 Welcome to the House Committee on Government Operations and Military Affairs. It is Tuesday, April 18th, and we're here this afternoon to pick up our work on S-32 and relating to ranked choice voting for presidential primary elections. And our first witness today is Professor Eric Masken from Harvard, who I believe is going to tell us a little bit about preferred models for doing some of the tabulation of ranked choice voting. So Professor Masken, thank you for taking the time to zoom in with us today. Well, it's my pleasure. Thank you for your invitation. It would be helpful if I could show you some slides. Do I have the power to share my screen? Yes, I believe our fabulous committee assistant Andrea has made that happen. And it looks as though it's going to work. Thank you. I just want to make sure that everyone can see the slides. Are they visible? We can. And there you go. Now you're in full screen view. That's perfect. Great. So I'll take a few minutes to make a few points, and then I'll be happy to take your questions. But if I say something in the middle of my presentation that you're not following, please interrupt me so that I can clarify. Sounds good. So what the point I want to make is that ordinary ranked choice voting is actually a good improvement to standard plurality rule. I'm very much in favor of it. However, it's possible to make a further improvement, which could be quite important in some certain circumstances, and I want to talk about how to make that improvement. So just to remind you of why ranked choice voting is such a good idea, let's imagine an election where there are three candidates, we'll call them A, B, and C, and we'll suppose that the voters break down into three groups. 40% of voters are the A supporters. They have the ranking A, B, C. 25% are the B supporters. They have the ranking B, C, A, and 35% have the ranking C, B, A. So in a sense, there are the A supporters and there are the anti-A people, the people who put A last. Now, the thing I want to stress is that in this example, most voters, 60% of voters prefer either B or C to A. Nevertheless, if we use ordinary plurality rule, the standard voting method in the United States, A is going to win because A is going to have 40% of the vote and that will beat 25 or 35. What is going wrong is that even though B and C are in some sense more popular than A, they split the vote between them and so neither wins. And ranked choice voting solves this problem. It solves it because voters get to rank the candidates. They can do more than just express their preference for a favorite candidate. And because 60% of voters are ranking B and C above A, that ensures that A is not going to win, that one of B or C is going to end up winning, which from a democratic point of view, democratic from a small D perspective is right outcome. In fact, in this example, what will happen is that since none of these three candidates is ranked first by a majority, we will drop the candidates who is ranked first the least often. This is how standard ranked choice voting works. That's candidate B and then people who support B will have their second choice moved into the first place and then C will defeat A by 60% to 40% in the instant runoff. Now that's certainly better than having A elected, however, notice that actually 65% of voters in this example prefer B to C. These people prefer B to C and these people prefer B to C and that adds up to 65%. And a majority also prefer B to A. These people prefer B to A, these people prefer B to A, that adds up to 60%. So if you believe in respecting the will of the majority, it should be candidate B who wins the election, not candidate C. candidate C is elected under ordinary ranked choice voting because B, even though B has all of this support, gets eliminated first. And this is not just a theoretical possibility. This really happens. My research associates have demonstrated that this has happened many times in the past and it's probably going to happen many times in the future where the candidates who beats each other candidate by a majority like candidate B doesn't win under ranked choice voting. The name that we use in the voting literature is that B is a condor say winner because B beats A by majority and B also beats C by majority. So what I'd like to do is to show you that there's a very simple change that we can make to rank choice voting to make sure that a condor say winner will get elected. And the idea is that in deciding which candidate to drop if no one gets a majority of first place votes, we shouldn't just look at the number of first place votes. We should look at candidates who has the fewest total votes, not the fewest first place votes. Now I have to explain what I mean by total votes. Look at these voters here, the 35% who rank C first and then B and then A. Each voter in this group prefers C to two other candidates, both B and A. And so reflecting the strength of the support for C, C should get two total votes from every voter who has this ranking because C is ranked above two other candidates. What about the voters in this group? Well, they rank C above one other candidate, candidate A. And so the voters in this group should contribute one total vote for each voter to candidate C. What about the candidates in the final group, the group that ranks C at the bottom? Well, in this case, C is not ranked above anybody and so C gets no total votes from these voters here. So now you get the idea that when we calculate total votes, we look at how strong the support is for a particular candidate. We don't just look at the first place support, we don't just look at the second place support, we look at the total support for that candidate. Now when we do the calculations in this example, we see that candidate C gets 95 total votes because C is ranked above two other candidates, 35% of the time. So that's 35 times two. C is ranked above one other candidate, 25% of the time. So that's 25 times one. And so that leads to 95 total votes for C. If we do the calculation for A, A gets 80 total votes and the calculation for B gives B 125 total votes. So notice that candidate A has the fewest total vote. So it should be candidate A who gets dropped in this example, not candidate B. But if we drop candidate A, we drop candidate A, now we see that the rankings look like this because the people who ranked A first now have their second place choice moved into first. And so now B is the winner against C. 65% of voters prefer B to C. So B wins if we make the small change from dropping the candidate with the fewest first place votes to dropping the candidate with the fewest total votes. And this is a small change in the voting procedure, but it's a big change for democracy because we are truly respecting the will of the majority when we elect B. So that's really the point that I wanted to make. If there is a candidate like B who is a Condorcet winner who beats each other candidates by a majority, then we ought to elect such a candidate. And furthermore, we can make a small change to the rules of ranked choice voting to make sure that Condorcet winners will be elected. And let me leave it there and take your questions. I have a couple, but I want to go to the committee first. Thank you very much, Professor Mastin. Representative Hooper. Welcome, Professor. Thank you for coming. So essentially, in my brain, what you're saying is without the revision, pure ranked choice manufactures the second place winner as opposed to with your Condorcet added, it reveals the candidate that is more favored by all voters. That's that's right. There is a risk with ordinary ranked choice voting that the candidate who is truly the most popular will not get elected. And the change that I am proposing corrects that problem and make sure that if there is a majority winner, candidate B in my example, that candidate will actually win the election. Is that what actually happened if you had, if you remember the Burlington election in 09 exactly, that is exactly what happened in Burlington in 09 they use ranked choice voting there. And the Condorcet winner in Burlington lost because because of the deficiencies of ranked choice voting. Now, I should stress when I say deficiencies that ranked choice voting is miles ahead of ordinary plurality rule. But it does have this small flaw which could be corrected using the change that I'm proposing. One last and the last question I guess are the voting machines capable of doing that at the present time. Absolutely. In fact, from a voter's point of view, there would be no change at all in what the voter does. The voter is just going to rank candidates. The only difference in the whole election procedure is that the software for tabulating who gets eliminated will be changed. But but that that is a simple and straightforward change and the voters will see no change whatsoever. Thank you, sir. Thank you very much for for your invitation. Okay. So that represents water sentence. Go ahead. Thank you. Hi, I'm wondering if this understate method is more accurately reflecting what the voters want. Why is it so much less commonly used than regular ranked choice vote? That's a that's a good question. And it's reasonable to ask of any system if the system is so good. Why don't we see it used more? We do see it used in some places, but ordinary ranked choice voting is, of course, much more popular. And I would say that that's probably for for historic reasons that ranked choice voting is actually an old idea goes back to the 19th century, and it started being used around the world, mainly in the early 20th century. So for example, Australia adopted ranked choice voting for their lower House of Parliament about about 100 years ago. And at that point, to do the kind of population that I'm proposing would have been very cumbersome, because it all would have had to be done by hand. And when you are counting millions of votes, potentially millions of votes by hand, and you have to calculate two, two votes from this voter and one vote from that voter, it would have, it would have been much too complicated to conduct an election at that time, totally by hand. These days, of course, we have very fast, automated election tabulation methods. And so my proposal would be easy to put into practice. But at this point, so many places have already adopted standard ranked choice voting, that's what people know about. And the method that I'm proposing is not yet as well known simply because of the historic accident that ordinary ranked choice voting was adopted first. Professor, my first question has to do with, so in the condorsate method, we've got to kind of multiply, there's this multiplier to get the total votes. That's right. And I'm wondering if that runs into constitutional issues when we think about the one person, one vote. I don't think so. When you, after all, in a ranked choice voting election, people are ranking candidates anyway, they are doing more than just expressing their preference for a single candidate, waiting a voter by how strong his or her preference is for a particular candidate isn't really doing anything more than is already being done in ranked choice voting. That is, if you accept the fact and many constitutional scholars do accept the fact that ranked choice voting is in line with one person, one vote, then the variation that I'm proposing will also be in line with one person, one vote. Thanks. And my other question is one of the things I read and I think you made reference to it in the article that you had written that was shared with us. I think it's called the fairest vote of all. There are mathematical challenges to any of these ranked choice voting methods, but one of the things that came up in testimony with the converse method was the idea that you can get into a circular challenge with the preferences where no candidate actually is a converse winner. And is that something that we should be thinking about as the primary drawback if there is one to this method? Let me say two things. You raised an important question and let me answer it in two different ways. The first answer is that the variation that I was talking about where we eliminate the candidates with the lowest total vote score rather than the lowest first place vote score, that method will always lead to a winner. So there is no difficulty in getting a winner out of the system just as ordinary ranked choice voting always leads to somebody being the winner. Now as you point out, it is a theoretical possibility that there may be no converse winner. There may be no candidate who would beat each other candidate in a head to head contest. In that case, the variation that I'm proposing is just going to lead to the same thing as ordinary ranked choice voting rather than to a converse winner. But my second answer is yes, there is a theoretical possibility of there being no converse winner. However, in practice, that almost never happens. My team has studied literally thousands of elections in Australia, which has been using rankings now, as I said for 100 years, and we have never run across a case using the Australian data where there has not been a converse winner. So it could happen theoretically, but in practice, it's extremely rare. It's not true that it's also extremely rare that the instant runoff vote winner and the converse winner would be a different outcome. I mean, we have this very real example here in Burlington, Vermont from 2009, but that is the extreme outlier, is it not? It depends what you mean by extreme outlier. Again, we have analyzed the data from Australia and actually in about 6% or 7% of the cases there, the converse winner and the ordinary ranked choice vote winner were not the same. So 6% or 7% is not every day, but it's not an extreme outlier either. Professor, you may have said this already and I didn't catch it, but how many different types of ranked choice voting exist? Oh, there are many types. I couldn't give you an exact number. Would it be like 20? At least, at least. There is a huge literature on... I took a course on this in college. Yes, that's right. And the methods go back hundreds of years. So, Condor Say himself was writing in the 18th century, interestingly, Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland in his professional career was a mathematician and he studied ranked choice voting. And that was in the 19th century. It's a large and rich voting literature. This is the kind of learning that makes me love this job. Thank you for sharing it with us. Representative Boyden has a question. So, I don't have the number on the top of my head, but a good amount of terms and remarks count their ballots by hand still. And I believe I just heard you speak to the fact that this method is a little complicated to count by hand. Are you suggesting that these towns not... If we were to go through it with this method, are you suggesting that these towns not count by hand anymore? So, I think Vermont is small enough so that doing it by hand actually would be feasible. I haven't done the cost calculations, but I'm guessing that it would be feasible given the size of your state. It would not be feasible to do it entirely by hand on a national level. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. You're six to seven percent Australian figure is surprising. Is there anything that you attribute particularly to something that they're using that gives us that? And when we look at the condorcet and the hair method not electing the same person, is that effectively sort of like having a tie in a regular winter takeoff? Okay, well, you've asked a couple of questions there. First, let me describe the circumstances in which ordinary rank choice voting, the hair method as you call it, would might not give the same answer as a condorcet election. Those tend to be circumstances in which there are three candidates, and the centrist candidates is in some sense not as prominent as the candidates on either side. So, that candidates, even though he or she might be central in the sense that the average voter would support that candidate quite strongly, the more extreme candidates, the ones on the left and right are going to get the lion's share of the first place vote. This, for example, is what happens in Alaska in the special House election last September. The candidates that everybody was talking about were Sarah Palin on the right and Mary Peltola on the left. There was a candidate, Nick Beggage, in the middle, but he didn't attract the same amount of attention. Now, it turned out he was actually very popular. He would have beaten either Peltola or Palin in a head-to-head contest, but he didn't pick up enough first place votes to survive under ordinary rank choice voting. Those are the sorts of circumstances where we would expect rank choice voting, hair voting, and condorcet voting to result in different outcomes. That's what has happened in Australia. Now, I wouldn't describe those circumstances as circumstances in which the rank choice voting candidate and the condorcet voting, the condorcet candidate differ. I wouldn't describe those circumstances as leading to no clear cuts or no obvious majority candidates. Even in those cases, it's clear that the condorcet winner is the choice of the majority. The condorcet winner would beat every other candidate head-to-head. It's just that because the other candidates may have more name recognition and are being talked about more, that they're more likely to get the lion's share of the first place votes. So, Professor Masken, this is the fundamental place where folks lose me a little bit, and so I want to try to phrase this question. So, in your analysis of the Alaska vote, when you look at the rank choice results, you say the moderate candidate who was less well known was more popular and would have won in a head-to-head because the mathematical head-to-head calculations from a condorcet method would say if you match these candidates up and each one was in a head-to-head, if they were presented panel versus the moderate candidate, potola versus the moderate candidate, if they were set up that way on a ballot, that's the way the results would have been the same as the condorcet method. However, I think that that assumes voter behavior that isn't actually accurate because there's a little bit of a Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The fact that we have some RCB on the ballot actually changes voter behavior. For instance, you choose the candidate who you most want, and then your second choice in the preference is the candidate who for many voters is least distasteful to them. And so, of course, the moderate candidate does better in that case in mathematical head-to-head match-ups, but I would argue that they don't necessarily win in real head-to-head match-ups. I wonder what your response is to that assertion. Well, in the case of Alaska, we can't really test your hypothesis because there wasn't enough done to see how people might have voted if they had been presented with the choices differently. However, this is again is why I think the wealth of data from Australia is so interesting. There, people are often asked in polls before the election if it was a choice between A and B, would you prefer A or would you prefer B? And so, in those elections, we can compare the actual outcome with the pair-wise choices according to polls. And it's the correspondence is really pretty good. I mean, of course, polls can be misleading at times, and the actual outcome, as we all know, may differ. But, on average, in a large fraction of cases, the polling data are pretty good and confirm that rankings in ranked choice voting election are pretty similar to what voters would do if they were asked to choose between pairs. Representative Hooper-Brown has another question. One last question, Professor. We had a presentation last week, somebody from Utah, somebody from Colorado, and they addressed the issue of precinct summability and said that it was possible in regular ranked choice error method that we, I think, are anticipating using to get that out of voting machines with little problem. I've heard other perspectives on that. Do you have insight? You know, I'm afraid that my expertise does not lie in the mechanics of voting machines. And so, this is not something I feel qualified to comment on. Representative Byron. Thank you. Thank you, Professor. And I arrived late, so excuse me if you maybe address this further. I'm curious to your opinion, if, for my word, to move forward with the AIRB method, in your mind, how would this still be an improvement over our plurality voting if we're just speaking to that one function? Right. So, a major flaw with plurality voting is that it's vulnerable to vote splitting. In the example that I put up at the beginning, I think you can still see it, candidates B and C split the anti-A votes, and that allows candidate A to win, even though most people prefer either B or C to A. And this is something that happens over and over again in plurality rule elections. Ordinary ranked choice voting, AIRB method, does solve this problem and makes sure that candidate A will not get elected if A is unpopular in the sense that I've illustrated in this example. So, moving to AIRB voting is very important. It would be an important step in the right direction for getting election outcomes to reflect the will of the people. My only point was that we can do even better by moving to Condor Say. So, you do see hair as a positive, not to split hairs here, but you do still see that I couldn't lay out that one. I got to switch to another video. No, but you do still see that as a positive step forward in your life. Very, very much so. In fact, I have tried to get hair voting adopted all over the country. I've spoken to many other groups as I'm speaking to you today, making exactly this point. Even though Condor Say is a still better method, I think it would be a mistake in Vermont not to adopt hair if it's a choice between hair and plurality rule. Hair is much better. Any other questions for Professor Mastin? Running on time today, loving it. Professor Mastin, this has given us a lot to think about. I think I'm going to go to Representative Rupert Randolph in a second here, but I wanted to really encourage the committee to read the documents that were shared with us, especially I think that the contemplation of the different manipulation or tabulation methods in the professor's fair photo, all articles, really, really fascinating stuff to think about for all of us who are elections go-ops nerds on this committee. I actually have a question for you, Mr. Chair. For me, okay. What is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? Oh, it's the idea that the act of observing it changes it. So similarly, I was saying the act of having the opportunity to rank your candidates actually changes voter behavior. I was using it as an analog. Professor, how many students do you have and how many courses do you teach? Well, over the years, I have supervised close to 100 PhD students here at Harvard and before Harvard MIT. And normally, I teach two courses a year. Sometimes one of those courses is actually on the theory of voting. Well, the reason I ask is because I wonder if it is information that comes readily to your students. And if you think that it's something that ordinary people could wrap their heads around easily enough. Oh, I have every confidence that voters will understand both ordinary rank choice voting and condor say voting, because we have so much evidence from places where rank choice voting has been used for years that people have no difficulty comprehending it, especially after they've had experience with it. If you're showing it to them for the first time, they might find it a little different from what they're used to, but they catch on pretty quickly. And I was heartened, for example, that after New York City used rank choice voting for their mayoral primary a couple of years ago, 75% of New Yorkers said that they were happy with it. They thought it was an improvement over the old system, and they wanted to use it again. We're at two o'clock. Is there any last burning question for the professor? Great. This has been a very healthy discussion and an exciting one, especially for what I think a lot of people think that we're getting into the weeds on math, but we've talked about physics, mathematics, philosophy, elections, principles, and it's only two o'clock. So I really, really do appreciate you zooming in with us and helping us understand the pros and cons of these different tabulation methods. It was really valuable. Thank you, professor. You're very welcome. I enjoyed it and I especially enjoyed your very good questions. It was a pleasure to respond to such important questions. My knowledge, you're the first Nobel lawyer we've had the opportunity to grill. Thank you. Well, I hope I won't be the last. Thank you very much, professor. Have an excellent day. Thanks a lot. Bye, everyone. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye. Great. So our next witness is Justin Marsh, and Justin, would you like to take the chair? Absolutely. Thanks for being here. Share your perspective on Ranked Choice Voting. Thank you so much for the opportunity to testify today in strong support of S32 a bill that will help promote a healthy democracy by giving voters more choice and more of a voice. For the record, my name is Justin Marsh. I'll you say them pronouns and I'm the political outreach director at Vermont Conservation Voters or BCV. For those of you not familiar with BCV, we are a non-partisan, nonprofit organization whose vision is for a bright future for Vermont, which includes working to advance and defend policies that protect the environment and promote health while advancing social, economic, and racial justice in strengthening our democracy. BCV produces an annual Vermont environmental common agenda to highlight the environmental community's top legislative priorities each year. I have several copies here. You've received them at the beginning of the biennium, but if you want to prove that I have more here. S32 was identified as one of our top priorities for the year. We prioritize this legislation because we strongly believe that a healthy environment depends on a healthy democracy. Our current political system exasperated by federal action like the Citizens United Supreme Court decision allows money and special interests to have undue influence on our elections. The current system allows candidates to win with less than a majority of support and it can shut out independent voices. By passing S32, we can give voters more choices and ensure we elect candidates that are supported by a majority of voters. BCV works to recruit and train candidates who share our vision and values. We often hear that people wrestle with whether or not they should run, often feel dissuaded from bringing a new voice onto the ballot. Rank choice voting will allow more diverse candidates to run without the fear that they'll pull support from a candidate with similar views. By allowing voters to rank their candidates in order of preference, people can support the candidates they prefer without feeling compelled to do strategic voting, worrying about which candidate they think is most likely to win. In 2012, my home district of Amoyal 3 had a vacancy for state representative. I was active and interested in the local races and was encouraged to run. However, because I ran as an independent with two other candidates, none of us received a majority of the vote on election day. Bernie Jeskowitz won with 37 percent of the vote, while it was assumed that the Democrat and myself split the more progressive votes as we had a lot of the same supporters. Our combined votes equaled 63 percent, and I often heard on the campaign trail that I wish I could vote for all of you. We kept it very cordial, all three of us. While circumstantial, of course, in the next contested race in my district in 2018, the Democrat Lucy Rogers won with 59 percent, and in 2012, the Democrat Rep Lucy Boyden won with 70 percent. No other independent or third party candidate has sought the candidate to see since I did in 2012. Had ranked-choice voting occurred, the end results may have differed, and more voters could have felt heard and represented. In BCB's candidate trainings and recruitment, we also hear candidates who feel discouraged from running due to how negative campaigns can get. This can be particularly true for women and candidates of color. Rank-choice voting helps to discourage highly negative campaigning, since candidates need to appeal to voters as their possible second choice. With politics getting more and more polarized, we think this would be a step in the right direction. We also believe a healthy democracy engages as many voters as possible. We are strong supporters of many of the reforms implemented in recent years, including same day and automatic voter registration, universal vote by mail for general elections, and adopting ranked-choice voting in presidential primaries and statewide elections will be another step in a positive direction by ensuring all voters' voices will count, which can become an issue when a candidate has pulled out of a race, which is common in presidential primaries. BCB has put a lot of time and effort in partnership with the Secretary of State's office and more than a dozen diverse organizations, including Disability Rights Vermont, the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance, the Vermont Network Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, the ACLU of Vermont, and the Vermont Interfaith Action, among others, to educate voters on vote by mail, and we stand ready to collaborate with partners to educate Vermont voters on how to successfully participate in ranked-choice voting for the presidential primaries in 2028. We can learn the lessons from other states and communities who have already successfully implemented ranked-choice voting. In conclusion, at a time when democracy is under attack in so many states, we're excited that Vermont is taking up S32, which will help ensure more voters' voices are heard, encourage more diverse candidates to run, and foster more positive elections. We hope the committee moves this policy forward, and we look forward to continuing to work together, and thank you. I'm happy to answer any questions. Justin, thanks for being here on behalf of BCB and also sharing your personal experience as a candidate in a plurality election. Who knows if there'd been ranked-choice voting that would have been a different outcome, but it's one of the examples I think that kind of exists in the stark relief. Any questions for Justin? One of the questions that I have that you're testimony about your experience brings up is that when we've heard some criticism of the ranked-choice voting results from the Brown to Mayoral race in 2009 or at the Alaska congressional race that came up in Professor Maskin's testimony, it's this idea that the second choice, we can kind of assume voter intent a little bit and sort of wonky things happen because of the tabulation method. And I wonder, based on your experience, if you felt like there, if there was the kind of vulnerability to ticket splitting, which it looks like there is, based on the subsequent results of those next couple of elections that you mentioned, do you think it was necessarily universal that the sort of second choice would have been the one that seemed like it more ideologically matched with anybody or whether there probably was more of a split. And when I look at those Brownington results, for instance, I say, there was kind of the implication during previous testimony that there's no way somebody would have said they were a court right voter and then had Bob Kiss really be the second choice, that there's a weird thing happening there. And I just wondered how much we should assume voter intent when we look at some of those results. Yeah, it's really hard to know without breaking down, without having it be ranked in first place back in 2012. But I think if you were to look at the endorsements that the Democrat and myself each had, and the subsequent endorsements that the Democrats that ran afterwards received, I think it would be pretty obvious that candidate K, which would have been addressed, would not have been elected. Either had I not run as an independent, or that ranked choice voting be implemented. I was basically called the spoiler candidate, which I thought was kind of anti-democratic in the sense that anyone should be able to run regardless of party and without that target. But so I guess I'm not completely answering that question. But yeah, it's hard to tell. I know that VCV has not taken a stance on endorse a voting, and we are, but we are ready to educate whichever way you move forward. I think we are proponents of the standard ranked choice voting, more so. Do you think that more people would run as independent or third party candidates if there was ranked choice voting? I don't know, but I think in my personal experience, I felt like I should never have ran as an independent, which I don't think is the right way that I should have left that election. It felt like a mistake to me, and I don't like that. I don't like that that's how I left. So I would hope that this would allow more people to feel that they can run and should run. And that's, you know, my testimony leads to that. Any other questions for Justin? Thank you for sharing your... Would anyone like a common agenda? I have a whole set. Oh, good. Thank you so much. Well, we're going to take a 15-minute break and then switch gears and get a presentation from joint fiscal about pensions generally, and as it relates to S42, the Divestment Bill. So why don't we, if Chris wants to be here at 225, let's try and get in here then, and we'll take 15 and try to get back in our seats at 225. Welcome back to the House Committee on Government Operations and Military Affairs. We're here on Tuesday, April 18th, and we're going to pick up our work on S42. So thanks, Chris, for joining us. And I've got a presentation that we should pull out on our devices. I'd like to introduce yourself for the record. Sure. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. My name is Chris Rupp from the Joint Fiscal Office. As you noted, I do have a brief slide deck posted under my name on today's date, and I'm not going to put my slides on the screen or anything, but it'd be helpful if you would sort of follow along and walk through it as I go. I'm not going to read word by word, but you are going to hear a lot of testimony on S42 in the days to come from people who are really in the weeds of investment management. You'll hear from lawyers. I am neither of those things. I know just enough to be dangerous. So I just wanted to put those caveats out there that my goal here is to sort of dip your toes in the water before throwing you straight into the deep end and introduce you a little bit to the topic. And give you some food for thought. And hopefully afterwards, you'll be able to have a pretty thoughtful and intelligent dialogue with the folks who are going to be lined up to testify on this bill after me. So on slide two, for newer members of the committee, I wanted to just refresh a little bit on how Vermont's pension systems are governed. Returning members of the committee heard about this ad nauseam in the last biennium when you all were developing Act 75, which created an expanded VPIC, spun VPIC off to be an independent entity and made a few other governance changes. But just to remind everybody, Vermont has three major defined benefit pension systems statewide. The CSRS, the CSRS for the teachers and the MERS for the municipals. It helps to just look at those middle letters. If you see the D, that means teacher. If you see the M, that means municipal. The state manages all three of those systems. But the state budget only funds the first two. The municipal system is funded by the participating members and municipal employers. So you'll typically, you know, you all in the legislature will typically focus a lot of energy on the first two systems and not quite as much on the MERS, but the MERS would be impacted by this legislation as well. So each of those three retirement systems serves different bodies or different bodies of membership, different units of government in the state, and they all have their own boards of trustees set in statute that vary by size. And you can see here, if you're looking at this online, there should be some live links that will tell you who's on the boards right now. You can also find that information on the state treasurer's website. The trustees are responsible for the general administration and the proper operation of the systems. And the state treasurer serves as a trustee on all three boards. And the state treasurer's office oversees really the day to day operations of the systems. They've got a unit over in their office, the retirement office. So whenever you are a member of the system and you're looking to retire, you go to the retirement office over at the treasury at the state treasurer's office to process your paperwork, questions answered, so on and so forth. There's this fourth entity up there, VPIC, the Vermont Pension Investment Commission. They invest the assets on behalf of those three retirement systems. VPIC is comprised of nine members, including the state treasurer. And you can see who they are here. But a key theme with all of these three trustee boards plus VPIC is that these retirement systems are governed by representatives of both the members of the systems as well as the participating employers of those systems. So whenever somebody wants to ask a lot of questions about what's going on with the retirement system, sometimes it's helpful to remind folks that labor and employers jointly make the decisions over those systems. And that is a commonly found model in the public sector nationwide. Slide three, something that is really important to highlight is, all right, what's you all's role in this process, the legislature. The legislature adopts the statutory changes to how the pension benefits are calculated. So the formula that set forth that will dictate how much I'll get into retirement many, many decades in the future is all set in statute by you all. You all also enact the statutes that govern how all of these systems are organized and governed. So you all did act 75 two years ago to revise that. If you wonder why a board of trustees has, you know, X number of members instead of Y number of members, well, because the legislature created the statute that way. The legislature will also create the amortization schedule and funding policy in statute. And probably most importantly, will appropriate the money to fund the annual employer contributions to the state employee and teacher pension systems, along with the appropriation authority to operate the retirement office and VPIC. So the retirement office and VPIC are not funded by the general fund. They're funded by assets from the retirement systems. So when you all pass the budget every year, that budget includes appropriation authority from those retirement systems to the treasurer's office and to VPIC. So they have the ability to cover their own costs, proportionate to the size of those various retirement systems that they serve. Something really important to keep in mind is what you don't do. You do not have responsibility over setting the actuarial assumptions. And you also do not pick and choose specific investments. You all created VPIC to invest those assets. So the obvious elephant in the room is why are we talking about fossil fuels investment from investments when we, the legislature cannot pick and choose specific investments? I mean, I'll respond. I couldn't take a stab at it. So VPIC is a creation of the legislature. So the legislature did delegate authority to VPIC. The legislature changes its mind or sharpens its thinking on issues all the time. Fair enough. But I think my point I'm trying to convey is there's not a group of legislators in a legislative committee in this building that sit around on a monthly basis with the investment consultant to figure out what to do in terms of money, moving money from one investment vehicle to another. You all have delegated that authority to VPIC. Okay. That's a little more specific than the legislature, which to me means the whole general example. And you do create, you, you create the governance and you, you can set policy into statute, but in the day to day mechanics are running the, the operation. VPIC manages that money. So slide four, VPIC, this gives you an overview of who's on VPIC and what their powers and duties are. You have a sitting VPIC member at the table right now who can weigh in and color in the lines and correct me and keep me honest. But among other things, VPIC has the authority to develop the investment strategy, hire the investment consultant, develop the policies and procedures for investing money. They set the actuarial assumptions for the investment rate of return, the inflation rate, and the smoothing method. Um, annually collect, conduct an asset allocation study, an asset and liability studies to be performed every three years, and the issue annual reports, which are a fascinating read. Um, VPIC has nine members and four alternates, and they sort of staggered for your terms. So, um, there is a term limit that it said in statute that the members and the alternates, there should be alternates, not alternatives, um, shall serve not more than three terms and can only be removed for cause. The chair position who is chosen by the other eight members has a limit of 20 years of service. And the law does have some experience requirements in it as well. So the chair must have the financial investment leadership and governance expertise as required by policies adopted by the commission. What I did not put on here is that statute also requires the governor's two appointees to be financial experts who are independent of the system. So slide five, I want to touch on this concept of fiduciary responsibility. And to really dive into the weeds, you'll want to talk to the folks at VPIC and the lawyers who will be testifying after me. But I wanted to just put this concept in your brains because it's a really, really important concept in the institutional investing world, or really in any world where somebody is managing money on behalf of somebody else, like a trust or something like that. And really the pension systems are a trust. On fiduciary responsibility is a very high standard of care that requires you to act in the best interest of the plan participants. What that really means is you cannot act in your own self interest. You have to act in what is in the best financial interest for the people who benefit from that trust you oversee. The statute also says that VPIC shall strive to maximize total return on investment within acceptable levels of risk for public retirement systems in accordance with the standards of care established by the prudent investor role. What is the prudent investor role? This is a concept that is enacted in most, if not all, states that really lays out what this concept of fiduciary responsibility really means when it comes to managing assets and investments on behalf of somebody else. So VPIC, since they're covered by the prudent investor role, they need to manage and invest those assets as a prudent investor would by considering the purpose terms, distribution requirements, and other circumstances of the trust. The trustee shall exercise reasonable care, skill, and caution. What this really gets down to is this concept of due diligence and being thoughtful, not being arbitrary in your decision making. The decisions that respect individual assets shouldn't be viewed just in isolation, but in the context of the whole trust portfolio and as part of an overall investment strategy, having risk and return objectives reasonably suited to the trust. So a trustee shall consider lots of factors including what's going on with the general state of the economy, what are the possible impacts of inflation or deflation, tax consequences, the total return from income and the appreciation of capital, your liquidity needs, the regularity of income, the preservation or appreciation of capital. What this all really gets down to is when we talk about pensions, a lot of times people will say, how come the pensions only return x percent return on their investments when my money returned y percent on investments? In layman's terms, we as individuals will invest our money differently than an institutional investor like Deepak would. So we all can tailor our strategies to our own individual tastes for risk, for volatility, for things like when we're going to need the money. So I'm in my mid-30s. My measly retirement savings is not going to be needed for a long time. I can afford a lot more risk now than say an individual, an institutional investor could, who is paying out hundreds of millions of dollars in benefits every year. And that's what's going on with the pension systems. So I can weather some really severe ups and downs in my tiny little portfolio because I don't need that money right now and I've got a long time horizon. But when you're investing a lot of money in systems that are paying out large sums every year and benefits, your risk, your appetite for risk is very, very different. So it becomes much less advantageous to try to get the best possible return you can in any one year. And it tends to be much more desirable to have a steadier return that has less volatility from year to year because when you're paying out so much cash in benefits, you just can't weather a massive double digit negative return in one year the way somebody who's 36 and doesn't need their money for 30 years can. So that's just something to keep in your minds that this is an entirely different world than what we all may be used to when we're looking at our 401Ks or our Roth IRA statements. So slide six sort of gets to how institutional entities like VPIC often manage their investments. They develop an investment strategy and that strategy considers among other factors the concepts of diversification and balance, your risk management. You know, you want to capture gains when the market's doing well, but also protect yourself from downside, from losses and from inflation. You want to minimize extreme volatility that can happen from year to year if all of your eggs are in one basket. And again, liquidity needs. How much money do you need to pay out in benefits? Because you need to manage that as part of your overall strategy of where you put your money. So there's a little box over here that gives you some sense of magnitude of how much money is in the portfolio as of the end of FY22. So it's a little over five billion. I think the number's probably a little more now, but the biggest systems are the state employees and the teachers and the municipal system is significantly smaller. You're going to see some words throughout this conversation that investors speak, but I wanted to translate it into layman's terms that, you know, when you see the concepts of equities and fixed income, what people are really talking about are typically stocks and bonds. But that's not all that pensioners invest in. They'll also invest in things like private equity and credit, real estate, commodities, all kinds of other products out there. It's really not just a list of stock holdings. It's much more complicated than that. VPEC on a regular basis will review their assets and their investment strategy, and they'll periodically make rebalance things if market conditions evolve and the thinking sharpens and global economic situations change. But something to keep in mind is that, you know, when you're talking about institutional investing like this, you're really not looking at short-term speculation. The really, really, I can't underscore this enough. The goal here is to prudently and responsibly manage the investments with the best interest of the members of the retirement system in mind. We hear a lot about the assumed rate of return. The assumed rate of return is a long-term assumption. It's informed by economic conditions and expectations for future market performance. It's not like the tail wags the dog. It's not like VPEC sets the assumed rate of return and then plays around with the investment strategy to try to find a way to hit that number from year to year. They almost work in parallel, but on separate tracks where, you know, the assumed rate of return is informed by things like long-term capital market assumptions on the state of the economy, expectations about inflation and interest rates and things like that. And hopefully that portfolio over time will generate a real return that is pretty close, if not better than that assumed rate of return. But they're sort of parallel decision points that go into that process. So slide seven just gives you a little overview of what the current investment strategy is. So whenever you look at these target percentages, they should add up to 100. And the way to view this is VPEC says that their goal is to have 29% of their assets invested in what's called global equities. That would be worldwide stock holdings and things of that nature. This allocation strategy really aims to maximize the total return on your investment, but again within those acceptable standards of risk subject to those diversity and liquidity constraints and interests. So you're going to see here that 71% of the assets are what's called growth assets, but you've also got some assets that are really intended to protect you from economic downturns and from inflation. So when I'm talking about trying to gain, you know, benefit from market growth, protect yourself from downside risk, this is where you see that. You know, you don't put all of your investments in one basket. You try to protect yourself from possible losses and also try to make sure you've got the ability that when the market's going up, you're benefiting from some of those gains. You will hear more from this from VPEC whenever they're in, but something to keep in mind is whenever we talk about these investments, we're not really talking about a giant list of individual stock holdings that you can just look down and trade, you know, with a matter of a few mouse clicks. Much of the portfolio is invested in index funds and mutual funds, and those are vehicles that really aim to track the broader economic market trends at very low administrative costs. So untangling all of the assets that are inside some of those index and mutual funds can be a little more complicated than it may seem on its surface. Another consideration you'll hear from VPEC when they're in is around private equity and private credit. Private equity and private credit are much more complicated in that they tend to be our higher performing assets, but it's because they're illiquid. We get an illiquidity premium as a result of it. So it's not like logging on to your brokerage account and being able to buy and sell your position in a private equity investment in a day of trading. These are long term partnership agreements that the funds enter into. They've got contractual agreements. It can take many years to unwind those investments. And in a way, you're kind of locking up your money for what can be a pretty long period of time in these private investments, but on the other hand, you tend to get a much better return on them. Something that I got to but I want to underscore is direct holdings, meaning a list of 18 shares in Prescript's widget company. Direct holdings tend to be a pretty small part of the VPEC portfolio. Most of their assets are invested in these index or mutual funds or in private investment vehicles. Slide eight, this talks a little bit with some pretty charts from NASRA, the National Association of State Retirement Administrators, about the trends in the assumed rate of return over time. So ever since the Great Recession, public sector pension systems have been gradually lowering their assumed rates of return because the market conditions have evolved. Expectations for investment gains in the future have evolved. Interest rates are lower than they were 20 or 30 years ago. Whenever you went back 30 years ago, it'd be really easy to earn a 7% rate of return by basically just putting your money in a savings account. And it is getting harder and harder just based on the way economic conditions have trended to hit 7% every year. So you'll see in these charts that we are not alone in lowering our assumed rate of return over time nationwide. Pension plans have been doing that. Most recently, our rate went from 7.5 to 7% back in 2020. We're right in the median of major plans, but you're starting to see that the average is creeping down below 7% a little bit. These assumptions have typically been reviewed and, you know, if needed adjusted following the completion of an experience study. The next experience study is going to be due in the not too distant future. It's going to be due after the close of the current fiscal year. So will that upcoming experience study lead to another revision in the assumed rate of return? It is a question to keep in your eyes. Slide nine, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on, but folks who love pensions have seen this quilt chart a lot. This highlights in one graphic why diversification is important. Every single one of these little colored blocks shows you a different index that tracks a different asset class. And they are ranked from year with the best performing one of the year at the top and the worst performing one at the bottom. The obvious thing here is that from year to year there is great fluctuation in which asset classes perform better than others. So this is a really useful picture, I think, to just underscore the point of why institutional investors don't put all their money in one type of investment, because in any given year you're going to have different winners and different losers. So I'm not going to go into the weeks of talking about the concept of correlation, but that just gets to this idea of, you know, you don't want all of your investments to be moving in lockstep in the same direction all the time. You know, if something's going up, you might want something that's not going as quite a rapid of a rate. If you know you've got one thing that could very well go down in an economic downturn, domestic equities, you want to have something that's going to gain a modest positive return to try to counter that out a little bit. Try10 just shows you the variation in investment performance years. I think you may have seen this part before. But in 2022, we were not alone that we had a rough year. And the actuaries calculate investment performance slightly differently than VPIC does. It's a different methodology that, you know, it's a different denominator, but you'll sometimes see a slightly different value in how the data is presented, but the trends are the same. That, you know, 2021 was the strongest investment year since, I think, 1983. And the systems just, you know, they were well, well over 20%. And then in 2022, the systems saw negative investment performance. They actually saw losses. So this is why we smooth the investment gains and losses over a five-year period is so for you all, when you try to figure out how to budget for the ADEC from year to year, you're not having that pendulum swing quite so wildly. So that black line on that chart shows you the smoothed out value. And that eliminates some of that, or I should say it ameliorates some of that year to year volatility when it comes to figuring out what your payments are going to be every year. But again, as performance is never a predictor of future results, the little chart at the bottom of the slide shows you what the most recent 5, 10, 15, and 20-year performance statistics have been. You know, our some rate of return is 7%. The caveat I just mentioned, a lot of these numbers are not too far off from 7%, depending on which timeframe you look at. So slide 11, now I'm going to actually talk about the bill you all are going to take testimony on. Slide 11 just goes over the elements of S42. And I did put a fiscal note on the legislative web page if you look up the bill number. And I'm not going to read that today, but this really does give you the contents of what's in it. That the stated legislative intent of the bill is for VPIC consistent with sound fiduciary practice and subject to any exceptions to divest the holdings of Vermont's three statewide retirement systems from the fossil fuel industry. The legislative intent is also for VPIC to establish a long-term goal to divest from any private investments that's private equity or private credit that contain assets in the fossil fuel industry on or before the end of 2040 if VPIC determines that such divestment is consistent with sound fiduciary practice. And I put this in red. This is an addition from the Senate Appropriations Committee that as part of their decision-making process, VPIC must include consideration of any expected increased funding requirements to the ADAC and administrative costs as part of its divestment plans. So the language in the law and the bill rather would require VPIC to honor before December 15th of this year, review the carbon footprint of the holdings of the three retirement systems and submit a report to the legislature by February of next year. The bill does not define a fossil fuel company. Instead it directs VPIC to develop a definition of fossil fuel company as part of its effort at reviewing the carbon footprint of the portfolio. The bill would also direct VPIC to develop a plan, you know, once they do the inventory and they see what's in the holdings, develop a plan to divest any holdings identified in that review honor before December 31st, 2030. VPIC shall submit this divestment plan by September 1st of 2024. The plan shall consider or shall include consideration of the state's long-term goal of divesting the assets that are exceptions to the plan honor before December 31st, 2040. And VPIC must develop this plan in accordance with sound investment criteria and consistent with fiduciary obligations. So I mentioned exceptions. The bill makes some very specific carve outs from the December 31st, 2030 divestment deadline. Those exceptions are de minimis exposure to fossil fuel companies, stock securities and obligations. And the bill defines de minimis exposure as being less than 2% of the aggregate amount of all the pension funds investors. So it's not any one investment vehicle, whether or not fossil fuels are less than 2% of that investment vehicle is the fossil fuel surprise less than 2% of the holdings of the entire portfolio for the three retirement systems. The law also explicitly carves out private investments that contain fossil fuel company stock securities and obligations. So the bullet point up above direct VPIC to to consider the long term goal of divesting fossil fuels from those private assets for those private investment vehicles. But it doesn't explicitly require them to do so. There is no explicit carve out for index funds and mutual funds. So VPIC under the way about the law is currently the bill is currently worded. VPIC would be directed to review their index funds and mutual funds and divest the fossil fuel exposure by the end of 2030. There are also some annual reporting requirements on VPIC that beginning on January 15th of 2025, VPIC would be submit would be required to submit reports every year on the progress of their divestment activities. So those reports would include updates on the composition and the percentage of exposure of any investments covered by the exceptions from the divestment plan and the summary of any fee impacts or instances of excessive charges or demands related to re-balancing the funds consistent with implementing the bill. The annual reports would cease to be required after January 15th of 2040. And I think I had a bullet point here that was cut off, but there would be a final, final report due in 2041 that sort of sums up the total the, you know, once the divestment work was done, it was sort of the final requirement to to terminate the annual reporting and say, all right, this is where we are now. So slide 12, this talks a little bit in the possible fiscal, some known impossible fiscal implications. Divestment is a policy decision, but it could have fiscal implications depending on how it is pursued by VPIC. We do know from a testimony that there are a couple known costs of S-42. One would be performing the asset review and divestment plan. So that's sort of first step of directing VPIC to take a look at their holdings, develop that definition of the fossil fuel company. The bill as introduced had a $100,000 general fund appropriation to VPIC in FY24 to fund this. The Senate Appropriations Committee removed that appropriation. It is not that they are throwing cold water on the idea of funding it, but the way they construct the budget is when you've got a lot of one-time appropriations floating out in different bills and then make it through the Appropriations Committee. As a matter, of course, they typically amend out the appropriations and put them on their list to then make decisions on what to fund in the big bill, because otherwise it would be extremely difficult to balance the budget when you're tracking little one-time appropriations in all these little bills. So it is it was removed and put on the appropriations list for them to consider as they develop the big bill. There is also, and this continues to be in the bill, it was not scrubbed out, there's the appropriation to add a new position at VPIC. The expected annual cost of that new position would be about $127,000. It's all in, not just salary. Anytime you see a number like that, assume that's not just salary. It's the benefits, it's the whole nine yards, and that cost would be paid proportionately from the three retirement systems. So those are the known fiscal implications. There are some unknown implications too. What actions will VPIC take to comply with the intent? What impact will those actions have on future administrative costs and investment performance? And as I mentioned earlier, the bill does require VPIC to consider, explicitly requires them to consider the impacts to the ADAC and administrative costs as part of its divestment decisions. So below are two charts that just show the range of possible fiscal impacts for investment performance or ADAC changing. I am being very, very clear that I am not presuming that divestment is going to lead to poorer investment performance or to inherently changing the assumed rate of return. I think what will happen will depend on what decisions VPIC makes to comply with the stated legislative intent of this bill. So I don't want anybody to read this or what I'm saying and say, you know, this bill is automatically going to lead to these impacts. What I'm doing here is raising, since it was raised in testimony, the range of possible impacts that could happen if decisions made by VPIC to comply with the intent lead to investment performance or the ADAC being adversely impacted. So if the assumed rate of return is lowered from 7 to 6.5 percent in response to either higher expected overall management costs or more limited future investment expectations, the ADAC would increase by approximately 25.2 million for visas and 29.2 million for the teachers system. Those costs would recur annually growing in 3 percent future increments until 2038. If investment performance, net investment performance, if your actual performance were to deviate from the current 7 percent assumption by 1 percent either way, so if you did 6 or 8 instead of 7, the ADAC would be impacted by approximately 4.3 million for the two systems. So it's just over 2 million per system. So that's just to give you a sense of, it's one thing to talk about bullet points and what is, but these ranges of possible risk were costed out by the actuaries so relevant for any range of decision making, but it's sometimes good to get your head around just the magnitude of if numbers change one way or the other. What does that mean in terms of your future ADAC funding requirements? So slide 13 just leaves you with some considerations as you approach this policy decision and you hear testimony on this legislation in the next couple days. There's two strategies out there, engagement and divestment. You'll hear about those. Engagement is not ticking your money out of an investment but continue, but is literally what it sounds like. It is you are the investor and you are engaging with the management of the company that you're invested in to try to get them to change their practices. There is a lot of engagement work happening at Depick right now. Engagement is happening all over the country in major pension systems as a way of accomplishing people's various policy goals beyond just trying to make the most money from year to year. Another question out there, so it's for you all to sort out what is the most effective strategy to accomplish your policy goals? Engagement, divestment, is there a way to have a combination of both? It sort of goes without saying that if you divest you can't really engage because you're no longer a shareholder with sort of skin in the game to go to the company and say, hey, you, I want you to change how you do business. Another question which we got to early in the slides was who should decide investment policy and how? Is there a conflict between the fiduciary duties of EPIC versus legislative driven policy? That's for you all to sort out. Understanding the current exposure in the portfolio, we can sit around and talk about divestment, but what are we really talking about? How do we define fossil fuel companies? How much of, how much exposure is in the portfolio and in what types of investment vehicles? And what are the fiscal implications of divesting those assets? Those are all very relevant and important questions that I don't think we have answers to right now until VPIC really would do a deep dive into the first step of what would be required in the bill, which is to really review the assets. Divesting is complicated. I have heard proponents of divestment make the argument that it's as simple as looking at what's in the portfolio and selling it and that cannot be further from the truth. How do you deal with exposure within index funds and mutual funds that track broader markets at low costs? So if you have shares in a index fund that tracks the S&P 500, you're going to have some exposure to fossil fuel companies in there. And that is not just unique to the S&P 500. That's in all sorts of large, broad index funds that are meant to track an economy or a broad market sector. And thinking about how to deal with the private investments, the private equity and the private credit, these typically perform better than your other investments because of that illiquity premium. But they're pretty difficult to unwind. And it's not something that can just log into their brokerage account and get themselves out of. It's going to take a long run away and some thoughtful discussion on what divestment means for those private investments. And it all really comes down to what the costs and everything else that we don't know right now is all ultimately going to come down to what actions VPIC takes to comply with the legislative intent of this bill. So what fiscal impacts will those actions have? What are the administrative costs associated with having to develop an alternative investment index as opposed to maybe a super low-cost, passively managed index that we're currently in? This whole issue of the private investments is going to be a topic of conversation. And I think one of the concerns and I think one of the the intense behind carving out the private investments in an explicit exception is if you're going to lock up your money for a long period of time, you want to do it with a money manager that is going to be performing really, really well. It doesn't really pay off to lock up your money in private investments that aren't going to deliver you a really strong return. But we're not real big as a state. Our investments aren't real big. And I think there's a legitimate concern and question as to whether having an overly restrict, not even overly, any sort of restrictive statutory investment policy, does that hurt our ability to place private investments with top tier managers? Not that those top tier managers would inherently be taking our money and investing them in fossil fuels, but the question is, is it worth them changing their standard terms in their agreements to accommodate our relatively small investment and our restrictive investment statute where you could just have somebody else invest their money as well. And the money manager wouldn't have to change any of their standard terms. I think that was one of the considerations why the private investments were explicitly carved out of the scope of this bill. So you just want to always keep in mind when we think about things like administrative costs or investment performance that if anything leads to spending more for your money managers or lowering your net investment gains that when all else is equal is going to lead to higher employer pension costs in the future through higher ADEC. I think that is why the bill explicitly directs VPEC to consider those impacts when making decisions on how to comply with the intent of this bill. Another question that's just sort of hanging out there is the S42 is specific to the three state pension systems, but what about other state funds? What about the OPEC funds? Are they worth considering one way or the other? It's just a topic of conversation. So that's all I have to sort of wet your appetites on this fun subject. And you'll have plenty of opportunities to really get under the hood with folks from the Treasurer's Office in the days ahead to really ask your really, really detailed questions. But if you have anything I can answer now, I'm more than happy to. Chris, thank you for putting this together. It's a really good grounding document for what are the questions we should be asking about? What do the pension funds look like? Who governs them? Representative Hooper or Frank Roberts? So you say we're going to get a lay of the land at the end of this this leader? Experience study. The experience study. Yeah, so the experience study will look at all of our actuarial assumptions and basically look at what's happened since the last study. How did that compare to our assumptions? What do we think is going to happen in the future? And based on all of that information, do we need to revise our assumptions? Do you have any predictions? None that I'm going to make on it this way. I think there are some assumptions that I think are very right to be revisited because I think we're in a different economic landscape now than we were four years ago. I'm not going to put my finger on the scale by any means. That is not my role. It would be inappropriate for me to do so. And if I was able to accurately predict the future, I'd be very wealthy right now and I would not be sitting here. And you know, the pensions would be fully funded as well. When we address Representative Hooper Randolph, when we talk about assumptions, we're not only talking about money. We're talking about people how long they're going to live. We're going to stay sex, boom, boom, boom. It's a plethora of variables that impact how much it's going to cost us in the future, keeping always in mind that when we talk about the pension fund, we're talking about 30 years from the date that you're talking about has what we're planning for, sort of. That's why an experienced study gets thrown around a lot, but that's why it costs us a lot of money. And as an aside, when we do some of these things, Steve generously says you can take the money to do it out of the retirement fund, which effectively cuts your shoe laces a little bit instead of paying for themselves. An experienced study, they're on the Treasurer's website. They are not as boring as they sound. The actuaries who, I think they deserve the pay they get because it's a very difficult job they do, but they do a nice job sort of distilling this into a slide deck with a lot of graphics that will show you sort of, all right, what was the assumption? What was the experience? Was there a recommended change based on that? So it kind of takes all these words and puts them into pictures that helps you get your head around what we're really talking about here. But I'm sure it's don't speak English. And most of the assumptions they come up with are counterintuitive from you. Thank you for a good life. So the more they talk to us, you understand. So I found when we were really digging into actual analysis over the last couple years of potential that when you start to think about policy decisions that we might make and how that would affect things like, when does the teacher decide to retire in their career, for instance, that that one variable could completely change the direction of when funds are walking out and when funds are getting invested. And so a lot of this very complicated thing and a lot of others taking control on the investment side, but also on a policy side for us. And so if we do the policy work, we have to keep this stuff in mind as we're making decisions. I was just wondering if there had been any more discussion around different ways to achieve this? Because looking at the who should decide investment policy and how like B.C.R.E. duties of BPEC versus legislative, is has anyone discussed or is there another option to directly pick two decisions based on our goals for climate change instead of going this through where we just tell them to divest? What is that worth exploring? I think it's a great question. And I don't think it's a question that Chris should have to try to answer. My answer would be that is the question. Yeah. So I know we I had scheduled for us and I want to I know we have our next couple of witnesses on a completely different bill in the room. But what I would say, Representative Nugent, is that I think that's a really excellent question. And it gets at BPEC's job is to make fiduciary decisions. And we all I think can can look at the fact that the world is changing and realize we don't want to be investing in certain things. And at the same time, you know, the contribution to the economy of building a building for a school and building a building for a prison could be exactly the same. Right. But we all know that they have very different outcomes in the real world in terms of where we decide to invest our dollars. And so it's similar to that kind of philosophical thing. It's sometimes we want to sort of put our fingers on scale to Chris's point and say we really want to make sure we're not investing our dollars in this thing because that we have this policy reason. And that's what the Senate sent over to us with S 42. And one of my last comment is you can look at my slides and my goal and what is the other is a pretty agnostic to rules. I think we can apply what I'm saying to any type of investment thinking about. I mean, the concerns are the concerns and the issues that are universal in this conversation. It's really not unique to fossil fuels. So you can know if you don't want to invest in widgets, I mean, it's going to be the same considerations. Just to clarify, I guess I'm wondering the specific fiduciary duties of the if that if you can add something in there that one of the duties would be to invest in things that are counter to our values or goals. Yeah, I see a representative for Brass and shaking his head. I think what's tricky about that is then you're asking them to define what's coming to our our policy values as opposed to us telling them explicitly this is what we want you to do or not do. And Chris has given us some very thoughtful things to consider as we can look at this particular set of policy questions. Sort of like if you go too far down that road, you become a fiduciary but system yourself and take on responsibilities and then we'll notice one time. So, Chris, thank you. This is a great foundation for the conversations we're going to have over the next, well, especially tomorrow with Mr. Galaca coming in and the treasurer. So thanks everybody for just jumping from topic to topic today. I have a request to have a couple of us with some experience that happened to be in the building in law enforcement specifically Sheriff's Office has come in and give us some testimony on a 17. Is there a specific order that Representative Oliver and that's great. And Mr. Howard, are you going to testify this afternoon as well? Yes. Okay, great. Representative Oliver, please take that. Thanks for joining us this afternoon. Thank you and everyone else. With introduction, I'm Oliver. I'm not Representative Oliver right now, I guess as what we would define my other title to be is a State Transport Deputy. I have been a State Transport Deputy for I've been going into my 25th year. I have worked in the Sheriff's Department since 1988 full time. I worked under Senator Norris's command of the Franklin County Sheriff's Office during this whole tenure and was his Chief Deputy when he retired. And I left at the same time and went down to Chittenden County. I wanted a different change of pace. Explain a little bit about what a State Transport Deputy did is it's a little bit muddy at times, depending on who you talk to. We are deputized by the particular Sheriff's Office. However, our pay and benefits come from the state of Vermont. Our primary goal is prison transportation, extraditions, anything having to do with anybody involved in the judicial process until they become fully committed to the Commissioner of Corrections. And then we have had some issues regarding, okay, who's really our employer? And this is where it kind of gets weird. So the Sheriff oversees and the Department of Sheriff's and State's Determinators also have a vested interest in us. And recently we have become by statute employees of the State's Attorney's and Sheriff's with oversight by like our immediate supervisor. And when you have 14 different environments, it got a little bit crazy like, okay, so these people are handled this way, this is how they're paid. Other people receive different, okay, you work these hours. The schedules were crazy and the compensation was not always done exactly the same way. So we enlisted that for the union and we are now hammering out our first contract. I'm the Chair of the Bargaining Committee with the VSEA for the State Deputies. And there's a couple things in this bill that we've identified that we have some like vested interest in. We are in full support of the Sheriff's and not necessarily what F-17 was. There's a one particular item in the F-17 about shall provide court security. That's a very difficult thing these days with lack of employment or lack of employees. However, the VSEA is looking to suggest or provide hopefully 25 more positions so that we can fulfill a court function on top of the transport function. They may be separated, but at some point it may be good to integrate the two as one and still be a state union employee just come from the state of Vermont. Or I don't see how it could happen instantaneously without supplementing some sheriff's deputies alongside with the state positions until it becomes fully functional if that's possible. Another thing too as as union employees we can see some of the deficiencies that you might find it within a sheriff or something sheriff's office that might be might be going wrong differences between departments policies procedures. We think it would be a good idea if if you do continue with the oversight committee or the study committee we would like to have a member on a VSEA union state deputy member if that's at all possible. There's a few other things I could I could go through and go item by item but I'd rather take questions but there's one that jumping out at me right now is regarding restraining orders and callbacks to receive property that's the one that really jumps out. And I think it was because it was they figured that we were charging victims for the service. I've never seen a victim charged for that service. It's usually the defendant that would particularly on a contract. They're the ones that need the service. And typically the service is almost always avoided by finding a mutual friend relative acquaintance between the two that can agree to make this happen without our involvement with any police department. They should be able to do that and it should fall under the jurisdiction of the department where that particular incident is taking place. If it's in Burlington then maybe Burlington Police Department can do this escort to mandate that the sheriff just arbitrarily are going to have to do this without receiving any funding. It's not going to work. Any questions? My first one would be on that score. We had heard some testimony. Thank you, Representative Hall. We had heard some testimony that there are there seems to be a diversity of approaches to how the one sheriff specifically asked to do that work around the use orders for property. We found property that sometimes sheriff's offices are charging and yes and then maybe in the in the two sheriff's offices of the two counties where you have experience that was not the case but in other places we had heard some testimony. So I think that's why I said I might have put that in there. But let's move for that. Representative Morriganian, Representative. Thanks. The work and family services have been part of situations. People wanted to go back and we were always advised to take mode first with us that this is a flashpoint when someone's leaving. Are you suggesting they shouldn't have? No, I'm not suggesting that. I'm suggesting that whoever covers that particular area that you need to go to, whichever law enforcement provides. I thought I heard you say you should have family or friends. No, well, lots of times so long as you keep the two parties that are not getting along apart and one can get mutually agreed upon person to go and do it. It's often very beneficial for everyone. We haven't had any problems with that particular suggestion. If they don't want to have it happen, they just flat out say no. We find so many to go into the escort. Thanks for that clarification. So your testimony was around the supervision of courthouse as opposed to the transport that combining them would allow for more flexibility and since their classified state positions probably consistency and people staying for a career rather than I can expand upon that a little bit, I think. Well, right now, there's 25 of us state deputies. There are 25 slots. I think there's 18 currently active somewhere around there. So we would need to have a first replenish that because we are heard it's very difficult to get everybody around. I hear about it every day being out. I'll leave the lapses down here. We would like to backfill those 25 and get 25 more. The only thing we need to run into the only problem we could run into really is if a state deputy is assigned to a courthouse duty and we're not fully on staff, they can't transport. So obviously I can assist a courthouse with court security, but for transport comes in. I'm going to have to complete that until everything's fully staffed right now. If I don't have anything happening, I typically go to a courthouse and help out. I'll be either in Edward Costello courthouse or over in civil courthouse. Until I get work, you know, transport. The question hearing that you've been in the courthouse in Wyndham County where we are like a transition where the sheriff said what you're offering does doesn't cover my costs. So they brought in private security. The challenge with that is putting back the family service work. If someone had to be put to custody, they can't do that. So we have to call whoever could call one out to whoever could come for a state police, private or police. So I'll put you on the spot and say, does it make sense more to have sheriff deputies there combination or private, which are usually less expensive? I don't know what the private company's charge. I know what some of the sheriff's charge the service of having at least a level two to level three certified officer in the building is good because you can have all kinds of things happen in there where they can immediately make an arrest and intervene, not just a firearm for protection purposes. So I would advocate for law enforcement, a blended service sometimes work. That's what they have right now at the courthouse, civil courthouse in Burlington because we're so sure it's that. Thank you. Representative Oliver, I just have one question. You said backfill 25, that's in addition to the 25 more deputies that you would need. We need seven right now, I think to complete the first load and then 25 more would be the goal. I'm not sure how that would all work out if the sheriff would be going to be responsible for looking for the employee to escape and do the hiring. I have no idea. But that's the number of employees that you're currently. It's about seven. I believe they are starting to reauthorize some replacement people. We were a little fired during cold and the now things are going full blast again for us. Great. Thank you. Any other questions for Representative Oliver? Thank you. Thank you. Senator North. Yes. Thanks for having me, Chairman Hersey and members of the fitting. If I'm in here, I'm not in the other gov ops. Listen to the testimony. So for the record, Senator Robert Norris, Franklin district, I'm sure you've heard a lot of testimony already. So I'll try to keep it brief. I've got a couple of few issues here that I'm concerned about on S 17. A little history of old disclosure. I was the sheriff in Franklin County for 20 years, retiring on January 31st of 2019. Before I go any further, let me emphasize the fact that Vermont sheriffs, ironically, are not state employees. We're paid by the state salary benefits and retirement, such as I think most members here would exception of the benefit package. Okay, we work for the state, but you're not officially state employees. The office of sheriff is a county function. All employees of the office are considered county employees who are eligible for state retirement at the sheriff. He or she wants to put them into the retirement program, with the exception of some counties, one state, paid deputy, or up to six, I believe, in Chairman County. Now, having said that, you've heard a lot of testimony. I'm not sure more I can add, but in looking at S 17, which came out of the Senate gov ops, I'm familiar with, I agree with some, but I do have some concerns about certain sections. Now, this bill started out as a quick five page bill. I might have is blossom to a 17 page bill. I'm sure you all don't do that here in house of God box comes in at five, goes out at five or four, right? Well, having said that, my concerns are starting with section two, VSA 290. And most of these concerns and everything that you hear most of you can find in title 24 under VSA 290 has all to do to share office by statute under section two of VSA 290 10 B. Makes a reference to an auditor or does a name you have at any time examine the books, records, et cetera, in the sheriff's office. Now, presently, well, not presently, I've been out for four years, the auditor would always do an audit of the sheriff's office books every other year. Seven counties would be one year, the other seven counties for the other year, but jobs had was referred to as a compilation on the off here. So you always were set to go for the following year. During that audit, you, you were charged accordingly, I believe it was broken into thirds county, yourself and the state had to do the mandatory audit. All the way this section reads, it clearly states that the auditor can come at any point in time and request an audit of the books. Now, having said that, I don't mind the artist coming in and looking at my books when I was there, I think it makes a better office of us, a better entity of us. I look forward to their their expertise and their opinions as to where the weaknesses were within our facility. However, having said that, it is time consuming. It does take away from certain personnel within the office because they have to be on standby to provide certain documents for the audit. But the way that the bill is presently written, technically, they could ask for an audit every month. It's still bill accordingly, according to the title that it was, that it was written under. That's just not feasible for a sheriff's office or anybody else. I don't see a problem with simply maintaining that their current structure, that's within the sheriff's offices. But the way this is written, I'm not sure why it's written this way to be quite honest on a monthly audit. A second section is section five, 24 VSA 291, which refers to the 5% fee. Now, according to the auditor of accounts office, we took testimony that in 1991, evidently, the sheriffs approached legislators down here in Montpelier and they were looking for compensation. Well, I think the legislators said, well, you know, take 15%. This is what I was told now, but the auditor of accounts office said, no, it took 5%. They allowed them to take 5% in 1991. So this is a legislature told them to do that in 1991. They have done nothing wrong with the 5% they've been taken. And every time that you take your 5%, you have to go to certain municipalities, any contract that you take it from, it has to be specified in the contract. It has to be the cost of the contract. And using a town first, since the town board has to vote on it, put it before the voters, they have to, it's fully transparent. No one's hiding nothing. It's in the contract by law, it has to be in the contract. So to remove the 5%, there's nothing that I personally believe does nothing then I say hand down punitive measures to sheriffs for doing nothing more than following the law. If you remove 5% from their ability to take from a contract or whatever, is that going to make them a better sheriff or a worse sheriff? I don't think so. They're doing nothing more than following the law, the law that was presented to them back in 1991. Now, of course, nowadays there's much more need for law enforcement coverage throughout the state of Vermont. So now their contracts may be larger if in fact they can find a person now to fulfill these positions, which obviously seems to be a strain throughout the state. But I guess I had a hard time following the 5%. And I know that the Senate appropriation made some serious changes to that, which I thank them for obviously. So they made some changes to it, but I just don't see the need to mess with the 5%, which is set by statute. They've done nothing else. I'm going to give me an example as to where they obviously violated any statute in reference to 5% statewide. Section 724, VSA 293, providing a minimum of one deputy law enforcement officer for each county. Well, in Franklin County, and I'll speak from experience, we had two courthouses, I also had three full-time individuals there. I had two door screeners and the Superior Court, Criminal Superior Court, I'd have referred to as a rover. But at any point in time, I could have anywhere some six deputies into the courts depending on how many they requested. We got an environmental court, we've got family courts, we got courtrooms that set up in the background as far as judiciary courts are concerned, so and so forth. But I guess my recommendation there would be, and it'd be an expensive project, mind you, but at some point in time, if in fact President Statue says that a sheriff may contract with the court of minister's office. 17 says they shall. Well, if you're going to put that requirement on them, you need to make sure that they shall hire appropriate workers to work with them as court systems, give them the pay and give them the benefits. I know we're short of people right now from cashiers to law enforcement officers throughout the state, I realize that, but you have to allow them to at least start implementing the procedure to put full-time law enforcement officers in these positions because per diems, as they're referred to, part-time officers, we have no control over them, or I had no control over them back in the day. They're available, they're not available. That's all there is to it. And you can't make them come in, they say I'm not available. I mean, there's nothing to do about it. But a full-time law enforcement officer with the credentials that comes along with it is something that we have to be looking at. Per diems should be used to backfill positions such as vacations, sick times, whatever else, but not being in there on a full-time basis. Well, one thing that they did overlook in S-17, which I personally would like to see not into, we're talking about this is a sheriff's reform. This is oversight of the sheriff's office. I can give you several examples, but I'll start with Franklin Kennedy because I'm more familiar with that. In the November election, when a sheriff is elected, okay, in my particular case, I was fortunate enough to come out victorious over the incumbent, 12-year incumbent. That wasn't allowed in that office until February 1. And I can assure you that back in the day when sheriffs left, they'd take a lot of things with them because they could. Nobody looked at it any differently back then. Today, you can't expect to go in and run a county facility and have it decimated by the time you come into office on February 1. And a lot of the examples that you've been listening to and hearing about, I came into office on February 1, and my clerk was sitting there, my bookkeeper, he says, I got good news and I got bad news. I said, well, let's start with the bad news. He said the bad news is, we're over $70,000 in debt. You got a 24-by-7 jail you're trying to run. There's four people in there. You've got four cars in the back yard. The repo company's here to take the only one that runs. Another one runs, but it only has reverse on it. It was chaos. And oh, by the way, I had $747 in my check account. That's the bad news, okay? So you can't expect people to come into an office, a county office, and run this. So I think that the reforms are over the oversight, and there may be some people disagree with me, but I think that from the time that that person is elected, okay, and the incumbent is leaving, there needs to be some oversight in that office because who knows what they can do with it. And I know there's a section in the statute that says that, well, side judges or system judges will sign up on an expenditure or whatever else. And then within 15 days, then it's part of accounts office. Well, that's all they do, folks. That's the only 30 they have. They can't tell you how to spend your money, which you can spend it on. Oh, $15,000 is going for a new car, yeah? They have no yay or nay saying this, okay? So I think that we need to look at those three months. It was very precarious for three months that there's no one in the office besides that individual who may be leaving. And I don't know if she may be leaving with harder feelings, but it was cumbersome. It was somewhat challenging. I might say when I came into office, but the community surrounded me. They worked with me. They helped me out. I knew a lot of folks. They made it easier for me. There's a lot of suggestions made. And I said, no, I said, the people put me into office because they figured I can do this job. Let's just pull up the sleeves, wake up the milk and move forward. And that's what we did when I left office 20 years later, there was two cars in the air out of 21 or 22. That's still a payment song. Every pencil in the office was paid for. He had over six digits in the checking account. We had a Marine division. We had a snowmobile division. We had you name it. I mean, four out of five of the schools were covered by SROs. Okay, I know what you thought, sir, an SRO is not really relevant at this point in time, but we put the first SRO with the Mississippi Valley Union High School. That was the start of it. We came a long ways. We had two canines. We came a long ways on the program. And I got to tell you that to see the news, to see what's going on within the office now was somewhat disturbing, but I knew that upon leaving, I had no control over this. In order to maintain, I'd have to stay. And I said, you know, 20 years is enough. I think I'll just pull the plug and walk away and hope for the best. That's where we are at 17. I agree that there should be some oversight, but the five individual cases we're looking at, there's only one, two, I'm sorry, there's only one that's still in office. And then there's two that are looking at potential criminal charges. And the other three are gone. I mean, this. So we have to approach this as oversight, reform, or attunity. I don't want to approach this. I don't know how I approached it, but that's not either here or there because now it's in your hands. So having said that, I'm sure you must be just about time for a break here. So if you have any questions, I'd be more than happy to hear that. I waited for a break to get over here. I've got a bunch of hands up, sir. I'm going to sign over with you. Thanks for coming. Yep. The situation we had in Wyndham County, I am also concerned about this idea of having to put a deputy sheriff. And what if we stipulated that they were funded by the state, like the transport deputies? You're talking about the core system of the sheriff's offices? What are you referring to, Mike? In section seven, sheriff's shall provide a minimum one deputy certifies law enforcement for county and state courthouse to the sheriff's county jurisdiction. Right. Those are the positions that I say she's looking at full-time certified individuals at a minimum. They're going to put one in each one of those court. Should we stipulate? Because there's no funding stipulation there. The assumptions, I would guess, is that the sheriff's supposed to find that money out of the 5% he doesn't get any more. These would be state-paid position cases. I don't see that in here, but is that your assumption? No, that's just my recommendation. I think we need to put that language in there. And you can do it in phases, whatever that may be, but part-time certified and very professional trained security people, whatever else. I don't know if they're armed or not. I know they're not hours of arrest, as opposed to taking someone in custody and so on and so forth. So those are things that you have to consider when you push it through here. Mark, leave it on the wall. So you got a lot of them on the wall in here. I want to say that I made an enormous exception to typical protocol by inviting Senator Norris to come and talk about this bill based on his years of experience as a Franklin County Sheriff. So I don't want to get too far into making recommendations about our approach to the bill, but I thought your testimony would be useful given your experience in the office. Representative Chase, did I understand you correctly that side judges do not have the option of withholding their signature from expenses in the last couple months? No, they can sign or not sign. That's entirely up to them. All I'm saying is all it represents is a signature they reviewed the expenses that you submitted. That's all it does. And in turn they send it down 15 days after I leave office to the Auditor of the Council. They have no say over to it when you can or not. That was the point I was trying to make. Okay. Thank you. It's a check, but not without a line. We'll have Senator Norris. Good job, guys. That oversight piece. How do you see that possibly working out? Who would do it? And that's I'm assuming from the time that you win elections and the time you take office. You're talking about that window there? Yeah, that roughly 90 day window. Yes. So you've got any suggestions as to who would just take that oversight? Well, it's a bit of a sticky wicked. I guess it would probably fall by a count if given the authority, the assistant judges would be the first in because you have two in each county. Having said that, the way the system is set up right now, the assistant judges simply have charge over the county budget period. They have no say over the sheriff's office. Even the executive director's state's attorneys and sheriffs don't have any say over the sheriff's office. Just the state-paid deputies that they employ there. The sheriff answers to here. She answers to the voters of the county. So I guess that'd be some place to start would be the assistant judges. Okay. Thank you. But there does need to be something there, I guess. Thank you. Representative. My question is once again, as usual, about process. What did you mean when you said you made an exception by inviting Representative Senator, sorry, Senator Norris. Typically, I wouldn't invite a senator who wasn't the reporter or the chair of the committee in to testify about a Senate bill that that's unusual. But I did that specifically in this case because in due respect and with the usefulness of Senator Norris's experience of two decades in the office, that's what I was saying. Okay. So is that just something for senators or is that for reps also? Because I've been invited in to testify about a bill in a different body in the other body that I did not sponsor or report. I would say it's not a hard and best rule. So that's working pretty fairly often, but that's a little unusual. I'm glad you made that exception. I thought I would use some of the rest of your experience and stand up when you came in. And I do want to say the way that you turn around the Franklin County Sheriff's office when you took office and the way you left it. We, people like me from Franklin County deeply appreciate the work that you did there. I wanted to ask you when you brought up the addition of the bank account and the board addition of the equipment that you inherited. Would you be supportive of us thinking about somebody to provide some support, model policies like beyond just the oversight, some ability for new incoming sheriffs to have a little bit more help and guidance in a professional capacity that was statewide. And you know, one of the things I keep thinking about in this context is that, you know, they're oversight and accountability is important, but that there's also this element that seems to be missing. Sheriff Anderson brought it up in some of his testimony that there when that person gets elected, it's kind of entirely dependent on their character, their quality of, you know, they don't have like a guidebook on what's the best way to run Sheriff's office. They kind of have to figure it out on their own. And we can provide a little more structure to that rules of the road and how you manage your books and compensation benefits, model policies, things like that. I mean, that would be nice. It's kind of like having children. They don't come with an instruction guide or a booklet. I mean, but that would be nice to have something because I came off the streets as a patrol officer for 10 years with the local municipality. I got frustrated with the Sheriff's office. That's my own choosing. I might add. I got in there and I said, oh, I said the Sheriff's office. I said, oh, no. I'll add. I mean, it's civil. A lot of the Sheriff's office is civil versus criminal. I came off the criminal division onto the civil division. So it was a learning experience, but it's nice that you make, you know, the Sheriff's office turn around in 20 years, but I can assure you how to not surround myself with five or six core individuals. Okay, this is not something that Senator North did by himself by any means. I can assure you that you need, you need to have good people around you. And I did. I had good people around me and I had a 12 months of playing when we started getting out to Sturgeon after the 10 months we made on one. So what are we doing now for the next two months? I mean, but yes, that would be great. Representative McCarthy to have some, some guys and maybe the Sheriff's Association can work with you on that or the executive director's office, someone there because a lot of times you're coming in cold, not knowing you're getting into here. And you have to represent the entire county for four years. So sharpen the pencils a little bit before you send these folks in the office, I guess. Any other questions for Senator North? I almost said Sheriff North since Sheriff, Senator, just don't call me like we're suffering. I'm almost said. Thank you very much for. Thanks for having me. I've seen everybody. Mr. Howard, would you like to take the chair? That's a tough act to follow. Lower the expectations right away. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for the opportunity to testify. I'm Steve Howard. I'm the executive director of the Vermont State Employees Association. And we're really here to testify about Section 7, which is the section that we were just talking about regarding the court security provision of the bill. I just want to first of all say that VSEA represents among the 6000 members we have statewide, we represent the employees, classified employees who work in the judiciary. So the folks who staff the courthouses. We also represent the 24 state deputies. The representative Oliver is the unit chair of our newest unit of those 24 state deputies and primarily responsible for transporting for transports, but also provide security in the court office when they are available. We represent the office of the state's attorneys. So the folks who work often in the court, either physically their offices are located in the courthouse or they are in court doing their job. We also represent the office of the defender general, not the attorneys, but the clerical investigators in the office of the defender general. So the reason I raise that is because we are here really to support the idea of the 20 positions that would be required to meet the responsibility given to the sheriffs in Section 7. We are here to advocate for those positions being state paid positions state state paid deputies. And there's a few reasons for that. First of all, the sides of flexibility that representative Oliver spoke spoke about courthouses at least three that come to mind are not just workplaces that are controlled by the judiciary. The judiciary happens to be one entity in that building. But for instance, the Costello courthouse, which is the largest courthouse in the state, also has the office of child support, has corrections in it, has state's attorneys in it. And in almost all these buildings, we have BGS staff that work in those facilities. So our position is that these deputies should not be contracted with just the judiciary, but should be contracted with the Department of State's attorneys and sheriffs, and they should be state, they should be paid for by the state, just as the 24 state paid deputies are currently. But also, I think Bennington and Barry also have very similar setup to the Costello courthouse. Bennington is actually, courthouse is actually in the state office building. So you have more than just the folks who I mentioned. You have the Department of Labor and Department of Children and Families and all of the folks who we would represent in Bennington are in those buildings. So we think that this contract should be with the executive branch of the state and not just with the judiciary for that reason. The other, I think three points we would make is that the one provision of giving the authority to the Department of State's attorneys and sheriffs is to provide some consistency and some of the discussion you were just having, Mr. Chairman, with Senator Norris, whether it's training or whether it's the human resource side of things dealing with one entity for the state has proven to be very successful with state transport deputies. It was a change the legislature made in the previous legislative session to bring some consistency throughout the state. So that's another reason why we would support it. We also believe it would make recruitment, which is a challenge these days, easier with the resources of the state other than having each sheriff try to find folks to fill these positions. The state has considerable resources in its effort to try to find and help the sheriff find folks to fill these positions. And then finally, we would say that we don't think there's a need to reinvent the wheel. We have already a model with the current state transport deputies and they have the right of collective bargaining under the statute. There is a bargaining unit that's already established. So by making these folks state paid deputies under the current statute, they would just become part of the bargaining unit that the VSEA currently has. And that would, I think, extend collective bargaining rights to the men and women who would fill these positions without having to go through a whole campaign and a whole organizing drive. They would know that it would be useful in the recruitment process that when they became state transport deputies, if they were reporting to the department of state's attorneys and sheriffs, they would have the rights of a contract that would be negotiated on their behalf. Representative Oliver is the leader of that negotiation, in addition to the staff of the VSEA supporting him. So we think that that is an important element that should also be considered. There's no reason to start from scratch here. We already have something in place that would be easily expanded for these new positions. Now there's the envisioning that we're basically just saying, and as I said, as it came over to us from the Senate, that sheriffs are going to staff courthouses. It's already due, some do and they can, and there's a couple that don't from the testimony that we've heard. But the bill as it stands is silent on whether there's deputies are treated like the transport deputies and our state paid employees or whether they are just any deputy in the sheriff's office. All right. So our position is that the bill should be explicit and say that their state depends on the state state paid deputies for the reasons that I just went through. Any questions for Mr. Hammer? That seems very clear. Thank you for being here. Thank you very much. So that is the conclusion of our testimony for today. We've been given a lot to think about about a 17. I will tell you that in consultation with some of the folks that heard from them in response to the testimony that I have been working with the legislative council on a couple of different ideas in response to some of the testimony referred. There's a couple obvious things like adding somebody from the Judiciary to oversight committee. I think there was due consensus from the committee on that. But I hope to have something that we can take a look at tomorrow. We're going to be hearing testimony from the department as well as others over the next few days on this. So more to come. But I'm seeing that there are a few things we might want to take a look at and in a minute not put some language on the table for us to think about. And if other folks have specific areas where they'd like us to consider language. It doesn't have to be me driving that bus. But I at least asked Mr. Devlin to do a couple of things for us. So we can take a look at that. Hopefully tomorrow we'll be ready. It's not Thursday. So any last thoughts before we break it for today? Well, thank you everybody for taking a ride through three different bills this afternoon. Appreciate that. We'll adjourn the job live and see y'all back here tomorrow. We're starting at nine o'clock, I believe.