 The lessons learned task force meeting in which we're going to talk about the work of our project to date. As the audience may or may not know, but certainly those of us here know, we have broken ourselves into three subgroups. Each of which will pursue a variety of conversations with the standing committees and some cross government functions. We've limited ourselves to talking internally within the legislature and have not had a great deal of conversation with leaders in the administration. And we've decided that just given the time and scope of what we're doing to concentrate ourselves on on the legislative activities and also what we have picked up in the testimony to our committees during the course of the pandemic. And that in itself is obviously larger in the right box. Our goal at all of this is to come up with the findings at these findings are at a very high level, over the course of really a three week period, and then to memorialize those into things that have gone well things that improvement areas that may need mid course correction now as you work on the pandemic. And then lastly, some lessons learned that we may apply to the future. Today, I think what we'd like to do is hear from each of the heads of the three subgroups to summarize the findings and perhaps talk a little bit about some of the high level things that each group has found thus far. Then following that we hope we'll have a committee discussion that will tell us a are there areas that we need to do more work on this week as we finalize what we do. Are there things that we have not yet gotten to that folks want to mention. Are there things that we should do that we haven't done that based on what we've learned so far from the subgroups and then to of course correct ourselves for the end. The goal at all of this is we have another group of meeting of the three leaders of the subgroups on Thursday, we have a meeting of this entire group again on Friday after Friday by which time we should have at least a draft a rough draft of our findings and then I've talked with Tim and we have a dispensation until the beginning of the following week like Tuesday of the following week to get a final report done and that way, we can make sure that Becca and I in particular have our weekend planned for next weekend in order to write the final report. So that said, perhaps Becca, do you have anything that you want to mention at this point to the group. Mostly I just want to thank people I know everyone's just so flat out with all the other work that they're doing but I do think it's important for us to take a few minutes and reflect and I certainly found it really helpful to hear from both my committees and to see the themes that emerged throughout you know as as we're thinking about it there are definitely some takeaways that seem generally acceptable or rather things that we all can agree on and pointing us in particular directions that we need more information on so I found it useful. Great. As we start talking about what the groups have done perhaps if we start with Chris, could you kind of touch on the high points and and and so on of the findings in your draft is at this point. You're you're still muted. Here we go. Okay, so I mean you want to just meet I won't read this whole thing. But I can sort of skip over or skip through most of it. I wanted to give a sort of an overview it's not related only to our group but as I would assume that our final report would have an introduction, we offered. This was just my draft so I don't know if my team would agree but just sort of some of the larger economic pictures right I mean, I think we've got a any lesson learned document has to acknowledge the weakness weak points of our economy that have really come during this pandemic when so, you know, almost half a month of no savings and I think it's and we're trying to find these data points. 25% of them have about 1000 bucks of savings. These are dynamics that I think are worth noting. And then as we roll through the committees and areas, we were assigned judiciary gave us a good summary Sears reports most elements of the system responded fairly well. So we had some corrections for dealing with the outbreak at Northwest and had a bit of experience pushed back from St. John's very but as we know we transferred prisoners to St. John's where we came a sort of COVID site intentionally and did a fairly good job releasing some offenders who they thought that was appropriate. He noted the courts were able to slow down the pace of new admissions to prison so that kept the population kind of stable. He expressed a wish that there had been better planning around enforcement of the governor stay at home or that it took some time to understand the division between law enforcement attorney general, etc, but ultimately they smooth that out. One thing that they clearly signaled as a problem which won't surprise you is the closure of Woodside. Then they, they, they brought the juvenile up to another home up in St. Alvin's I believe Randy, and people broke out of that it was this facility was completely inadequate. They hadn't installed needed security measures, etc. They had several runways then they moved them to middle sex, also inadequate, also led to problems. And this was all under the guys that Woodside might be or mental health beds. If there was a COVID outbreak around, I guess, mental health facilities and that never happened. It was all a contingency plan that was never needed actually. So that was for judiciary do you want me to stop and see if there are questions or should I keep going. No, if the yeah I certainly if there are any questions for Chris at this point. I'm on a small screen so when I'm reading I can't see you so just chime in. And maybe I'll turn to Andy and Brian any anything that cover it or we're remembering anything else. No, that's good. In ag where Brian and I both sit. You know it's high the crisis highlights several infrastructure challenges, both for for food infrastructure and for ag economics. We don't really have a coordinated system to move food from farms to markets, especially local food and local markets. And our infrastructure I would say broadly is is very dependent on imports right for food products for other household goods. And at the same time, food banks are challenged to keep up with the demand we saw over the weekend 1900 cars up at Berlin at that food drop. And I know those have been wildly high demand at all of those sites across the state. And the, as a state. It's come clear that we are more dependent on a single commodity than any other state that being dairy. And so we that does leave us vulnerable. In this case there's reduced demand for dairy. And of course already our dairy economy was struggling. And therefore, a large portion of our farm based economy is exposed in that sense. Also been some unique challenges among dairy who is especially dependent on migrant workers, migrant workers are sort of been left out of virtually all of the response from the federal government. And have trouble accessing health care, although that has gotten better because federal funds will cover uninsured. And there's just a language barrier for Spanish speakers or migrant workers who are trying to learn how to cope in this crisis with significantly language barriers with farm owners and the bosses. So that highlights some opportunities, certainly some vulnerabilities. There's not been, you know, any clear crisis there has been milk being dumped elsewhere in the country I don't think a lot in Vermont that we've heard of. But that has been some of the challenges there at the same time. Actually, non dairy producers have seen a swell in demand. And some of their lack of infrastructure has been highlighted as people have been scrambling for local food so some real opportunities there. In national resources. We didn't get a lot I had one conversation with chair Bray. And the agency didn't report too much in terms of need to react but one example and I'm trying to figure out this out a little bit better but waste water managers, people that work at our wastewater facilities. Apparently their license is somehow linked to that facility. And one of the things they realized and corrected was that was a problem when we had working and personnel issues at other wastewater facilities and they couldn't call, you know, I'll make this up South Burlington couldn't call people from Burlington to come help them, because the license bar it would be as if you had a medical license that only allowed you to practice at Porter hospital. So they've somehow opened up some flexibility to allow those licenses and those workers to to drift between facilities. So we know the other one was around trash hollers and recycle hollers. Waste management districts have consolidated access in Chittany County we can only go to Williston to the one more central drop point. And as far as I know that has been worked pretty well and gone smoothly. Anything else there, Senator Perchlet, I thought I saw you on mute. No, I just changed my name. Okay. There was not much to report in transportation. There was some steps that that we took as you'll remember through some of our early go box bills around DMV timeline. Without access to the DMV. There were some little penalties around renewing your license in 15 days or some of the commercial truck registrations. We relaxed access or relaxed some of the timelines through DMV and that seemed to go pretty smoothly. We had on our sheet broadband infrastructure issues as a broad assignment which I suspect all of us looked at at some point so we just flag some questions I think we'll flesh this out a little more this week. Broadband is one meat processing food processing. And then a question that I'd appreciate some feedback from this group. Look at other potential disasters. For example, something might link to energy. We import a lot of our energy. If there was a natural disaster that, you know, really walloped Quebec, like the ice storm 20 years ago, we would be vulnerable to about a third of our power. There is a lot of belief that in the coming years we will link up to offshore wind in Massachusetts. So in some ways we'll have, you know, most of our power coming from two sources beyond our control. So just, just, or is there any opportunity or need for us to try to think about not just COVID but other infrastructure we should look at, you know, other kinds of disasters. I guess I'd stop there and ask a question. Because I can't see everyone on the screens because I'm limited to to nine at a time so please speak up if there are questions for Chris. Well, do you want us to, you know, should we do anything about other disasters or are we really, I think I think we should, because that is one of the things I know that in terms of looking at what my group has done. What we've done is what should we do better to prepare for the next crisis. And one of those things is we have to think through and kind of almost do a risk assessment of what are the other kinds of crises because one of the things that we're seeing is we were well prepared on continuity government plans to deal with floods and hurricanes but pandemics was for a lot of the planning was not really there. I feel that there are other kinds of crises that that that can affect us. I mean, just basic infrastructure things like well we, we are backing up all the records in the tax department, and we have offsite ability to do it. But what happens if the tax department building blows up and you lose all the people who know how to use the systems. What do we do that. And those are those are some of the questions and they are at the stage only questions but kind of thinking through other kinds of disasters and the one that you mentioned such as energy issues the loss of major portions of the grid could be significant to us. Okay, well we'll try to touch on those things at least not necessarily think through every disaster that could happen but look at weaknesses that this perhaps is exposed and in that area. Well even just asking the question could prompt somebody else to think about it down the road. Then we shifted to our own behavior as the Senate. And flagged that, you know, we were the all Senate calls. We got going right away. They were very effective, brought us together. It allowed, and was really important and well done in the first few weeks of stay at home when we were all scrambling to understand what's going on. We thought that the use of joint rules and Senate rules to coordinate, get information out to legislative leaders and then the full bodies also worked well. Got even easier once once it became live on YouTube. And the ability for legislators ourselves and the public to access committee hearings was helpful once that system got smoothed out. We didn't get into what could we have done better. And I'm sure we will spend some time there. It's similar what changes should be made we've got some work to do there. We did go down to opportunity for improvement. We noted that public access has been, I think, broadly positive that that people can watch us more easily since it's all video from home committee discussions are videoed, but that there are we noted a few people who their access had been coming to the state house and now they can't do that. And in fact, for some there is a access payment there's a fee to access if you don't have broadband or if your phone is paid by the minute so just noted that it's not universally positive. And of course our public resources like a library which might get you around having to pay your own accounts or your own equipment are closed so that that does create some issues. The lessons learned activity of Senate committees and Senate resources was somewhat uneven, the committee structure, you know has that baked in at some level and work well on many issues at once, but then other committees didn't meet it at well at all. So there it was uneven and we weren't maybe drawing on on the expertise of all 30 senators. And then we thought it might make sense and, and, you know, I wouldn't claim to have spent a lot of time reorganizing this so maybe they should go somewhere else but maybe smart to pull together a packet a catalog of the emergency bills that we passed very quickly and just have them in a file somewhere. So that if next February, something rolls through and there's a stay at home order, you know, there's one big bill that the people can turn to and have some confidence that that will facilitate ongoing local government and state government. Anyway, so that was a thought that that might be smart for us to consider moving forward. And that's what we've got at this point. Great. Thank you. Thank you very much. Any questions for Chris at this point. Okay, let's let's move them to Becca and your group. Let me just invite Brian or or Andy if, if you know we all sort of dumped it together a document but I want to make sure I have it. You did. Yeah, that was the good the only other thing that I heard from some folks about public access. And just how we've had had to do it quickly was our reliance on zoom or or YouTube these other companies were we had the time to check their privacy policies and does the state want to be so dependent on on these other options for such an essential service as legislating. It's something to think about if there's any other. I don't know if there is another option but yeah, there are. So that's a question. The question is, do should we have a backup to zoom. Yeah, part of our contingency planning. Good idea. Anything else guys. Becca. I don't recover the material that that Chris went over because a lot of the themes are the same. But I do want to say that in general the sense was that as a Senate, we did work well together and got up and running nimbly and a pretty short time and good communication between the governor's team and the Senate. You know, to a large extent something that went well is for the first, you know, big chunk of the initial emergency political agendas were put away and many senators felt like there were. There was a very strong sense of everybody working on the same goal, which was just making sure that we were taking care of Vermonters and getting information out to them as quickly as an efficiently as possible. We did a pretty successful job of pivoting to a new kind of work. We learned that remote working was possible for us as a body which before had been just a theoretical possibility. The IT staff did an amazing job with a very small number of people and the committee assistance really had to change their game in the way that they were doing their work and people felt like it really went as smoothly as it possibly could have without us not having any plan in place beforehand. As Chris said holding the zoom meetings been more transparent for a lot of people. An interesting thought from one of the committee chairs they felt like this format led to witnesses providing more detailed and complete answers that they felt like there was less hud hedging and testimony, possibly because there was a video record that whether consciously or unconsciously. He felt like they gave more full responses to our questions. So a sense from a number of senators that they saw silos between departments and agencies coming down to some extent seem to be better communication both across state government and between the various agencies and departments and the legislature. And someone mentioned that there was greater flexibility in getting legislation passed because we were able to relax some regulations, some structures and enable to address the emergency. Another interesting byproduct was that committees felt like they were much more informed about what other committees were doing. And it was it's interesting because I know there's been talked for years about having either the clerk of a committee or vice chair right a synopsis of what was happening and in the past that has felt like just too much of a burden when we're in the process and there's so much happening. But for some reason this emergency allowed people the, whether it was the space headspace bill to do it or just the realization that it was a much needed bit of information for other senators to have the synopsis that each clerk was writing for the committees was very helpful to senators to know what was going on. Let me make sure a number of people commented that the governor's daily press conferences were helpful in not just informing us and citizens but also in reassuring them and that going forward when there ever there's an emergency. There needs to be a point person in government who's going to be taking that role. In this instance it was the governor and Department of Health. There might be a different person and we might want to flesh out who those people make some suggestions for who those people might be but I remember on joint rules early in our conversations, the feeling of who is going to start making the public statements and there was a few day lag time early on and I think generally the response from the governor's team was was very good but I do remember a few days early on when a number of senators felt like we need somebody out in front right away reassuring people that we've got to handle on what's happening. A big win for the state and for the homeless population was that the agency of human services and legislature and all the housing advocates were able to house every single homeless person in Vermont and get them out of shelters. Anyone that was seeking a safe place to be was provided with that which is remarkable. We didn't have. I believe at this point we still have not had one COVID-19 infection reported among the homeless population which stands in stark contrast to what happened in Massachusetts in New York. So we're really looking to continue that work. To Chris's point, the nature of work has changed and thousands of Vermonters are working remotely. The question is, is that sustainable? What happens if the grid goes down? What happens if we don't invest the money that we need to in digital resources going forward? Obviously there are broadband Wi-Fi connectivity deserts in our state that are challenging not just for us to do our work but for business, education and telehealth to continue in a state of emergency. There was a sense that in general across state government, we need clear, concise and widely accessible online portals for people to get information from different departments that it really varies from agency to agency and department to department. But we might want to have a rubric for scoring how well information is provided. That was certainly something that came to the fore really quickly at Department of Labor that in general there was information there but it wasn't well organized. It was very frustrating for folks. So we talked about what if the grid goes down, what's the back-off plan? As Chris said, if we can't access the electricity we need. And in general, have we done a good job of examining the vulnerability of all of our systems? Okay. Number of people mentioned that although it has been helpful to have Zoom meetings, something is lost in these committee meetings. There's no opportunity for side conversations, smaller groups coming together to flesh out an idea or policy. The work takes longer and is often very choppy. I think that's all I want to say about that. I'm just feeling that we don't actually have a good handle as legislators on what the state's contingency plans are for emergencies. Where are they housed? Who's in charge of them? We probably should be briefing ourselves on what these plans are so we have a general sense. And also what are the contingency plans for the capital complex going forward? The next thing that emerged is what we noticed is that humans need to step in sooner when we have a crisis bubbling up with technology. Again, coming back to the Department of Labor question. You know, we've got emails and recorded messages that were going out, but they weren't the answer. They weren't reassuring people. They were creating more problems than they were solving. A lingering worry coming out of finance is we don't just have to refill our reserves that we need to make sure we have reserves and then some. We're in a better position than many states with the reserves that we had, but we're still not in a good position. And so that that's very alarming to know that we did set aside the rainy day funds, but they're not enough when faced with this unprecedented financial calamity. Other lingering worries as we head into election season and we're out of shock mode for the initial part of the emergency. Will we will we continue to have good communication with the administration and across party lines and across chambers. How are we going to build a recovery when we have no money in our budget right now, like even if we are able to identify the things that need to be done. How will we do it when we're facing like a half a billion dollars in short shortfall in the revenues coming in. We're still haunted by our bad it track record. How are we going to change that how are you going to do better going forward when we know it not just doesn't just take investments of money but also people highly qualified people to maintain those systems. And I think I'm going to keep it at that high level right now. We have to hear more information from education and health and welfare to wrap this up. But it's been interesting to hear Chris's report and to read through yours last night Randy and just see how there are there are general themes that are emerging that will point us in the right direction. Great question. Any questions for Becca. Great question for the two of you. You mentioned Tim said we could finalize a report early next week. Do you want, do you expect us to be finished by Thursday or Friday or what by Friday. Yes. Okay, by Friday that way we can then take the individual committee reports and then create a final product that incorporates information for all of them in a, in a logic, hopefully a logical way. In terms of what our group found. Many of them are the same themes that Chris and Becca have have described they're in common. I think one of the themes of course is the Senate did an outstanding job and everything that it did. Of course we knew that finding was going to come anyway. But among the things that we did well is we, we did demonstrate as a state the ability to react quickly to an unprecedented situation, and to work together putting partisanship aside in the face of the crisis. And I think that was something that I think we should all be proud of. We demonstrated ability to listen to the expert and to be guided by the science and the governor's communications to the public as as as Becca you have said, had a calming effect and also gave people confidence in the fact that their government was doing something that hopefully to most people at least they made sense. The fundamental continuity of government and emergency operations plans, although not designed for this type of crisis actually seemed to work reasonably well, and the fact that we had such planning, although it was uneven in a few places but by and large plans were in place and reasonably up to date. We demonstrated the ability to be flexible such as require relaxing some licensing rules relaxing procurement rules in the face of an emergency to be able to respond more nimbly that we could ordinarily in the normal course of business. So those things are things I think we can say what reasonably well. There of course are were opportunities for improvement. And so our response for PPE was inadequate and for those people who are managing the emergency that's one of the recurring themes that we heard but what that said is should we have been better prepared, and is there something that we need to do for it affect the next crisis to make sure that we are not so entirely reliant on on health that might not come. And then was better coordination was needed between legislative leadership and legislative staff in some cases that coordination was not as good or as smooth as as as it should have that. There was a lack to some extent of a broad contingency planning view, in other words limited outside of the box thinking about the kinds of risks that we face. We were prepared for hurricanes and floods but we weren't particularly well prepared for this, although we reacted and and and change direction and and very very quickly. We need better planning for communication with elected official staff and the administration in other words, just the basic things in place like a list of everybody's cell phone numbers to be able to contact folks outside the office if need be. We need to do risk assessment and prioritization for upgrade or replacement of older critical it systems and the our focus on doing something like repairing and replacing the Department of Labor system which we knew was was elderly and and written in code that people don't use today and these are things that we knew but we didn't perhaps places higher priority because we weren't anticipating the kinds of surge that actually happened. And so one of the questions that you know I'm jumping ahead to what we should do, prepare for the next crisis is make sure that we have an assessment of all of our systems and although the UI system was the problem here what system might be the different kind of crisis that we may face next time that we should be thinking about now. Broadband and cellular coverage was at the top of the list for it and almost everyone we talked with. We have this need to communicate to do medical telemedicine to deal with education to communicate among ourselves to deal with the business community throughout the state, all of those things suggest that we need to pay priority attention to ensuring that we do in fact deliver adequate broadband not just limited broadband but adequate broadband across Vermont to the people who don't have it because in a crisis like this they are in effect left out of the picture. Of the things that we should be better to prepare for the next crisis obviously must expand broadband and cellular coverage as as one of our highest priority. We should rethink the depth of succession planning for potential loss of leadership in executive and legislative branches. You know, for example, in the federal government when there's a joint session, at least one member of the cabinet is off site just in the event that the capital blows up, for example, we don't do that in Vermont and in fact the depth of our succession is not at the secretary of state. There are no designated succession planning after that, and when we have a joint session of the legislature, everybody's in the same place at the same time. And in terms of a risk that's a huge risk that we perhaps should should address succession planning is also an issue elsewhere in state government within within some of our departments and functions that we need to think about. We look at legislative IT redundancy and also the risk of key of loss of key staff. We picture for example the tax department. Let's say you have a disaster in which the tax department is blown up in a terrorist strike. Well, we have the systems available so that they are off site and so the loss of data risk is minimal, but who's going to run it. And the tax department are blown up. That's the piece of contingency planning that we don't really have, and we have this in a lot of places, and it's very very difficult we know in a small state to deal with that, but at least we need to think through things like that. We need to assess the full range of risks and rate them relative to probability impact preparedness. What probability based risk should be be planning for now that are different than the ones that we have we have seen before. Chris mentioned, for example, the loss of the grid or key energy sources is one that I don't think we really thought through. We should consider how the General Assembly would be if a joint meeting were required and social distancing were needed that what New Hampshire did is I understand it is the Senate meets in the House chamber where there's room to be able to do social distancing, and the House meets somewhere externally. And I know that in the cutting in the planning that's being done by the Sergeant at arms and the capital of police chief they are thinking about locations where these things could happen elsewhere. So that planning is being at least thought through but I'm not sure that the leadership from our perspective to them is as as as robust as it perhaps should be. As some of you Becca and Chris have mentioned, we need a better and more intelligent information portal, the ability to pass information on to people, particularly citizens who need them and we saw this, particularly in the issue of the Department of Labor issues. This, though, potentially presents some tremendous opportunity for us. The opportunity is to be able to use artificial intelligence and robotics, more effectively to be able to build intelligent portals. You know, one, for example, and one, I spoke with a person who's in the artificial intelligence business and the innovation business and one of the convention is, you know, why don't you do something like put a tape recorder at the Department of Motor Vehicles all day and listen to what people ask, and then build artificial intelligence to answer those questions effectively and think if we had done that from the beginning with the ability of a recorded line to route the calls that were coming into the Department of Labor into a more intelligent response system. That may have been a way to alleviate some of the issues that we had and also give her monitors more confidence as opposed to being on a phone line, not being able to get through for days and in some cases weeks at a time. Connectivity is critical just to reemphasize again the broadband piece, but then we have to ask ourselves, well, what happens if there was no, there's no internet availability, what do we do then. I don't have an answer to that. Any questions on that piece or if Cheryl or Dick you have anything to add. Yeah, am I on. Go ahead. No, you. You had mentioned point person and we heard that as well that there needs to be a more prominent, I guess, dissemination of the information because some systems were getting directives from different places and not getting the same information. So that's something that I think that we need to look at, and people have talked about and especially in the emergency systems that are set up throughout the state. You know, if you're getting directives from health and you're getting directives from public safety and you're getting directives from here and there, where does it come together so that you know what you should be doing at any one time. I think what are you done show. I didn't intend to interrupt. Okay. I think with with the, the disaster at UI. I think first of all, it was just a question of scale. When you compare the number of UI applications handle pre coded with what got dumped on the department with it. I can't imagine actually creating and maintaining a system large enough to take care of that volume. And then having it in normal times. Yeah, I kind of forgive the Department of Labor I don't see how they could have been ready for but having said that. And I'm going to sound like a cranky old curmudgeon here, but I think there were fundamental problems with the computerized setup that had nothing to do with coven. It's a problem that sort of just is ubiquitous wherever people use computers and it's this that. It's not a problem with the technology it's a problem with the use of language and the organizing of information online. I think the people who program the computers know a lot about computers. They don't know a lot about logic. And I say that because there are some computer programs that are actually very logical. There's something called Westlaw. And it's very obvious that it was not put together by computer people was put together by lawyers, and there's an orderliness. If you want to find a piece of information, you basically play 20 questions. You start with the whole universe you keep dividing the possibilities, and you creating smaller and smaller universes but the questions cover that entire universe. The problem with people trying to sign up for UI was very simple they would get a question like what were your 2019 wages. Well, that's a stupid question, because not everybody works for wages. Some people get salaries. Some people are sole proprietors ships. Some people, you know, are living on royalties. And what you need is a question that embraces all the possibilities, for example, a menu of the various ways to get paid, and which of these is you, and one of those should be other. And that's just that and that is so basic if you've ever had kids and you play in the car in a long trip you play 20 questions, you keep dividing the possibilities. What do you do with technology that's about how or how information is organized. And if the one the most common complaint I've got the most common complaint I've gotten about UI is just not being able to get through it all is getting a busy signal. It's just get leaving a voicemail, getting no answer but a people who actually could analyze what their problem was. Invariably it was that they got a question on the computer screen that they couldn't answer. They needed at that point to talk to a human being, not because they hate the computer. They need to talk to human being because the computer program did not envision their situation. They couldn't get a human being. So I think we need to clean up our act with our computer programs, but we also need to provide for a bailout when when the computer is not working. That we should just not assume that everything is going to be done online because it doesn't always work. That's it. I'm going to go go chase the kids off my lawn now. Yeah, I agree with Dick. One of the more common complaints I heard with that whole issue of claiming was if you got to a certain point and answered the correct the question incorrectly. It completely threw everything else out. And you could never get back to where you needed to be to fix it without getting somebody involved on a personal level. So I think Dick points out a very good situation where you can't structure something so tightly that if you inadvertently give it a wrong answer, you are tilt out of the system. And then it takes you another week to get back into fix it. Just an observation. Well, that's exactly what I was talking about when I talk about artificial intelligence that you have systems like you I that were built 30 years ago, and people who are building really effective information technology today don't build it that way. For that very reason. Yeah, a couple of things came to light from your report one is very obvious with UI but perhaps more broadly, I think we may want to suggest that that the legislature have points of contact in different agencies. We're all scrambling to figure out where to send people or ourselves where to contact and then Sirachin and Becca and you guys gave us a few names at DOL and that made a huge difference, but you know, a few days ago, I was trying to help a business and I was like, I don't know where to send you really to be honest. So that might be a good idea for us to just have a list that that they designate somebody that that legislators can turn to and and I'll just take this opportunity to say that Jessica at DOL is like, she's amazing. She I call it the wizard. Yeah. Yeah, I would agree. And you know she has a little baby at home. Yeah, she wants to respond. Well, I'll get to that. My kids about to go down for a nap. Which which brings up the second point. You reference staff Randy for this for the legislature. I think we should pull that out a little bit more because we are tough on our staff. We're very demanding we demand we demand a lot of intense hours. And that's normally under the context and we forgive ourselves because well you only have this nightmarish situation for five months of the year and then we have this vision of a luxury office with nobody around and so two things. This dynamic has shoved of course the staff and the challenges they've had and they've all answered, as far as I can tell amazingly. But they're in the home front they're wrestling with kids. If Luke had four kids at home. You know, what would have happened. I'm not sure we I don't believe he has any kids but you know that is a dynamic that we are vulnerable to and it's worth flagging. And I think going forward, we've got to acknowledge that we maybe need to adjust our expectations since this is not five months of intense work. People are juggling a whole lot of other things as they're having to work from home. And I, you know, I don't know if it's worth checking with the legislative council committee, or what but it strikes me that we just sort of barreled through as if wherever they were they would keep acting the way we expect in the state has and that's probably not a fair expectation. Good point. We reached out to both legislative council and also to JFO for their specific input, and although I've had conversations with Luke he wanted to have a little bit more time to come up with a deliberate response which he says he'll be providing to me in the next day or two. And but it does focus on some of the very issues Chris that that you mentioned as as Luke and I talked about it at a high level. We also today, I believe Joyce is on the call, and I did get some input back from from JFO regarding their observations of lessons learned and Joyce could you perhaps give us the high points of that. Yes, certainly. So, so we would echo many of the thoughts that have been expressed already. We felt that we were able to get to work pretty quickly. Everyone adapted to working at home quite well. We have the problem that we didn't have cell phones for people outside of JFO and that slowed down things a little bit at the beginning. We felt that our revenue forecasters worked pretty well they were able to communicate effectively and shared data and so forth so that seemed to go fine. There's some areas that have been a little bit more of a struggle. So for example, just figuring out how to communicate with people that you don't bump into in the pink lady, or that you don't bump into in the State House all of that has been rather strange I would say. It's also true that we did not have a legislative plan for emergency disruptions we did not know how to respond in that situation so we made a lot of ad hoc adjustments that turned out to be fine. But it would be nice to think through the process in advance for the next time. There were some issues in terms of the way that the fiscal situation has been working. There have been some times when we felt that communication between the legislature and the administration were perhaps not, not ideal. So for example, the administration decided rather quickly to hop on to the federal timing of income tax due dates. So that got pushed into the next fiscal year, which meant that all of a sudden we had this big problem of large shortfall in revenues coming in for the current fiscal year. So if there had been more communication we might have been able to think through some of the implications. It's also true that we've recently gone through setting up an RFP I shouldn't say we the administration has has set up an RFP to hire somebody to help manage the coronavirus relief funds coming from the federal government. And I think if the legislature had been more involved in that process we might have done things a little bit differently. And there are these cases where decisions were made quickly and maybe they had to be made quickly, but a little bit more communication between the branches of government might have helped. Plenty of people have talked about the unemployment insurance program. There's a nice chart on the JFO webpage showing how from 1987 to February of this year. Employment insurance claims were sort of bouncing along and all of a sudden we have this gigantic spike. So it was really out of scale, compared to anything that we had seen before. No one's mentioned childcare but I think that is an area that that needs to be thought through that's that's crucial for so many people in the economy. And of course for our kids. And boy, I don't think many people had thought through the implications of an emergency like like we're in now for childcare. And of course food needs have been mentioned as well. So just quickly what could be changed now of course we talked about broadband for everyone so that all employees and all kids can work from home. We would like to have a legislative plan for any future emergency disruptions. And in terms of the the fiscal side of things. We, we feel that it's necessary to maintain the legislative role in spending and revenue decisions. And we feel understanding that sometimes somebody has to make a quick decision to spend money and other folks will find out about it later. So that has to happen in some cases but we'd like to minimize that as much as possible. Great. Thank you. Thank you very much Joyce. Does anyone else have anything to add at this point, places that we should go that we haven't areas that we should explore in and looking at the remainder of this project. Randy, I just wanted to go back to the UI situation, and I agree with what Dick and what Joyce has said about the really fast uptake of, you know, the number of cases and stuff and so we can't blame it all on the department, but a lot of the complaints that I've heard come from the interaction of claimants with the call takers, and especially with the, you know, company that was brought on to help fill in the gaps there. And I know that it had to be done quickly. But I think that we need to talk about making sure that those people who are on the other end of the phone have been trained at least in how to be a little more respectful of the claimants when they call. Yeah, I just mentioned childcare which is a reminder and and we haven't looked at schools. And I, I, you know, yeah we're waiting to get that information from. Yep. Okay, good. Yeah no there's there's a lot of information there that needs to be mined still. And that that will be important for tweaks or you know as we think about the fall. My wife's a high school teachers as you know and and they just yesterday and staff meeting started wondering, you know, should we be ready in case we're not in the classroom what would that look like and it's a grizzly thing to think about this moment but we owe that to people. Yeah, the whole piece of education is is is critical and we have the note also of dealing with the higher education not simply K through 12 because they're, they're obviously implications that we have there that that go beyond Kobe but perhaps are exacerbated by on on that note we have four minutes to go before our time is over. What we the next step in this process is that we will continue our data collection by the three groups during the course of this week refining these draft reports, based on what we've heard today and the information that we collect during the week. The three subgroup leaders are meeting again on Thursday by which time we hope we will have collected everything that we're going to collect given the limited time that we have, and then present those things to this full group again on Friday afternoon. Friday of this week, then over the weekend, we will complete the actual report process with a notion of delivering it by Tuesday morning. In the meantime, after listening today and thinking about each of you, if you have things that you thought about that we haven't covered today or that ought to be covered or that ought to be addressed. I would appreciate it if you would just send an email at least to Becca to Chris and myself that we can use as a basis to perhaps add some more ideas and and things that we need to do to this process. Before we close today is there anything else that anyone would like to add. Well, again, thank you all so much. I know this is a great deal of work, a great deal of burden, a great deal of thought, but I hope we'll have a product that will at least be useful in the short run and in the medium term going forward. And thank you again so much and we'll see you on the floor.