 Okay, so we are now live on YouTube. This is the continuation of the morning appropriations committee meeting. We are ready to hear an overview of the energy, not the energy, the agency of digital services budget. And we have joining us, the house energy and technology committee. And I'd like to welcome Chair Brieglund and the members of that committee. I just wanted to make sure that all house members know that the budget that was presented by the governor, his new proposal is a full year budget. So it even in some areas makes changes to the quarter year budget that was passed. And it was built off the proposal that the governor presented to the legislature back in January. And so there's many modifications to it obviously because we're in a very different place than we were back in January, but it's built off that premise with many of the same priorities in place. And so with us today, we have Secretary Quinn, welcome. It's nice to see you. And Secretary Quinn's area is one of the areas that we're seeing throughout all of our budgets as ADS has made some reductions in the charges, the internal service charges that go out to all the departments. And we're seeing this not with just with ADS, but also with BGS and with I think human resources. And so that is going to be something our committee really needs to understand. Secretary Quinn, when you start this discussion the impact, how you were able to make those reductions across the board. And I think your target was still a 5% target where the other reductions asked of departments stayed in the 3% level. Is that correct him? And so I'm going to start talking, stop talking and I'm going to let Secretary Quinn do his presentation. And for members, if you have questions just where there's natural breaking points, members of both committees, please just raise your virtual hand and Chair Briglin and I will make sure questions get answered. So welcome and let's get started, please. John, it's up. Great, thank you for, oh. Are you there? Go ahead, the floor is yours. I think so, I think so. Okay, thank you for having us in today. It feels a little bit like Groundhog's Day presenting this budget for a second time. I'm sure all of you feel the same in some regard. It's been an interesting couple of months here under the new budget scenario. And I think overall the agency of digital services has presented itself with a budget that we can certainly live with but still make some investments in cybersecurity as well as modernization, which is really important to not only the long-term sustainability of providing services to our citizens but also the growth in our number of employees that we have and our budget. So we take all of those things into account when we build a budget, we're looking to make sure that we can hire the right skill sets going forward but also decide on platforms and decide on technologies that may take a little less than our current solutions to ensure that we don't have to grow our workforce in the future. Our budget does present a 5% down from where we started in FY21 when we presented last time. We can go ahead and move to slide two if we'd like. I don't have control here. So total budget amount, $81,226,444. And a couple of things that I always like to highlight that I think are important is the cost of avoidance so far. And we do this by year. So we did not update this number between the time that we put this presentation together in the fall or this number together in the fall and now the 4.82 million identified statewide savings and cost avoidance is actually much higher than that now. But in order to keep the baseline and really track year over year, we kept that number the same. So in the FY22 and we're back here in a couple of months that number will be significantly changed. And one thing I think me and the entire team are proud of is being able to reduce the CIT deficit which is our internal primary internal service fund by $1.19 million. And that's something that we inherited. We inherited a lot of that deficit from the former DII and before that it was CIT. And I think it's carried a deficit for a long, long time. So we'll continue to work on that this year. Could you give us a total of that deficit if you're going to reduce it by 1.19? What is the total deficit? Kate, do you have that number? So the original deficit when we inherited it was 8.6 million in the last fiscal year, we were able to reduce it by 1.19 million. I'm sorry, 1.19 million. And the hope is that we will be able to continue in FY21 to reduce it by at least that equivalent amount or more. Thank you. Peter, did you have a question on the deficit? I saw a hand raised. Peter, did you have a question? You did ask my question. Oh, and commissioner, what is CIT? Please explain, acronym. CIT was a division of buildings and general services. It was what I would call almost the original centralised IT group or IT group that took care of the agency of administration as well as small departments such as the governor's office, the governor's commission on women, some of those, you know, ancillary small areas where they didn't have IT services. I think it stood for computers and information technology. At the time. And I joined that group, I think back in 2000 and that morphed into the Department of Information and Innovation, I believe in 2004, 2005. And then you all created the agency of digital services in 2017. Is that considered an internal service fund deficit? And if so, where is that reflected in the caffer? I had not seen it in my reading going through the caffer. It's such a riveting document. But. It is included in the caffer. I could send you- Just tell me what page, please, or where approximately. Sure. That would be great. Sure. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Secretary- So as you can see the agency- I need to interrupt. Sorry, we have another question from our representative Campbell. We'll do a question until the questions are done per page. I see you have four pages and Scott? Sure. Just quickly, just so I understand, I'm kind of new to this. So when you say it's, this is an internal services fund deficit, that's sort of an ongoing thing. What might be considered an ongoing debt? Is that correct? And what we're doing is reducing that debt by 1.19 million dollars? Yes, sir. Okay. I just wanted to understand that. Thank you. And then I just do need some clarification before we leave this page. You mentioned that the identified statewide savings were originally in January, a target of $4.8 million. It's going to be significantly higher than that is we're seeing this 5% change throughout all the budgets. Why would you not identify that full number here and wait until 22, or maybe I didn't follow what you were saying. Right, so we build a, or we have a spreadsheet of all of our savings and cost avoidances throughout the year. And each time it's kind of like our baseline or our KPI on how we're doing overall. So I didn't wanna confuse people by adding a number partway through the year and having our KPIs be off. I thought we could still show that number here. A lot of the new costs are cost avoidance. You'll hear us, or you'll hear others talk about Salesforce in which we saved through the contract negotiation and senior management getting deeply involved. I believe it was close to $2 million over the cost of the licensing, which is a significant amount for one piece of software. And we wouldn't have been able to do that if we weren't a centralized agency where we were able to really look across the enterprise and say, okay, projecting out across these projects buying the licenses in bulk was able to save us a lot of money for time. So that's really a cost avoidance, but. And you tell us what the statewide savings or cost avoidance number is for what you are projecting for fiscal year 21 is we're seeing all of these reductions in ADS in our other budgets. There's all, usually we see an increase in the ADS. So what should that four point, what is that 4.8 going to look like with all of these mechanisms you're putting into place? I expect it to be at least, yeah, I expect right now, the running tally is an additional 3 million at the moment. Okay, so it should be three, it's just around $8 million total. Yeah. Okay, thank you, thank you. Yep, and those things may show up in some departments budgets and not in others because they are, sometimes it's for a specific piece of software that just one agency uses or just one department uses. But because of the centralized buying and the way we're doing things and the negotiating, we've been able to lower some of those prices. Thank you. And we have one question. Actually, we have a couple of questions. We have one from representative Chestnut Tangerman and then Hooper. Thank you. John, of this 8 million or close to 8 million in total cost avoidance, is that primarily from renegotiating software costs or does that include changes or reductions in services? It's anything where we have a reduction that was really driven by ADS. So in some cases, it could be file storage where we currently post things here on site in Montpelier or in Burlington. And we've moved those things to the cloud where we're already paying for that storage. So it's been a reduction to people's budget. We would count that as a savings to the state. We've been pressuring the executive branch agencies to move more and more to these cloud-based services that we're already paying for to reduce their own costs. Because I think as representative Toal said, we're usually seeing increases and a lot of those increases are consumption-based. So we're trying to assist them in driving down their cost by getting rid of some of the duplicative costs that we see across the environment. And in the CARES money that was approved, there was money for additional security for people working from home with the increased exposure there. I believe I saw something about some amount of money going to the unemployment insurance program. And I'm wondering if those are reflected in here or is the unemployment insurance, any of those funds, did they go to department? Are they reflected in department of labor budget or in ADS budget? You're talking specifically about the CRF funds? Yes, as well as any other money that may be allocated for updates or additional security. So ADS has received Corona Relief funds. The exact amount Kate can give you, but I believe that the first time it was 5.5 million and that covered hardware, people cost, and some software costs. And then we received $1.7 million more for a buildout of grants management, which we've been running the external CRF grants through, such as healthcare stabilization, the commerce grants, the agriculture grants, the working lands grant was stood up today. So people can apply for that. So all of those types of things were paid for with CRF funds. And so those are not in the proposed budgets. Those were given to us already. Okay, thank you. Kate, am I correct in that last statement? I just want to make sure that... Yeah, yes. Those were appropriated to us, what we consider as part of last fiscal year or one-off appropriation. So we didn't include it in the FY21 budget request. The only piece that I would correct is that the original CRF pot of money that was appropriated was actually $7 million to ADS and not the $5 million, just in case there are any questions from folks who want to be here. Thank you. Thank you, Kate. We have a question from Representative Hooper. Thank you. I'm just trying to understand the cost savings or avoid cost avoidance. The different agencies were allowed to reduce their internal service fund charge from you all. Can you tell us what percent reduction they were able to do? Or is that a question for finance and management? I'll defer to Kate. She might have a little bit more information on that. So what I can tell you is that out of the ADS allocation, it was a 5% reduction to all departments across state government. So you should be seeing that in their budgets. But that's only a piece of what departments pay to ADS for services. So there's the allocation piece, which is there's a definite reduction. Then there's the demand side, which is broken into unique needs of those departments. And some you may see go down in their request and some may have been an up or some may have been level. It's really based on the business need there. Yeah, I understand that. So the fact that you all were able to reduce your costs by 5% translates out directly into what the individual department savings are. Thank you, that's real clear. And so I just want to add to Mary. So the 5% equivalent is $7.82 million. If I'm doing, is that the correct math? If you had to find 5% in our... Sorry, we were told to find 5% in the ADS allocation and then an additional 3% in the general fund appropriation. That was our task. And because of so much of our budget is what I call pass through, it's demand services. So if an agency is asking for a piece of software or they use a piece of software, it's really hard for me to reduce that line item if it's in their budget. Because what would happen was if I reduced my overall budget by that, I would bump up against people saying, well, I want to do a computer replacement. And I would have to say, no, that was sorry, we've hit our cap. So it becomes very challenging on the demand side of things to reduce the overall amount. So we control the allocation piece and that's really what we focused on driving down those costs by 5%. Okay, this is a representative Feltas's budget and her hand is up and I'm confused and I think we'll clarify this with your question, Marty. Why don't you ask and hopefully I'll get clarified. I think we need to ask Kate to explain but I think what our committee is confused about is this word allocation. It's not the allocation from the state general fund as an example. It's the calculation that ADS makes to charge each particular department based upon and Kate can give me the details but basically based upon their headcount and their number of applications and their number of pieces of equipment and things like that. As opposed to what a department might use for something special, the demand charges that John just referred to. But just like BGS has a price per square foot that they charge folks, then ADS has a standardized cost that they charge to each department varying by the size of the department. And that's what I believe they were asked to or they were told to just reduce that cost by 5% everywhere. And Kate, you could explain better exactly what allocation means from your perspective. Yes, that's correct. So when we refer to ADS allocation, that covers for the basic, basically the runnings of the internal runnings of the IT department. So there are certain elements that have to exist in order to be successful for the enterprise. Things like e-signature software, cybersecurity. Networking. I'm sorry, John. Networking. Networking. You know, like our desktop staff, those are all, those costs are taken together and then distributed across headcount for each agency. So when we went through the budget exercise, we were asked to look at those costs. And I think in a further slide, we shows us a little bit more detail on where we are in the allocation, but was to look at those costs and reduce that by 5%. Cause that's really where we had, if we have any control in our budget, that's where we have the most control. Marty, do you have a follow-up? Well, again, I think at one point, we're gonna ask what kinds of changes they made in that pool of centralized services that they needed, how they could reduce that by 5%. What did they do in order to make that reduction? And you will follow up on that, Marty, so that it's crystal clear to our committee. And... Yes, and I suspect Kate has some information today. It's included actually in the next slide. Okay. So if John's ready to jump there. Thank you. Representative Hooper did have her hand up, Mary, question before we go to the next slide. And maybe it will become clear in a moment. I understood the allocation and the cost reduction until you said, and we had to find 3% reduction in the GF. So the 3% is not inside the 5%. It was a separate reduction that you were required to make. Yes, Mary. Okay. That's what... Thank you. So the allocation charge. Our general. Go ahead, John. Go ahead. I was just going to point out that our general fund bucket is extremely small. We get $174,000 of general fund money. And that's really for our, what used to be called a VCGI group, the Vermont Center of Geographic Information that does a lot of the statewide mapping for agencies, department, municipalities, and so on. Thank you. So the 3% reduction is off the GF of 174. That that was your 3% target. And the 5% reduction is a combination of the allocation and demand charges. Just allocation charges. Just allocation charges. Okay, thank you. I think we should move to the next slide and it may become more clear to all of us if we don't ask our questions, if I don't ask questions before the information is presented. Right. So I'll point to the bottom left box for how we reduced our ADS allocation. We canceled a subscription to Gardner Services which provides us a lot of guidance and insight into what others are doing and best practices around how to do them. They're a strictly consulting company that doesn't sell anything besides their membership, but we've used them for a number of years since probably the beginning of Vermont Health Connect coincidentally as to, you know, someone to provide us guidance on where to go next. We're canceling that subscription. We found that over time, we've used them less and less in the state space, state government space. They don't have a lot of insight into what other states are doing and we found our membership in the National Associations of Technology Leaders and CIOs to be much more useful in that space. And so we were able to reduce this line item and that was $200,000. We removed the governor's case management system out of our budget, which we had agreed with the governor's office last year that they would take over those costs. So those costs came out of our budget as well and then we defunded two exempt positions. We were able to do that. One of them we did through consolidation of agency IT leads, people that are responsible for running IT for that specific agency. And then the other one was a executive director position that has been vacant since the middle of 2017. And those are what make up the 5% reduction. I thought the 5% reduction was 7.82 million. No. No, that would have been on the entire budget. 631,000 is 5% of the allocation. Thank you, Peter. So the 7.82 is how much of a reduction off the entire budget? I don't have my calculator in front of me, but if the overall budget's 81, I would say it's got to be 8%. That representative Fagan tells us pretty quickly. I'm really confused with what you were asked to do by the administration reductions and where... So some of these reductions, you had additional reductions beyond the 3% and beyond the 5%. You had additional reductions in cost savings or cost avoidance. Is that correct? I have written in my notes 7.2. Yeah, in our... ...avoidance or savings. So, Kitty, to restate, I think, what you've done is you've added the $3 million that he reflected in cost avoidance for this year to the 4.82 million already accrued over the years of cost avoidance efforts that they have done to come up with 7.82. Am I correct? I'm looking for John to confirm or... I think so. I mean, Kate, is that... Yes, that's what Kitty has done. And those numbers are not necessarily reflected in the ADS budget. Those are cost avoidance or savings efforts that are more in a statewide perspective. So it wouldn't be accurate to tie that to an ADS budget savings per se, if I'm making sense. That's what I was doing. Thank you, Kate. Yes. Marty. Well, I just wanted to clarify. Yes, the number that they talk about for identified as state savings and cost avoidance is over time based upon work that's been done by ADS. It's not a specific calendar year or fiscal year savings of specific amounts. It's how they've saved us money over time by doing better purchasing as an example or moving file storage to the cloud as opposed to being in servers, that sort of thing. Just for clarity, folks, if I'm deferred, Kate, on some of these with a confused look in my face, some of it's my internet connection here. I care about every third word of what Representative Tull was saying. So I just, I want to make sure that we answer you correctly. I don't want to give you bad information based on my internet connection. John, that's not good for Vermont when the secretary of ADS has had a bad internet connection. If I could use my powers to get faster internet, I would. We have a question from Representative Campbell. Thank you, Katie. I'm just trying to understand what we're looking at here. So this 80-some-billion-dollar budget is the cost of IT throughout state government, but most of that is reflected in individual department and agency's budgets or please clarify this for me. Yes, there's a few different buckets here and Kate can talk about all I think five buckets or six buckets, but the two primary buckets that I always think of this as is allocation, which is spread across the head count of the employees, which we've talked a little bit about this morning, and then the demand side of the budget, which are things that specifically benefit that department and maybe not everyone, right? So computer refreshes when an agency decides to refresh a third of its computers or a quarter of its computers, those are demand charges. Those are pass-through charges back to the agency. We reflect them in our budget to give the legislature, the administration and the public more transparency about what we spend on IT holistically across the board. Right, and the allocation charges are those also reflected in agency and department budgets? They would be. Yeah, okay. So actually ADS's budget is only whatever you get out of the general fund, 174,000 costs for that state government. That's what this $80 million is representing. Is that correct? These costs are all in other people's budgets. All other people's budgets, okay. I just want to be sure I get that. Thank you. Thank you, Scott. Okay, there's a couple more questions. Let me see. Representative Feltas and Fagan. Well, I just wanted to clarify for Scott that the 81 million is parceled out to all the various departments. The total that each department pays in essence comes up to the 81 million. So it's duplicated. I mean, it's not really duplicated in terms of being spending, it's just gathered together in one place here for us to see how much we spend on IT across the whole state. And then you will see in each department an amount and another department and another amount and another department, another amount. When you add those all up, it comes to the 81 million that you see in one single place here. So Marty, while you're on a roll there with allocations that receive the 5% reduction, the total of all those savings throughout all the parts that we're going to see should be 631,000. Yes, if we look at AHS and we'll see that they spent so much on allocation last year and now this year it's going to be less than that. And if we add up all of those, it should come to 631,000. Thank you. I can breathe. Peter, Peter, did you have a question? Yeah, Marty explained it well and I was just going to comment ADS is conglomerator. All the efforts for IT funnel through them at some point in time. So all the bills come into them. They then figure out who the bill belongs to and that's the demand side. The bills go via, if it's a specific bill for a specific department because of demand, it goes directly to that department. If it is not specific to a department, it goes into the allocation and then is meted out through our FTE count statewide. So it's a conglomerator. When Marty said it is duplicative and a manner of speaking, that was a very good comment and confusing to be sure. You have to understand we're only spending the dollar once but it's reflected twice. Thank you, Peter. Committee members, it's similar to how we see BGS. BGS spends money on all of our state buildings and they have a huge total of how much they spend. But when you look at each department, they pay so much fee for service for the square footage that they use and that goes back into BGS. So again, we can tell how much each department uses and we can maybe make evaluations. Is that correct or is that not? But the total will show up within the BGS budget. Right, where it becomes even more fun. So this is the same way. Yeah, where it becomes even more fun and more duplicative and more confusing is when you look above at the investments in FY21, we're paying fee for space to BGS that goes into their allocation. It's coming out of our allocation, which is then going back to the agencies. Yeah, trains passing in the night. We have a question from Representative Hooper. I have a question on a different topic. So, okay, good. Thank you. And this has to do with the services that ADS provides other agencies and your ability, one, I'd like to understand the relationship between you and your clients within state government and your ability to understand their decision-making. And to use a specific example about an issue that I am concerned about, the Department of Labor, as we all know, has been under huge pressures with their ancient IT system. They had had a strategy for replacing it, which has been abandoned. They, it is my understanding, they do not have a plan today for how to replace it. Yet through the CRF funds, they are making decisions, they're purchasing stuff to deal with their existing issues that may be influencing future decision-making. How do you, how does ADS provide service to them to assure that we're making the right decisions going forward? And can you, the core question is, can you insist that they have a plan, a well-documented, laid-out, not high-level, but a very specific plan before they begin, you know, go down a road? Yes. Yes, we can. You guys have given me that authority in statute to oversee all of IT and approve IT purchases. So, absolutely. What I would say is that throughout this pandemic, ADS has been right in the middle of making sure that we get payments out as quickly as possible. And I have not downplaying any of the issues down there. But what I would say is, you know, ADS can only fix the things that there's money to fix, right? So I hate it as much as anyone that we have a 40-year-old system down there, but the funds that have never been invested, I'm not blaming anyone, but they've never been properly invested to replace those things. When the Department of Labor and ADS came to, I believe it was the JFC, it asked for $4.5 million to make investments this summer, they were, that was a well-organized plan to replace certain pieces of that overall system that were gonna be long-term and sustainable. And by saying those things, I mean, they were things that were low-code that were easy to maintain. The infrastructure all belonged with the vendor, which means it was always up to date. We never had to go through this capitalized expense of $5 million for a new server every year or every three years. We were gonna be responsible for just making programmatic changes. Those are long-term things that ADS was right in the middle of to make sure that whatever the Department of Labor needed from a programmatic standpoint, we were building a IT system that was gonna be sustainable long-term. It did not replace the entire mainframe because it gets way more techy and complicated for the core components, but all the things that we asked for were things that were gonna be needed in the new system. And it made up, I don't remember the exact number, we'll say 50% of the overall system. We would have been able to do it in less than a year. So ADS, because of all of you creating ADS, I feel like we're much more organized and have a much better view of long-term goals and needs and sustainability than we would have by letting four or five common IT people decide what the long-term technology strategy is. That makes sense. Mary, do you have a follow-up for... Yes, please. I absolutely understand the statewide strategy of having a centralized ADS service. And that makes sense. What I'm trying to get at is the decision-making, essentially on the local level. And when I was asking the Department of Labor about their specific spending proposals for the CRS money through the Joint Fiscal Committee process, I was getting very patchy sorts of answers, which alarmed me in that it did not appear that there was a plan for this. And I think in our further investigations and conversations between JFO staff and your all's people, I was of the impression that there was not a clear plan. And so therein is my concern. And I wanted to raise this with the Energy and Technology Committee because this belongs in their lap. I will ask the Department of Labor when they visit with us, but having a clear, coherent plan that we understand, I think, is essential. And I don't believe that it has been well-articulated to us yet. Thanks. So let me try to address that the best I can, but I'll start by saying you're right about the plan to some extent. And so to back up in January and February, I don't remember exactly when we decided to leave the consortium because we were spending money and we were not getting a product. And we had been working on it for a long, long time. And while it was all federal money, we knew that we were never going to get a product in the end. Right about the time that COVID pandemic came to Vermont, came to the United States, we were entering the final stages of separating from Idaho and North Dakota. As far as the plan to move forward, we were discussing options with North Dakota who had the same mindset and same vision as we did, but hadn't made a determination on what we were going to do long-term. There are certain portions of the UI system that are Vermont specific and things that we need no matter what we do with that system going forward. We've chosen to focus on the things that we need no matter what, and those are the things that we've tried to identify and put in the plan. In the Department of Labor's last ask, specifically around technology, there was $750,000 there for two things. One of them was a product called MuleSoft, and what that did in the simplest terms is it connected our PUA sales force system to our mainframe so we could share data easily between those two to help turn around checks and get information back to for Monter Spaster. The second piece of that was for document management to help the agency in their long-term goal of getting out of their very, very old process of filing cabinets and poor storage document management. And so both of those things are needed either way right now and that's why they were asked for. They serve current need, but are both long-term, long-term need as well. And that's why we suggested those two to the committee. Mr. Secretary, I'm trying to find an email that I will share with you the period, rather than me trying to typify it and I'm looking right now, so I may come back to this, but I think there's a bit more to the story. So let me get back to you on that. Thank you. Yeah, the other thing I'll quickly say, I know we're short on time is that asking Commissioner Harrington, and no disrespect to Commissioner Harrington about IT is a lot like asking me about PUA benefits and what they are. While I know overall, and he knows overall, to get into depth, we wanna make sure that those are going to the right area when possible, so you get the exact answer that you're looking for. Absolutely, and so while we're on this topic and it actually comes now back to the slide that you have up that we're looking at, which is with regard to your reduction. To my, do you, I am concerned about other agencies being adequately resourced to be able to manage these services. So again, using DOL as an example, it appears to me that the point of contact for information technology is the program manager rather than an IT person over at DOL. So do they have, do the agencies, do the different departments have sufficient staffing to be able to manage their decision-making around IT sufficiently? In a lot of cases, no. And I think that was some of the benefit of us doing, this consolidation is because we took some of that, we really took some of that decision-making away from them because we didn't want programmatic people deciding on which piece of software we bought. And I'll just give you a quick example. We have 1400 pieces of software for us, 9,000 users. I mean, that is a ton of software and we've been reducing that number, but the only way we can meet those adequate staffing needs, and I know you're talking about the programmatic side, but it blends over to the IT side as well, is to reduce the number of pieces of software and choose common platforms like a sales force, like a workday, like a Microsoft, where we need less people to manage them because we can focus our skill sets in one area without having so many people that, you know, manage each one of the things and having specific skill sets and not having backup. So I think we all need a little help still, but I'd say that we're making progress. Mary, can we move on or do you want to follow us? Yeah, I will let go of this bone. I'm still looking for my email. Okay, we'll let you follow up with the secretary afterward or through Marty. I think, are you finished with this slide and should we move to the- I am, yep. Okay, thank you. No, I thought I heard enough. I think I want to talk about the investments, maybe. Oh. Thank you, Marty. Sure. So yeah, we named it investments, but I really wanted to highlight that we were adding an additional million dollars in cybersecurity investments. That was in the original 21 budget and we left those in there, even with the reduction, those additional benefits or those additional investments are still there. We saw it as a priority for state government to have additional cybersecurity benefits. And I think this would probably be a good time to share a little story with you about August. We had a cybersecurity intrusion into our network on August 6th. And because of the investments, and this is absolutely no BS, without the investments that you all have made in cybersecurity, we would not have found the person that intruded our network two years ago or three years ago before these things were done. There's no way I'm 100% certain they would have been in our network. They either would have, they would have been a ransomware attack or they would have stolen tons of data and on that account, we probably would have never known. So these security investments have paid off. We're wrapping up the investigation now. We have found that they were not able to steal any data. They did make access through a misconfigured machine in a small department and made their way across multiple domains. And within 20 minutes, we had been detected. It had been detected by one of the softwares that we've bought recently. And we had people on the ground, Norwich University, us and two vendors have been working on this nonstop and were able to stop it almost in its tracks, which is extremely impressive. We've received a lot of praise from the vendor as well as the outside consultant that's been helping us as far as how impressed they were with the security team and the tools that we have for being able to stop the intrusion. It was pretty scary for a couple of days, but I wanted to highlight that we certainly appreciate the additional security investments that you have all have made through ADS. And then the other areas. That's $1 million of general fund. These are not CRF dollars. These are general fund dollars. Are these in our allocation, I believe? Yes. Yes. So it's spread across the head count of state government. It's not necessarily all general fund dollars. Thank you. And this year, we had to further our building of ADS. We added lease space that ADS occupies to our allocation as well, which was $407,000. We increased the parcel mapping funding where we changed the funding mechanism and that was $257,000. And then as you can see an increase in demand has gone up 7.78 to the best of our knowledge on what we've been able to plan out and see across state government. Okay, before we- And then on the last slide. Are there questions on the assessments before we move to the last slide? Mary, is your hand up new? No, I forgot to read my word. Peter? John, can you give us one or two examples of those demand items that increase the demand cost, please? So it could be additional spending for integrated eligibility or additions to contract services for a specific piece of software. It could be new software for an agency that they have budgeted. Maybe it's a new lottery system where we would, that's not a good example, but it's those types of things where they have specific pieces of software that they need and we've been able to project out and that they've budgeted for and gotten approved. Thank you. Yep. Let's move to the fourth slide, please. I'm in due to time. And this is really just to show you the ADS allocation year over year and where we are as far as ups and downs and I think it's always good to show the history of where the allocation has sat and that we're not on a steep incline. Overall, we did have a low year in FY19 and that's because we had a bunch of limited service positions in the allocation that we gave back and that dropped that allocation cost. Besides that, it stayed pretty flat. I mean, when you look across the years. Thank you, John. Teresa, let's go back to the screen with both committees and with Kate and John. Thank you. So are there any final questions regarding the ADS budget that committee members from either committee have that they'd like to ask at this time? Okay. I don't see any. Sorry. Mary, and John, just the two positions, have we covered the elimination of the two positions enough for both committees to feel they can weigh in on? That's, I wanna make sure that there's no questions later about, was it two positions or one, John? We eliminated the funding for two positions. Two exempt positions. And were they vacant or? They were. One we had consolidated when someone left and the other has been vacant since 17. Okay. And it's not, will it impact any of your services or to departments or to your agency or you feel that you can eliminate these and continue your operations? These would be the least impactful. Things that we could, you know, I mean, overall, I think we can do just fine without these two positions. Okay. We have three questions. We have Dave, we have Mary, and we have Robin. Dave? Thank you. My question's for Kate. When you do your allocation back to the departments, is it a flat per employee cost or is it very throughout state government? So it's a cost per employee. So it is flat. And we work with finance and management to identify, I'm sorry. No, no, go ahead and interrupt you. Okay. We work with finance and management to identify each agency and departments headcount. And from there, we then calculate out what the cost is for each agency based on the headcount. So everyone, you've got 10 employees here, you're paying, say, $5 per employee. If you've got 15 employees over here, you're also paying that $5 per employee. Of course, that's not what it is, but... Where I'm headed on, I'm trying to see if there is a way to maximize the federal cost allocation contribution. So for instance, department of corrections, I'm making an assumption and I shouldn't, but I'm gonna make an assumption they do not have a lot of different software programs in terms of prisoners, et cetera, staff working in prisons, et cetera. Whereas office of child support may, through Title IV, we may have far more different tools that they use. Could you change your allocation from a flat per employee rate to a software rate and thereby increase the amount of dollars we draw down federally? Have you looked at that? Is that something or is the juice not worth the squeeze, so to speak? So we've talked with finance and management about different ways to attribute these costs. Looking at really the total amount and the items that fall into the allocation, it really doesn't drive off of software support, it drives off of user support. And although corrections might not have as many applications that DCF might have, they do have other needs that make up that difference. So like password resets, there's far more correction officers that'll have to call in for password resets than in another department. Or in corrections is not a good example necessarily, there could be one agency that has a high need of e-signature software, where another agency does not have as high a need. So it really does work its way out. And we've, even though we've looked at it many times with finance to try and figure out how we can best capitalize on the federal dollar, we always come back to headcount. And when I look around, Thank you Kate. Yeah. Yeah. When I talk to other states, other states are kind of in the same position we are. We're always looking to figure out a way to pay for IT in a new and modern way. And we sit in the same situation that all the other states sit in and they seem to follow this same kind of allocation method for the most part. And where we can, we try to drive costs, specific costs back to departments. So, a good example of that is the Microsoft product. We know how many correction employees use the different elements of Microsoft. So we can actually, it's better not to have that included in the allocation, the ADS allocation total, but to put that into the demand side so that we can make sure that we are only billing them for what they use in that case. So we, we're constantly looking at that. Like, if an item sits in the allocation, it might not always sit in the allocation. Years down the road, it might be, we might have moved to a model where we can drill back to the user. And so we can put it into a demand model. We can capitalize on those federal dollars that are out there if it's in the demand model. Thank you Kate. Thank you. Got it. We have two questions left and we're just over time. Mary, we'll hear from you and Robin you'll finish up the questions at the end. Mary? Yeah, I won't go into it. I found the email that I was looking for and I will just forward it to the secretary with so that he can see why I was concerned about kind of project management and our capacity at the different agencies and departments to manage what we're trying to do here. Thank you. Thank you, Mary. And Robin, the last question please. Thank you. I'm just, I'm trying to understand the impact of the, John mentioned an exempt position that has been vacant since 2017. And it seemed to me that if it has been vacant since 2017, the money's not been allocated for that person but still budgeted and has thus probably been used elsewhere so that that eliminating funding for that position does actually turn into a cut to whatever services that money has been spent on since 2017, am I correct there? Well, I look at it as, all going towards our bottom line and driving down that deficit number in the end, right? So if all the money, if we add up our revenues and expenses at the end of the day, there's a plus or a minus and this time it was being able to give 1.19 million dollars back to make up some of that deficit. Some of that, I'm sure came from not spending the money on that position. For awareness, the position was my old position before I took this one. It was the chief innovation officer position. And so, we had left it, not knowing what we would need moving forward and I'm at a point now where I feel comfortable we can do without. But just trying to understand the flow here. If that position was budgeted at say $100,000, but was empty that $100,000 would be allocated within ADS for other uses. I'm assuming is that correct? It would be left in the position bucket and show up as a, what's that? I see Peter shaking it. It would be left in the position bucket. It would be left in the position bucket and would show up as a positive on the backside, right? So it would show up as a positive of money that we didn't spend. And that money that we don't spend goes towards that deficit, yep. Thank you. Okay, so at this point, this is when we were going to have committee discussion with the two committees, John. And I see no more questions for you or for Kate. So I'd like to thank both of you for coming in and presenting your budget. And Marty will follow up on our committee side with any additional questions or information that is needed. And you both are willing or welcome to stay and listen as we continue this discussion. It's just that we're in a very different budgeting mode and timeline. And so for the two committees and Tim for you, because we're moving at such a quick pace. First, I want to tell you, when you give us a committee memo, it can be very informal. I don't have to have a siting statute and siting specific areas within the budget. We'll be able to figure that out. It can be a simple email. I just can't rely. I don't want to rely on my notes for the position of your committee. And so what I'm in typically from appropriations, you would receive a letter that would say, here are XYZ and one, two, three of the areas that impact your policy committee's jurisdiction. We don't have time to do those. And so instead we're doing this joint effort and in hopes of expediting the budget into, I'm not sure the date that we have to have it out, but it's going to be early September. And since the legislature's not fully coming back until the 25th, the timeline is substantially cramped. And so what I'm seeing that you will weigh in on is putting money toward the deficit, which is a call that our committee will make. But if you see issues there where you think it should be invested elsewhere, the 5% reduction in the allocation bucket, the 3% reduction to the general fund, if you see it has policy implications, the two position elimination of two positions that the secretary walk through and any other policy concerns. Usually you send back one letter that talks about all the areas that we have in common as you finish one budget. If you could send us that memo right away and if there's broadband issues, don't wait to put broadband into this memo. That way we can close out budgets more quickly and do this work in about two and a half weeks. If we wait for all the memos to come in at the end, it will take more time for us to get through them. Does that make sense? It does, do you, kitty, do you have, I think we work better under deadlines if there's just in terms of situating our calendar over the next two or three weeks. If you could give us a day, certainly ADS is a high priority from a budget standpoint. I'm not sure if there's other areas you want us to weigh in on as well, the department of public service or PUC or other things that are in our jurisdiction. And I'm not sure if you have them scheduled to come in and testify or what the timeliness is of that work. Well, as we're learning, as we're uncovering all the pieces within the governor's budget, we will have in anybody, any changes that we need to hear from, we will have that group in to testify. And if we do, and it's related to your committee, Theresa will make sure to invite your committee in. And we hope that we make the scheduling work. Next week, we are having two public hearings. And I'm not sure if in your areas of jurisdiction, if there's advocates or Vermonters who will be weighing in on certain pieces, but the public hearings are Thursday, the 27th at five o'clock and Friday at one o'clock. And Theresa will be sending out those links and the notices have already gone out, but she'll send out the links to all members so that they can tune into those public hearings if there's concerns that you would like to hear. And then the following week, because we can't make any decisions until we really hear from the public, the following week we'll start closing out budgets that the easier ones to close out. And so if we could get something from your committee early in that first week in September, that would be helpful. Okay, so what I'm anticipating is that we will probably invite Secretary Quinn in to dig a little more granularly into some of these things. I don't know if we'll take more time, but we've got a handful of our committee members here who have gotten the first brush at this and certainly invite Marty to that. And I don't know if it'll change our recommendation to you, but it'll certainly be that much more informed, I think, just spending a little more time. I also know that the Joint Information Technology Oversight Committee is meeting on Friday and they are taking testimony from ADS related to some of the things at the Department of Labor, as well as from Commissioner Tierney with regard to some of the CRF spending. This is another topic, I think, but I'm anticipating in the month of September taking testimony in our committee from some of the CRF areas that our committee dealt with back in June. And just from an oversight perspective to confirm how that money's been spent, the pace, et cetera. And I don't know if there's an opportunity for our committees to interface on that. Again, certainly would invite Marty to join us for that. There's going to be, there's two pieces. And I think I mentioned this earlier and I can't remember. We've now had several groups in that the governor's presentation, the administration's presentation or proposal includes CRF spending and the budget in one package. And we may separate that out and move things separately. There may be pieces of CRF that go prior to the budget, some within the budget and some after the budget that we need some clarification from the speaker's office with timing of different bills and perhaps if CRF will be split into different packages. The budget pieces here outside of CRF if we could get by the 1st or 2nd of September only because we've got to get this to the Senate and the Senate has to do their work and then we have to get it to the governor and it has to be signed by September 30th or we don't have a budget for the second quarter. And so I'm shooting for the 1st or 2nd for budget pieces and then CRF pieces we will, Marty will be in touch with you with the timings. Great. Thank you. Any other final thoughts? I'm looking at my calendar and I don't know how we're gonna do this but I guess we're all gonna do it. It always gets done. Yeah, this is a little fast track for what we typically do. But thank you for coming in and I think you hearing what we're hearing and then we're here with others concerns and include in your case, Marty or for other agencies and departments whoever is their liaison to include our appropriations committee member into your discussions we'll just make it a faster process with less questions. But as you can get us memos even if they're several smaller ones it's much better than waiting for a larger one and make sure you don't spend a lot of time on formality it's the information that's important at this point. If they're just informal memos they can be emails that go to Teresa with our committee CCD. Okay. Any final thoughts? Again, thank you John and Kate for coming in for your presentation and very happy to hear that our preventative work did work and somebody was not able to get into our systems and create havoc and steal important information. Those investments are key. So we are going to take a break at this point and we'll be back at one o'clock to hear the BGS budget and that's another budget as you know where those service charges charges go out across state agencies and departments and like BGS there's a reduction in the amount like BGS there's a reduction there and we need to fully understand how that works and Peter, you have BGS? Excellent. Then I will see everybody at one o'clock and we're ready to go off live. Please.