in terms of our strategic policy in terms of building more homes is a focus on senior housing so that we have the homes that are available for the people that want to come and work here in Vermont. One of the other challenges that we have to solve for is obviously the changing climate in Vermont. And I wanted to just show this slide because, you know, the flooding was horrible. And in many communities was worse than what we saw during Irene. But there are some bright points in terms of the resiliency work that has been done over the last decade, a lot more needs to be done. But you look at Irene compared to the July flooding, there were about 500 miles of state roadway that was damaged. And this most recent flood it was about 273 miles. In Irene, it was 34 state bridges that were impacted. Here it was three state bridges that were offline, 1,000 culverts washed away. Here damaged culverts were about 657. And then just a specific example, the state waterbury, the waterbury complex, the state office complex in Waterbury, which was destroyed in Irene had no flooding this year in 2023. So this resiliency work is possible. We can do it. It takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of money. But we see the progress that we've made from 2011 to 2023. And we'll need to continue to do that as we think about how we design our towns and where we build new housing and the like. So just to get into the revenues, and again, we're open to questions here in just a minute, I'll go through these quickly. A lot of the benefit that we've been seeing the last few years, I didn't start with this because I think we're seeing sustainable growth in our population. So I think that's driving the revenues quite significantly. But the other thing that's driving our revenues and supporting our economy is a lot of the federal funds that we've been receiving from the federal government. And this is only capturing a percentage of them that's going to state government. There are also funds that we're going directly to people, to other organizations as well. And in total, Vermont got something like $12 billion of federal funds over that COVID-19 period, either directly into people's pockets or to the state of Vermont to support things like infrastructure. But you can see the significant numbers there, and there's still more money on the way, both from the Inflation Reduction Act and also from the Transportation Bill as well. So again, we showed the personal income tax numbers. This is now showing sort of the broader general fund. And you can see that our revenues, which are the green every year outpace our base appropriation, we want to see that we want to have a surplus. But you can see how much greater, you know, you can look at the yellow line, that's how much our appropriation number is, it's how much we're spending. So you could look at that number and say, wow, that's really grown a lot. But then look at the green number and you can see how much our revenues have grown. And then you can see how big those gaps were in 2021 and 2022 and 2023. Those were significant one time monies that came to the state of Vermont that we were able to invest in things like housing and climate resiliency. And then you look at our reserves, our reserves are higher than they've ever been. So from that standpoint, if there was an economic downturn, Vermont's well positioned to have money in its reserves that cover budget deficits. And then you look at the cash balance. So this is what's in our sort of state's bank account, if you will, this is managed through our office. We used to have, you know, maybe two, three, $400 million on average. Now on a three, three month rolling basis, it's about $2.5 billion. So this is money that we're earning interest on. This is money that we're investing in things like housing that we just mentioned with the Virgin's project. So again, we're in a really strong position from a cash basis as well. Then I just wanted to mention the debt side of it. So the pensions are a long term liability that we've been having to address. But we did have a pension reform bill two years ago. I was on the pension task force committee and we all the stakeholders agreed to a certain number of benefit reforms. We agreed the state would put in more money, one time money from some of those big surplus years we just saw. We said that employees would start to contribute more. And all of those things together have started to move the pension in the right direction. This is the state employees retirement system and this is the funding ratio. So how much money do we have right now relative to how much do we think we have to pay out? And you want that number to be higher, not lower. And it was going down for a whole decade. But in the last couple of years, since the pension reforms have been put into place, it went up from a 66% ratio up to just under a 70% ratio. We really want to see that up into the 80s, if possible. That's when I think we'd feel more comfortable about where we are. But the teacher system was in even worse shape. That got down to 51%. And again, the last couple of years since the pension reforms, it's starting to work its way out. It's now at 57% in terms of the funding ratio. And similarly, you want to see this up into the 80s, but you get really concerned when that funding ratio gets below 50%. So it's good that we're moving away from that. And then there were certain changes that we made to the health care, the OPEB, the other post-employment benefits within the pension systems. And you can see the liabilities, how much they shrink as a result of these pension reforms. So we were able to reduce about $1.2, $1.3, $1.4 billion in liabilities from the systems. So they're moving in the right direction. And then the last slide is just talking about all of the other debt that we have. So that's our pension debt. These are the debts that we take out for bonding to build bridges or welcome centers or state buildings. And over the last 10 years or so, the amount of money that we've been recommending that the state bonds for with this thing called the Capital Debt Affordability Advisory Committee, which the Treasurer is in charge of, has gone down every year. And that means our outstanding debt is starting to go down too. So we pay about $70 million in interest charges a year as a state. Treasurer Pierce, my predecessor, I think was very wise to implement something called a cash fund. So instead of paying for projects out of bonded money, you can pay for projects with your cash that you have on hand. So that's becoming a greater percentage of our capital bill as the actual cash rather than the lending and the debt. And that will put us in good shape over time as well. So I think you can see sort of why I feel like we're in really strong financial position from an economy standpoint and also from a state revenue and budget standpoint and why I feel so optimistic you know about the future of our state. But with that, I'll turn it over to Carol for any questions that folks might have. We have time for a few questions. Any for anyone on Zoom, Kat? No. Okay, well maybe they can get going. All right, we got, I knew it. Yes. Ever since we closed the state hospital, mental hospital in Waterbury back in the 60s and 70s, we have a big mental health problem with the people that used to be in the hospitals now like downtown Burlington. What can you give us on an update on how that problem is being addressed? Yeah, that's a great question. I wonder, maybe I could just ask for a show of hands because I'd be interested in the response. Like how many people here feel safe going to downtown Burlington or other way around? Who would not go to downtown Burlington? So whether the safety is the reality or the perception, from an economy standpoint, it doesn't matter. If people aren't going downtown, then that's an issue. So to your question, what is to be done about treating individuals experiencing mental health issues or substance use disorder issues? I mean, I think the most effective treatment and the most progressive approach at the moment is something called housing first, which is to try to get people stabilized into housing as they start to get treated for their underlying substance use disorder or mental health issues. The challenge that we run into is when you have a housing first policy without any housing, it doesn't work very well. And it's really hard for somebody to get on the right track if their life is so unstable that they don't even know where they're living in a given night or a given week. So that's again why I point back to housing as being our primary issue, not just again for our economy but for our social issues as well. So that's where, if we're going to make progress on that issue, that's what we need is more permanent, stable housing for individuals. I have a very specific economic question about the pension fund, which might affect many of us. So I heard that there was a bill introduced in the legislature that the fund would have to divest itself of any, what, petrochemical stocks. This issue came up about eight years ago. Sure. So the question was about this bill that some are referring to as a divestment bill, but basically it looks at the state's holdings in terms of its investments and it's trying to say you need to move away from fossil fuel company holdings. So it's been an issue that's been around for about a decade or so. And I will just say that a lot has changed like in terms of alternatives to fossil fuel investments in the last 10 years and a lot has changed as to our appreciation of the impact that climate change is having on us. 10 years ago, I felt at least that it was academic or theoretical. Now I feel like we're living in it like it's happening to us. So I think that has changed people's perspective a lot. So the bill, which is called S42 if people are interested in it, it was something that I worked a lot on with the stakeholders because from my perspective, we need to protect the pension first. We don't want to do any harm to the pension, particularly when we're starting to see improvements to the pension. But part of not doing harm to the pension is thinking about what is our risk or exposure to fossil fuel stocks. So I approached it from sort of a risk standpoint. And I didn't want to do anything that was dramatic or too quick that would impact the system. So the advocates that were pushing that bill really took that to heart and in my opinion, and provided much longer runways like 10 years, 20 years for moving away from fossil fuel stocks, they provided exemptions. So certain types of investments like private equity that we don't have any control over, either we invest in the private equity firm or we don't, they let us in or they don't, we can't tell them which stocks to invest in. That's exempted from this conversation, so that won't be impacted. There's also recognition that there might need to be a de minimis amount of holdings because things like index funds, we buy the index fund and they might have ExxonMobil in it and we can't tell the index fund to get rid of it and to replicate the index fund would be expensive or not as successful from an investment rate of return. So I think they have done a good job balancing the need to look at the risk long-term of the fossil fuel holdings and not doing anything too dramatic or too quickly. So I told them when they introduced it last session, once we worked with them and they changed it that I would support it. And that's sort of where I still stand now. If it was immediate divestment, I wouldn't support it because it's impractical to implement. But the way that they have agreed with us and changed the bill, I do agree with it. Thank you for such an interesting presentation. I wanted to have you talk a little bit about the cost of living in Vermont. Yeah. For example, renders are in buildings that are taxed as non homesteads. So they're at a higher, it's a higher property tax rate, which might affect high rents. Well, the rents would be, yeah. Yeah. And you know, there are a lot of issues in terms of building related to the requirements for energy conservation, which we all support. And but on the other hand, it adds tremendously to the cost of the building of the housing. And the shortage of workers has also increased the cost of building and living. So anyway, if you could just address the general area. Yeah. I mean, there are two areas that, you know, when we talk about affordability for Vermont, right? I think there are like two areas that you really, you know, you could focus on the taxes and all that. And I don't immediately go there. Although I do think, you know, this, you know, I do think we should look at two tax, two taxes in particular, the tax on military pensions and the tax on social security. You know, those are two that, to me, don't make a lot of sense why we have them in terms of the benefit that we get versus the downside of people moving away or not coming here. But I don't go to the taxes first for the cost of living piece. I go to sort of housing costs that you pointed out and then healthcare costs. Those are two really significant drivers in people's personal budgets. And they're things that have gone up dramatically over the last 10 years. So those are the two areas we need to continue to focus on slowing down the rate of growth and trying to, you know, bring down the cost overall. Housing side is probably easier than healthcare, right? Healthcare is a complicated issue. But on housing, you know, part of the reason we're seeing rents go up so much and the median housing price go up so much is just simple supply and demand that the supply for Vermont housing is really high right now, maybe higher than it's ever been. And our supply is not keeping up with that demand. So the prices continue to go up. As we put more and more housing into the market, you know, those rents and those median housing prices will stabilize and even hopefully come down that actually would be a good sign given our current state of our housing market. So, you know, so I think though, so I think for that way it goes back to, you know, needing to build and support more housing in the right places. It's an interesting point that you bring up about the property tax though, because we often think of non-prime areas, commercial or second home. And it would be nice to be a little bit more granular on that, because I think there are some areas where like for second homeowners, for example, you maybe want to have more burden on their property tax revenue, considering that, you know, they're taking a house off of the market for someone that would otherwise be living there potentially and doing work and living in Vermont. But we don't have that fine of a point that seems right now that we need to have. So, but anyway, I think to answer your fundamental question goes back to this housing. And unfortunately, I think for a lot of your questions, I might have that answer. Yeah. Anyone else? This has been awesome. You are the best. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.