 Well, I'll be interested to hear more on how the treasurer is connected to those issues. So why don't we get right into that question. Okay. What are, and this would go to Michael, what do you think are the most important roles played by the treasurer's office and what kind of changes would you like to make? And could you talk about how housing, childcare, and climate change are connected to the treasurer's job? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, when the rating agencies look at Vermont, the two things they normally point out are the unfunded pension liability and then they point to our demographics in Vermont. Those are the two challenges that they see when they analyze Vermont from a financial standpoint. On the demographic piece, we're getting older and our workforce is getting smaller. So how do we combat that? We need more housing for people to be able to move here, particularly young families to be able to move here, starter homes, affordable housing by its definition, homes for families, homes for seniors as well across the entire spectrum of housing. So how do you do that? You know, I think you need to look at the regulations that are in place to make it easier to build housing. Act 250 was something that was created to protect our environment, to protect our landscapes. It's done a great job at that. But now the single biggest thing we could do to reduce our carbon footprint is to build more dense downtown housing. So that's something that should be easier to do in Vermont. On the childcare issue... But what does that have to do with the treasurer's office? Well, I think it ties back to demographics. I mean, those are the things that the rating agencies are looking at when they call out Vermont. They say you're demographics, you have a smaller workforce, and you're getting older. So we need to have all our policies that we can to combat that. Things like investments in infrastructure is going to be critical as well. Broadband, you know, a lot of money has been put aside for infrastructure in broadband. But wastewater and sewage is critical as well. So anything we can do to make it easier for young families to live in Vermont is something that all policymakers and mob dealers should be focused on. And just to educate me, how is a treasurer connected to that? What decisions does a treasurer make? Just say more about that. So I think on the infrastructure point, if you're going to bond for certain investments, that's something that the treasurer's office has a critical role in. There was a housing bond in 2018, I think it was, $37 million. So those are the kind of infrastructural resource investments that the treasurer's office can focus on and bring to bear. But I think there's also a real voice on all issues economic that the treasurer's office has. So when the legislature meets and they're debating what does active 50 reform look like, what are the positive benefits that that can have, I think the treasurer should have a strong voice in that policy discussion. Okay. Thank you for clarifying that. So Brook Page, tell us what role you see the treasurer playing in the state. I'd be interested to hear your perspective. I want to respond to Mike's little discussion in brief. Best way I can, without being too insulting, is to reflect back when Doug Hoffer was running for reelection for auditor of accounts against Dan Feliciano. And in their debate, Dan was glowingly talking about housing and childcare and climate and all manner of things. And after he'd gotten done with his dissertation, Hoffer looked over at him and said, well, those are all really wonderful goals, but that's not this job. And I would respond similarly to so many of the things that Mike's talked about. These are noble things, but they're more in the venue of the legislature and the executive branch. Treasurer is a member of the executive branch, but a separately elected member. And so I think that the best thing the treasurer can do is make sure Vermont has its financial house in order to make sure that we're trending towards fully funding the retirees' funds so that we get an improved credit rating. Heaven forbid if we lose any more of our credit rating, because the cost of getting bonds out there would go up exponentially, and this is not a good thing. The treasurer is supposed to be the accountant, the bookkeeper, or the main person. It has lots of people working under them with the green shades and the pencils. Don't get me wrong, we're not using either of those anymore, but tapping away at the computer trying to make sure the house is in order. Do you think the Vermont's credit rating is at risk? I think if we do not get control over the pension fund, we are going to be in trouble because the pension fund currently has a deficit of between, I hear as little as six and as much as $8 billion. There are 630,000 people that reside in the state of Vermont, children, adults, folks that just happened to be wandering through when they took the census. And if you divide that by, say six in a little bit, that means that every single person that was an inhabitant on that day basically owes $10,000, the simple mass of taking $6 billion and dividing it by 600,000 people. And that's not a good thing. Many people are in crisis because of this and have decided, and many of the people that I know have said, this is crazy, we're getting out of town. Because while that obligation falls on every single inhabitant of state of Vermont, and so someone like me who plans to get buried out back when he dies, many people are going to have an easy out. All they have to do is move over to New Hampshire or down to Florida or over to Tennessee, and that obligation on them evaporates. So, Mike, why don't you just talk about the pension and your view of- Yeah, for sure. And just to respond to that, I mean, we talked about the rating agencies and their concerns about Vermont. But again, the rating agencies say unfunded pension liability, and then they say demographics. So the treasurer has a direct role in working on issues that solve that demographic issue. And when they say demographics, they mean we're getting older and our workforce is getting smaller. So any policy that we can implement in an appeal that gets more workers in our state and gets more young families in our state is going to help us give us a stronger financial base to be able to do all of the things that we want to do and take care of all the people we want to take care of. But it's also going to allow the rating agencies to say, Vermont is in a strong financial position, they are a less risky investment, and they're going to have lower interest rate when they go out for bonding. So I see them as very connected. And I was happy to serve on the pension task force last year that came up with the recommendations that did reduce the pension liability between $1.5 and $2 billion to put the health insurance, the OPEB on a track to be paid down, which was critical because there was no plan to pay down the health care component of our teachers and state employees. And that's a significantly growing expense and cost. So that was good progress. The rating agencies actually upgraded partially Vermont from a negative to a stable outlook. So at least one credit rating agency looked at that work and said this is a good thing for Vermont. So we have made progress on that. We have to keep a close eye on it because we need to make sure we have the right assumptions. I agree that we need to have the right assumptions and we need to have a realistic expectation of what those assumptions are going to be as well so that when we miss them, we're missing them to the favorable side instead of to the negative side. So is the treasurer's job to invest the pension funds? So it's partly, I mean there's a group called VPIC and the treasurer is one member of that group and that group makes the ultimate decision for the pension funds. There is a small other subset of funds that is connected to the OPEB liability that the treasurer has sole fiduciary discretion on. So there's a smaller subset where the treasurer has full fiduciary ability. And then on the other side of the equation, you have to work with the group, the VPIC, the Vermont Pension Investment Committee to make those kind of investments. So let me ask Brooke, how would you advise this group that is in charge of investing the pension how to invest? Where are you looking? I think first and foremost, we have to look at the history of the investments over time. Beth Pierce, the first year she came in, I think projected like seven or seven and a half percent and it reliably was about percent and a half or two percent below that. And so in the second year she basically made the same estimate of the earnings and once again they fell short. Well at some point in time early on she should have started to recognize that the projections that she was using were too aggressive and scaled to mech because when you give the legislature these overly rosy projections, it then gives the legislature licensed to a short fund, the pension fund, assuming that this extra money is going to come in and that's how we've gotten in trouble moving from when Ms. Pierce came into office about $2 billion shortfall to now seven, eight. And I should mention that $2 billion of that is an accounting change that the federal government required. But even if you use the $6 billion number, it's a lot of money. And so let me just ask you, where would you, what would your recommendation be about, especially in this market, in this time, where would you say that the funds, pension funds should be invested? I think that you need to consult with folks that are experienced in this and make the best investments to maybe not maximize returns, but get a strong return on investment. All of this where we want to move away from all of these companies that maybe aren't as socially agreeable, say fossil fuels, and preclude getting the benefit of those earnings is not a smart move from the standpoint of maximizing the return to put into the pension fund. We have a firm obligation to the state employees and the state teachers to make sure that the pension fund is in good shape, hopefully fully funded because we've made this promise and it's something that we need to abide by. So Mike, what kind of recommendations would you make as treasurer on how to shepherd care for and nurture this pension fund and deal with the incredible gap in funding? Yeah, so like I said, some of that work has been done, it wasn't on the investment side, it was on the contribution side and on the benefit side this agreement that all members of the unions that were represented, the legislature agreed to increase the contribution amounts that individual employees and teachers are paying and there was a reduction in benefits too that resulted in the savings that we talked about. There was also a plan put in place for the health insurance which wasn't there as well. So there has been good work trying to close this gap. Now we're going through this period of time where investments are really volatile. There's no pension fund in the country that's doing particularly well right now. In Vermont we average our returns over three years so that any given year doesn't have too significant of an impact whether that's good or bad. Last year we were at 23% of a return, this year we're probably not going to be anywhere close to that but they'll average out and you need to sort of see where that goes. I think when you're talking about VPIC it's not so much the investments that are being made. VPIC has done a great job of making our investments much more straightforward, less costly, less fees, just sort of back to the basics in terms of investing and I think that's a good strategy but we also need to have a realistic expectation of what the return's going to be over the next 10 years let's say and 7% might be a little bit too high so maybe you have to look at that and bring that down in a responsible and graduated way to a lower, more realistic number and there's other things that you can do I think to offset the impact of that. For example, we are working toward fully funding 100% fully funding our pensions but unlike an individual that buys a house and wants to have their house paid off completely when they retire, the state of Vermont's not going anywhere we're not retiring, we don't need to get our pension fund up to 100% so if we have a more realistic target on that side of the equation as well I think that would be good also so we just need to have expectations that we can meet that are reasonable and as Brooke said, that allows for fully funding the pension every year it doesn't create a situation where you think you're fully funding it but in fact you're underfunding it. So how can Vermont make investments with its own money in Vermont? I mean is there, just talk about that how could we use state money to promote economic and community development in Vermont? So putting the pension to the side for a second there was a compromise that was reached where 10% of the state's average deposits could be used for local investing fund that could go for things like housing you go for things like infrastructural investments it could go for updates for ADA compliance with public buildings but it was a 10% of the state's deposits that could be used in direct projects here in Vermont so I think that is something that I would like to really look at and make sure that we're vigorously making those kinds of investments on the pension side, you know, part of it is you have to find a good investment to make sure you're getting a good return so we may want some of that to be in Vermont but largely you want it to be diversified across the country even internationally as well but I think there is opportunities to make local investments through the treasurer's office. So Brooke, what do you think? Do you think 10% is enough to invest in Vermont? I think that we should look at investing as much money in Vermont as we possibly can as long as those investments are sound. You know, the thing, getting back to the EB-5 thing when Mike was there in financial regulation, you know, I was always disturbed by that because it was like it was a scheme or a scam where we were basically extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars out of these overseas investors dangling the carrot of getting them and their children and their family green cards to escape from the third world hellhole that many of them were living in and it was just unsettling and to me it got far worse when they started talking about building the medical factory or facility in Newport where they were going to grow organs and skin tissue and things and I got thinking and I said, wow, I didn't realize such technology existed. Well, I didn't and so now Newport has settled with a great big hole block along in the middle of downtown. So, you know, invest in things, but invest small. You know, the other thing I want to mention since hopefully I got a moment is I don't like the idea that we're talking about demographics negatively, okay? Mike's young, I'm old. You know, I take it a little bit harsh because the elderly and the retirees touch very lightly on the duties of the state and local governments as opposed to young families who have children in school and things like that. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with having families and children. That's a great investment for Vermont, but because we have so much taxation, many of these people, especially the young folks that were doing a wonderful job trying to educate, as soon as they're able to graduate, they head on out of state for many of them because, you know, while we've given them the wonderful opportunity, they see better horizons elsewhere where they won't be so heavily taxed and there's just an incongruity or a disconnect there that troubles me greatly. And so something I'd like to see for old folks and for retirees and state funds, I'd like to see and this is more the commissioner of taxation and the governor, but I'd like to see us reduce or eliminate the taxation on military pensions, social security interest payments, whatever we're calling social security this week and retirement funds so that these people aren't having so much of their savings that they set aside to have money in their retirement years just swept away and it's just a bad situation. Let me ask you this question. We have a few more minutes. You mentioned that you thought some of the COVID money should be set aside as a rainy day fund but my understanding was that that money had to be spent. So can you just clarify that? I think that, I remember back when 2020, Jim Condos talked about, oh, we gotta do the vote by mail because we've invested money in it and if we don't, the federal government's gonna come and claw the money back, you know? And I don't think the Biden administration's clawing anything back from anywhere. I think that the well thought out programs such as improving the ventilation in schools and things like that should be followed through but I think there's a lot of other programs that the money being invested can't be justified and it would be better to set that money aside to either look for better projects or maybe backfill some of the obligation in the pension fund. Your view on the COVID funding and... Well, you know, I think the rainy day fund is fully funded. I mean, we're in a good spot as it comes to that. So I think any money that we put on the sidelines is not a good idea. That money needs to be invested in Vermont. We need to be building out broadband infrastructure so people can build housing and we need to make investments in childcare too and climate resiliency. So the COVID money is doing the exact thing we want it to do, be out in the community, creating opportunity and economic opportunity for Vermont. So you were asked to play a role in the COVID recovery. What was that? So I worked on the COVID-19 response where the governor did the data, the modeling, the trending of where COVID-19 was, where it was heading and what we could see in our future. And were you surprised to be asked to do that job? I mean, was that consistent with your real house? It's not consistent with our department, but again, COVID-19, a pandemic, none of us had lived through such a significant pandemic as the one that we just experienced or are experiencing still. So it was unexpected. I remember the governor, when he called us in, he said, you know, Mike, you might be wondering why I asked you to be here. And I kind of was, but it was often running at that point. It was all hands on deck. Everybody that could contribute in some way, stepped up, including Vermonters. And it was really something to be quite proud of, in my opinion. So I wonder, Brooke, do you have a question for Michael and Michael, do you have a question for Brooke? Why don't you go first? Well, I guess as it relates to the COVID-19 and your involvement in that, it was kind of extracurricular activity as it related to the Treasurer's Report. But at this late date, do you think that the state over responded to COVID-19 or do you think that the response was proportional to the threat? So there was no playbook when you had the COVID-19. We all have to acknowledge that. And I think about that question a lot because when you have the benefit of hindsight, you say, what is the approach that you should take? And the approach that you should take and the one that Vermont did take is make sure that people are protected in terms of limiting virus transmission for as long as you can until a vaccination is available and then try to get as many people vaccinated as possible. And then once that happens, you have to start looking at the other end of the equation, economic issues, issues around education, and then you needed to start returning to a more normal society. And that's the exact plan that Vermont followed. We limited transmission, we limited death, we got the highest vaccination rate in the country, and then we rolled back those COVID-19 precautions and got the economy back into its trajectory. And do you have a question for Brooke? So I think one of the things that's really concerning for Vermont is our position, we have some of the lowest retirement savings in the country. So the treasurer's office certainly wants to make sure everybody has a secure retirement and just wondered what your thoughts are and how that office can ensure that that's the case for Vermonters. Well, as I said earlier, I think the biggest thing we can do is try to reduce the heavy hand of government on the earnings and savings of retirees. You know, we're not, we're taxing military pensions, we're taxing Social Security. And we're also making no accommodations as many other states do to reduce the property taxes on the elderly. You know, the elderly are placing a very, very light touch on the towns and counties and states, yet they're being hammered hard as far as their obligations. And I think, you know, we really need to take a hard look at that because I think we should be encouraging the elderly to stay here with us. Because when we say elderly, we're not talking about somebody that's just barely getting around in a wheelchair. We're talking vibrant people in their late 60s, 70s and on who can contribute to the community, childcare, substitute teaching, in all manner of things. And we don't seem to look sufficiently at the virtue and asset of having old folks stay with us. So why don't we move right to closing comments? And H Brook page, why don't you give us your closing comments for Vermont treasurer, thank you. Well, it's my hope that people will understand that Vermont's in a little bit of financial pickle. And that we need to find a way to get into a more secure position to maybe get away from some of the pet projects that the legislature has identified and get back to more core responsibilities, such as housing, such as childcare, hunger, and make sure that those things are being properly funded and look maybe to the community, to the churches, to private organizations, to NGOs to step up and take care of some of these other duties, responsibilities, obligations that we currently look to the government to do everything. And old economics professor of mine said, the only way that the government can do everything for everyone is to take all of their money. All right, well, there's a, that's a walkoff we say in my family, like Peechak, please tell us why you're running for state treasurer, your closing comments. Well, thank you again, Lauren Glenn, and thank you again to town hall TV. So, you know, as I mentioned, I've had the fortune of serving for monitors for eight years and a variety of capacities at the department of financial regulation as a deputy commissioner, as a commissioner, working on the COVID-19 response task force, working on the pension reform task force as well. All of those opportunities has given me the appropriate experience, the technical understanding and ability to come in and do a good job in the role of treasurer. I also want to work as treasurer to solve some of these important economic issues that we confront. How can we make our economy resilient and stronger for everybody? How can we get more housing? How can we get more childcare? So people can go to work so that businesses can hire and expand and our state fiscal bottom line will be stronger. Those are the reasons that I want to run and I'd really appreciate your vote on November 8th. Thank you so much. Thanks to both of you. Thanks for watching. It's our pleasure. We have been speaking with two candidates for state treasurer in the state of Vermont and that is an election on the 8th of November. So be sure to vote if you have not already. I'm sure you've gotten your ballots in the mail, but if not, be sure to get to the polling place. And in Chittenden County, don't forget that your solid waste district, your CSWD ballot does not come in the mail. So you're going to want to obtain that independently or come to the polls to vote on the new sorting machine. But having said all that, please stay tuned here to town meeting television and also on November 8th at 730 to our live results. Thanks for watching.