 Welcome Elaine Haney, it's so nice to see you. I know you're very busy, you have so many hats as the head of the Essex Select Board and also working at the agency of commerce through the state of Vermont. How are you doing? We are pretty darn busy. We just completed our very first all staff, all agency Zoom meeting just now. So there was about 70 of us all together chipping in to say, you know, here's what I'm doing, and seeing each other's faces, it was really nice. But we have been flat out. Our agency has stood up the information website for the entire state of Vermont. I'll get you the website before we're done. And you can see all of the information that we had put together. It's the unemployment insurance information. It's the financial incentives and programs information. accd.vermont.gov, that's it. And you can see all of the executive orders that the governor put out, you can put, we developed criteria and guidance for almost every single business sector in Vermont. So if you, depending upon what your business is, some of them are considered essential, some of them are considered non-essential. And then there's these gray areas in between. So businesses are going to our website to find out exactly what it means for them in terms of how to conduct business while maintaining social distance. Sometimes they have to shut down. Sometimes they can maintain remote operations. And so in order to collect the information we needed to create that data, we stood up a form that businesses could fill out to say, you know, this is my business. This is what we do. This is my sector. What's the guidance that you have for us? And so, and here's our questions. And so in the first 24 hours of that form being live, we got something like 2,000 responses. And that was last Thursday. As of today, we've had just over 3,500 responses. They've slowed down a little bit, but we've been responding to every single one of them. So I've been on the phone with businesses. I've been emailing with businesses back and forth. And there's 15 other staffers throughout the agency who have been answering questions. The businesses, how do I stay open? How do I pay my employees? What happens if I can't get into my office? I need to get in to do the mail. I need to pay the bills. All these process questions that you don't think about because you just do them until you're prevented from doing them. And then suddenly everything comes to a screeching halt. So it's been very hectic trying to make sure everyone's questions are being answered. The state has the state emergency operations center. So as we develop new guidance, we would bump it up to them for their vetting and to make sure that it was accurate and it was following the governor's orders exactly. And so it's been a big team effort and some of these things have taken more time than we'd like, but most of them have gone pretty darn fast. And so it's been a whirlwind of responding to businesses. And I'm hoping that now that that basic information has gotten out there, we can now start turning our attention to helping businesses recover. And is that, what form does that take? Again, in-person or telephone and email counseling, basically, we have marshaled all the resources that we can, the Small Business Administration and the Vermont Small Business Development Corp Center, the Vermont Manufacturing Partnership, Vermont Businesses or Social Responsibility. All of these businesses are coming together to provide that information. Guidance on whether the Payroll Protection Act applies to you and what you can use for it, use it for. Guidance about whether, how to take care of your unemployment needs for, you know, a lot of employers are saying, well, I have to lay off my work, but I'm gonna get dinged for that. And so we have to explain, you know, you won't get dinged because if it's for COVID-19, and so some will, some won't. There's all these gray areas where we have to help people out. The Department of Labor is taking, you know, 99% of those questions because it's their program and they're a steward and implement the Unemployment Insurance Program, but businesses are also contacting ACCD for the same kind of information. So it's, we need to be able to share with them what steps they have to take in order to recoup any losses that they might be able to get back and what they can do once we're allowed to move out in the open again and re-establish business connections. So I think we've heard that there's a real backlog in the Department of Labor with the unemployment claims. Do you feel that in the Agency of Commerce, these questions for businesses, you're able to stay on top of the inquiries or the inquiries too much for you to be timely? What's the, what's the status? Department of Labor is operating at an order of magnitude higher than us. They have received in the last two weeks more claims than they have in an entire year. And so they are working incredibly hard to maintain a constant rate of response and to address all of the claims. I don't know how they're doing it, frankly. They're so working so hard. They have a very old computer system that they have to deal with, which from what I understand is the same problem in Labor departments across the country. They have old technology. So they're doing the very best they can. On our side, you know, like I said, we've gotten about 3,500 people filling out that form, not to mention the hundreds of phone calls and the hundreds of direct emails. But at this point, we're operating at almost 100% response rate. We have gotten back to every single business that has contacted us, at least to give them basic guidance that they can get started with. And then if they have more specific information, we are getting back to them when we can. Because as I said, we have to vet these responses up to the SEOC. When we come up with something that looks like it's unique, we vet it with the SEOC, and then we share it out with the public so that any community business that is asking that question will have the same answer. We're trying very hard for consistency. So on our end, we're doing super with the response rate. We aren't giving, you know, individual one-on-one hand-holding guidance at the moment. We're getting out as much as we can in a blanket form and then answering questions as we can get to them on an individual basis. So you're all working independently. How do you feel the agency is working as a team remotely? How do you characterize the leadership? I imagine, you know, this is a very new experience for your agency and state government as a whole. It's really new. And our leadership, I have to say, has stepped up and I'm so impressed with what they've been doing. They are working together as a team very tightly. They are easy to get a hold of because we're all sitting in front of our computers. So we use Microsoft Teams. And when I need my boss who's the deputy secretary, I just hit a chat with him and he's right there. Of course, we're texting, we're emailing, we're calling. They have been extraordinarily available to us. And I think because of the urgency of the work we're doing right now, answering those questions, we have very strong communications right now. I think when things step down a little bit, we might loosen up a little bit, but right now we're really very quickly in touch with each other. Working from home has been, you know, it's pleasant. I'm fortunate enough not to have little babies at home at the moment to deal with or young school-aged children. So my oldest, my son is very, he's on autopilot. He's in middle school and he's taking care of himself. And I'm just kind of watching. Lots of our staff members have children and babies in the house. And so that's been very hard for them. We try to keep in touch, chatting and just, you know, reimagining what it's like. You know, we have an open office with all these cubicles and you can just look over and say, hey, can you help me with this? That's gone. So we're trying to recreate that online. Everyone's doing okay. No one's had any major meltdowns, but I think our focus has been so strong on business response that we haven't thought about what's driving us crazy about working from home. Stepping back, is the agency looking at the long-term economic impact of the COVID pandemic? First week, we did a different form. We asked businesses to submit details about how they anticipate this will impact them economically. And we shut it down after a week. We had heard from companies that, only for those first few days, that about $100 million in economic impact to businesses just in the first couple of weeks of being shut down. This situation is unprecedented. We're not sure what the final tally will be when you think about lost sales, broken supply chains, broken distribution, and not being able to complete your work with the usual production flow. It's gonna be a massive hit, definitely. And so we're using the federal program and the state programs that we've been given to try to stem that. And still it's kind of an emergency mode. Some people compare it to when Tropical Storm Irene hit, which is true, except that this is not a two-day event that we start recovering from two days later. We are still in the onslaught stage. And we just don't have a good picture of what the end result's going to be yet. And I'm a little worried about seeing what it's gonna be. You know, in human services, the real, I guess this would be the word I would use, the real structural defects of our human services model is becoming very stark in this crisis. I wonder, are you seeing other places in government where you work where the structural problems are just self-evident? And maybe we have a prayer starting to look at them and fixing them. That's a great question. And, you know, when Tropical Storm Irene hit, I used to work for the state college system. And we saw that situation as an opportunity. And we retooled our entire IT system. Everyone learned how to telecommute in a week. And it was a real lesson. And so I see that happening now. ACCD, we immediately began telecommuting. We are doing all of our billing and payroll online now. Everything's happening online. And we didn't think we'd get there, but suddenly we had to. I alluded earlier to the Department of Labor, their computer systems are ancient, like 30 years old. And so I really hope that out of this situation, a new IT system arises from the ashes for labor. In terms of processes, I know that AHS, the structural issues that they have are caused by so many different things from different funding streams to territoriality and silos and different populations that they're serving and HIPAA and all sorts of stuff going on in there that prevents a true integration of service. And so I'm hopeful that they will come out of this with improvements, process improvements and changes to how they do business. But that's gonna take a lot of political will as well. And so when you wanna redo a transform a system, we heard Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders talking about transforming systems at the federal level. And a lot of people saying, there's no way you can do that. It takes a lot of political will. And sometimes when the entirety of the government is up against the ropes, good things can happen from that. I'm hopeful they will. Agency commerce is pretty fortunate. Our systems are pretty agile as they are as well as could be expected. But I think we're more fortunate than other agencies that our limitations aren't as strict. The one limitation we have is we don't have enough money to help people. We only have two business programs in the entire state, veggie and Vermont training program. Those are the two incentive programs we offer. We really wish we had more, but what we do offer, we do really well with. So we're fortunate in our system. And it sounds like there'll be federal dollars to help people more directly as well during this time that you'll administer or help to. Yeah, so I believe Vermont will receive $1.25 billion. A chunk of that will go towards community development block grants, which our department of housing and community development will administer. Within the housing department, there's also the community planning and revitalization department, which handles downtowns. And so we are working closely with them to make sure that we can get aid to downtown businesses. Last, yesterday or the day before the governor issued an executive order about large box stores and what they're able to sell. That was a result of our community planning department and our commerce department working together to say to the governor, our downtown businesses are not allowed to be open, but you can still go buy a TV at Walmart. So we worked with them to make that executive order happen because we're able to coordinate across those kinds of departments. I'm hopeful that they'll be, they'll be business aid through the Small Business Administration, the PayChat Protection Program is going to be handled through banking. So we won't be dealing with that, but we'll be referring people to it constantly. So our guidance to get people to those programs will be important. So just to recap, if folks have questions, I'll be running the web address. It's accd.vermont.gov. That's right. And the COVID-19 response resource center is accd.vermont.gov slash COVID-19. And there is a phone number which I'm going to try to find for you. Oh goodness. I can look it up. That's fine. Yeah, it's in the COVID-19 website. My apologies, it should have been more prepared. Oh no, it's fine. I can definitely get it up at the title. That's all right. I'm gonna just switch you just for a minute to Essex and Essex Junction. Sure. This seems like a remarkable opportunity for the village and town to unify its response to this crisis. Do you see that happening? It already is. Our public works department is working in the village and the town together. Our police department is working together. Our fire, our recreation departments work together. They last, yesterday, decided to shut down the parks because people were still congregating. And so for public health, we needed to keep people away from the play equipment. They are already working together. However, we have put merger on the back burner because it's just not important in comparison to what we're doing right now and keeping our residents safe. We will turn to it in maybe a couple months to pick it back up and see if it's time to continue with that. We really are more focused on making sure that our staff are able to work from home. And most of our buildings are shut down, including the libraries, but the librarians are still online doing story time and music time and the online systems for renting audio books. And that's still running. So they're doing that from home. The essential services like public works and fire, if we have a road wash out or something, that's still gonna get taken care of. But standing up all those systems, just like at the state level, it was a shock. And it took some time for us to get everybody remotely accessing their work. But it wasn't as heavy a lift as I expected and everyone's doing fine at this point. In fact, our IT department managed to stand up a new website for Essex. We've been working on it for many months. And so sxvt.org is the new website and they launched it the other day. So we'll have a big press release and something in the near future. But somehow they managed to get that done while they're working from home. So, and the fact that they got us all lined up to do a remote board meeting was really astonishing. Nobody was in anybody's offices. It was all done remotely. And now that we have guidance from the state about being allowed to conduct meetings entirely online and not have people at a direct site to allow the public in, I'm happier about that because the rest of our staff can stay safe as well. So I'm really impressed with how well the town stepped up and the village, they're working very closely together. And so it just demonstrates how well we already get along and how well we've depend upon each other. And just overall speaking, not only as an elected official, the head of the select board in Essex and as a state employee, how would you rate the governor's response and the leadership offered from the highest level in the state? I give governor Scott full credit. I think he and his team are doing an outstanding job in an incredibly difficult situation. There have been, there's so many different emergencies to address and there's so many contingencies to address. While we're all hearing everyone screaming about everybody needs to stay indoors and we're all gonna die and we need to do this. We need to do that. They have been very level headed. They've been very, everything has been pretty organized. There hasn't been any chaos at the top as far as I can tell from where I sit. I'm really pleased with the level of executive orders that he's been issuing and serving as an example for a lot of the rest of the country. Vermont appears to have some of the strictest guidelines regarding sheltering in place, not as strict as New York City, but definitely more strict than other states. And I think they have provided an appropriate level of response and they are taking it incredibly seriously. Commissioner Mark Levine has really impressed me with his calmness and his accuracy and his ability to explain what's going on in a way that we all understand. And I know that there's information coming from all sorts of sources nationally, from the media, from the CDC. They're doing their best with a fire hose of information and dealing with getting all of us in a place where we don't feel afraid, but managing to make sure we all remember that it's serious and follow the rules that they've set up. I've been very happy with what they're doing at the governor's level and with the legislature. That's great to hear. And I appreciate all the work that you're doing on the state and local front for the folks in our communities. It's incredibly inspiring. So thank you. Well, thank you, Lauren Glenn. And thank you to you and your staff for allowing us to conduct government business still in the public eye. Because I didn't even realize how you were gonna be able to get us all online and have people be able to watch us and participate and you have. And so kudos to all of you for doing that. Well, thanks. And also, I think, importantly, archiving these meetings. Yes, yes. What a history lesson this'll be. Exactly. Thank you, Elaine. You're very welcome. That was great. Thanks. Great.