 Especially, again, acknowledging that the Department of Health is under a lot of pressure these days to do a lot of work. We want to get started promptly. So the reason for today's invitation was driven first and foremost by the discovery of PCBs at Burlington High School at such a level that they've had to move out and find alternate headquarters, whatever, for the foreseeable future. So we wanted to check in and learn more about not just the Burlington High School question, but also what the levels are, how you judge the toxicity of PCBs and how a state standard functions compared to a federal standard, usually people are saying, well, they appreciate that Vermont's standard being more general, I think in some cases more strict, I'm thinking of PFAS, for instance, that we're more protective than the federal standards of the health of Vermonters and that's a good thing. Someone did come back to me going the opposite direction and say, well, if we increase the Vermont's levels to match the federal levels, would Burlington High School then be judged safe? And that would be the direction we would go. So I'm not sure that we're not here to make any choices or recommendations this morning, but just know why there's a difference and what the state's thinking is why we have a difference and where we might go next. So I see Ms. Vos, Mr. Englander, Ms. Capolino, I don't know if we should call on you in order on our agenda, that would be Ms. Vos first, or if someone, you know, you're all three here, we're asking you to, you know, this could be like tag team wrestling, you can move back and forth between yourselves in order to work on the questions at hand. So why don't we start with just an explanation of PCBs as a toxin briefly and why there's two standards in play and how that relates to the Burlington High School scene and then just add a little more and how is Burlington High School representative of high schools or other public buildings generally from that era? Some people worry that BHS might be kind of the canary in the mine shaft telling us about other schools of that vintage. Yeah, this is Sarah and if it's okay with everyone, we would like Trish to go first because she's got a PowerPoint that'll give you some of that information and then I'm happy to answer questions and discuss more after that. Great. Thanks so much. So just give me a minute to get the PowerPoint up. I'm Trish by the way. Good morning. Thanks for coming in. Sure. Are you seeing that? Not yet. No. Okay, hold on for a second, sorry. So Senator Bray, maybe Jude could put it up. You think Jude could put that up for her? I'm trying one more time. This should work. There it is. There we are. So I wanted to go over just a little of what PCBs are. So polychlorinated biphenyls, they are human made chemicals. They were used commonly in buildings and electrical equipment, EPA banned them in 1979. PCBs are harmful to the immune system, reproductive nervous and endocrine systems. They can cause impaired immunologic development, fertility problems, changes to brain development in utero, thyroid, home remedies, increases in type 2 diabetes and they are cancer causing. So they're not good chemicals for the environment or people and Sarah, Dr. Vose can go a lot more of how these played into the values we're looking at. Specific to PCBs and building materials, because that's what we're talking about, they were used to impart flexibility basically to keep products soft so they wouldn't get hard and dry up. Where we find them mostly in buildings and specifically in schools, in the caulking, in the paint, fluorescent light ballasts and the capacitors that are in those light ballasts, window glazing, ceiling tiles, spray on fire proofing, floor finish and mastic such as the glue or resin. So there isn't I would say one thing that PCBs are not found in for the most part in older buildings. Why is this a concern? So why do these PCBs in building materials impact us? So our biggest concern with schools is the impact to indoor air. They can be released into the air through off-gassing so if you have caulking that has PCBs in it and it's in the building, PCBs can off-gas like a vapor into the air for it to be inhaled and breathed. PCBs can be absorbed into the building materials that are surrounding and I'm going to use caulking that are next to the caulking so the masonry next to the caulking can become impregnated with PCBs and now the building material itself is now contaminated with PCBs. Furnishings inside the buildings have this great foam inside them that absorb PCBs and they can become a long-term stink and continue to off-gas and provide PCBs to the air and then dust itself can settle onto the contaminated building material, become contaminated and then become airborne and spread throughout a building. And then going on to the last bullet is that some of the PCBs present in some of the products can contaminate the adjoining materials and contaminate them. They can fall out of the building and contaminate the ground surface outside the building also. The health department and agency natural resources and the agency of education worked on a potential process that we think would work when looking at the potential for PCBs in schools. Our thought process was looking at any school that was constructed or renovated before 1980 and renovated because you could have used any of the PCB containing products to renovate such as the caulking or the paints or the mastic. If a school was not constructed or renovated before 1980, we didn't think testing was necessary. We also wanted to make sure that all of the old fluorescent light ballasts and capacitors were replaced. I understand that Vermont went through a pretty large process of getting all of these out of school, so that's already good for us. But sometimes some of the capacitors may have leaked, so we want to see if there's any oil leaking or the capacitor itself was not removed when the light ballast was removed. And then we would like to see what sources of PCBs could exist in the school. We came up with a checklist that identifies most of the products that I listed earlier and others that could be in the school to use that and determining where potential sources of PCBs could be in the school. And then the next step would be testing the indoor air for PCBs. And we put together a guidance document that goes through what the testing looks like, looks like the analytical methods and reporting requirements. When results come back in. When the results come back in, we'd work with the department of health to evaluate what the concentrations were and any next steps that were needed. And then we would work with the schools to determine where the sources might be and how to best remove or mitigate those exposures. The question is, you know, what does that look like if you do detect PCBs and indoor air? What do you do next? So we'd go back to making sure that all of the fluorescent light ballasts were removed, that there wasn't any staining inside the building. If schools in session, we'd look at trying to implement some best management practices. So ventilation, wet cleaning to clean surfaces and duct work to make sure we're getting any contaminated dust out of the school. Collaboration with health. Working on how to address any detected concentrations, the risk, and the next steps. Sampling to identify PCB sources in the school. Looking at how to remove any of those sources and then mitigate if you can't remove them. And then re-sampling to ensure that we've done the best that we can. These are the current screening values that exist. For the most part, just to take a step back, PCBs are regulated by EPA. Most PCBs, actually all PCBs and building materials are regulated by EPA and the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources for the most part regulates PCBs in soil, groundwater, surface water, sediments. Not in building materials. This is a way for us to ensure that PCBs that are in building materials and impacting indoor air are being taken care of and we're being protective of the people that work in the schools, students and teachers. So the Department of Health calculated a screening value that's 15 nanograms per cubic meter that we look at as the detection that if you're below that, you don't need to do additional work and if you're above it, we need to evaluate further. EPA has several different values that they have to evaluate impacts to indoor air in schools and they're listed below in this table and they're based on age of the school population. I want to be clear, though, that EPA is basically saying that these are not to be interpreted as bright line or not to exceed values and that EPA is recommending that concentrations of PCBs in indoor air be kept as low as reasonably achievable. So even if you achieve one of those values, it doesn't mean that your school is okay. You still have additional work to do under EPA authority. In 2013, the Agency of Natural Resources, Department of Health and Agency of Education, I think at that time it might have been Department of Education. We were working towards trying to evaluate potential PCB impacts to our schools in Vermont and so we looked at four different schools in the state that met the criteria listed before Belcher renovated before 1980. So we did Berrytown, Champlain Elementary, Holland Elementary, and Mount Anthony. And so for Berrytown, the takeaway here was that we collected 23 indoor air samples in the school. Three of the samples had detections. They're listed there, 3356 and 130 nanograms per cubic meter after evaluation by the Department of Health. It's determined that the levels are not a significant health threat because average indoor air concentrations were below 15 nanograms per cubic meter and we didn't require any additional work. Champlain Elementary is in the same situation. We collected 20 indoor air samples there. Four of those had detections. They're listed out 2732, 36 and 165 and it was the same analysis and outcome for Champlain Elementary. The other two schools were Holland and Mount Anthony. Holland had 10 samples, not anything of 24. They all came back non-detect less than 15 nanograms per cubic meter. So we were feeling okay. I guess about our outcome with the schools. But here's Burlington High School and what we're finding in Burlington High School. So I only listed four of the buildings. We did sample six of the buildings that were there. And I'm listing them out as buildings because they are separate buildings that are just connected by walkways. So building A, we've done up to 12 indoor air samples. Concentrations ranged from four. So it's still below the 15 to up to 260 nanograms per cubic meter. Building B, 12 samples range from 27 to 270. So all 12 were contaminated. Building D, same thing 10 indoor air samples and they range between 11 and 300 nanograms per cubic meter. And building F actually can't see. This is 160 I think. 160 to 7100 nanograms per cubic meter. Building F was the building that we got the results back first, which caused the school to consider relocating with students. So for each building, what we're doing with Burlington High School sounds like you wanted to have a little background on the work that we're doing there. The school's consultant has gone through and they've done a very comprehensive survey of all the potential PCB containing products within the school. They are collecting a lot of data so that we can understand what products might be causing the largest impacts to the indoor air so that they can be removed as part of their renovation or mitigated if they can't be removed. We are starting to get results back from building A and based on what my understanding is right now that the caulking and the formastic have some of the higher concentrations in building A. They are working methodically through each building to try and collect building material samples so they can have a better understanding of how to best renovate, remediate, and mitigate the school for future use. The budget considerations that went into the request or went into the governor's budget that you're looking at was based on our estimate of the fact that there might be up to 300 schools statewide that meet the basically built or renovated before 1980. We're looking at a range of costs to sample each school which would be between $15,000 and $20,000 per school to collect indoor air samples. The remaining funds would be used to provide a publicly accessible data management system and provide technical assistance from both agency natural resources and the department of health. What was not considered in the budget is if indoor air concentrations are found to be elevated there is no cost within that budget to do any of the sampling. I was just talking about this happening at the Burlington High School to look for those sources within the school. There is no cost in the budget to remediate or mitigate an impacted school and the costs that I've listed here are ranging between small school where you're maybe you're just taking out some caulking to large complex schools where there are a lot of different building material contaminant issues. These costs include replacement costs. If there is glazing on a window it doesn't include the cost to replace the window it doesn't include the cost to put new tile down if you're taking out the mastic and it doesn't include the cost to put new caulking or anything like that into a building. Can we pause here just for a moment? One is the prior slide tasks here the statewide survey for instance they're already in the budget and you already have a plan to go ahead and do this work. Is that on your to-do list already or this is an idea that maybe would be a good idea to do it? The cost is on our to-do list so we have not done any survey or inventory of the schools yet to date to determine how many fit within the built or renovated category. Okay and so do you have an approximate timeline for when you would start this statewide survey and how long it would take to conduct it? We're waiting for data from the Agency of Education on schools in the state so that we could actually reach out to those schools. I would estimate once we get that information we could start doing outreach and receive data back within six months to have a comprehensive understanding of what the population is. Okay great and let me pause just to look around the rooms here and see if there are any other members of the two committees have questions Senator Hooker. Thank you. Thank you Patricia. I'm just curious to know about the buildings that you tested in Burlington High School. Three of them seem to be pretty close in the numbers but building F is a real outlier. What was that building? Building F is the building that has their tech center in it and their day care. Building A has their gym so they all have different building uses and different construction inside them. Some of them are all classroom and some of them may be more industrial. But each one will find out I think more about what the main source of the contaminations are as we continue the sample. Sure. Senator Lyons then Senator Campion. Thank you. Thank you for the slideshow presentations. Very helpful. So I have a couple of questions and first relating to EPA but then moving down into the questions around our local high schools. So when was the last time that the EPA evaluated and made changes to the standards for PCBs? Do you know? So I know at least for soil and building materials is 1980 time frame when the TOSCA regulations came out. I'm pretty sure Dr. Vos... 1976, right? I know Dr. Vos will be able to talk to you about when they did the evaluation for the indoor air values which is more recent. I don't know that. Okay. And then another question related I mean because obviously the understanding of the effect of lower levels has significantly since that time. The next question I have is with respect to enforcement, consumer products enforcement, Attorney General's office and through the Attorney General's office and has... I don't remember when that came into play. Was that active after 1980? If you don't know the answer we can find out but certainly there may be some leakage in the consumer products that came into the state if there wasn't any oversight for that. So I don't know. Okay. So that and then the testing that's gone on obviously since 2013. Have you done testing at all on buildings that were constructed after 1980? And then as you're looking at Burlington High School that seems like such a high level in that one building. It suggests to me that there might have been some additions additive PCBs since 1980 and are you getting at... are you going to inquire about that and get at that issue? Oh, sorry. Yep, go ahead. Okay. So to be clear within Vermont state, Vermont government there is no one that regulates PCBs and building materials so we don't usually get involved in this process. The times that we are normally involved in PCBs and building materials is there are Brownfield's renovations for the most part where we're seeing it and we're looking for it there and they're cleaning it up but at the same time usually EPA will be involved and so there's already a regulatory authority there. So there's not been a lot of reporting to the state on when PCBs are being found in schools. I am aware through recent digging that there has been some PCBs that are being found during renovations in schools but indoor air is not being tested as part of that removal of usually caulking or window glazing. To the Burlington High School question our understanding is that most of the school was built between 1965 and 1967. There may have been some renovations that happened afterwards but I think the reason that they are in the process of trying to renovate the school now is because it hasn't been renovated in a very long time. Yeah more or less I mean there's so many questions in this thing and if we're going to start we are very concerned and as we start testing schools regardless of when they were built I think it's very important to understand if any of these products were distributed after the EPA ban on PCBs. I mean because then that and then if that is the case how can we hold the schools harmless or the state harmless for the significant cost of testing and repair. So that's a comment but I think it's a great concern. I do have one little tiny question and that is as you're doing testing are you doing any on-site testing do you have that capacity to bring in your I don't know what you're using a mass spectrometer or what? For indoor air sampling potentially I know if you're doing the building material sampling we had looked into that with use of the EPA mobile lab and it doesn't work as well only because if you're what I understand anyway when you're looking at a caulking the PCBs are so entrenched within the material that you really need to make sure that you're grinding it up really well so that you can get the PCB concentrations out the best through extraction. So there's a potential that it could happen with indoor air sampling but probably not with the building materials. Thank you. Thank you and before going on to center's Campion Westman and Hardy just a quick follow-up then based on what Center Alliance just asked if those PCB containing materials may have been imported after the ban does that 1980 date need to be moved closer in time? I'm sure there's the potential that there were products of mastic or caulking that were ordered in bulk and now they're being used so we could look later in like 1985 potentially and go back from there so we did constantly looking at a wider age range because of that thought process. Thanks. Thanks, Senator Bright. I'm wondering what it means to be non-detect. It seems as though non-detect, there's some PCB there, there's something. Is it just that's the safety level? I know we dealt with this a little bit when we were doing the lead bill as well. So non-detect, you would basically look at what the detection limit is that the lab is reporting to you at and let's say it's four nanograms per cubic meter, non-detect would be below what their detection limit is. But there's still PCB there? Not that the instrument is reporting to you. So non-detect means zero. Non-detect means it's not being detected by the instrument. Great, perfect, thank you. Senator Westman. I'm interested in you know at the top level there's 20,000 per school and apparently you said that the ED agency is trying to refine the number of schools that would need to be tested that are before 1980. When will we have that information? I'm not sure when the agency of education will come out. For the record, Peter Woff commissioner of DC has a great question. I think what we're finding across the board and that's part of the reason why I believe that there's a broader effort to look into the condition of various school buildings around the state is that we don't have great records at the state level and we're working to improve those but it is going to require a district by district survey to understand the full universe. This estimate was based on what we know and what we imagine is likely it will need to be significantly refined. Well the I just say the four and a half million is pretty much hitting between 15 and 20,000 per school because there's 250 schools in the state. It would seem that if we were going to move ahead with this we should very quickly be able to find out with that confined number what the real number of schools would need to be done. I can pretty much tell you that of the 10 elementary schools in my district, three were built after 1980 and or two were built after 1980 and one has been completely the school got it in rebuilt. So but I would think we would want we want to be pretty diligent to try to get those numbers to be able to move ahead with this. Okay. Certainly we agree with that and we want to get there the question of timing and where we are in the legislative calendar. We wanted to get this in as part of the budget. We understand there was significant interest and so wanted to make sure that that process was started and certainly there are other steps that we'll need to complete. I would say we put the money in for Burlington the budget adjustment but this is really pretty important stuff and you know so a lot of us that have districts where we know our schools were built you know before I haven't got a single high school in my district that was built after 1980. So you know having that information would be really important. Commissioner Walk, I don't know if that is something on your to-do list or this goes back to Ms. Capolino but who could we check in with to get it you know basically something like a date certain to know what we're talking about so that we can then go ahead planning and budgeting. Who owns this that we can ask about it? It's a combined effort between the agency of education, the agency of resources and the Department of Health. I think we all have a role to play here. I think one of the open questions and frankly you hit on it in your earlier questioning was whether or not schools would be required to test because I think as Trish made clear we would be able to regulate indoor air quality as a result of releases. It doesn't constitute a release under our current statute. So if we're going to we built this with in part with the idea that it could be used as a volunteer testing program by schools or as a mandatory but that question is frankly open and one we don't have control over and one we would be looking to work with you on to understand what the desire is. Thank you so that seems like one to flag as a policy question to make sure we come back to. Any Senator Hardy thank you for waiting. Thank you Senator Bray. I have two clarifying questions and then a broader comment but Patricia could you just clarify for me is the EPA level at the 15 nanograms per cubic meter or is that the Vermont BDH level? The Vermont BDH level is the 15 nanograms per cubic meter. Okay and then the EPA levels are those higher levels the 100, 200, 300 whatever in that chart. Is that correct? Correct. Okay and so that was my first clarifying. Second is is there a requirement at this point in law or rule or wherever that requires entities schools or other public entities to report if they've detected any PCBs because I know this was an issue in Burlington that these were discovered and it took I believe almost a year for them to be reported to teachers and parents etc. So is there a requirement or is it just voluntary? So there's a requirement if PCBs are detected in groundwater soil sediment or surface water in Vermont to be reported to the agency of natural resources as a release. When PCBs are detected in building materials the requirement for TOSCA is to report it when they're ready to clean it up. Aha so that was probably contributed to the delay that there was they weren't ready to clean it up yet and it wasn't it wasn't necessarily in the water and soil. It was in the soil and it was in the soil from the building materials contaminating the soil. So that should have been reported to the agency of natural resources at that time as a release. Okay I see and just sort of broader and Commissioner Walk kind of alluded to this but you know this feels a little bit like deja vu. I was on the Senate Education Committee two years ago when we went through this whole process with the water led water testing that Senator Campion mentioned and it seems to me that we're going to every two years have some other issue or other toxic chemical that's found in schools or somewhere and I'm wondering if it may be prudent to sort of set up this kind of system more broadly if you're doing a survey already or planning one maybe we should include other things in that survey and I think that the sort of system that was created by Department of Health and DEC for the lead testing as far as I know worked quite well and I was very impressed with the public database that you set up and everything so I'm just wondering if we could if there are other things on our radar I know radon is one issue and there are other toxic chemicals that may be helpful to include in this but doing so without losing sight of the urgency of the PCBs but it may be more efficient to tackle it and I'm wondering if maybe Commissioner if you were going to address something like that in your comments or if you have any thoughts about that I'm happy to weigh in so I think you have identified a key issue I will say that I don't believe that it's easy to see the sort of the lead and PCB issues as similar and there are lots of similarities things we don't want to be in schools as a basic starting point the challenge is that what we would do when we found a lead in drinking water in schools was primarily a sort of replacement of the faucet or drinking water fountain or whatever it might be which was relatively small scale and inexpensive this really is a would require sort of building wide survey of materials significant investigation the cleanup is significantly more expensive and so it's a little bit different to have them on the same sort of timelines and thought processes and there as we think about what other things we might be looking for there is that sort of raises further challenges as to sort of would the identification of an issue and the potential remediation of that issue be on similar timelines and how we would resolve some of those things but I do appreciate and that's one of the things certainly that the information is thinking about in terms of their survey is to understand sort of the full gamut of need and so there is but that but that is on a on a more deliberate and diligent timeline as as Senator Westman referred to and trying to understand that sort of full context but understanding the full context does make it move slower okay I don't want to waste a good survey so if you're going to survey schools they get a lot of surveys you might as well survey them about multiple things at the same time let me clarify quickly just there's there's not confusion so the survey we would do would be a quick sort of tell us about the age of your building so we understand the universe of the of the testing need the survey that we has in place this thing is contemplating and I believe is part of the budget discussion I'm a little unclear about that but I can get the details for you would be more of a hiring somebody to do a more detailed analysis of the state of Vermont school buildings across the board and so that's a much different level of effort that then would be required for us to kind of do that for screening level examination of what buildings might need to be tested well and to Senator Hardy's point and I'm sure Senator Lyons whose hand is up will have something more she can share with us too I mean that on our agenda this is listed as PCBs and other chemicals of concern because we know that we don't want to be in the whack-a-mole business of coming back one by one by one and that's always seems like it's one of our challenges with toxins that over time we identify more of them and or we come become more sensitive to the things that we once thought were healthy now we see as maybe riskier than we believe because science advances so it seems like another follow on discussion would be how do we have a more comprehensive survey plan regardless of the timeline for the different chemicals because they're not all the same and I think and the fixes aren't all the same I would hate to have anyone listen to us talking about this and come away and I know you don't mean this that we don't want to look for things that would be very expensive to remediate so we'll have to figure out a way around how to address that. Senator Lyons and then Senator Westman and then Senator Campion. Well thank you as the discussion goes on of course it reminds us that the Vermont Department of Health and through Health and Welfare Committee we've put in place a comprehensive children's products assessment of toxic chemicals and trying to eliminate those toxic chemicals from children's products. The original intent of that program was to have a full expanse of consumer products generally and that didn't that hasn't happened but it is absolutely essential I think Ray has said that we have that comprehensive analysis or actually elimination of those chemicals that are so toxic particularly to public health so that's a broader conversation right now we're nickel and diming schools and then we're making a decision that maybe we shouldn't be testing some chemicals in schools because it's so expensive and we should. I mean there's no question that we should be working as quickly as possible to change over the school environment for kids so it will be costly but I do think that this all falls into the purview in this case as did led it falls into the purview of the Department of Health and we need to work on that I know the ANR also has the hazardous chemicals group that's looking at hazardous chemicals that I'm very concerned that we not that we let some of the schools go for one reason or another we need to have that list and we need to know what contamination is there regardless of cost because the cost to our children and to health care in the future is astronomical just looking at PCB looking at BPAs and related compounds the cost in Maine was over 637 million dollars a year for health care effects for kids so you hear my I think working together to test get the information Senator Hardy's interest in transparency for the public is also critical I think first we have to know what's there Sarah Limes if I might just clarify I don't want to leave the impression with the committee at all that we are not looking to test that's who wouldn't have put forward this proposal I didn't I did not commissioner I did not get that impression and you've always been very proactive in this area so thank you and same here I'm just saying there will be some people who will be concerned about the liability of what could be revealed by testing and I think the next room is that everyone wants to go ahead with the testing regardless of what kind of financial implications that testing might reveal to all of us. Senator Westman I just like to say I totally agree that we should do something comprehensive this problem is in front of us many of us have lots of schools that were built before 1980 and the legislature more than likely will not will be on more of a normal schedule this year than we've been so we have real will be gone after May and so from my vantage point there's some urgency to figure out what schools might be at risk where we are to be able to make sure we can deal with that because I wouldn't want to be in the position of waiting for another year. Sure. Well thank you for that. Miss Capolino you just took down your your power point and I was going to ask you about your second budgeting. May I just get in the queue. Oh yeah I'm sorry thank you. This might be for the commissioner do we know for example I know with your work with PFOA we've had these conversations over the years where we can outlaw certain things in the United States and in the state of Vermont but then they still might come in from other countries and I'm just wondering do we know and this might be a kind of a silly question but are people manufacturing in other countries with PCBs and is it possible that we are receiving this country things with PCBs that you know as we continue to build etc do we have any sense of that That is not a question I can answer at this point but yeah I agree with you that there are there are challenges to the way we regulate chemicals at the federal level under TASCA some of the changes that were part of the Latin burger amendments in 2016 helped improve that system but it is yeah there are challenges so let us dig into that a little bit more unless Trish has some knowledge off the top of her head but that's a lot to know I really appreciate that and I'm wondering also and this could be kind of I mean is our PCBs just so I know are they being used anywhere now in the United States or is it just they're done I mean there's no they're just they're not in bye bye you know when I go out later to buy a beam for something I usually do on a Tuesday afternoon is it's definitely there's there's nothing there's no reason to be concerned that a PCB might have been manufactured and put into something in this country so there's still PCBs that are used in capacitors and transformers and other industrial products that are not required to remove the PCBs right now so the EPA is still allowing for that use so if a school were to buy something and would they know that it has a PCBs in it you know going forward so in the US they're banned I'm not sure that they're being manufactured in other parts of the world right now I haven't seen that I did did look for that earlier maybe even Dr. Bruce might know more but I'm not saying that they're still being manufactured okay center lines that's what I was going to say I'm good okay so before we go on or can I just confirm that the four and a half million ballpark estimate for testing for PCBs statewide yes okay it's more of a one-time surplus spending recommendations it is included as part of a ten million dollar transfer to the environmental contingency fund and up to five million of that is set aside for testing and technical support and the public awareness website for work that center already referenced and this capolino second budgetary slide with all the remediation etc that's where we don't have money allocated because those are going to be on a case-by-case basis yes I just wanted to get that part straight and then center mcdonnell we hear occasionally the phrase one-time spending surplus money but what exactly does that mean is that a question for me Mr. Walk used that in budgetary matters we more frequently the expression one-time money surplus something or other that's where the money is coming from could we get a more specific understanding of what that term means sorry my internet connectivity got a little unstable there as I was trying to explain I think I cut out it is essentially a transfer from the general fund to the environmental contingency fund that is not part of our base budget is not an ongoing expense is a transfer a one-time transfer recommended in the budget that would transfer general fund dollars into the environmental contingency fund where five million dollars up to five million dollars would be made available for this testing proposal so when the general fund is being when the budget is being crafted for state spending it will be short that amount of money this year and is there any where is it going to come from just from the routine revenues to the general fund correct and in the belief from the both legislative and the executive economists that the there was an increase in revenue in this projected for the coming year that we're not likely to see on an ongoing basis it comes from that portion thank you Mr. Chair the finance committee will probably be looking at the kind of roller coaster questions about revenues that have been taking place over the last nine months where they're up and they're down and they're up and they're down so thank you very much and thanks for the clarification can I quickly ask senator McCormick a question that has been taken up in the institutions committee at all as a capital expenditure you're muted senator good reason to learn sign language yes or no question there has it been taken up in institutions as possible capital expenditure for any of the remediation oh okay might that that might be a good conversation well you know part of the interesting thing about this meeting is that we have our committee is usually focusing on what's outside of a building you know our territory sort of tends to come up to the building's edge and then health and welfare I don't know how you would describe it it's more like you're looking at products and things people have in their hands and I don't know who sort of owns the indoor space of a school maybe that's education worrying about what's going on inside there but it's of interest to all of us and we so it's good that we're all in the same meeting at the same time because we don't want it to fall through the cracks just by virtue of not quite being clearly someone's jurisdiction I will say senator that anything that affects the human condition in terms of the indoor environment is clearly health and welfare but however in this instance it certainly is a part of the educational enterprise for expenditures and remediation and it carries outside to the to the soil as you heard soil testing so it affects each one of our committees we say if it's on planet Earth our committee is interested we like that so Ms. Vos and Mr. Englander you've been with us well let me pause and say Ms. Cavallino did you have anything more you wanted to share with us this morning I know you've already thank you very much for that helpful order orderly presentation on the whole issue and so I don't know if Ms. Vos or Mr. Englander if you had anything you wanted that you had planned to share with us on this topic or you were just here for technical support you know yeah so my name is Sarah Vos I'm the state toxicologist and I assess the health risk from exposure to chemicals in our environment so Trish did include an explanation of health effects from PCBs so I'm happy to answer any questions that you have about that I do have one quick one and that is as part of our work on plastics last summer a summer before last we talked about PCBs as forgetting a sign held up here I am unmuting it is not responding okay we're not holding you responsible for bad for an equipment failure thank you center McCormick anyway so we were looking at that moment at PFAS and then we had testimony from John Hopkins who is talking to us about PFAS and other plastics as endocrine disruptors and then it was orders of magnitude like two orders of magnitude more sensitive in terms of possible impacts so can you just say a little bit about you know we might feel like our 15 nanograms per cubic meter is a reasonable standard but do you have the sense that we will learn that these are actually impactful at even lower concentrations and that will need to adjust them in the future I mean where I just say the levels will keep dropping as we come as our understanding becomes more and more subtle yeah so PCBs and I think Trish might have mentioned this PCBs are a class of 209 different chemicals that we call PCBs and some of them are very potent endocrine disruptors we also know that they are potent developmental toxicants so they affect the way that a developing baby's brain is formed and those can have impacts to children later in life and we know that these PCBs last a very long time in the environment so that's you know similar to PFAS they don't break down very easily they also don't leave our bodies very quickly so the half lives of PCBs you know they do range because there are 209 but some of them are decades so you know we do have a lot of concern about those when you're dealing with developmental toxicants especially something that can stay in your body for a very long time it means that even short exposures to for example young women could lead to exposure to their baby later on in life as far as the levels Trish explained a little bit about detection level and reporting level the screening value that we created was selected to be above the detection level because you know it's not very feasible to have a screening level that's below what the machines can detect so your question of whether or not it would go lower I think would be a function of how quickly the analytical methods so what if they change and how quickly they change to be able to go down orders of magnitude but I mean nanograms from meter cubed is already a very low you're wearing a very low range there right okay thank you centered alliance so thank you Dr. Voss the question I have is do we have any indication of is there a trend line in a state or any indication of increased effects or effects of as a result of PCB exposure in kids you know obviously developmental delays or autism or some of the effects may be there but have we done any measurement public health measurement on those illnesses or changes that would suggest PCBs have had an effect there are publications that look at neurodevelopmental impacts from PCBs there are not any I guess I'm talking about Vermont more I'm not talking about sort of the general literature but yeah yeah so I was just going to say there are not any that specifically look at exposure in schools for some of the reasons that Trish has explained and there are not any that look at exposure outcomes in Vermont any other questions for our guests from the Department of Health this morning alright well thanks I mean since I haven't seen a meeting since the last session I'll just say along sort of this is one of those on behalf of every Vermonter thank you so much for all your work during the pandemic I know it's been it's something we say and it sounds like it gets repeated it's hard for us to appreciate how much work it's been for you all and but we appreciate it but part of the reason that Vermont is doing so exceptionally well in the country is because of the work of you and your colleagues so thank you for that yeah thank you I'll pass it along I work with a very broad group of people but I'll pass it along to everyone yeah okay thank you alright so that finishes a first conversation as a group on PCBs and school testing there's money in the budget at least to address this particular toxin but the bigger question that I think we'll want to work on as a group is how do we move away from being reactive to the discovery of one thing to getting out ahead of a wider panel of tests and I think so we've done it with we've done a version of it with PFAS now we're talking about revisiting on PCBs radon when I was on the Education Committee had come up as another problem and so I'm just sensing that we're it's a little bit like Groundhog Day where we're having another version of the same conversation repeatedly I don't know how we what plans we should I guess we should continue the conversation about how do we move from reactive to looking at things that aren't already listed as a known problem but may well be there Senator Bynes so thank you for the comments I couldn't agree with you I couldn't agree with you more in particular with respect to the good work that the Department of Health is doing during this difficult time the reason I raised my hand is that Senate Health and Welfare needs to move back into its own room at this point and thank you for the joint meeting we didn't want to say anything but it was getting a little crowded in here yeah I can tell you know we want a good air quality alright thanks for joining us actually I have a question for Dr. Volk and for Dr. Voss and that is have we tested the State House for this not bad question I am not aware of any tests at the State House for PCBs obviously we are talking about a subset of buildings that wasn't limited to the use of PCB containing building materials in schools okay thank you and committee Senator Hooker we need to leave just a quick question to Dr. Voss are there any anticipated studies for looking into effects of the PCBs so maybe I can just explain quickly EPA's levels are based on the state of the science as of 1994 and when we looked at the same science we also looked at newer science you know 1994 was quite a while ago and that's one of the reasons why our levels are so much lower so whether or not EPA will go back and take another look at the additional decades of research that show health effects including developmental neurotoxicity at lower doses than what they found in 1994 I would I think it's anybody's guess as to where if and when they would ever reopen that and come up with a lower level but with regard to what's happened at Burlington High School will Vermont move forward and look at the effects that PCBs have had we've said that there's no data and I'm just questioning how do we go forward when we have no data to rely on as far as what the effects have been okay yeah thank you I'm sorry I misunderstood your question so I think you're asking if we would do an epidemiology study and my typically when we're asked that question you know those studies are typically done in academic institutions that are research entities or not research entity typically the number of people you would need to enroll and the amount of time you would have to conduct a study would be very prohibitive in Vermont we have such a low population but there are a number of studies and granted they weren't done specifically in Vermont but there are those epidemiology studies done on larger populations that do show these outcomes pretty consistently and clearly in different populations thank you sorry to hold up alright well good to see members of health and welfare thanks for joining us see you again and thank you Department of Health okay thank you