 Good morning. You are with the Vermont House Government Operations Committee. We are gathered here this morning to talk about S349, which proposes to send some COVID relief fund money out for municipalities. We have a number of folks to hear from this morning. And what I want to say here at the outset is that this kind of open-ended conversation about how to put together a bill that tries to get millions of dollars out into our Vermont communities is a new experience to do on Zoom. And so I just want to welcome committee members to reach out to me if there's other perspectives that you would like to hear from that are not with us here this morning. We've got more committee time later this week and we can hear from other folks as well. And likewise to any of the folks who are with us from outside of the committee, if there's a perspective that you think would be valuable, please don't hesitate to reach out. If we were all in the State House, of course, these would be conversations that we might have in the hallway after we leave committee. So I just want to make sure that folks feel welcome to have those hallway conversations. If you think there's something that we didn't cover when we were here in committee. So thank you for being with us. I think what I would like to do first is invite Karen Horn to share with us some information. Karen has been obviously polling municipalities from around the state to see what their COVID needs are. And as we frame up what the House will do with S349, we know at a minimum that we don't have a $16 million box to work with. We have a $10 million box to work with. And so Karen, if you could help us understand a little bit more of the range of needs of COVID relief that you've heard from municipalities, that would be helpful. Thank you, Karen Horn with the Vermont League of Cities and Towns. And I did send over some preliminary results from our survey that was conducted in May, second half of May. And Representative Harrison had asked for some of this information. So what we asked in the first instance was what newer additional sources of funding towns are seeking for revenue shortfalls. So that's the first table. I apologize. I'm not the best formatter in the world. So it's, it's kind of messy, but we were looking for state funds. We're working very hard with the National League of Cities and other organizations in Washington DC to see if there might be federal funds made available or if the guidance might be changed to allow for use to recover lost revenues or replace lost revenues as part of the CARES Act. But that's not moving very quickly. You may have noticed. There are a number of towns that are borrowing to cover essentially the education payments that they had to make. There were 31 towns that reported that they did that. We had 100, did I say up here at the top? 296 I believe towns respond, but not every community responded to every question. And if they didn't really know what, what their needs were, they tended to say either I don't know or not say anything at all. There's a number of towns that are using reserve funds that they that they've had that they can move to cover some of these needs. And then there's, there's 28 towns that don't anticipate needing additional funds, which is interesting. That's good. I think that that number might change quite a bit as the year progresses and we get into the new fiscal year and people start making or not making property tax payments in July, August and into November and beyond. So that's the first question. We asked what kind of unanticipated expenses and activities towns have had. And then our IT person or I guess survey person had there she's very precise so she put in definitions of what PPE is and things like that. So you can see there the kinds of things that towns have spent money on. I think one of the other things that we've heard anecdotally, which interestingly interestingly doesn't show up in this but is actually reconfiguring offices to allow for them to reopen. So that might involve some minor construction. So there's that. And then the next question, do you anticipate any decreased expenses due to spending freezes and cost savings. And this is really kind of a moving target. I think that's really the results of that we got from that question. We've heard from a number of towns we heard back in early May that they were going to not hire seasonal staff, particularly for camps and summer programs. And we've heard a little bit in some of the communities given new guidance from the governor and the agency of commerce and community development. But there's a lot of towns that are looking at not hiring seasonal staff. And then administrative office staff, those kinds of things. And we've heard data on what kinds of functions were furloughed or put on given center unemployment. And administrative office. A lot of those folks were furloughed or had to had to collect unemployment. We anticipate that quite a few of them will be hired back when this is over or when it that things turn around a little bit. But when you look at functions like wastewater treatment and public safety and emergency medical services, those, those functions were not furloughed. I don't think in any town really that what they've gone done is gone to split shifts and things like that. And then what, what kind of requests are you receiving from citizens nonprofits and local businesses. So, and it's quite a range of, of requests. So that was just sort of to give you a little context in terms of what the conversation is at the local level right now. And then the other thing I want to mention is that there's really a very wide range of communities and and what they're doing if, if you look at our largest city, Burlington. They put together a whole resource recovery center. They're performing all kinds of functions that they never did before. When you ski is in a similar boat. And then some of the very small towns that shut offices for a month or so, really didn't have additional expenses other than trying to sort out how to hold meetings and how to include the public and and working with teleconferencing platforms that they used before. So it's a very wide range. And I guess I'll leave it there madam chair and, and if people have questions. Happy to answer them. All right, Jim Harrison. Thank you. Karen, thank you for forwarding along the bar graphs with all the fancy colors and sharing what your questions were. I'm curious if you were able to get any information on actual dollars spent. And maybe it's there and I'm just missing it it looked like most of there are, you know, 20 people 20 towns said yes to this but any sense of average dollars. So the problem is that there's not an average, you know, there's some towns that really haven't spent anything. And there's some towns that are up in the million dollar range. And, and it's partly because of size and what they've been asked to do and sort of their capacity to pivot to to providing new services to local officials so I mean I could. Give you some of the responses that that we've got but there's depth there's not an average, which, which means that I think that the way that as 349 is constructed that has sort of a population component to it. And will will be helpful. I can appreciate that and I think there is probably some correlation with size of a community on any of the dollars you did get is there any way to put them into a ratio. For example, Burlington is much different than my town of Chittenden certainly, but there might be something related to size, and I'm just guessing here that would help. I can ask Heather, our survey person if she can put that together. I definitely can't I'm not a math person. I'm just going to say that. So, but, but I can ask her if she could come up with that average figure she might be able to do it this morning. Thank you and I'm not looking to delay things. What the Senate did maybe the right approach I just we don't have any basis as to where do we draw the minimums or maximums. You know, based on what we know right now. Yeah. Well, I'll see I'll see what I can get for you. Thank you. Any other questions for Karen. All right, excellent. Bobby Bermacom, I'm wondering if you have some thoughts on on extra pressures that municipalities are are experiencing during COVID and if you can enlighten us at all, sort of the range of challenges that are out there. Well, I have to say, in Marshfield we haven't had any tax collection yet so I can't speak to what the financial pressure will be. We did have some construction to do to make my office more easier to distance. As far as the, the community goes we've, we've been able to maintain most of the town services, you know dog licensing that sort of thing through the mail. I think you'll hear, you'll hear from other people today the biggest challenge has been the land records, people who have lost their jobs would like to refinance their mortgage draw some of their equity. There were real estate transactions that were already in the works and everything had to come to a halt when the select board closed this building. We're, we're lucky we have some of our land records online. The fee changes that we made last year have allowed more towns to begin digitizing their land records, but title searches require 40 years of history and in a lot of cases and the cost to index those back records as prohibited for most towns we've been pecking at it a little bit for the last 10 years, working our way back but it's very time consuming and the only really effective way to do it is to hire a service to have it done for us because we don't have extra staff to dedicate. For town our size, we, we were able to continue almost everything that we normally do other than the land records. Our road didn't really make any changes, we, we can do most of our other operations by mail it's a little less convenient, we've had to turn away people that want notaries but that's been addressed. The land records that have been impacted. And I would assume that the, the fee because it only came into effect last year has not has not given very many clerks, a pot of money in from which they could start to do some of this work is digitizing land records, something that you can accomplish during this time of social distancing. Yes. So help me understand a little bit about what that looks like in your office. So land records arrive usually by mail. And before we were digitizing land records we would photocopy them, make the land record books type index cards and anyone wanting to do a title search would have to come into the vault. Look at the index cards and pull open those books. And everything would have to be done right here. Now with the system that we have the land records still arrived through the mail. That's something that we could change we could pass legislation to allow electronic recording but we don't have that capability right now. But they arrive in the mail, we index them and scan them, and they're immediately available online to anybody sitting at their home office. They can see exactly what they would see if they were here. Did you have to buy a scanner. Just for that purpose. Yes. Yeah. Yes, I, my, my startup costs were relatively low because we already had computers I think we may have replaced our desktops but we already had computers. We had to buy a desktop scanner. And we had to upgrade our internet service, because the land records are hosted, the system that we use is on the internet, we have to have good internet. Yeah, and the, the feed that the feed that we're collecting the $4 that we're setting aside for records restoration pays for my land record system, but there's nothing left over to do back indexing. Okay. Committee any questions for Bobby on on the expenses that that she's talking about COVID related. All right, John Ganon. Thank you. Bobby just a spirit. Sorry, I have someone knocking on my door. Okay. You can have a question for her and she's answering the door that's fun. Oh, the challenges of meeting remotely. Um, may I make a comment while while we're waiting for Bobby. Absolutely. In large part the, the issue around digitizing is really almost a commerce issue. It's that we need to have the ability for property owners to, you know, get the information they need to transfer property or to refinance. Particularly now when when interest rates are so low. So I, I just wanted to put that out there that this is not just a municipal issue. It's, it's something that provides a vital service to property owners and Vermont. Thank you. So, no, I understand the benefit of digitizing records. I mean, Wilmington digitize its records after tropical storm Irene. And so lawyers were able to continue to do property searches during the COVID-19 crisis. What system are you using Bobby to digitize your records. I'm using the cot system. Okay, so that's pretty common among Vermont towns. There are, there are four vendors that almost all of the towns that are digitizing. There are four vendors that they use. Three of them have online portals. The fourth is the Nimrack system it's a Vermont based company and it's great for indexing and scanning I used to use it, but it's not really. It's not as amenable to doing an online search. There's no online access. So, most most towns that have an online system have either the cot system, Avenue, or co file. Those are and those are the three vendors that we survey to get pricing. Why did you choose to go to with cuts. Let me do the back indexing and scanning myself and I underestimated how long that would take. And they were the most cost effective at the time and the most flexible. I did a lot of research I went to their of the Plattsburg recording office to see the cot system. And I went to Syracuse, New York to see what's now the Avenue system. Was the best fit for my office. Okay, thank you. Bobby and that system. And the other ones do you still own the data and can transfer it to another vendor if you choose or does it have to be. Yes, it's still my data. The compatibility between one system and the other is sort of the universal thing. As you mean if I was to change systems to transfer somebody could still do a search. Oh, yes, there are there are similarities in the search functions. I think it probably takes a couple of minutes to learn how to do a search in each of the systems. They're all similar. Yeah, they're questions for Bobby. All right, I don't see anybody diving for their little blue hand so I think what I'd like to do at this point is invite Jim nap and Chuck Storo to to share with us your thoughts on coven related expenses around digitizing land records. Good morning chair and committee members for taking us at such short notice. My name is Chuck Storo I'm with Leonine public affairs, and I'm here on behalf of Connecticut attorneys title insurance Corporation, which is actually a Vermont domestic insurance company that's primarily regulated by Vermont DFR. I'm actually part of a work group that is a loose knit group of people that includes the Vermont municipal clerks and treasurer's association VLCT, the bar association, the realtors association and the bankers association. And we came together after speaking with senate gov ops about the problems that were presented to by virtue of the lack of access to the land records. We spoke to the committee about the problems that are out there right now on that. And the issue of digitizing the land records came up and we were basically instructed to collaborate with each other and try and come up with a proposal. We're sort of our proceedings have been facilitated by Tonya Marshall from the Vermont Secretary of State's office she's the state archivist. And we've been, you know, looking at this issue and trying to get some some cost information and just sort of understand how we could move forward on this and it might provide a means or a vehicle by which we could move forward on this issue. As Ms. Brimba Cohn explained, you know that the COVID emergency has significantly impaired people's ability to access the land records. You know, originally under the governor stay safe, stay, stay home order, municipal clerks offices were closed completely. And that restriction has been lifted. As a practical matter, many offices are not open at all, or are only open on a very limited basis, in terms of the duration that a person can be in there. And the number of people that can be in there to buy by social distancing requirements and also reflective of the fact that there have been furloughs of municipal employees that have left clerks offices short handed and therefore not really able to serve people fully who want to come in and look at the land records. This has created a big problem in terms of Vermonters abilities to move forward with real estate transaction. First of all, the market is actually quite strong. There's a lot of people who want to buy houses in Vermont. And, you know, you need to do a title search in order to engage in a purchase and sale of property. And as was also mentioned, a lot of folks want to take advantage of low interest rates and refinance their properties and pull some equity out so that they can to tide them over during this emergency. And all of that has been significantly impacted by the inability to have good access to the land records, which generally speaking is, you know, in person physical examination of the deeds and other elements that are recorded in the land records and the index for fine indexes for finding those records. What we have come up with is the idea of building off of what is already out there to a certain extent on the part of some towns that have started digitizing their land records and making them available online. Mr. Knapp, who's a part of the here on behalf of the Vermont bar association has done some survey work and can explain a little bit more what's going on or what is out there right now in terms of online accessibility of the land records, but for the most part, you know, first of all, the majority of towns are not online. And secondly, the those that are online are only you can only access records after a relatively recent date, saying the last 10 years at most. And therefore, you know, you really can't do the 40 to 60 year title search that is required. Basically what you have to do is you have to go back 40 years on the title to a property and then whoever owns the property owned the property as of 40 years ago you go further back to when they first acquired the property so generally speaking you need to search back about 40 to 60 years. The proposal is to basically fund the come up with some of money that would be dispersed to towns so that those towns that are not online could get online hire a vendor to get get online on a going forward forward basis and then also to fund what I'm going to call back scanning scanning the paper instruments that have already been filed, going back 40 years in order to have, you know, meaningful set of land records available online in that back scanning would also be done with to the towns that are already online to get their records going back 40 years also online. As it turns out, a lot of the towns land records are are also on microfilm. In the state's records, the records division of the Secretary of State's office has a large collection of microfilm land records and it turns out that it would be, you know, relatively would be less expensive to have those microfilm images converted to digital images than it would be to necessarily go into each town clerk's office and scan the actual paper documents themselves. So I throw that out there. And so, you know, one of the questions is we see the, you know, the cares act money as being a source of funds to fund this project. There's restrictions on the use of that money by the US Treasury, and I posted or submitted to the committee assistant, the latest guidance that I could find from JFO on this issue. And basically, you know, the requirement is, first of all, that the that the expense that's funded with this money be incurred between now and the end of the year. We think that that is possible because there are vendors out there that could do this job in agreements could be reached with them relatively quickly to get going on this. So we think we would meet that require real sort of, I guess, issue would be, you know, is this a necessary expenditure occurred due to or result of the COVID-19 health emergency. We think that this this proposal would would pass that test. You know, in order to digitize the land records, it's going to cost money. That's the only way to do it is to spend some money to get that done. And this is, in fact, attributable to the health emergency, because as a result of the health emergency, you know, the ability to access those records in person is either consistent or so limited that it is not meaningful access. So, you know, these standards are pretty general. But I do think that there's a solid argument to be made that this proposal falls within those guidelines. And I will know in looking at the document that that JFO has put out is that they indicate that the US Treasury guidance suggests use of CFR monies basically turns on the state's determination as to whether or not a specific expenditure is necessary. In other words, you know, there's some differences being shown there if the state thinks that something is necessary as a result of the health emergency, then it appears that US Treasury is going to defer to that determination considerably. So, you know, overall we do feel that this proposal meets the guidance that's been put out in connection with using these monies is sort of similar in some ways to using the money to expand rural broadband capacity to facilitate distance learning and telework, which is an example of of an expenditure that is considered appropriate in connection with using these monies. In a sense, it's similar to telework. The ability, you know, accessing land records is important to the economy is important to Vermonters well well being and since you can't do it in person. And being able to do it electronically via the internet is similar to expanding rural broadband. So, you know, we submit that this is an allowable use, and we realize it's a big ask. And the money you have but we'd like that, you know, at a minimum have that we appreciate the opportunity to bring this issue to your attention and hope that we can figure out a way to fund it. And so that's what I have at this point and be happy to take some questions but I would also invite Mr nap to you know speak to the issue in general and also he is the one who put pen to pay paper to figure out the cost that we're proposing which is, or that we would like seek funding for which is $18 million. So, with that I'll stop and turn it over to Jim but I'm happy to take questions in the meantime. So Bob Hooper, do you have a question for Chuck. I'll wait and hear what Jim has to say Madam Chair. Thank you. Go ahead Jim. All right, thank you for inviting me to talk. Here's what we did. So we sent out a survey to all of the towns in the state of Vermont with the kind assistance of the Secretary of State's office and some folks from our committee. And in response we got 167 towns who gave us some data on their state of their records. What we learned was that there are 33 towns that have some images online that are searchable. There are 44 towns who have some element of their land records index online, but not images that you can see. We have 128 pounds that have computer indexes, and that includes the 44 that I referenced, but the difference between the 44 and 128. And the 45 that are public, something like 80 are only visible within the office. So what we then asked was, what's if you're using a system, what system are you using and the answer was cuts has 20 towns. 15 pounds co file which I think is a newer entity has eight presently, and the numeric system has 57 pounds. So in those numbers are everybody who's online. For instance, the town I the city I live in South Burlington has their land records digitized, but they're not online. So, and I think they use the cost system or avenue I'm not sure which it's been a while since I've been over there to look. So, we thought a quick, easy way to get a sense of what this would cost would be to ask the towns what it costs them per page to put their to digitize their records and put them online. It's not about to be completely unreliable because the range of estimates was from five cents a page to $2 and 95 cents a page, which the span is a little bit big to figure out what, what the right number was so with that in mind, I engaged in a little little bit of mathematical juggling of the data that I had, and I've concluded that on the average, each town will need to scan index and post about 44,000 pages. For all 250 towns in this state, that would be 9,994,000 pages to process using the information that each of the companies gave us and I'll start with avenue because they were the first ones to return their survey. We estimated that the initial startup cost per town is somewhere between $5,700 and $6,000 just to turn the switch on that doesn't include processing any documentation at all. If we're able to use the Secretary states the archivists microfilm copies, we have about a million to $1,100,000 in conversion costs where they take a microfilm image and essentially turn it into a digital image that can go up on the land records. The problem with that is, and this is, this is an aspect that doesn't have a good solution right now. Those images are a snapshot in time. The land records are actually a living instrument because when a discharge comes in, a town clerk like Bobby will write on the mortgage deed discharge at and the book and page where the discharges. If we only convert those digital images. They won't have all of those annotations because those digital images maybe anywhere from a few months to a few years old so we'll spend a lot of money to do that. There's nothing behind it yet, not that that can't be fixed. It's just a consideration whether we follow the concept of microfilm conversion. The real challenge in the microfilm conversion is that what you have to do is run a specific process on each image to enhance the enhance that image, because microfilm is not a very high resolution process. What they'll do is they'll, they'll run an image they'll run a process on the image to make it a little bit better so it will show up online better. The combination of conversion enhancement as I said is about a million one across all the towns. The real challenge comes in taking those digital images and indexing them using avenues estimate that you have to index, essentially, out of the total 2.5 pages turns into a document. So that would mean a two page warranty deed is two pages and 18 page mortgage is 18 pages a one page discharge is one page an avenue through their process has assumed has determined that if you're budgeting, you should guess 2.5 pages turns into one index entry. At that rate, the 10 million pages or nine 9.9 million pages that we're looking at would cost about $10 million to index. Taking all of that to run back to 1980, which is probably mostly long enough in most towns to probably cover the bulk of title examination requirements. With a contingency built in for administrative costs. My poor math skills and anything else we're talking between 16 million and $21 million total to digitize the records in all the towns in Vermont back to 1980. We ran the same kind of numbers on cuts because we got their section, their proposal a little bit later. Co file only came in recently and I haven't had time to do a similar analysis of theirs. The cost system has a much more expensive startup process their their take on the startup process, including the first year of support is close to $20,000 per town. Their microphone conversion is more expensive. Their paper to digital scanning system is more expensive. Their indexing cost is less. So overall, their numbers came out at almost exactly the same about $16 million to $25 million. I'm guessing that the high end estimates that I came up with the 21 million the 25 million are probably too high. My guess is the 16 million estimate is probably a little too low and that's how we settled on the 18 million. Those are the approximate numbers that we have. I'm happy to try and answer questions that anyone has, or explain more fully how I arrived at some of these numbers if that's of interest. Thank you, we've got some little blue hands lighting up by Hooper. Thank you madam chair for either of the individuals testifying. In a given year, and then comparatively speaking in a covert year. How many people will the digitizing of these records serve. How many mortgages do we transact. What percentage of the population I mean, it was brought up that, you know, this is comparable to learning from home with broadband or expanding something like that then I'm just sort of looking for a relative idea of how many people this reaches as opposed to something else. That's a really good question and I don't have the answer to that I have no idea how many individual documents are recorded. I'll tell you that I've had conversations with three different law firms in the last 24 hours, each of whom had between six and 10 closings scheduled on either Thursday or Friday of this week. But that's purely anecdotal and fairly difficult to convert to real numbers. Certainly a number we could do some investigation on, but I don't have data to indicate right now what that is. So it's a simple question of how many title searches get done in an average year. Okay, well, we can certainly begin looking into that. Thank you. I can tell you that years ago when I was in private practice, I average, I averaged between 200 and 250 a year, but I only did higher in commercial transactions so I had no residential practice at all. And that's where the bulk of this is. I would say on the just a quick guess one of my agents issue does between 20 and 25. This is one person in the state does 20 to 25 closings a week. All right, Jim Harrison. Thanks, Jim and Chuck for bringing the issue forward and also Jim for some of the numbers. I don't know that there's anyone on the committee that would take any issue with in an ideal world trying to get all of this digital and online accessible. But I do wonder, because every dollar we potentially allocate here means a dollar that doesn't get spent somewhere else. I mean, my broadband coverage that representative Cooper so nicely articulated the other day, which is why my video feed is off so one of my towns at the start of this when they started doing office hours by appointment only or trying to do it via mail. They said in published their index online, so that the title attorneys could say, Look, I need page, such and such of journal such and such, and give them a list, so they could go and do the research for them. How many towns have their indexes published online and might that not be a easier ask to get everybody with an index online so we know where to look if we can't easily have title attorneys going into town halls. Based on the survey results 44 pounds have their indexes online. 43 have their images online which would include their index so I would say, if you combine those numbers it would be 77 pounds have some or all of their index and records online. It would be reasonable to just put everyone to start with. I'm not saying what what you're suggesting for the whole ball of wax sounds great. But if we just did the indexes that might be doable. I'm thinking in a shorter time span and for for a lot less money is that fair or not. I don't know about time span. The process of indexing is is data intensive. It involves essentially looking at every page, identifying the parties involved, entering the parties into a database system I can tell you that based on the two companies that I looked at the, they would indicate the cost to index alone. This does not include conversion scanning or anything else is $10 million. So Bobby bring McComb is also waving her hand I think she wants to weigh in on this. I was going to say basically what Jim said, getting the image on is very simple. They come on site with a scanner, they run everything through the scanner that's easy it's inexpensive relatively inexpensive that indexing is the most time consuming and the most expensive part of the project. The challenge with having just the indexes online are the clerk now spends a fair amount of time, identifying scanning and emailing documents that the process of title searching is a very iterative process. I want to look at one document that leads me to need to look at six documents that needs me to look at each of those six documents turns into another three or four documents in a clerk's office with multiple employees, what probably going to be a regular town, probably with a higher percentage of transactions going on. I could see a circumstance where in a busy day you might have six seven eight nine 10 attorneys, asking the clerk to please send 20 pages, 30 minutes later 20 pages, 25 minutes later three more pages 15 minutes later 20 pages, a single clerk in a single office could never keep up with that volume they would have no time to do anything else that they're required to do. It's an interesting stop gap process the people that I've talked to who've done title searches that way. It's very interesting they range from people who are satisfied that it works to people who have refused to do real estate, unless they can look at the records because they believe it's their obligation to their client to go examine the records on their own. So, it's a solution. It would probably save some money. But the other question is, how is the town going to put their searchable index on up online without engaging one of these companies who hosts the searchable index, an index that's nothing but a PDF of thousands of pages. Unfortunately isn't going to solve the problem, because there's no way to search that particular index. Those would be my thoughts on the just indexing, but certainly indexing is better than nothing. Okay, no I appreciate that Jim. I'm just, I'm looking at $18 million that we may not have. So, you know, how can we potentially narrow it another possible path to go would be and it wouldn't get 100%, but could be a matching grant type program. In other words, if my town is not online. Maybe this pot of money is available for 50% grant and I'm just picking a number here I don't know what what it is. It might push some towns to take advantage of it this one time opportunity, but it certainly wouldn't take every town, it wouldn't, every town wouldn't so you, so you might go from 70 towns to 120 towns, I don't know, I'm just picking a number, but it would help. Yes, and the other option would be. Maybe not every town wants to go online maybe not every town wants to digitize I can imagine that there are some small towns where the ongoing annual cost of somewhere between three and $6,000 a year, maybe more than the town can pay or is willing to pay. And if that's the case, maybe the answer is, you let the towns apply for a grant to get their records online and the towns that don't want to apply don't apply, and there's a certain amount of money, and I do think getting the towns that have the population to get their records online where there's a higher percentage of real estate transactions, I don't want to pick on anyone in particular but I grew up in the Northeast Kingdom so there are a number of towns up there that probably do not have a high volume of land record transactions. They're also probably the towns that are closed or have minimal staff and can't really let people in to do searches and it's challenging for me to say we should not support every citizen in the state of Vermont. But if there were towns that had 456,000 residents who weren't online if we could focus on getting them online because they are going to have the bulk of the real estate transactions. That might be another way to have a smaller ass, but get a bit bigger bang for every dollar. Okay, thank you. I just, I wanted to add to what I said earlier about the indexing if we hire one of these outside vendors to do the indexing, they do it from the images, we don't give we don't send our actual books out of state. The indexing comes first, it's, it comes after the imaging. There's no way to do just the indexing. Does that make sense, because we wouldn't want to send our actual books to Ohio or wherever they are. They would come on site, film everything and then take the film back to their office to do the indexing. That makes sense. Thank you, John Gannon. Thank you, sort of following up on Jim's questions about how to little down this $18 million ask or $16 million ask. Have you, do we have data on how much restoration funds are available town by town, because I know sometimes we're collecting before we change the fees. I know the process of beginning to gather that data, but I believe we've only had about a year of collections. So the data may not be very extensive. Carol does who is the clerk in very city is leading the group that's collecting that data because they owe you folks a report in a couple of years. And I know Carol mentioned on one of our calls that she's starting the process of collecting the data. I don't know how much is available. And do we have any data. Do we have any data on which towns have a high number of transactions. I can tell you, not at this moment but with a little bit of work I can tell you which towns have the most pages that would need to be processed. Well, but I'm looking at another way is I mean, as you said some, some towns don't seem any real estate transactions and any given year where others see a lot. So prioritizing towns that do see a lot of real estate transactions might make some sense, especially in a grant process. Again, we can certainly supplement our survey and get that data but I don't have that data that wasn't that wasn't the way we asked the question. So Karen I see that you've unmuted yourself. Did you want to chip in on something here. Well, it seems that maybe an approach to take might be to set up a grant program that asks for the number of transactions that there are and then you could, you could rank the, the towns that get those grants based on the number of transactions. You wouldn't actually need to have the information today but you could make it part of the grant requirement. Okay, thank you and I had one more question and this is with respect to the microfilm that said viscera. So I'm a little confused is how that information will be useful. Given Jim's comment that those are like static documents that may not be updated by a town clerk. And how using those documents would benefit this process conversion is slightly less expensive than raw scanning, not significantly but slightly less. And if we were trying to fit a project into a budget, having that data is better than not having any data, and probably not as good as live scanning. Over time. It might save money in the short term, but in the long term you're going to have records that are inaccurate. So I don't see, I don't see the savings. I mean, ultimately, I mean, if I mean if we're going to do this we want to have a product that is reliable. I don't understand how converting those documents, which may not contain things like you know if a mortgage was discharged is all that helpful. It may not be when we were trying to when we were trying to grasp the scope of what this was. The folks at the Sarah offered that they had the microfilm and the companies that do this offered conversion. And so it was something of a relatively easy computation just to add that in. I don't know that conversion is better. Certainly from the point of view of someone who used to do title searches but doesn't any longer. Having the best live up to date documents is a better investment than something that could be anywhere from months to years old. I agree. And would the Sarah put a charge on accessing their microphone. It's actually our microphone that they're storing for us. Sure Mike. Okay, hopefully not. My recollection is it was $15 a fill for the Secretary of State's office, the Secretary of State's office offered a conversion process themselves. What I don't know is whether that conversion process would work for these vendors that was a question way beyond the scope of anything we could ask in a survey that we could ask people to respond to in three days. So it's possible that Secretary States office can do the conversion for significantly less than the million plus dollars that we have on either of the two proposals. But I don't know how each conversion process works and whether it would create images useful for vendor. Okay, thank you. So we have about 25 minutes left of committee this morning and I do have one other potential need for funding to get on the table. So Bob Cooper go ahead with your question and then we may shift gears. All right, my quick question. The subject of towns having some lot some few transactions brought up this question. Do time shares enjoy the traditional title search when they do a transfer Jim immediately looks up in the air. Yes, yes, it's over his shoulder hoping that there's someone's whispering in his ear the answer to the question. A few times share projects that I the few times shared transfers that I was involved in split about 5050 half the time the people said they didn't want to pay the cost of having the title search done they would take the risk and about 50% of the time. They wanted the title search done to verify that the person who was selling it to them was the actual legal owner of the property. And I suspect that maybe the answer is yes and no, that that some people want to search some people don't. And if a bank is involved in invariably going to be a requirement to do the search. Absolutely, as a function of insurance title is just security of their collateral. Thank you. Bank is required by statute to have a title search for any property that they loan money secured by a mortgage on. All right, so I'm going to ask folks to continue to work on ways of narrowing this. This project to be more directly coven related and and also so that we can make an honest good faith effort to, if we decide to put money to supporting this that we're actually going to have a few dollars within our CRF bucket to put into this project so please please keep thinking of ways we can put bumpers around us that will make it work. So it had it came to my attention that the COVID related expenses of solid waste districts weren't necessarily it allowable in the Senate version of this bill as a allowable reimbursement and so I'm, I have Paul to Massey here with the Northeast Kingdom. Solid waste management district to help us understand a little bit of the COVID challenges of these essential businesses and whether there's other COVID related funding sources to support them so Paul go ahead. Yeah thanks for allowing me to testify on such short notice. We've been kind of scrambling ever since the pandemic occurred to, you know, trying to identify sources of funding kept our eye, you know, mainly on the federal level, but also on the state level and to date. Literally, all forms of relief have passed over municipalities until recently and then, you know, we heard about as 349 being put forward, and then wondered why, you know, solid waste districts were were excluded. We were deemed an essential function as part of the governor's executive order here at the Northeast Kingdom waste management district we were essentially forced to reconfigure our staffing so that we could maintain social distancing yet continue to provide services. So we have a relatively small staff of about 11 individuals but we took steps to split them in groups, so as not to have more than two people in the same space at the same time. We did that in March, late March, and we continued that until late May. So, essentially what we did we offered our employees what we're calling hazard pay for we paid them for 40 hours, but they were only required to come in for 24 and then towards the end of that period. They came in instead of three days a week four days a week to kind of ease them back into the routine of things. So most of our coven related costs are behind us. Of course, you know, that assumes no kind of flare up and reestablishment of a stay at home order. We did try and send Andrea spreadsheet that details all of our costs during that time period. I will. I don't know if the committee members have actually seen that yet. Most of our costs are related with the hazard pay and that totals around $19,000 and then about another $1,000 in direct cost for things like zoom masks, disinfectant wipes, a thermometer so that we can check employees temperatures, supplies, you know, specifically related hand sanitizers and things like that. I will tell you that not all solid waste districts are created equal so I, I would be hesitant to say that our costs are representative of other waste districts. We do have a district managers meeting scheduled for this Thursday, and we're hoping to share all of our costs at that time so I don't have you know I know Jim asked the question earlier to Karen about average costs for for towns. I don't have that all I have is what we've spent. But I feel confident that the other solid waste districts could provide detailed figures. I don't know though, however, if all of the solid waste districts have gone back to full staffing, I think some of my colleagues are still working from home. We were never really able to do that because of the poor internet service here in the Northeast. Thank you any questions from committee members. Marsha Gardner. This may not be a question for Paul but other committee members do we know if the hazard pay bill would cover the expenses that that Paul has outlined to us. I'm not sure of the scope of that bill but Stephanie Barrett has turned on her video so I guess. So, as it came over from the Senate. Government employees were explicitly included the hazard waste districts I don't know if they would fall on that. Definitely the waste hollers would have been covered by the Senate version of the hazard pay bill. I know on the house side the hazard pay bill is probably going to be significantly revised if it goes at all is what I've heard. So I don't, I don't know what the status of that is at the moment but I, if, if solid waste districts are considered a sort of a governmental entity I don't think they would be included the districts themselves in the hazard and the hazard pay bill. But the hazard pay that they are experiencing would be part of what would be covered as an allowable expense under S 349 here it's just how the solid waste districts get represented in either item one or two. So that would be added explicitly in number two, along with the sheriffs and counties and gores or do the solid waste districts do they have an ability to, to build their, the towns that they serve in any way for their costs and then that would be reflected in number one by the towns if they submit. So that's the question I think on that one. Thanks so much Stephanie I appreciate it. Harrison. Paul it's good to see you again. It's been a while. Thank you for sending the spreadsheet. Can I assume from this, the 20,000 is the extra cost that you've incurred related to COVID for your district. Yes, that's correct. And if I, hey, you know I know I reached out to Senator kitchen when this bill was moving through the Senate, and she mentioned the possibility of having us go to the towns for reimbursement. I will tell you, you know we have 49 member towns. And unless there's some sort of direct assistance to, you know, help with that. I think that's going to be a real struggle to try and walk all of our members through that process. And how many solid waste districts are there again. I want to say 11. I'm embarrassed to not know the exact figure but probably fair that you have the most towns in your district though. Yeah. Thank you. All right, other questions from committee members. Welcome back Rob. We are, we are rapidly nearing the end of our committee time this morning and so thank you Paul for, for helping us understand the COVID related expenses that your district has incurred and I, I only wish that your director's meeting was tomorrow instead of Thursday because the timeline on making a recommendation on this bill night might not allow us to wait until then. So we are going to need to look at how we would craft the eligible expenses or the amount of money that we might put towards, towards solid waste management district COVID expenses. So I would put out the same invitation to you that I did to the folks talking about digitizing land records and, and that is to, you know, keep doing some work on this keep thinking about how, how to craft a grant program or on what basis money might be made available to these districts. Any other questions on anything that we've heard so far today. I'm actually checking on it today. Are you. Thank you. I, I think that we should all take a moment to stretch before we get on the house zoom at 10 o'clock. And so we will need to come back to this at our next committee meeting. And so would invite the folks who are here with us today to, to either make a proposal and get that sent out to us. Before tomorrow's committee meeting or come and join us again tomorrow you can let Andrea, our committee assistant know that you'd like to have the zoom invitation. And for committee members, I really want to invite you to, you know, to continue to think about how we take a Senate proposal and tailor it to be the size and scope of what we're seeing the need is here on the house side so tomorrow for committee, although floor starts at 10 so I wonder if we might not end up getting pushed back a little bit for our start time tomorrow. Marcia. And chair will we have time for committee discussion on these items that we have heard today. That's a great idea and and you know we could take, we could take five minutes of committee discussion right now and still have five minutes to stretch before floor time so what are what are people's thoughts on what you're hearing for need out there. Marcia, do you want to go first. I will thank you. Thank you. Looking through what the Vermont League sent to us. Maybe I'm missing it. I just don't see anything here that pertains to digitizing land records. And while I realize that that is very important to some. You know we're working with cares act money, and I think the first public perception of how we spend that money can be very important. And certainly see the solid waste districts receiving some assistance I think anyone can understand that they have had some difficulties over the past few months. I'm not so sure about digitizing records. So just a thought. Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. It's so far difficult for me to conceptualize how we would make money available for digitizing in a way that was responsive to the immediate coven emergency. Jim Harrison. I have more of a question for you Sarah but do we have a total number parameter that we should be working in or is it what the Senate sent over, which was the 15 million. Our, our box to work within is 10 million. And furthermore, the speaker reminded me that there are several other critical need areas that that would take any extra dollars that we didn't bend. So. So 10 is the max that we have to work with on this. So, given that, I mean we might consider, you know, a small portion for the solid waste districts and I say small, you know, it could be a quarter million it could be quarter million up to a half million, I don't know. Paul's numbers are very helpful. But, you know, Chittenden might be, you know, significantly more but it would be nice if they could maybe email the districts and get some information by tomorrow, even if it's back of the envelope type of information that might help us put different pots. 10 million is not a lot. So, especially when you divided up to 250 localities. So, I kind of agree with Marsha I think the digital of records would be a great service. I just don't know how we take 10 million and spread it to everybody based on what we're talking about. Thank you. I appreciate it. So, yeah, Paul, if you have the ability to to pull some other districts and get us some more information that would be very helpful. Yeah, I've made the note and I'm hoping to beat the bushes and get you some information before tomorrow's testimony. Excellent. Thank you. Bob Hooper. I'll join in with Marsha and Jim. I think John's are the answer that John got to the moment in time question is the thing that dictates every click of the clock makes that one shot deal less and less reliable and they wouldn't use it so without funding the whole thing it almost seems like it's good money going the wrong way. For the land records and it to me it serves so many fewer people that we should be looking for the most bang for the buck. Thanks. Thank you. I think it's really skeptical to think that's that's where money to go. I've been put a query out to the three towns I represent and, and for example, the town of domestic and got back to me and said they've spent about $1,000 to make some accommodations in their office. And I would hope small towns like that small expenses could find some some relief out of these are definitively COVID related expenses and I know Westminster has been doing some other things and right now they're not allowing people in their town because they need to do in the town hall because they need to do more. So I would hope that but small towns are experiencing across the state could could find some relief in in in this funding as well. Thank you. So I mean there is another solution for the land records issue which is the restoration fund that each town has. Well that money may not be large right now. So with time one thing we may want to look at, which we didn't do in the clerk fee bill is is mandate that that towns use those funds to start digitizing their records. And we may want to look at that next year but I agree with the other members of our committee that that's probably not the best use the money. I do have money to towns. I do still have a concern with respect to giving, you know, money to towns and other municipalities in that some towns, such as Burlington may have spent a lot of money on COVID-19 expenses and I would not want to see small towns who may not have the capacity to quickly apply for a grant left out. You know, and that is a big concern of mine is that this money will go to a couple of the larger population towns and that small towns will struggle. And I also think it's important to support our municipalities right now. Well, some of them are in good financial shape for this fiscal year that ends on June 30. Next fiscal year is a whole other story for most of them. Thank you. Excellent. Hal Colston. Real quickly, I just agree with, whoops, there we go. I agree with representative Hooper. I think it was well said. So that's how I feel. Thank you. All right, I want to thank you all for being with us this morning. Mike, your hand is still up but I'm thinking that's maybe from before. Let's all do a couple of jumping jacks and grab a glass of water and see you all on the floor zoom. Thank you for being with us today.