 All right, well good morning everyone. We are picking up on H107. We have an interesting mix of witnesses this morning. We'll start with Commissioner Curley and we'll start with the department first. Let us once again go around the room for introductions. We'll start with the committee and then I'd like to just go around the room. There's a lot of people in here today. Some faces I recognize, most faces I recognize and some I don't. So I'd just like to know who's here and who you're representing if you wanted to share that. So Tom Stevens from Waterbury. I represent Waterbury and Moulton, Huntington and Beale's score. Representative Gonzales is the right member. She's from the musketeer she won't be in today. Matt Byron, Regents, representing Regents, Ferrisburg, Panton, Walton, and Hanson. Randall Zog from Barnard. Marietta Glash from Spontane. John Calackey from South Burlington. Tommy Walts from Garry City. Chip Froyano representing Hardwood Standard and Walden, Northeast Kingdom. And Representative Howard from Rutland is also the committee. He has broken her arm in two places this week and representative Long from New Faye is the will be in if she can make it and then we have a vacancy. Ed Dillman, action circles, legislative internment. Farnam, tax department. Amy Leonard, legislative council. Joyce Ventus, you're joining the squad. Kelly Avery from Waterbury, Citys and Towns. Derp. Oh, sorry, Derp Anderson, general council, department of the laborer. Jessica Jengres, I'm the legislative policy director for the department of laborer. Angela Oldway, I'm director of human resources for climate technology. Ashley Moore of the Bain Street Alliance. Ernest O'Bowdy from AFL-CIO. I'm on the town's Rockland Martin. Matt McMahon with MMR. Tess Kennedy, Chalice Associates. Great. Welcome, everybody. And are you from Orca? Jero, what are you calling me? From Orca. So we invited you back in Commissioner and your team to really walk us through your thoughts on the building. Over the years, there's been some evolution on thoughts about the bill. And while we acknowledge that there's a, we had the administration in yesterday as well to discuss the administration's plan, we just wanted to hear from the department of labor on just the practicality. This is a sliver that would probably be housed the computer. Half of the computers would probably be housed in the department of labor and half in tax. And we just wanted to get your thoughts just on, and Cameron's thoughts obviously on the practicality of what we're looking to do and how it is to set up a program that is similar to programs we already have. But I must say, after doing my expenses on the new employee expense computer program, I understand that things can be difficult rolling out. The microphone is yours. Thank you. For the record, I'm Lindsay Curley, the commissioner of labor and with me today. Cameron Wood, I am the, excuse me, director of the unemployment insurance division for the department of labor. And we'll also squeeze Dirk up to the table here in a little bit. If that's okay, I'll just kind of start off and then I'll make room because they are the experts. Sure. And in a case like today, especially with the department, anybody wants to get in one week of going on occasion, someone may raise their hand from the sides. If I do, I mean, we try to keep the witnesses here at the microphone, but if I do notice that somebody is offering information that can clarify a point, just please, if I recognize you, please identify yourself. So that when this is on the record, we know who's chatting. Sure. So as you mentioned, I know yesterday at Kendall-Smith, along with commissioners Pitchak and Pistigie were here to talk about the proposal by the administration with the state of New Hampshire. And we are really here today to, you know, I'll just reiterate, obviously, we are also just reminding that we do not support a mandatory paid family leave program. That being said, you're here to talk about H107 and we wanna really focus on that for you all today. And regardless of what the administration's proposal is, we're going to talk about H107, you know, separate from that because we do have some things that we want you all to really think about as you move forward in making your decisions. I understand yesterday that you asked that the administration be very responsive and thorough as the committee makes requests. And I just want you to know that our team is, we are fully on board with that and we are committed to doing so. I just wanna give a little outline and like I said, then hand it over to Director Wood and General Counsel Anderson because they both have a great deal of expertise with respect to our unemployment insurance program, which is really that the only thing or the closest thing that we can compare to this. So we can talk as experts from that perspective to help through this process. The bill as proposed, as I understand it, would require the Department of Labor to do the following, administer the receipt and processing of benefit applications, create forms, processes, create and adopt rules, determine eligibility for the benefits and make that determination no later than five business days after a claim is filed. The maximum time allotted is 10 days. We would be responsible for collecting overpaid benefits. We would be responsible for creating the ability and capacity to determine an audit process in an effort to reduce fault statements and representations. We would create an appeals process developing and making information available in materials to educate employers and employees regarding the program. We would report to the General Assembly every year the contribution rate necessary to provide the benefits and administer the program and assume all other duties that are not specifically laid out in the bill to be covered by the tax department who would be co-administering as we understand. The largest and most concerning piece of the bill and this program for our department is a perceived lack of understanding regarding the funding needed to create and carry out such a program. There were some preliminary numbers discussed at the very tail end of last biennium which we'd be happy to try and go over for that as, you know, again, we did testify a great deal last year on this little bit in this committee but quite a bit in the Senate as well. And, you know, what we feel is really important is that if we are doing this, we have to have a properly built IT system. We have to have the infrastructure in place to have this case management system and to track the claims and track determination, basically track everything that we need to track through this process. And another piece of it is tracking determinations as to whether or not claimants fit the medical criteria or are even eligible. At some point last year there was some suggestion that maybe we could just hire people and do a very manual approach and I just want to caution you all that based on what I know now in watching our unemployment insurance program try to come into a modernized program, IT system, we don't want anything that manual. So I would hope that we could keep that off the table. But again, our concern is that we know how much it's taken for us to lift an IT system that is in a consortium. Meaning another state is helping us to build the system which means the costs are kept down. But we're looking at right now we've spent $20 million to lift our IT, our UI system. And in talking with the state that we're involved in if everybody had it to do it over we would all say that we should have put more money aside for it or we would have put more money aside. That being said, we have an agreement with them we're working through it. But sometimes when I hear $2 million thrown out for a system it puts me into anxiety I guess. So I just want us to be thoughtful as we go through and understand what the costs behind building a system like this is. Again, I don't want to delay I want to let you all chat with Cameron because he really is the expert as well as Dirk but I'll stay here and be available for questions as needed. I should decide Dirk, do you want to come up here? Can you forward me, may I ask? Oh yes, yes. Oh yes, for sure. Three of us are freshmen and many others are new to this committee. So I think those costs, the IT costs that you came up with at the end of the last session would be of note for us. So if you could share those with us at some point I think that would be helpful. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Okay. Cameron might, yeah he might have that in his notes for today as well. Yeah, I appreciate you saying that but very helpful. Anyone else? Yes. I'm Angela Rogran from Chroma Technology. I'm actually just curious, have you looked at what's available for purchase for systems? Because I understand unemployment, you're creating something completely new but everything you mentioned for administering large employers are already needing to do based on federal FMLA and there are already softwares that you can utilize and subcontract with. Okay, and just, I'm sorry. Directly, yeah, it's new to me too, so you can share it, but and you can also speak more to that when you sit forward, but I would ask the same question or let Cameron discuss that because I think one of the lead questions I have is, so why is it so much? No, but please start with your presentation and then we'll have you with questions as they come forward. Whatever works for you. All right, thank you. Again, my name is Cameron Wood, I'm the director of the Unemployment Insurance Division for the Department of Labor. I've been in my position for nearly three years with the department and when the bill last biennium first came out, I think there was a lot of conversation about actually structuring the program on top of the Unemployment Insurance program that we have because of the similarities that there are between how I envision you would administer something like this. For those in the room, a quick overview of unemployment insurance, we collect taxes on wages that are paid to employees from employers, so we have the tax side, we also have the benefit side where we have to take in claims, process those claims, and pay the benefits and unemployment insurance similar to what you have here in front of you. There is a monetary eligibility threshold that one has to meet in order to become eligible. There are additional eligibility criteria that one has to meet in order to be deemed eligible to receive unemployment insurance, so I'm just saying this to say that I think the programmatic structure that you have in front of you is very similar to that, and as the commissioner mentioned, going through our own modernization effort in trying to develop an IT system that would suffice for what we needed to, my biggest concern with putting into place a paid family leave program like this is making sure that everyone at the conversation is fully understanding of the complexities of a program like this and what it actually takes to build an IT system that would run this program. There are many, I think other programs out there which I have not investigated, so I can't necessarily speak to, but what I can say is there aren't many programs like this in the country that have been implemented, so there may be things that employers have in place, but there aren't things that other states have in place that can easily adopt, and so it becomes very tricky as I'm happy to kind of go into detail with them as we're doing an employment insurance program, it becomes very difficult when you start to create different parameters in these IT systems to fit state law and to fit particular circumstances of state law. So for unemployment insurance, for example, the majority of what we do as a program is directed by federal law, and there are really a smaller portion, let's say less than a quarter of unemployment insurance that's decided by the states, but that 20% is drastically different across the states, so it becomes very difficult to find something that will fit for each state, becomes very costly when you get in there and try and build something to address that 20%. So the biggest concerns I have with this are the dual administration of the program, when it was initially, when it kind of initially came to me and we started having conversations that was originally gonna be administered by the Department of Labor entirely, as we kind of moved towards, moved down the road last biennium, it became a dual administration tax, I don't wanna speak for the tax department, but my understanding from testimony last year, they have a more modernized system, so it's a little easier for them to tweak that to help, I think, address some of the issues, but when it became a duly administered program, I think it just opens up a whole nother avenue of potential conflicts and choke points that I think would hinder us having actually an effectively administered program. So I'm not here to advocate for or against paid family leave, I'm not here to advocate for against the, this bill versus what the governor has proposed, I'm just here to tell you that in administering a program like this, I see a lot of challenges with that. And I'm happy to pose it to questions if that's how you would like to proceed and we can try and question things out that way or try and address some big ticket items. Well, sure, just I'll go with the representative, I'm sorry. Thank you. Of the states that have built their own IT program for this, for a paid family leave, have they done this in-house, have they contracted out? If they've contracted out, are there certain companies that have the ability to be able to successfully build one of these systems? So I can speak a little bit to that, somewhat on the unemployment insurance side. I'm not fully aware of all the other states that have paid family leave programs because I know some of them are designing something more, state level driven, I know some other states have more of a private insurance model. So I think the cost would be drastically different based on which way you go. I would want to confirm this number but my recollection from last biennium when we were discussing the state of Oregon was looking at, Washington was looking at, I think $80 million to build a system, to be able to administer their paid family leave program. I don't want it to attest to the reality of that number but I just recall that being the case for unemployment insurance, most unemployment insurance programs across the country are aging and so our unemployment insurance program, for example, runs off a mainframe computer and a technology called Kobal, which I've never even heard of before. So there are a lot of states across the country that are at a similar point and so the U.S. Department of Labor, which is funding our project, has tried to incentivize states to get together and build these new modernized systems together to help drive down the costs. Most of the consortiums that have gone out to private vendors, they are available to build systems for unemployment insurance, have costs I've seen anywhere from 40, 50, 60, up to $90 million. What have we done? For unemployment insurance? No, to rebuild. You said you're moving ours into 20%. So real quick, what we did, we joined a consortium with the state of Idaho because we, as opposed to trying to go out and find a vendor and get a private company to then build the system for us because we were looking at those costs, 40, 50, 60, 70 million dollars. We decided to build, we, Vermont and the state of Idaho decided to take the IT systems that Idaho had, which they were in the process of modernizing themselves, they did it in-house and we decided to enhance those systems, continue to modernize those systems and add on Vermont state requirements, as I was saying. So we decided, as a consortium, not to go with a private vendor because of the costs and instead to do it more in-house as a joint distributed development. What I can tell you is they modernized half of their UI system in 2014. It cost them $9 million to do that, just as a general number. And as the commissioner mentioned, we, state of Vermont, by the time we get to the end of the project, we'll likely spend $20 million just in both payments to Idaho for their work but also in our own in-house work in order to do that. The numbers are somewhat apples and oranges. We are building, we are modernizing something. There's a lot of work that goes into that that wouldn't necessarily be the case for building something new but in building a system like this, you are, I would imagine, in the tens of millions of dollars in trying to do so, whether you do it with a vendor or whether you do it in-house. So this may be a question for you, Commissioner Curley. Do you know or are you aware of what your responsibilities would be pertaining to eligibility and appeals and such under the voluntary plan that we heard about yesterday sponsored by the governor? Will that be in your department? That will be in our department, as I understand it, as I read the bill, I think that would involve a fair amount of rulemaking for us to really get the details down. Again, the only thing we really have to compare it to right now is our unemployment insurance program which is, like I said, we have appeals process, we have quite a crew that is paid they're funded by the federal government to do this. And our, again, if this is what we're handed, we would figure that out, but we would have to add medical staff to determine eligibility. There would be a host of pieces that are, as Cameron said, so while we're comparing it to UI, it's very different too, you know what I mean? Did I answer your question? Yes, yes. Okay. I'm sorry, will you ask your question again? Just things I misunderstood, what you asked. I'm asking if the responsibility of eligibility and appeals and that sort of thing would come to the Department of Labor under the voluntary program sponsored by the administration. The administration. I'm sorry. No. No. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm sorry, I was, I thought you were afraid of those. Okay, so that would not come to you. That would not come to us. Okay. Yeah, that would be through a private insurer. That's what I was wondering if the insurance company would be responsible for that or that would come to us. Yes, right. Good, thank you. So, Cameron, our employment system today, I mean, regardless of its age, it runs well. It's responsive. No, I'm just talking about, well, just because the user interface, you know, the user, if I go online, I'm not using paper, I'm required not to use paper. So, I go online, I'm just the vermonter who's seeking my benefits. And behind that curtain, you're telling me that it's gonna cost 20 plus million dollars just to renovate that system. And so, two questions, which again, the times that I've had to use unemployment, it's been sufficient. And timely, and responsive. And so, to me, we run, no matter how much duct tape might be behind the curtain, we run an efficient system. And I think the commissioner testified that, I mean, we're odd as vermonters, we're proud to get people their benefits on time. That's brilliant. But in this case, first of all, who's paying for this? Is this a federal, federally funded, federally subsidized program? So when we say we're paying $20 million or more, am I, are we paying $20 million? Yes. No, so it's a federal program. The department has received multiple federal grants in order to design and build this new UI system. So we are not using state dollars in that sense. And so, I know I'm asking you to get geeky here, but I think it's important to know it's for us to not be scared of hardware and software issues. I mean, no matter how many employees can pick a number, how many employees it would cost to run this program, to administer this program, say 25 or whatever the number it may be about. So let's say that's a couple thousand dollars or more for work station. So the hardware thing is not very expensive. So why would it cost $20 million to develop the lines of software necessary when we know, even if it's COBOL, we know the general gist of how the existing system works. It's hard, I think it's hard for me to understand. Where does that money go? What does it go into? So I can talk a little bit about our internal work. I'll start by saying I do not profess, although I'm somewhat younger to be IT proficient in any way, shape, or form. Even though we are building this somewhat in-house, the unemployment insurance system, like I said, we're not going out and hiring private vendor to come in and do the entire front to back for us. We still have to go out and hire contractors to do the work. And I think that in and of itself is where a lot of the costs will go in trying to design and develop this. We have project manager one for us. And actually I have three project managers for different aspects of the project. But the single project manager we have, that's kind of at the very top of the organizational chart, he's $165 an hour. And I have four developers that are $125 and $115 an hour. I have a business analyst that's $125 an hour. That alone is just for those five people, $1.5 million, please don't write my math down and correct me, it's over a million dollars a year. And so trying to design, the other thing I would caution you is the implementation dates of this going out and trying to design a system like this is not something you can do within a year. We started officially kicked off our unemployment insurance project on July 1st of 2016. And we are looking and going live either late this fall or early next spring. And keep in mind, we're building off stuff that we have had for 75 years, not the technology, the program UI has been around since the 30s. So you would think that we would know exactly what we need to do to design that, but you don't, you have to have, we would have to hire individuals to come in and actually design the system itself. So we have a bill here, but there are a lot of questions I have about what the intent of the legislature is in administering a program like this. And so we would have to develop rules, then we would have to design the system, then you have to hire people like business analysts to come in and translate that into something that the programmers can actually program. And then you have to, we have $500,000 roughly set aside just for testing, just to hire testers to come in and help us test the system. I have an additional five of my staff that we have taken off of their daily operations to work with them. So we have almost 10 people, their sole job is to test the system because the worst thing you wanna do is you go live with something that's just gonna completely fall on its face. So it's the manpower and the cost of that manpower that it takes to design and develop something like this is not cheap. So most of that $20 million will simply go into that. The four developers we have with one business analyst and we had a project manager under Wonderbar contracts from 2015 when we signed with Math Tech up to the end of this year. That contract alone for five people for roughly four and a half, five years is over $5 million. So if we had, again, I'm gonna come back to the consumer side and go behind the curtain a little bit. You talked about dual administration. If I'm looking at my paycheck and I see what my wages are and I see what my taxes are and if I see what my deductions are, this is merely another deduction. Yes, sir. So it's a box on my paycheck. So pay data or some whoever does paychecks, they're gonna go, oh, we're gonna open, we're gonna click on this, we're gonna open that box and now we're going to take from that those wages and plunk it into this box. And that money already goes into the little superhighways of wherever it's supposed to go. This goes to unemployment, this goes to social security, this goes to workman's comp. This would go to PFL, which is where I suppose the tax department would come in about where the money resides, where the trust fund itself resides. And so that if it was dual administration, that would leave the department of labor with creating a software that says, hey, I need to take a leave. Here's my application, can you approve it? That to me sounds from this side again, it's just another box on my paycheck. So where do the difficulties come in? And if the money's over here, they tell you, hey, we have a million dollars in this fund. Yeah, so I agree. And I throw some of these numbers out there because I think this is just what I have to compare it to. There aren't many states that have gone forward and implemented something from scratch. So I think it's just difficult to have a true apples and oranges comparison. So if the bill has structured, if it were to pass in this manner, you're right in the sense that department of labor would only have to administer the benefits, arguably the benefit side of this, which does help drive down our costs. I don't wanna speak for the tax department. They have a newer system and to the extent that they can tweak it to allow, that box tweak it to allow for just another deduction. But when you get into the back end, the things that I know aren't, I can imagine I shouldn't know in order for the tax department, aren't there in their system or how you attach wages to someone's benefit, right? So for example, in unemployment insurance, you have to have a certain amount of wages within what's called your base period. So the system has to track your wages by social security number and we have to then, you apply, we look at your wages, the system has to make the calculation right there, whether or not you're eligible based on your wages. And then we have to lock those wages in because you're only eligible for 12 weeks within my understanding, 12 weeks within a 12 month period. And I imagine you can't use the same wages that make you eligible for one year to make you eligible again for the next year. So these are things that I think need to be fully clarified, but that would be the way I perceive the same way in unemployment insurance. So what I don't know if the tax system is capable of doing, because it would be duly administered, we would receive the, we eat labor would receive the application for eligibility. We would then have to, if it's real time it becomes, you know, I would argue more difficult, but we would have to then match that with the tax department's wage record data, because they're the ones collecting the contribution. They would, their system would then need to tell us whether someone's eligible or not, but it would then also need to attach those wages to the benefit year that our system has because you can't use those wages again to make you monetarily eligible in a subsequent year. That's my understanding of how the bill would be, how it would work. So that is what we're doing in unemployment, yes sir. But so that's where I'm trying, that's where for me I see the connections. And so I'm thinking if it's a very similar program, in that way, we're using monetary eligibility, you're locking down your wages, so you're not using them again for a subsequent year and you're looking at what it's costing us to build our system. I mean, I think we would have some foundation with the tax department, but you know, I don't wanna speak to the tax department, this isn't what they do, right? They don't use their wage data in this manner. We do. But if you have this, if you purchase this, if you're purchasing this code to run this system, and I'm sorry, I'm just gonna, I'm just going really black and white here. I'm like, can you copy and paste it? So we had that conversation in... And then tweaked it. We had some of that conversation last, by any of them, where the bill was, it was structured on UI, but the way it was written was it didn't match up with what we actually did, which we came in and said, you know, this isn't how our system works, so to change it wouldn't work that way. And so then we got into a conversation of, okay, well, can you build this onto your UI system? We are in a, we, I'll say we as like the state of Vermont, are in a difficult position to try and do that because we are in this consortium. We are trying to go live with our system. We have two other states in our consortium that are trying to go live with the system subsequent to us. To ask them to build this for us is many years down the road, even if they agreed to it, because what U.S. Department of Labor would come in and say is you, state of Vermont, can't, you know, prohibit those two states or delay those two states from going live with their UI system, because that's the purpose of this consortium, that's what they're funding us for. So could we ask them to help tweak the system, to add on to it, potentially, I just think the timing would be off to what I think you, more specifically, to what you said, can we copy it? Or can you develop it in a way? I mean, this consortium doesn't sound like it's, it allows you any flexibility in growing the system if you're concerned about other states, but there's a, I mean, to rebuild a system that totally, that totally, all right, so it may be to take it off the highway, you know, where you're not collecting the data twice, or you know, you're saying, okay, here's this product that works with these four states, but how do we funnel our information into a program where you don't have to reinvent the wheel, because that's what it sounds like, 20 million dollar venture is reinventing the wheel of inputting the material twice, as opposed to utilizing a system that we're paying for, you know, the idea that we have with all software in the state government, which is we're supposed to be tying it all together, so there's only a couple of clicks away from food stamps and from healthcare and from UI. Yeah, go ahead, and then after your question, then Tommy has, yeah. Just, I was just gonna say, do I think there are possibilities for that? Absolutely. The struggle we have, and I don't wanna say this to come across as, you know, not being willing to work with you on this, it's, we are in a difficult position because the money that we have from the US Department of Labor to fund this project and the money that we have for the administration of unemployment insurance has to be spent and used for that purpose. So when you, so I agree with you and I think we, you could try to drive down some of the costs by piggybacking off some of the things that we already do, but it then becomes a, you know, it's still, whatever work would be done for a state level program would have to be paid for by the state. And I don't, you know, I don't think that means that you can't do it, right? People have responded to me and said, okay, so what's the cost? You know, and so I'm just trying to acknowledge that, you know, and not trying to like protect us. It's just the reality that, you know, we can't, we have to be very careful about how you go about doing that. Not saying it can't be done, but so that was the conversation we had in the committee and I tried to tell them like you can't just take UI and make it work for paid family leave. In the same system, can you leverage the code or can you leverage information that we've already have to help? Can you, you know, try to utilize the services that we've created to look at eligibility and match it to the wages in our system, try and take that code to use it to branch off to a paid family leave program? I'm not an IT guy, so I mean, I wanna sit here and say, I think you can, I don't see why not. And does that drive down the cost? I imagine it would, but that, you know, that whole thing needs to be fleshed out, right? If you're using UI wage record information, then that opens up a whole host of questions I have because the way the bill is designed, it would be the tax department collecting the money and not the department of labor. You know, we did, we labor did the healthcare assessment when it was initially put in place up until just a few years ago and we had to receive state funding in order to administer that program. And we had to do a lot of work to make sure that we segregated those functions out. And we actually had to go, one of the tricky pieces is when we trying to be effective for the businesses, you know, if we tried to collect information on unemployment and pay family leave at the same time, for example, which I think we would all agree is what you would want to do. You want to make it efficient for both the state and the employer. When you start to do that, you mix unemployment insurance with a state level program, you have to bring USDOL in and they essentially have to sign off on that. When we did the healthcare assessment, we literally, I was not there, but from my understanding of the people that were there when we were designing it, you know, even down to the forms that we created to gather information on the healthcare assessment, USDOL came in and said, okay, you know, your form is this much of it's healthcare related and you're going to spend this much time of your auditors doing healthcare and they came up with a percentage of what they expected the state to pay in order to administer it. So can it be done? Yes, I'm just highlighting, that's what the details will give up to. It's all important for us to know. Representative Wallace. On the technical side of it, I can see the issues that you're having with the federal involvement here on the technical side. There are these two approaches to take. One is you could have one massive system with different interfaces depending on the department or you could make sure your data dictionary is a clean and that, sorry, I am a geek. Yeah, and you allow florals, even if you are buying different pieces of software. And so there are technical ways for which this could be completely solved and it doesn't have to be horrendously expensive. It doesn't have to be $80 million. I agree with you. It definitely would be millions, but not 80. Yes, no, I absolutely agree. And that's where I'm saying, you know, like we have wage record and so again, do I think you could utilize that? Yes, you know, when you're talking portals, I'm hearing words that I hear every day with our new system. So I agree with you. My concern though is you would still need the benefit side of the house to administer the program, which, unless you're building it on top of the UI system or within the UI system, that would still need to be built. I think you can still leverage interfaces and leverage information that we already have, but the benefit side would have to still be built, which is just as complex as the tax side. I mean, you need the individual's information. You need to know what I imagine you would establish a benefit year, 12 month period. You would need to know how many payments are going out the door. You would need a system that would allow you to collect overpayments for when people are found to defraud the system and it's going to happen. That's one thing I told the committees last year when we looked at the original staffing of the program. This is in no way, shape or form adequate. You're going to have a lot of these things that I think people just don't initially think of. You know, I have a staff to run an employment. I have a staff of 80 to 90 people. My annual admin budget is in the $7 million range. And I think you can shave some of that off because I don't think there are some things we do that you don't necessarily need for this program, but you're asking us to make claims determinations in five days, a maximum of 10. That's extremely difficult to do. I mean, for now, we don't have a federal mandate for that. We have performance measures we have to meet. We're expected to pay a certain percentage of claims within 14 days on the unemployment insurance side. So, yeah, again, just trying to make sure you all have that clear picture. So, absolutely agree with that. Well, we have to agree because that's what we mean. Representative Zot? Two, I think one of these relatively quick question, which is I've heard you talk before and I've heard other people talk before about the consortium. And it's clear that there are some advantages to the consortium, but I've also heard kind of over and over how being in the consortium hamstrings here. So working with other states can be a complicating factor in hinder the ease of administration of work. Absolutely. And then my second question is, when you explain all the technical difficulty and all the sort of costs associated with it, I think of a private provider as used in some states and as proposed in possibly in this state. And so I'm wondering, and you may not be able to answer this, where do you think those private entities will be recouping those costs? And how will they manage? Who's going to ultimately end up paying for all the costs that you're talking about with the private side? Like, how are they going to make up that cost to their own organization? I have no idea how I would answer that. But they would have to. My presumption, if you went that road, is yes or they would have to. But it's my imagine would be where is the money and who's holding the money? If you're asking private insurers to do this and you're paying premiums to them, then they're collecting that money, and then they can invest that and make money out that. And that's how they would turn around and invest in the system that it would take to run this. But they may not. I think I'm following your question. I was like, do they have a plug-and-play system where they would be able to monitor where that's the question is like, do they have a plug-and-play system that we're just recreating? Or does it make sense to just, and I don't know the answer to that. I don't think we will know until we hear from the insurance companies that are been requested for information. Any further questions for Cameron? This is, I thank you for, we're peppering you and we feel like there's some high tech notes. It is our desire to get as much information as we can. It's really insatiable at this point. So, Representative Mosh. Yes, I'm wondering, assuming we would go forward and a new system would be built, it then takes people to monitor that system and to do all that's necessary to connect all the dots and so on. Have you any idea how many employees that might involve? And do you think it would be additional employees to what we now have? I would pose that question to ADS. So we have, I do say digital services. So we have IT staff that do maintain our current systems. We expect to have IT staff that will maintain the new system as we go forward. You would need that in order to administer this program as far as how many or who. I would defer that question to them. I think currently we have running our UI system or helping to support the backend of our UI system. I think we have five to six people give or take and I would ask for more. Was your question also like the administration piece? Like we need other staff. Right, I mean to me it would seem likely that you would need additional staff because the staff that is maintaining the systems that now exist are doing that. So I'm not envisioning that that same staff or that same level of staffing would be adequate. Depending on what the technology is written in, you know, so we're, here's where I'm getting back into the world of IT where I'm not as familiar. You know, we're writing our new system in a certain code base. And if the department is maintaining this and a paid family leave program and they're written in two separate code bases, then you're not gonna have staff that can overlap. But if it's written in a similar language then in theory some staff can overlap but you would still need additional people. How many I do not wanna say I would defer to agency digital services, but. Can I ask you to follow up? So this is going a little bit away from that. Will you talk about different code systems? Yes, ma'am. We have different code systems operating next. Across the state, I'm sure, yes. The reason I ask that is that I've heard that generally referred to as being problematic in terms of computer systems not being able to speak with each other. I don't think it's as problematic as it used to be. I think nowadays they have the, there is the capability of getting programs even written in different languages to talk to each other. I think it becomes more of an issue when you're talking about maintaining them. If you have two systems with two different code bases then if I'm an expert in this code base then I'm not gonna know how to maintain this code base. And so then, like I said, you don't have that overlap whereas if they're in the same language then you hope you can drive down a little bit of the staff costs because people would understand the language of both and be able to maintain both. But I think nowadays in the modern technology I mean I think we can, my understanding in having conversations with our staff as we're modernizing is it's not as difficult to get different codes to talk to each other than maybe it used to, so. Oh that's good to know. And so, and just in H107 the cost estimate does include seven and a half percent. I think well whatever the percentage was per year for administrative costs so part of that 0.93% in H107 is that annual cost. The, do you represent a copy, do you have a question? Well, since this is an ongoing conversation the Joint Fiscal Office showed us a modeling program and was all of your IT costs and all of your expected personnel costs given to the last time they did that last year? Or has things changed? We've given them what we could but honestly we haven't had the opportunity or the resources to really do the research. And so it's really hard for, I mean this is just like guessing, it's hard to, I mean Joint Fiscal's done so much work but we can't say that we've had, like I said, the time, the resources to do the work. It's like a shum of dark for us. You had said there was 26 people administering, if I understood you, 26 people administering the unemployment benefits? No sir, no, I have a staff of 80 to 90 people. So how many staff do people have to administer this? So we did provide some information just to your first point. We did provide some, I think staffing, administrative and IT. We're not experts in what it costs for IT systems so we worked with Dan Smith, that Joint Fiscal Office is still there but we worked a little bit with him to talk about IT costs. We did try to provide as best of information as we could on the administration of the program and what the annual administrative costs would be but that was based off the bill that I think came out of the house last year which was administered fully by the Department of Labor. We didn't fully go down that road, I think based on more of a joint administrative model and so I think that would take a little more research to look into. How many people would it take to administer this? That's something that I would advise you to fully flesh out and to come back and have a conversation. It depends on how you want the program structured and I don't mean to kind of kick it back to you in that manner. I know some of that has to be designed by the department and fleshed out by the department. We're the experts in that but for example, I've seen estimates of only 1,000 people utilizing this program a year and I can tell you I just based on my experience think that's vastly underestimated and you're asking us to provide benefits in five days. We don't do that in unemployment insurance and just in our call center, we have 24 staff and that's two supervisors that's give or take. It's two supervisors, three admins. I think the first staffing note I saw had half an admin for the entire program which is not feasible. Three admins we have, I think it's six or seven customer service representatives. It is their sole job to help take phone calls all day every day to initiate the claims taking process. We have about an equal number of adjudicators because what you're gonna run into is there's gonna be people that we're going to deny benefits or they're not gonna provide us the necessary information or they're gonna provide us information and the employer or someone else is going to provide contrary information and then that's gonna need to be adjudicated in order for us to make a determination depending on how many people you have in the program at one time will depend on how long that takes. During our busy season at the for unemployment insurance we do the best we can but I'm sure you have heard maybe from your constituents or may have experienced we get very high call volumes sometimes up to an hour maximum wait time for people and sometimes it takes weeks to administer the actual adjudication of a claim. So if you want us to maintain that timeframe of making a determination in five days or 10 days your staff numbers just went through the roof in order to maintain that. But there are things that surround this that I think need to be fleshed out. For example, the definition of employee is a tax definition. It's someone who's required to have income withheld. That's not in a labor definition. So what do we do in the situation we see it in unemployment insurance all the time someone files for benefits we don't have wages in the system for them because their employer isn't reporting them as an employee. So we then have to have an auditor go out and make a determination of whether that individual is an employee or not. And then we have to get the wages from the employer if they are put it on the system then make the person eligible. You're gonna run in the same thing with this and who is administering that piece if we're relying on the tax department to tell us whether someone is monetarily eligible who's making the determination for those individuals that don't have wages. We send a request to tax department they send it back note there is no withholding are you gonna hold that against the claimant when they may have been misclassified and how do you make that determination who makes that determination and how do you go about recouping the cost of the employee? You know for us it's the the cost is borne by the employer so we get to go and we say employer you misclassify this person give us the wages now you owe us the tax contributions. You're gonna say to a claimant potentially I guess these are questions I have right? You say to a claimant who tries to file we don't have your wages somebody goes out and makes a determination oh you're an employee but guess what you haven't paid the contribution for this entire time. So now in order to collect this benefit you need to pay us tax number of dollars. I don't know if that's what your intention is or not but those are the types of struggles I see with a potential dual administration of a program like this and where you're applying tax definitions on one side labor definitions on another side. So we have nine auditors that go out and do this do you have a similar expectation that we have that type of program? We have nine staff give or take it is their sole job to work with employers on the employer side filing their reports answering questions. I don't know that you would need that many because as it's set up it's more of a withholding and I think it's a little more straightforward but you need staff for that employers are gonna have questions. We have finance individuals who maintain our trust fund you're gonna need that. We have 10 staff dedicated to program integrity they audit claims and make determinations of people who are put in overpayment who shouldn't have been paid and they collect the overpayment amounts that's going to happen you're going to need that staff in order to get some, it's gonna happen they're gonna have people who are gonna try to file who shouldn't be eligible and then you're gonna have to try to recoup the benefit from them. One thing the commissioner mentioned I didn't catch it but it seems to be there in the bill how much quality assurance do you want in the program? We have five staff and it's their sole job five staff plus a supervisor so six staff and this is a federal requirement so you may not want this piece but it's their sole job to audit us internally to make sure we are making the proper determinations. We do have an improper payment rate we do pay some people improperly and then have to go back and recoup the cost it's just the nature of a program and so whether you want that level of quality assurance I would advise it but it's up to you. So these are questions that I'm more than happy to come back and flesh out or provide if you're seeking information from us about more how we structure our employment insurance happy to provide as much information as we can. Again, my hope of coming here today was just to make sure that everybody's having that conversation because in my experience so far it hasn't necessarily been fleshed out as much. That's why we had Jim. Thanks for all that. I guess I have more of a request than a question on how you were laying everything out there with the staffing needs that you would foresee for your department to take on the workload with this. Do you have that kind of like fleshed out in a document format or anything? I think we can see what we had from last year and I think we can as an initial matter submit that I would just with the caveat that it was on last year's information which was a different structure. Yeah, and that's what I was saying kind of like with this because structurally speaking to apply those numbers of cost of operation would be very informative to take a look at. I don't want to speak for the commissioner. I'm happy to help provide as much information on that as possible. Again, I think it would be with a lot of assumptions built in. No, no, of course. Yeah, I mean nothing's done. Everything's fluid right now. So, but just to see it as projected line items. And just before you go, before we switch witnesses, I want to go back to your formal comment. It just made me laugh because 20 years ago plus I heard a story that NASA was actually on eBay looking for 280 Intel 286 chips to run their shuttles because the Y, they were simpler. And they were able to put ships into space without the blow that now exists in operating system. Well, we struggled to find cobalt, folks that are cobalt, what's the word? Savvy. Savvy, thank you. And the one or two that are left in our department are very close to retiring. So, yeah, so we're pretty excited to get into the program. Well, nice to them. Oh, we have. Those are my advocates, the pencils are cobalt, right? Yeah. I love that he said he was too young to remember it. I remember it. I just always think it's great because that gives me assurance that our system is secure because I'm not sure anybody did. I'm not into them today, I don't know how. So, thank you for your time. There's a lot of information for us to process and have a great future coming in. And, wait, Dirk, did you have anything or were you just playing back up? I can talk floor one, but I know there's a lot of witnesses. I just want to, if I can raise a couple of issues. Sure. For three or four minutes. Here, Dirk, come sit. Okay, thanks. So, for the record, I'm Dirk Anderson, General Counsel, Department of Labor. I just want to reiterate what Cameron and the commissioner have said. You know, we are not here to argue about policy issues and we're not giving you all this information as a way of saying this is too complicated, we can't do it. We just want you to be aware of the nuts and bolts and the realities of administering a benefit program and what that's going to require. Cameron's talked about a lot of aspects of that. I just want to add a couple of things. Every claim we get, I mean, some are going to be black and white, you know? If you're having a baby, you're having a baby. But, we're getting every claim. Potentially, there's going to be an issue is if it's the illness of a family member, is it a qualifying family member, you know? There's a list, but individuals may not feel that they're stepfather, they may treat them like their father, you know? Their spouse may, they may not be married, there may not be a spousal relationship under the law as I presumably would have to define that rule, but we're going to have to look at that with every claim that comes in. We're going to have to determine serious illness. Your idea of what a serious illness is may be very different from the definition in the statute which would presumably be further fleshed out and rule, but we'd have to have, presumably, in order to adjudicate these claims properly, you know, we'd have to have some sort of, you know, medical staff, you know? I don't know if that's a doctor or a nurse or what, but somebody's going to, if somebody says, here's what I have, we're going to have to determine, well, you know, how severe is it? That kind of thing. So, and anybody who disagrees with our determination is going to have the right to appeal that determination. There's some pretty tight turnaround times set in statute, well, in this bill. You know, currently for the unemployment insurance program, we have, Cameron said, I think, nine claims adjudicators. I think so. We have three administrative law judges. You know, their turnaround times aren't quite artist, you know, again, it's federal guidelines that we're supposed to comply with, but they're not as tight as what's required by this bill. They're going to have to get evidence, you know, have an evidentiary hearing, that kind of thing. The, what else did I want to say? And this is a policy issue for everyone to consider. It's nothing that we're taking a position on, but this bill provides for 12 weeks of 100% wage replacement. That's pretty generous. It also says an individual is disqualified in any way in which they are receiving either a worker's compensation benefit or an unemployment insurance benefit. So people are going to make decisions based on the various benefit to them of those programs. So the potential is there, if this bill passes, that somebody who is injured at work and ought to report that as a workplace injury may say, well, I'm only gonna get 66% wage replacement. I'd rather get 100% wage replacement for 12 weeks. And then when the 12 week runs out and they're still injured or unable to return to work and then they file a worker's compensation claim, we're gonna have to figure that out. Workers come, I'm sorry, unemployment insurance benefits roughly 45% wage replacement, right? A little more. I don't want to check that. Okay, but maybe closer to 50 capped at $498 a week. So again, if you are laid off, normally if you are laid off, you would file an unemployment claim and we would give you those benefits. An individual who has an upcoming lay off may decide, well, I'm pregnant, I'm just gonna do this as a paid family leave thing and get more benefits or somebody who is ill may go that route because it's a more generous benefit. Not saying it's good or bad, I'm just saying that is this program going to potentially be paying for people who more properly would be receiving benefits under a different program from a different pot of money. In other words, there may be an incentive there for people to apply for a benefit that is not necessarily the appropriate benefit. So two things, the UI department is huge and I appreciate you really emphasizing that. And again, what we see on our end is just claimants, for instance, like we could say, oh, there's only 400 claimants this week or whatever that is or new claimants or whatever the numbers are, which is, again, we have to try to bridge that chasm between what does that mean for you overall? Because obviously it's a big program with a very small window into our world. But on all these questions here, what is the fraud rate in unemployment? Do you have a number? Can you get us a fraud rate for the last five years of people that do try to work the system? Because the number we got from Rhode Island on workers come on family leave was less than 1% over time. So to that point, I can see what I can pull together. It's potentially two different questions. Just to clarify, so there's fraud, people who are intentionally trying to receive a benefit and lying to us in order to receive it. That may be a little tougher to get, but I'm happy to look. But then there's also an improper payment rate. As I mentioned, we do pay people, unfortunately, it is a reality of the system, and I'm happy to share that. I mean, we do as much as we can to try and not pay people when they aren't eligible or don't deserve the benefit, if you will, but we make incorrect determinations where people aren't trying to defraud us, but we are paying improperly. And so two separate numbers that I'm happy to try to get for you. Happy to try to look for five years. I think Vermont, I was actually looking at the improper payment number just the other day for the past year. And I'm wanting to say we were at 3% over a four quarter period. And again, that's not necessarily people who have tried to defraud the system, separate question, but our improper payment rate, I'm wanting to say it was about 3%, but that was on a sample of 350 claims. And that equated to, I think, and I'm happy to get this information and give it to you. I think that was $2 million of improper payments that we then have to account for on the back end of trying to go in, make a determination that it's improper, allow due process to go through, and then try and collect that money back from the individual. So just when you're setting up the program, know that that's a lot of work on the back end too. Just following up on that, you had mentioned earlier, you have internal audit required by the federal government, five people on staff, I think you said. Yes, ma'am. They do that all the time. Is that where you will get this information from your internal issues? That is where most. So would that also show, those audits would also show fraud if there's or not? Two separate units. That's what I'm trying to get at. So what's called our BAM unit, which stands for Benefit Accuracy Measures. They audit us internally to see whether we are administering the program according to law policies procedures. That's where we get our improper payment rate from. So they will audit a claim front to back and see whether or not we made the correct determination whether we allowed benefits or denied benefits. If we allowed benefits, they look at the claimants their benefit year and go in and look at every single week they filed and try to make sure whether the payments were proper. That's where we get the improper payment rate. A separate unit called our Program Integrity Unit, they deal with auditing claimants, not auditing us, but auditing claimants to make sure that they are reporting correctly. And that's where we would get information on fraud. And it's a little different, but this is a question I would pose to the committee. So the only disqualifying criteria currently, my recollection of what's in the bill is receiving workers comp or receiving unemployment insurance. And my question to you would be, is this intended to be a wage replacement for these individuals? And if that is the case, there are a host of other mechanisms in which somebody could receive payment where we deny them for unemployment. So if you are receiving wages, you're required to report them to us, if you receive sick pay, vacation pay, all that stuff. Some of that's not applicable, I get that. But that's where we see a lot of fraud from claimants is they're unemployed, they're actually working receiving wages and they're not telling us. And so then we do cross matches on the back end. Employers report the wages. We look at all these individuals were filing, were they filing, were they reporting the wages that have now been reported to us by the employers? We find out they weren't. And so then we have to go in and do that investigation. So, to separate the issues of the question. So we'll review that in the legislation. So thank you. I'm gonna switch out here. I think I need five minutes just to stand up and before we get to our next witness. But happy to come back to you. Thank you very much. And if we could just save a couple of minutes, no more than five minutes. I'm gonna restart the clock at 10. What are the federal guidelines for tonight? Thank you. Sorry, but they're coming up, yeah. Are you aware of that? We're on the record. All right, thank you very much. And I would just like to thank everybody for, that was a lot of information and I appreciate the department for coming in and sharing it. I'm sure we could spend three more hours, you know, pulling out that same information. But I did want folks who have come up to testify both Doug and Angela who were on the timeframe. So if we start asking questions again with more speed. Yes. It's in respect to you getting to where you need to be next. And I'm a fast talker and my talking quickly is for the same reason. You can ask me to slow down if you need to. Okay, so please introduce yourself for the record and tell us why you're here. Sure. I'm Angela Earl Gray. I'm the director of human resources at Chroma Technology. I'm Warren Bellows Falls, high tech manufacturing, about 130 people, employee owned, pretty innovative. And I'm here to speak in support of H107. And before I start talking about that, I just wanna give a little bit more background on me because sometimes people that are familiar with Chroma go, oh, it's employee owned. It does profit sharing. You have lots of things to leverage that a normal business wouldn't. So your perspective is really unique. I just wanna mention I've been doing HR since 1892. Prior to being at Chroma, all of my experience was non-profit experience. So I'm used to having small budgets. And I also am on the steering committee for the Brattleboro Area Human Resource Network and do HR trainings throughout the state. So I informally mentor a lot of people and hear a lot of different perspectives. From an HR perspective, it would be incredibly exciting to offer paid family leave as long as it was a meaningful program, as long as it was something that people would really utilize and would make a difference in our workplaces. Chroma currently offers short-term disability to our employees. They get 12 weeks out, up to 60% of their pay. We put in place a maternity leave program, which gives newer employees 60% of their salary. Employees who've been with us a long time, we actually up to that benefit to 80%. And one of the pieces was recognizing that at times, 60% of your income isn't enough for you to really use leave. If you don't have a strong support system, if you don't have accumulated assets, if somebody tells you take a significant pay decrease, or inconvenience yourself, push yourself when you shouldn't be, you go to work. And that's just the reality of it. So we have sick leave, personal time, other things that can help offset it, and we see that people have no hesitancy to take advantage of short-term disability when they have those and are able to offset the difference. But when they start to run out of time, they start to try to push themselves to come in, and that's where the workforce that's well paid, has good 401k, is accumulating stock, long-term has a sense of financial stability, and they still worry about a pay decrease. So for people at a lower end of the income range, not getting 100% is a big deal. Also just in terms of the system working, it really does need to be universal because the more scale, the better it is for cost. The reasons that we offer the benefits that we do, just to give Chrome a credit, the very first one is ethics. We believe in it. We would do it even if it didn't make good business sense. We recognize and see the ways that it does, but we would do it either way. And I think and hope everyone feels that way, that if it wasn't cost prohibitive, if it wasn't too much work, you would want people to be able to take care of themselves, and we're gonna speak to you assuming that that's the case. So one of the other pieces I just wanted to mention is that we have our health insurance plan is more generous than typical, it's self-funded, but we utilize a third party private insurance company to do all of our administration. And that company is trained. They wanna be making a profit. They wanna be making as much of a profit as possible. So even when we're asking them to not be rule-lawyering, saying to somebody, gee, this came in on day 11, and it would've been fine if it came in on day 10, but sorry, you're denied. We have to get involved over and over again personally to keep that from happening because they have such a high motivation and that's the way they're trained. Even the people that we've told and talked to about it in the past revert to this is what we do. We're trying to maximize our profit. And anything that's run by a private company, that's what they're gonna do, maximize their profit. Where with the state, again, thinking that your ethics are, you want people to actually be able to utilize this benefit, they're gonna have a much better chance of being able to do that. Other reasons that we offer strong benefits or that we see a business case for it, recruiting and retention, we differentiate ourselves as an employer by offering strong benefits. And the question comes up and why would you want every employer in the state to do it? And there's two reasons. When you are an employer who gives people strong benefits for family leave and they have a partner or spouse that works for a company that doesn't give them strong benefits, that every time anything happens in their family, your employee is the one that takes time off. We recognize and realize that we get utilized more because we're a generous employer and it actually works against us in some ways to be giving those benefits because other employers are able to step back and not give the same thing to the spouses of our own partner soon. The other piece that I wanna touch on and I apologize because I'm trying to go fast so I'm not going through my full notes, but the piece in terms of abuse, again, I've worked in HR since 1992. One of the nonprofits I worked for did care for people with developmental disabilities that were combative. We have all sorts of workers' comp places. We have all sorts of people out of the workplace. In my entire career, I know of two people who seem to be pushing a little further. It wasn't that there was nothing at all, but that they were saying, gee, I can't come back in when really we could have given them a modified work assignment. People wanna be doing the right thing. You take pride in your work. There's a wait period before this bill kicks in. So you've established relationships with your colleagues. You self-identify based on your profession and your job. And when you're able to, you wanna be a contributing member of society. There's a myth that people are looking for holes to exploit in a system. And it's a little bit of a classic myth because every time we think of it, we think that people like us wouldn't do it, but they will do it if we give them the opportunity to. And that hasn't played out in terms of anything I've seen in the workplace. When you talk about the work involved in administering FMLA, as I said, your employers are already doing that work. Any employer that has more than 50 people in the country, if they have somebody that's out, we have five days to notify them of their rights under FMLA. A certificate goes to their doctor. Their doctor has to sign off and say that they have a serious medical condition. It's very well-defined. It has gone to court many, many times. So everyone clearly understands what is or isn't a serious medical condition. And again, in the course of the work that I've done as an employer, getting those forms back twice, we've gone, we want additional information from this doctor's office because it seems funky or odd. That you would have to have your doctors being willing to participate in fraud of the system to have a lot of fraud in the system. And that just isn't something we've seen happen. So again, we have to track the time that they're out. We have to do proper notifications. The only thing that would be different about the state doing it than employers doing it is the money aspect, which absolutely I know adds complexity and is something that's gonna need to be dealt with. But the reality is if employers that are 50 or larger are already doing it and are already doing it on the same tight time deadlines, I would assume that the state, if you centralize the function, if you have people that do it much more frequently for a lot of employers, it comes up a few times a year. So if you have people that this is your job, you're really well-trained on it, it's centralized economy of scale, it's gonna be more efficient, it's gonna be less expensive to run. So I'll mention those, just come back real quick. The other piece I just wanna go back to and I know you hear this all the time, but is recruiting in Vermont. And that recruiting in Vermont is hard and it's getting harder. And you have all the numbers, but I know that this is a six month in a row that our unemployment rate is lower than it was. And I can tell you, we're a great employer. We get 40 to 150 applicants per position. Still in terms of tracking our metrics, the amount of time it takes us to fill rules has gone up by 18 days in the last two years. It is harder and harder to bring people in, we're talking about it all the time, we're doing really neat programs and it's not getting better. And to give the governor's office some credit for it, there's some things that have happened that have been really neat and innovative. The pay people to move here and work remotely. That got so much pre-pass. The amount of marketing that we got for the cost of that program is amazing. And every time we pass progressive workplace laws, that's what happens. It goes out into the world that Vermont is some place that cares about having people come and be a part of our community and takes care of our community. And then we as employers can go out and market for you. We're gonna seize it, we're gonna jump on it. It's gonna be a really good bang for your buck in terms of an investment on getting people to move here. Is staying on the cutting edge. Representative Fran. Yeah. So the incentive, remote work incentive program, only works if you can work remotely. And the issues in Vermont right now are that remote areas of the state are where the employment problems lie and that program cannot attract people to come and do that if there's no internet. I agree with you completely. I am in a remote area of the state. But what I will tell you is that we've had applicants from across the country who because of hearing about the fact that Vermont was doing that looked at us as a state and went, wow, that's really neat. I've never thought about moving to Vermont. Would it work to me or not? That there's a certain amount that's just what is the message we're sending to the country? We wanna be taking care of our people. We wanna be taking care of our employers. And something like that is huge for employers and it's huge for small employers. If I can't get a new employee then we're pushing back lead time on shipping something. I have a lot of friends who own small businesses in Wyndham County. If they can't get employees, it means they're working longer and longer hours until they finally give up. And we have definitely had businesses in Wyndham County that have closed based on nothing but we can't find people to hire. Just to follow up, change a little bit. Sure. I've always held the opinion that, and for you who's been in HR for a long time, I've always held the opinion that a content worker is a better worker. That a content worker who is taken care of and looked after by their employer and has good benefit packages works harder. And that harder work, I'm asking, the question is that that harder work, I've always believed that turns into loyalty, less training costs from turnover, and ultimately profitability. Is that something that I'm on track with from your experience? From my perspective and experience, absolutely. It is exactly what Chrome has founded on, that if we take care of our employees, they will be engaged, they will be contributing at a higher level, that we will be able to have less employees producing a higher volume of work. And it's true. We don't want employees in our workplace who are sick. We don't want employees in our workplace who are distracted thinking about sick family members because it risks infecting other staff members and their quantity and quality of work isn't as good as you would want. And none of us want it, right? You don't want to go into a cafe where somebody's working when they're sick because they have to. There's no job where it's a good idea to have somebody who's not capable of doing their best work being in the workplace. Thank you. Representative Monson, I'm sorry. You mentioned having difficulty finding employees. And is there a common denominator of what that is about? So, and I can say this more from my work with my HR group than other things. I think that there's multiple things. I think not having good internet and not having good infrastructure is an issue. In Lindum County, I think we have issues with not having diversity that the people who are wanting to move around and resettle in new locations right now are not necessarily all middle aged and white. And the times that we recruit people from outside our region into our region and they look different and have different interests, they fit in well in our company and then come and tell us that they don't fit in well in our communities. I think that's a big piece. Are you saying that you're not getting local people? We get local people. We get local people and we get Vermonters. Some of it's just the low unemployment rate that people are able to, we hire for second shift a lot. There's a lot of people that don't wanna work second shift. There are a lot of people that are able to be more specific about exactly what they are and aren't willing to do because the unemployment rate is so low. We definitely have specialized high tech things that we look for that we have to easily could spend six, eight months looking for a position. There are times we've closed things and gone to using consultants or gone, how do we solve this in a different way? But even entry level positions, there's a lot going on in the state for workforce and development. We're involved in a lot of it. We just started our own internal apprentice program. We're talking about doing training with CCB on site. But at the end of the day, there is a definite skill knowledge gap. We still have a lot of people in Vermont that can't even use computers. And we're a highly automated firm. I can't, you can be somebody who's- There's an educational issue. You can be somebody who's worked for a long time. We have a lot of people that are getting laid off after years in the same job, using the same very small, narrow skill set and are needing a lot of retraining. What are the federal guidelines for term around? We have to notify people of their rights in FMLA within five days. They have 15 days to get us paperwork and then we have to give them a determination. I think it's within five days. I frankly sometimes tell like my assistants and my generalists that they have to do it within a shorter period to make sure we're compliant, but I think it's five. So in the bill we're talking about- It's the same. The administration felt that that was, that five days and five days was totally inadequate. From your experience as an employer. I mean, it's not fun. It's something that employers find challenging to do when you have to work out a system once you get to the size of being able to comply. What generally happens is you hit 50 people, you go, oh no, I need to do this and I don't know how to yet. You try to do some spreadsheets when you're having three or four of them a year and then once you get larger you move to outsourcing the administration aspects of it and then you're just typing everything in and they're doing the processing from there. I could easily imagine a system set up with a state where it's the same thing that your employer was typing in your initial data, your employer is flagging you on if they think there's something odd about it or not and that people are getting involved at a higher level if there's warning signs based on kind of volume and norms. Is that turn around the same kind of window federal guidelines? I don't know, because employers don't have close to as much involvement in unemployment. But I will also say that I truly hope the state considers looking at some of those systems that already exist for FMLA administration because we interact with a lot of the state software systems and a lot of things that get developed in-house. There's not necessarily a partnering with people that are gonna use them during the development and they end up being pretty cumbersome. Speaking to wage replacement or levels, both, you said both your short-term disability and your maternity are at 60%. Our maternity paternity for employers who have been with us for more than five years is 80% actually and we increased that specifically trying to get more utilization. We definitely find, especially with fathers, that if they're not getting wage replacement at a high level, you know, I think it should be 100%, if they're not getting it, then it's I'll be there for the first two weeks, I'll be there for. Oh, and just one other thing in terms of Workers' Comp that I wanted to mention because when he was talking about the interplay with Workers' Comp, Workers' Comp and FMLA currently run concurrently. So I think with this program, unless you decide something else into it, what would happen would be I would have Workers' Comp, I would be getting 60% from my Workers' Comp, I would file FMLA, it wouldn't, okay. It wouldn't run concurrently at all or it would. It wouldn't, it's specifically. Excluded, okay, that's fine, yep, thank you. So is there an employee contribution to your programs? No. It's just a benefit that's provided. And so you buy it from a, do you self-insure these programs? We self-insure our programs and we self-insure our programs specifically because we feel like it's more cost-effective for us and because we don't want to have somebody, frankly, who has a motivation to turn down the claim, haggling with our employees about it when they're in a situation where they're dealing with something significant in their life. So in a case like this, so we're, and we've learned through just our proposal with 12 weeks that includes short-term disability as well as family of both of which would be taxed differently just the way they fall and I guess some of the tax go to think that the phrase is if it looks like unemployment is taxed this way and if it looks like work is taxed this way, which is fine, but the idea that you can offer these without cost to the employee, but you stop at 60%, is that, I mean, that has to be because you need to run a profit in life? Yeah, I mean, you need to run a profit in life, but in the same sense for us, we also are generous in terms of our vacation and our sick and personal time, so for a lot of our employees, they actually are getting 100% for a portion of it, but yes, I think that, you know, again, if we were all able to, we would wanna be taking care of people completely and you look at economic realities and you do the best you can, but I feel like to give a state-paid FNLA program and say we're gonna cover it at 60% is a little bit of an illusion, right? I'm gonna, there's gonna be 10 people who are bleeding and you're gonna give first aid to five of them because the other five, even if there's things available, aren't gonna actually be able to utilize it. It's our lowest-paid workers, it's the one who are gonna, going to be the least drawn the system are gonna be the ones that aren't gonna come to work if they're not getting 100% of their pay. Just to revisit what you said about your experience with fraud, the administration was in here, they were sort of cautioning us about potential claims and the chair sort of addressed that with Rhode Island. So if I gave you the figures that 40,000 claims were audited in Rhode Island and of those 40,000 claims, they found 42 that were questionable, not a confirmed fraud, but only 42 that were questionable with that giant with your experience. Absolutely, like I said, people take pride in their work, people care about their co-workers and they've already proven themselves to be a good employee by meeting that waiting period. And one of the theories that we've heard over the years of working on paid sick days and on this program is that, and we saw it in the Rhode Island numbers where they offer and pay for 30 weeks of short-term disability, only four weeks of family leave, but 30 weeks of, or 26 other weeks, I guess, of TDI. But the average usage is only 13%. And I think our modeling numbers are at a little bit higher rate, but still is that, I mean, again, it's kind of, the theory being that just because it's there doesn't mean it's gonna get used. I see employees, I mean, it came up yesterday, we had somebody go out with an eye surgery that was supposed to be out for a month and they're coming out back after 10 days. And when I got the note saying they were coming back, I called them and said, I think this note is wrong because it doesn't match what you told me. And she was like, I'm recovering more quickly than people typically do from the surgery. The doctor told me he'd give me a note for a month, but I told him I'm good. The reality is most people want to be at work. We very frequently offer benefits that people don't fully take advantage of. We offer five days of bereavement leave for deaths in immediate families. It's unusual for our employees to make take more than two or three days. They go, oh my gosh, I, this is where I can let go of my stress and focus on something different. I don't want to be taking every day out of the workplace that I can. And do you think that there's an attitude of like, well, if I only take three, then I have two left. I can use, something might happen later. There could be and there should be. Yeah, there could be and there should be. I mean, it is 12 weeks on a rolling calendar year and you can run out if you are abusing it. And generally, I would assume that anybody that is abusing it, when I said that I've only seen twice in my years of HR, these were big and obvious. There's no, if you are somebody that doesn't want to be in the workplace and is trying to figure out what you can play for systems to be out of the workplace, you'll be able to do it for a little bit, but that pattern becomes really obvious. You're not gonna have somebody whose morals and integrity means that they aren't taking advantage of things all of a sudden decide they want to and then immediately switch back to, okay, I'm going back to the status quo now because I've used up my 12 weeks. So you're one of the businesses in the state that's over 20 employees. Yep. And we've heard which is great because it's grown. We've doubled in size in the last five years, pretty much. What do you say to the people who, and we've heard especially from people who have service industry, not service industry jobs, but convenience stores and stores where there's long margins and it's a different kind of workplace. In your experience as an HR person or in your, do you see that as an issue for those businesses? I feel like the benefit to the state in attracting people would more than make up for what you're asking them to pay. A lot of the businesses that can't attract people are smaller businesses, are businesses that are paying at the minimum wage level. We actually, the cleaning company we contract with, we said you have to pay your people at least $15 an hour and our cleaning company has trouble recruiting people. The cleaners, the convenience stores, the restaurants, those are the places that if you go and look around, they always have help wanted signs. And the employee cost is pretty low for the benefit of being able to fill things faster and have stronger employees in those roles. Well, thank you. Okay, thank you. Yeah, and I believe Paul's coming in. Paul is coming in. So you'll get to hear more from and about Proma. Thank you. Well, thank you for your time here. Doug, welcome back. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And I understand we'll see you back again on another issue, so welcome to our committee. Well, happy to be here for the record of Doug Farnham, policy director for the Vermont Department of Taxes. So does the committee have any specific questions to start with or should I just jump in to? Yeah, why don't you just jump in? I mean, I think it's clear when you were here for the first part of the conversation, and I don't want to pick tax versus labor, but we did last year, so, or at least I said it. But the idea of what came out of the conversation this morning in relation to tax included, well, your systems are newer or more flexible or you offered to be able to take on a certain part of the dual maintenance of our administration system. So if you could just fill us in what you're thinking is on that. And again, in a non-judgmental way, just sort of an informational way, that would be great just to start, and then I'm sure we'll have questions to cover you with. And you have to be in ways and means at 1115? I should be there to support my commissioner, yes. At 1115. He is technically in the chair, so. We'll let you go by 1125, I don't want to misrepresent that. So, yes, for a little bit of context, the department recently replaced several legacy systems with, so we had an IDM mainframe, which was 40 years old. We had a Oracle database that was what I would classify as a failed implementation as the person being hired by the department to come in and try to recover that system. That's how I ended up with the department about seven years ago, that ended up being my first task. And we had a moderately successful kind of traditional state implementation of a piece of software that we customized to a certain extent, and it could do limited things, but we couldn't do much with it, it was very limited. So we had three systems, and over the course of four years, we spent about $30 million to replace that with a commercial off-the-shelf software that's used in 21 other states. And it's very, it's niche software, it's very focused on tax processing, so it does that extremely well, but it does have significant limitations if you try to do anything outside the realm of tax processing. So Cameron's points about, if tax were to try to do the benefit side of this type of program, we just, we have no experience with that, our system isn't really designed to do that, so we would have significant challenges in trying to do that. But the specific question was asked of the department last year of, if you were to collect the money as a payroll tax with the payroll submissions with holding forms, what would it cost to build? So I answered that question, and it is a pretty, it is a fairly low number, only because we're modifying the existing system and it's a manageable modification for us. What was then? I'd have to go back and look at it, but it was less than a couple million dollars. I think it was, there were a couple different ranges I gave, but it was like, I think 500,000 to two million different points. I'd have to go back and look at the exact fiscal note, but it was for that collection, and that's our general range right now for putting in a smaller miscellaneous tax, smaller modification. It's gonna cost us somewhere between 250 and 500,000 to update the system. For a bigger tax, it'll cost us a couple million dollars usually, but that's in the context of tax and only collecting the information necessary to calculate and charge a tax and then refund and recapture funds if necessary. What Cameron pointed out about tracking every employee, that was not in the model that we priced out. We priced out one field basically on the withholding form that would be a lump sum and we would have no visibility into the individuals with employees there. So we wouldn't, the tax department would have no way of knowing until the end of the year, currently, when they filed the annual reconciliation, how much each employee actually contributed. So for that real time processing, the way we were talking about building it, the tax department would be of no help in that situation. So what would be the role then of tax and what would be the benefit to setting up any kind of system that's proposed in 107 of tax, being able to collect those taxes but with all the other information staying in labor? I mean, I think that's what Cameron was speaking of is that even if you peel off this small chunk of the collection so that you have a bank account of PFL money, that's essentially what you're saying. For the most part, that's what it would be. Yes. So what's the benefit to that of taking that away from the labor side that I mean, do you do that for unemployment as well? Do you do that for any other labor-oriented taxes? No, that's an extremely, an extreme point of complication is that tax only deals with the withholding definitions for what an employee is and who has to pay withholding. It's different for unemployment insurance. The universe is largely overlap, but there are differences there that can be significant. And so there's a mismatch. And that mismatch is what would cause a lot of issues with tax collecting the money. You could arrive at situations where it appears that someone should be doing the benefit, but they weren't subject to the original payroll withholding because it's like a Venn diagram, the circles don't completely overlap. So I guess we'll probably talk to Damien about this, but what is your understanding of that? I mean, we did talk about this earlier about the fact that there are numerous definitions of employee in state statute. What do you see as the two circles that create the Venn diagram? Primarily the definition that we use for withholding and then the definitions that's used for unemployment insurance, which I think most people have connected to the paid family leave concept is the unemployment insurance definitions. And I think that's the way it was in the, yes, I believe that's the way it is in the bill currently. So if it were as structured than the tax, we would just be collecting the money and depositing it just as we collect money and deposit it for use by ANR or transportation. And we don't talk to them at all about where that money came from generally. So all of the policy, I mean, to open up the box on my paycheck, that's all you care about is that box on my paycheck, you know, that nothing else really matters. Like what actually happens to that money and how it's pushed out into benefits or stewarded is irrelevant to the tax department. It's just merely along with these other taxes that I'm collecting this percentage to. Yes. And that was based on, I believe mostly conversations in economic development where I was asked to price out a model where taxes only involved on the front end and doesn't support really anything else there. Which makes it a very, a quote of somewhat limited value because when you try to actually make that work, how well does that actually work? I think labor would run into problems not having information that they need because we took the information in a very blunt and limited manner. Very percent of clack. I was with you in the advisory board during the four years of the poll. And what was lovely to see is that it was stacked and you did components of it. It also took a lot longer than we hoped it would, didn't it? I mean, what we're trying to figure out in the modeling is that it looked, there's like a one year build up for the IT stuff and I'm just wondering in this bill if that's enough time given your experience of it took four years. So for the committee, I was two jobs ago at the tax department. I was the IT project director for the implementation of the system. And our system was on time. We had 37 tax types to put in and we scheduled a certain number of tax types for each year that we had about a year per phase. And that was with very little customization of code. So we weren't writing a lot of code. Most of the developers working on our project were configuration specialists. They didn't write actual code. They configured the attributes in the tables. So they weren't creating a piece of software. They were modifying it just for our purposes. And we agreed on behalf of the state of Vermont to dramatically limit how much we were going to customize that piece of software in order to reduce the risk of the project and meet those timelines and costs. So we made a lot of decisions to put things in in a simple and streamlined way. Where in the past, custom built software, you tend to go down a lot of radicals and build things exactly as they should be. Whereas we built it in the most efficient way. All compliant with the law of course, but a very kind of minimalist approach to configuring the software. Which I think if you want to avoid overspending, you kind of have to do that nowadays. So you talked about buying off the shelf software and I don't want to short change or actually give more credence to off the shelf software than perhaps I would like to. But I mean, is there a catalog of off the shelf software that I can look up and say, hey look it's paid family leave, you know? It's, you know, is there a source? And I appreciate the fact that as you said, it's you purchased something that was very limited so that it could be efficient. But are there sources that are available in a commercial marketplace where you could at least start with it sounded to me like labor, labor was putting itself in a box where it had to almost create a whole new universe with this or parallel universe with unemployment. I don't have any knowledge of any at the moment of any software packages that are designed specifically to do this. But I honestly haven't done a lot of research looking into that side of it. For context on the tax software, we had a somewhat difficult decision because when we went out for our RFP, we had three respondents essentially. Two of them were, one of them really qualifies for what you think of as commercial off the shelf software where it's used in many places, very little configurations necessary. One was they could technically meet the definition but they were more, we're still building it and we'll make it work for your state. And then the third one was complete build, complete customization, code build essentially. So with taxes, which all 50 states have to deal with in the federal government, there were only two or three options at this point. And that's for something that has been around for personal income tax 76 years or so, something like that. So I think it's, I don't know, sorry. No, no, we asked you to come in. I mean, that was just kind of a, like I said, I don't know, the less time I spend going there it must be, you know, this isn't there. And, you know, it sounds like the answer is probably not impossible, but probably not at least not for a while. Yeah, represent clapping. Or, art costs $30 million over four years to do it. Cause you went with the firm that had the, this off the shelf thing that you then tweaked, right? Isn't that the firm you went with? Yes. So it still, it doesn't mean it's cheap off the shelf. It was, it was not the lowest cost options of the RFPs. We did choose to low, go with lower risk and quality over, you know, spending the lowest. And did you get what you paid for? Absolutely, the department's very happy. The way we paid for it was with, we tracked the benefits, the increased collections we were able to do with the newer system. And we actually paid off the contract for that. So that $30 million was an agreed fixed amount, but we paid off more than a year early, I believe, ahead of when we anticipated being able to do that. And now we're working on proposals where the, the remainder of those benefits that we're collecting, the general fund and other funds will get a greater share. So at the end of the day, we believe we're successful in upgrading the software and producing more revenue for the state. In your experience with the IT in the state, I know it's been, you've been with the tax department, but we've heard a little bit about the fact that there might be different language or different, you know, that state departments don't necessarily easily speak to each other or is that going to be, if this program goes forward, is that a problem? I think it is getting to be less of a problem than it used to be. There are still some legacy systems out there with, you know, the required legacy code experience, but more of the projects started nowadays are going to be on SQL server. Most, most new implementations we're seeing are using that. So I think the competition, and this is good and bad, the competition in language structures is completely different now than it was 10 or 15 years ago. There was a lot of diversity and there's very little diversity actually. Most people are training their developers primarily in Python and working in SQL server and it's kind of narrowing down. And for the tax department is ironic because we, of course, don't allow our systems to actually directly interact with anyone else's for security reasons. But so we work through file interfaces where we have to. And then when you're working through a file interface it doesn't matter what the original database is linked in. I do know that ADS for at least the next five or 10 years still has a tough job for them to maintain some of those legacy systems. But it is more in the keeping that database functioning properly and lessen them talking to each other. But again, I'm speaking from an island, being in tax, we share very little of our data. We share when we're allowed to, but those are very specific exceptions. From your department's perspective, the way that the administration is shared, is that the most efficient way to do this in the current bill we're looking at? So that's a very difficult question. I think that to speak outside of this bill for a moment, it really gets down to whether you feel like the state should be doing it, or the state should be working through a third party, putting that responsibility on the third party. In general, I would say that if you have the systems to support it, one entity handling both parts matters and will be more administratively efficient. I think the fact that tax has a structure bill right now that could be added on to to collect the money makes it very tempting to spend a small amount of money to just bring the money in the door. But because it matters so much to this particular program, who submitted that money? Unless you're willing to accept wholesale that if someone was an employee, then they were submitting wages, then it could really complicate labor's administration of it. And again, I listening to the camera talk about unemployment insurance and the efforts they go through there, we have 150 employees at the tax department to do all of the work related to 37 tax types. So we don't go into as deep of a dive as they do at labor, because we have to spread ourselves a bit thinner. So I guess. I'm sorry. So could there be a hybrid situation where the bill contemplates saying it's gonna take a year to set up a system to collect the money, 15 months to collect the amount of money that we would want on the day we open the doors to the benefit. Is there a way to collect? I mean, so for what I hear is that if you just simply collected the money, you could start collecting it just by opening up a box on a paycheck and it wouldn't be your responsibility to follow who paid that money, but you would collect it. And then, but on the labor side, they would be able to know if I threw out my social security number, they'd be able to say, well, you made this much money this year. So I'm assuming you paid this much money into the, or perhaps it even shows that I paid this much money into the fund, but simply I think we're going off of an income-based qualification. So is it possible that we could say, oh, let's let the tax department collect this money for 25 months and give labor 25 months before they have to have an up and running system and then take over that tax collection as they would for UI? I think that that is certainly possible and- Technically, not technically, but technically. Yes, because sometimes you do have to, you do have to, especially if there do happen to be disagreements over how much a particular program is going to cost to administer, you may need to build a particular level of solvency in that fund in order to actually administer it in order to actually budget and hire the people and spend the money on running it at that point. So you may need to theoretically start up with a flexible program such as yours while labor is working out the kinks, especially if it's nothing else but collection. Theoretically, because we're generally only involved in the upfront collection, I would think of it as how we deal with the clean water surcharge. The tax department collects the clean water surcharge and deposits it into that special fund and then the clean water board makes the decisions about how it is going to be spent and which projects it will be spent on. There's no, you know, absolutely direct link in the timing. Now, there haven't been mandated timelines as far as when those projects have to occur. We're all just doing our best to meet the EPA's requests. But yes, I would say that, you know, it depends on politically what's palatable to Vermonters, but yes, the department, in the limited version of the department's involvement in this bill, if we could stand up the additional collections through payroll relatively quickly and deposit those into a fund and... Fair enough. All right, I think for the questions I've got, five minutes to get to ways in the incident. Just have stairs back. Yeah, I think I'm gonna find them. I'm just gonna go put in a thousand steps. No, I'm not. Yeah, all right, right. So, any further questions for Dunn? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. See you soon. Alcohol taxes, I'm sure. Yes. Thank you. All right, next slide, this is Paul. I don't know. Hello, Paul. How are you? It's good to see you. Good morning. Good morning. How are you? I'm okay, there was no ice on the ground this morning. That was very nice. That's good. I appreciate it. Yeah, we're gonna go around circle and introduce ourselves to you. This has been a little while since we've been at the committee, but that's irrelevant because so many of us are new, either on the committee or into the legislature itself. Representative Tom Stevens from Waterbury and sitting here but not today is representative Deanna Gonzalez from Winn-Ustern. Representative Matt Byron. Randall Zough from Barnard. Mary Anna Gommash from Swanton. John Colackey now himself from London. And how long do you think? Tommy Walts from Mary City. Yes, we need you all. Jock Dreyal from Stannard. Nice to meet you. Representative Mary Howard is from Rutland and she's out today as well and we have representative vacancy from Richard. So please come tell us. I just representative vacancy. You get it. That would be interesting. He or she is the silent question. I'll anticipate the question. I know you're running late, so I'm gonna. Actually, we're right on time, so. I'm gonna be brief anyway. I hope. So in the vernacular of business these days, it's very popular to talk about risks and opportunities and that's what this is about, I think. The risks in not having this bill passed are we don't make a new contribution to the Vermont workforce. People are encouraged to stay home because they have small children and they have no time off to deal with those children. The risks are we have a burned out workforce because who can work 52 weeks a year and only get weekends off? The risks are that we have, that we promote illness in the workforce because people stay, continue to work instead of staying home when they're sick and we know this, the potential of this is the measles epidemic that we're reading about. And so other communicative diseases, the flu, et cetera, those are the risks that, among other risks that we see without having paid time off in the state. Aside from just the general moral conundrum that says, how do you expect people to work? All of that time, this is going back to the pre-40 hour work week. This is going back to where we insisted that people work maximum number of hours except for that time that they're legally entitled to take off. The opportunities here is to contribute a small portion of what Vermont needs to a full-time workforce. The opportunities here for the state is to have a way of attracting new workers to the state. It's just one way of attracting new workers to the state. But a state that has a guaranteed paid time off is a state that offers something that other states don't offer. And people who work care about such things. The opportunity for the employer, because we all know that the bigger companies in the state all include paid time off, all include vacation time, all include healthcare in their employment packages. The opportunity for the smaller employers is that they can do it also. That they can offer to their employees what the larger companies offer now. Not as much, and I would love it to be more, but it's something. So the small employer can do it without it coming only out of their own pocket because it's a pooled amount of money. So if I'm a small employer and I've got five employees and I don't have this, then I'm responsible for all of their paid time off. If we have this bill, then we are collectively responsible and it's cheaper to be collectively responsible. We all know this. This is in healthcare, this is in workman's comp, this is in unemployment insurance. When you have a larger pool, the amount of money that the individual company pays is far less than if they try to do the right thing and this is the right thing. If they try to do the right thing on their own. So I don't see that this is anything but a no brainer. I see the plan that the governor and that guy from New Hampshire are proposing to not address risk and to not address opportunity. Because after all, if the individual workers are going to be responsible for paying the premiums and you make $10 an hour, then you don't get paid time off and you don't get healthcare. You get very little. It creates, as I said earlier, it creates a very unhappy workforce and we have an opportunity to contribute to developing a workforce that's proud to work in the state of Vermont. Thank you. But nobody's going to say that. Well, you can drop the microphone if you'd like. Questions for Paul? I think what I know of your work history is that you have worked anywhere between bartending and in restaurants. I've done a lot of, I was a busboy. I spent 11 years as a bartender and a waiter. I moved to Vermont, got a job, got fired and we started our own company and that was 27 years ago. And I had to say that we're one of the bigger employers in Linden County. Well, and you settled, why did you move to New Hampshire? Why did you go there? I can't remember as far as it's just right across the way. It's not why did I not move to New Hampshire when I first moved to New England. The reason I moved to Vermont is because I had a cousin in Williamsville and Vermont as was printed in Digger the other day was filled with hippies and I understood hippies. So I felt comfortable here. But it's later that I discovered the difference between Vermont and New Hampshire. We had a ribbon cutting of a, we had a, we doubled the size of our plant last year. And we had a ribbon cutting in November and I was, when it became my turn to speak I clinked it out that the model of the state of New Hampshire is live, free and die. Me and the South say live, free and die. But the model of the state of Vermont is freedom and unity and it's a no brainer because the model of New Hampshire really does represent what New Hampshire is all about. And the model of Vermont really does represent what Vermont is all about. And we can do it better even with legislation like this. Represent collaboration. Your HR portion gave us a lot of about your benefits which seemed pretty extraordinary. But going from a startup, you started this to this incredible now multinational cooperation and one of the biggest employers in the state. What are the pressures for you in recruiting? From the higher level people to the interlevel people. So many of you know that in the summer we hired Janet Bombardier to become our Chief Technology Officer. She still lives in, what is that town over there? North of Burlington. No, no, no, no, no. Anyway, it's, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Colchester, sorry. She still lives. I was just trying to look for those of us who shouldn't account, sorry. Yeah, I struggle with it because just so you know, there's the Society of Professional Engineers just named Janet the Engineer of the Year. And so they sent us the press release and they said, we will send it out to all the papers in the northern part of the state. We're nothing down there. I mean, not even the Society of Professional Engineers cares about our newspapers down there. Anyway, just to the side. Oh, God. Recruitment is difficult. Recruitment these days is more difficult than I ever imagined. When we started and as we were growing, it was fairly easy. We had a running workforce in William County and we put out an ad and we got people. It's more difficult now. It's even more difficult for assembly work to get assembly workers. It's certainly very difficult to get engineers who are willing to live in the community. We have engineers that live outside the community. We have engineers that live in Burlington and work in Burlington. We have a subsidiary in Burlington. Our CFO commutes from Massachusetts. Janet commutes from Colchester. It's increasingly difficult in the southern part of the state to get workers. It's increasingly difficult outside of Chittenden County to recruit. It's not just the southern part of the state. Kingdom has the same problem. Berlin has the same problem. Barry has the same problem. And anything that we can do, that's among the reasons we have the benefit package that we have, mostly we have the benefit package that we have because we think it's the right thing to do. But it also helps us recruit. And everybody in the business community, in the state of our mind is talking about a dwindling workforce. Anything we can do to encourage young workers to move to this state is a benefit to the state. And as I say, this is one of those things. You know, rationalizing healthcare would be another one of those things. Affordable housing would be another one of those things. You know, we know all these things. So, but this particular bill is one of the most important pieces of legislation. And it's uniquely brilliant because it doesn't ask the state to contribute. And it doesn't take money out of the public coffers because it says, okay, we're gonna make the vehicle for this to work. And then we're gonna provide this to employers big and small. And like I said, because little employers, the opportunity to act like big employers. And that's really important. When we were starting out, our company is a technology-based company. We put a small ad in science like this big, cost $6,000. In the next month, a new journal came out called Major Genetics. And I could put a full-page ad in that journal for $1,000. For $1,000, we look like big shots. So it's important to give smaller companies the opportunity to act like big shots. And I think this bill does that. And frankly, I don't know any small employers in the state who don't want to provide services like this, benefits like this. I mean, some of the business organizations may tell you that they don't. But this is, come on, come on, guys. Our employers really do wish to provide benefits to their employees. Sometimes it's hard, so you're making it easier. Nice, guys. This, you belong to a number or have belong to a number of business organizations over the years. And I mean, it's been a question for me sometimes. Because this benefit is aimed towards those who have not had access to this before. Lower middle-class people, I believe the number this year is 100% way to replace another $55,000 a year, which is just about the median income in the state. But I wonder why some, in your opinion, do you think the larger organizations where their companies maybe as a rule offer this slew of benefits, do they not see that there's this problem at the lower end of the spectrum, the economic spectrum, or do they? No, they do. I don't think, none of the organizations, I can't say none of the organizations. The lower business round table has taken no position on this. I don't know what position the chamber has taken. I assume VBSR is supportive of it. I think that there is, throughout the business community, I can't talk for every organization, there's tremendous support right now for a related issue. The related issue is early childhood care and education. But it's a related issue. And so with the business community is in large part right behind that, in a really good favor of universal early childhood care and education. And some of us also, after school care, for older people, older students, because same issues, actually more issues. One assumes that they would be supportive of this. I don't think we've asked them. It hasn't come up at any of the meetings that I've been to. Right, it's a, they've adopted early childhood education as their, as one of their solutions. The business round table has. Right, yes. Years now. Yeah, three times now. But why not on this issue? It hasn't come up. Because we all have benefits. None of us think, none of us, but generally it's not what's in people's minds. We know how early childhood affects us. We know that there's the potential of putting 11,000 more workers into the working population of Vermont if we have universal early childhood care and education. Nobody has seen this as a quantitative issue. You know, even now I'm talking about as a qualitative issue, once again, it's given the small business community an opportunity to provide the services and benefits that big businesses do, and I think they want to. And I don't know who's arguing against it. It makes no sense to me. Well, we can online provide you, I'm sure there was a. Tell them to call me. No, I don't know. But I mean, I just said, it's curious. It's curious to me, because it's almost like, and we use the word privilege a lot in this world now, in this political world now, and we say, is it the privilege of, well, I've always worked for a job that's always had these benefits. Therefore, everybody must have these benefits, because I have them, and I've always had them. And I mean, I just wonder if there's a certain circle of, I don't know if it's blindness or blinders. Yeah, I'll tell you the truth. It never dawned upon me until Main Street Alliance started pushing for this proposal that people worked without vacation time. I never thought about it. It just never crossed my mind. And when I was told it was true, it was completely unbelievable to me. I mean, I had, as they say, wrap your mind around these things. It's very difficult. I can't imagine what it's like to spend five years at a job and have no time off other than weekends. I can't imagine spending five years at a job and not being able to stay home when your kid gets sick. And surely, that's the case, you can't afford a care. These are things that are unimaginable to people in my position. And now we have been encouraged to imagine it. Representative Mosh. I'm interested if you have an idea of why, you mentioned a few times, small businesses, they would love to do this. So since they're not doing it, and then 78% of the state in terms of employers, what do you think is the reason that they're not doing it? The issue is a complicated issue because it is expensive for a small business. A coffee shop, it is expensive for them to do it on their own. You don't do this, you don't give pay time off with insurance, comes out of the profits of the business. So that's what's so beautiful about this. This is a group response to the issue. It is, it's a very difficult question because it leads to this serious economic philosophic question, which is, if a business can't afford to benefit its most valuable commodity, the workers, then should it be in business? That's a bigger question. But I think it's a question that this country is gonna ask at some point. You know, if I can't afford raw materials, I go out of business. But in a society where we have, we place different values on workers than we do on raw materials, it's conceivable that you can load it on workers and because you can't on raw materials, your supplier won't let you. So the supplier makes a constraint. The supplier limits your access to the supply. You know, the society will limit access to workers by hiring everybody and then the small business is not gonna have a choice. So it's, but I understand and I have sympathy for people who want to do the right thing and I believe that well over 80% of Vermont businesses who can't afford it now would love to provide benefits. I have sympathy for them and I think this is the first step in a creative solution to give them that opportunity. This is a real opportunity. And I'll let you go in a minute. I mean, what we've heard just from individual folks who have managed to testify in the past as well is that, well, I do take care of it. I mean, you address this about being able to buy into a collective insurance program. But I do take care of my employees. They are my lifeblood. They are without them, I'm nothing. It's just an interesting. But why do they testify against the bill if they are? Let's get real, you know, if they feel that it's important that they do it and they can afford to do it, why come in and testify against the bill that it's gonna make it easier and less expensive for them and other businesses? There's something else here. And I don't know what it is, but it, flabbergasted. Now this happened during the health care debate years ago. I want to provide healthcare for my employees, but I want the state to do it. I will, when one of my employees gets sick, I'll make sure that he or she gets paid. There's something about reliability. There's something about consistency. There's something about my being able to depend on the benefit that isn't answered by, I'll take care of them. And because once you take care of, once you have that opportunity, you can take care of some employees who you like, not the ones you don't like. You know, it's fraught with risk. Thank you. Thank you. This is beautiful. So I hope to see you again soon. Not here. Okay. Sit down. Let's have a transition. I think you missed our last round of introduction. So the committee to introduce themselves, it's a different committee from the last time you were here. So I represent Tom Stevens from Waterbury and we'll see you later this afternoon. So, you know, make yourself at home. Representative Gonzalez from Wadiski is unable to come in today as is representative Howard, they're both out under the weather. Representative Matt Byron is a neighbor and a constituent of mine. We've been on the same street. I'm Randall Scott Barnard. Mary-Anne Gommage, Swanson. John Colackey, South Portland. Emily Long-Newford. Colleen Waltz, New York City. Richard Troyano, Standard. So welcome, please introduce yourself and where you're from and why you're here. Great. Thank you for having me. And many of you, I know, either from having been here in the past or from outside connections outside of the room. I'm the co-founder of Stonecutter Spirits. We're in Middlebury and we have a bar restaurant in Burlington. We began as a company of two, just being my business partner, and we are now 20 plus. We cycled between about 20 and 25 between the summer peak and the winter. And we've offered pick, I believe, since day one. So when we started the company and just wrote our employee handbook using a template from our legal firm and then trying to personalize it into our own language, we really spent a lot of time thinking through the kinds of things that an employer should offer to their employees and to treat them like family for us involved treating them the way you want to be treated yourself. And so that wasn't just things that we wrote into our employee handbook. That was also the way we built our space. In our tasting room in Middlebury, we have skylights. The skylights are energy efficient. They also lead to better quality play for those of us who work there every day, which is both us as the employers and for our team of employees, and they're better for our customers. And trying to think about things in a smart and thoughtful way that involved what we want for ourselves, that's what you should want for the other people you care about, too. And so that also included trying to be thoughtful about benefits to the extent that we could afford them. And we still are a small company. I mean, I feel massive now that we're 20 plus, but in the grand scheme of things that is still just a small buy out of the Apple. And we offered family because it was the kind of thing that we thought would be right for people. What we've found in the five years since is that it has also been a wonderful recruiting tool. And so in an industry like ours, Stonecutter Spirits, we make Jena Whiskey. We're a young industry where I'm one of the older people in our industry because I'm in my mid to late 30s is not an industry that is as spread out in age demographics as others. And that age set is one where Vermont as a state, as we all know, has been struggling most significantly. We're losing younger folks. We're not retaining ones who come here and we're not attracting ones to come here in the first place. And we found that offering benefits like family ended up being a differentiator that helped us hire and keep people. And we've ended up having folks come to work for us, either folks who are Vermonters who grew up and stayed here or folks who came to Vermont for school and then chose to stay here when they found exciting jobs with companies like ours. And that includes former students from Champlain College, UVM, St. Mike's and Middlemore College. All those are real examples of folks that came to school here either having gone up here or having come here for school and stayed and worked with us. We've been asked many times, well, if you already offer a family leave, why would you support other folks offering it? That's going to take away one of your competitive advantages. And we've found that to be quite the opposite of the case because what we do find is a challenge and this is one that I believe was asked of Paul before me, is recruitment in general and the pool of potential applicants. And as compelling as one can be in the benefits that you offer if there aren't enough folks here in the first place to be interested, there's still a shortage of potential people who are right for the job or qualified or interested in looking. And one of the biggest factors and whether or not you're going to have that pool is people who are already here. We're not a large employer. We don't offer some of the much larger and more generous benefits that were discussed, although we do offer family leave, we offer vacation, we offer sick time. People aren't going to move to Vermont to come work for us and they're not going to move to Vermont to come work for most other small businesses. Some of the larger employers can have enough in terms of benefits in terms of being able to pay for your move, other things like that where they can really bring folks in from out of state who come here. But most of the rest of us are trying to find qualified applicants who are interested in working for us who are already here and it's great if we happen to offer this benefit but the real advantage to us and to other small businesses would be everyone's offering the benefit because if you have a state where this is just a statewide benefit I think you have a much greater chance of having a lot of folks who are coming here and settling here who are in that younger demographic where they're more likely to either be already having kids or planning on having kids and obviously family leave is more than just children but that's one of the biggest and most salient parts and it gives a chance for folks to think about where I want to actually put down roots. Here's a place where I could come and start a family or grow a family and here's a place where I could grow old and care for my parents as they get to the point that they need extra help. Things like that are important and if we can offer them in a larger pool that isn't taking away our competitive advantages given us a new one. Also related to that I've always found it fascinating from economics. There's a lot of research that supports that I'm a foreign research scientist myself so I get very interested in this stuff but if you had a hot dog car in the corner and another hot dog car comes and joins on the corner you'd think that the naturally action should be hey, get off my corner you're competing for my business but there's a ton of economic research that has shown that if the second hot dog car comes they actually both end up doing better because more folks now know it's a place they can go to get hot dogs and it's what they start thinking about on their lunch break or whatever you carry the analogy and we've seen that in a ton of really large examples you think about the flower district in New York and all these places where a block is known for something and how can you have all these things specialized in this thing all doing well but once people know that's a place to come that actually leads to a much larger set of folks that come there and that's what we want here in Vermont we want this to be a place where young people are choosing to come and settle where young people who are growing up here are staying where young people who are up here and once of our elves for school or for another job come back when they're ready to settle down those are the things that we all want that we're fighting for and Paul spoke earlier I don't know how some of the small businesses think I could speak to how some of the small businesses think because that is who we are here set is and we all talk about these things not all of us can afford to offer something speaking to that as a last point and then I'll just open to questions we are a small business that is not profitable we're growing we're investing in ourselves we're trying to grow to the point that we can be what we really want to be when we grow up and so when we make choices about things that we're spending on every one of those is a dear choice because we're not even break even yet we're growing every year it's a wonderful trajectory but all that is only because we've had great financial backing from our lenders and from our financial backers who've helped us go to this point and continue to do so so when we think about benefits like these they are expensive and when you really think about something like family being an insurance program we're an employer who employs mostly younger folks as the age representative goes as the age demographic goes that means we're more likely to have folks who are going to need these services it also means that even when that happens we are in a much harder position to be able to cover a person's workload for the couple months while they're out we believe they should be able to be out but we don't have the ability internally to spread our risk the way a larger employer does an employer that has 150 people and is able to offer these same benefits also knows that on average it's going to spread out over time even if they weren't profitable but especially profitable companies they can build them to the budget and be able to spread out when the hits happen and you're essentially double paying for one person's work for a couple months because you have to bring someone else in or you have to add some extra hours to other folks to help cover a larger company can spread that risk out internally small companies like us can't and so we are just selling at the risk that even when someone is forced to be able to say hey looks like we're going to have a kid or hey we're adopting a kid or any of the other things that are wonderful we want to support that but also means we have to figure out how to cover that when they're out and that's really hard for a small business I think it's one of the main reasons that other folks that are our peers don't offer these benefits even if they want to a state-wide plan like this actually spreads out that risk and that is such music to the ears of a small business person when there are so many other unforeseen things that happen all the time that we don't know in the first place what we're going to see so any of those question marks that we can take away are always fantastic so what do you say or do you have a paid family program how does that work how do you pay into that yeah so we don't pay into anything we promise our employees that we're going to cover them if they're out and so we offer all employees this is the structure of the full-time part-time is similar it's just proportional full-time employees if you have a child or you adopt a child if you're a mom or a dad please take two months off fully paid and then when you come back please come back for the next two months only half-time so that you still have a chance even while you're zoning back into work to spend a lot of extra time at home with the newborn or with the new adoptee but to your question we don't have our own internal pool where we put money aside every month for this or that it's just a financial risk we will have to bear even when they happen and that's really scary for a business so you know we could also alternatively put money away in a certain proportional thing for our own insurance policy but even that is very difficult as a small company you don't have a company big enough to print out real actuarial tables and know what it would be so even if you're putting money in a special savings account for that you would still not have great confidence that's accurate and just to follow up before I was trying to just so the idea and Mr. Millman said this is that so you're paying full freight I mean we've heard this from some small businesses as well you're paying full freight basically if I have to take six weeks off absolutely and that's on one hand that's normal I mean you're just not getting compensated you're not getting compensated by my work have you done a math yet on what it would cost your business now I mean you've graduated now you're in the top 10% of businesses in the state of Vermont in terms of employees have you done the math on what it would cost you on an insurance program like a pay family program like this or specifically this one as opposed to what it would cost the occasional employee yeah I think that we would save money in the long run if I was speaking cynically I would say we haven't yet had folks who have called on us for the benefit so anything we pay is going to cost us more but I'm not a cynic in that way this is a benefit that we offer because we want folks to utilize it and as our young workforce that is more heavily in the 20s than the 30s grow we want them to stay with us and grow so we want this to be something that is more likely to be drawn upon soon in the long run I think that we save money at the very least even if we didn't I know that it spreads out the risk and that alone is worth it well it's again it's this is exactly that representative of the trial well that was more or less what I was going to ask if a consistent contribution from your business would be a more sound method of this approach to provide family leave is that something that you considered or would support I think the biggest part for us is thinking about a proper insurance plan that has a large enough pool right and so I think of this like a real insurance plan sure I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that's gone into making this about more than just a certain age set that are having kids right one of the big fatal pitfalls I think of Governor Scott's plan is a voluntary plan you're most likely to volunteer in if you think something that's going to be relevant to your life and by having the current plan cover more than just birth of children but also caregiving you really have a compelling and meaningful reason why it should apply to all the working population of Vermont and when you have it applied to all the working population of Vermont not just you have larger numbers but you have a much more large number of life circumstances right people at different points in age and you know people having children later in later in life now than they were used to as well so some of the classical or you know the stereotypical versions of what these would apply for change but to have that large set I think ends up being much more meaningful I actually do think that's a cost reduction for all of us rather than if we just did it ourselves also to Governor Scott's plan there's been a lot of pressure or maybe this is supposed to be the good spear that says well hey if you do a state funded plan you wouldn't be eligible for the federal credit to employer the new federal credit that's offered to employers that offer family leave but that credit is not all it's cracked up to be and I don't think that gets enough air time of why it's not actually as helpful to businesses like ours because it's a nonrefundable tax credit and deductions right but a credit in theory is worth more than a deduction but only if you can use it and credits are broken out into nonrefundable tax credits and refundable tax credits and a refundable tax credit you'll get the money regardless nonrefundable tax credit you'll only get it if you're profitable enough to use the amount of the tax credit so you take a small business like ours who is not yet profitable we could offer a bazillion dollars in family leave the credit we would get from that federal credit is zero net income against which to take it because we are still growing business that's not yet profitable and now forget a business like us that's 20 and is fortunate to be able to be able to build loans and financial backers who can help us spend more than we make every year because we're trying to grow to the level of what we spend at take a normal small business in Vermont and oftentimes small businesses and startups are lumped into the same category but there is a very logical difference most businesses are not trying to grow to be a 50 person company they're trying to be a small business with a team of five or ten people who do the thing they do when we think about our main street businesses those are classic small businesses and that's a big fabric of who we are as towns and as a state so many of those small businesses even if they are not in a lost position every year if they're just great even well then they don't necessarily have the capacity to take a non-fundable tax credit but a lot of you know handling and saying well you know you have to do the government's plan because you could use you could retain the use of this credit if you did the state the legislative plan then you wouldn't that credit is really only worth something to profitable companies so you're continuing to build divide between the haves and the have not it's not in terms of the employees in terms of the employers larger profitable companies I answered all my questions yes this to be an inappropriate question truly so not sure how to I'm curious you you're not breaking even so should you have an employee or two unexpectedly need to have a block of time off mm-hmm and you don't have reserves for that specific how will you how will you manage I don't want to say you're running your business in a deficit because I don't know that so I'm not to make that statement but having been a small business owner myself that's kind of a tricky thing absolutely so you must have very generous lenders and people who are financially in your business so yeah I'll have a happy speak to that I could talk real numbers with you not in Tasman Doctor but just without even using numbers I wouldn't I wouldn't be afraid to talk about numbers so as a growing business who has been fortunate to grow we grew 50% year-over-year we're really work on it we're pushing hard the rubric in the world of startups to try to grow that way is typically some version of spend this year what you want to make next year so that you can grow to that level you can only do that if you have sufficient reserves and you're absolutely right but the only reason we can do that not even because of our lenders the lenders were the original part that helped us grow in the lenders of back to equipment things like that because they are finding that gap every year and you can't run that gap forever to try to do this right you run that gap in the early years so that you can be spending this year what you want to make next year so you can catch up to that and over time those come closer and closer we think we're two years away from really being able to cross that and that's only because we've had folks who believe in the vision over time so yes we are we are keeping reserves not because we're profitable enough to make the reserves are presented by wrong given the need to run close that gap you need to obviously keep reserves what's your turn over to look like yeah your employee growth and kind of apply that yeah I would say there are two halves of the business that really end up speaking to the two locations right our production facility in Middlebury which is also based out of that where sales efforts are based out of and our bar restaurant in Burlington which is more of a classic bar restaurant that part of the business has much more turnover simply because that's classic to the industry where you have folks who are hourly and they shift and many of them are not full time they have two days a week and that's cobbled together as part of they're also in school they're also working a different job so that certainly has higher turnover in the business in Middlebury which is our production we've actually really been blessed with very low turnover over the years most folks who are with us now have been with us for two years or more we've had very few times that we had to let someone go the times where someone left it was usually for their own personal reasons or life changes or they're moving the state or other things like that so we actually had markedly low turnover and I think that's because A we have the right fabric of what employees would find desirable what they're looking for and I think we've been really fortunate the spirits industry the alcohol industry in general certainly one of the bellwethers of an exciting industry that folks want to come and be involved in but also beyond that I think it's because small companies like ours that are growing offer a lot of opportunity to employees in terms of what do you do day to day what is your actual job is there room for it to grow and you know the classic corporate hierarchy the way you grow is you eventually you know move up to the next level within your hierarchy because your boss got promoted and then you get promoted to take your boss's spot and you know that kind of classic growth is way from someone who specialized and study and XYZ in school and then they go to work on a job like that and you know smaller employers we don't have things like that often but what we do have in case at least of startups are growing companies is we always have more things coming on than the last thing we did or oh we have to now do that anyone know how to do that who at least wants to figure out how we do that and that is actually remarkably exciting to employees who feel they get the chance to grow with the role we like to say not only you want young people to move to the state but we like to say jobs jobs jobs and we get to hear at least at this level I'm sure commerce here's it as well what are the good jobs you know we hear that there's a shortage of engineers there's a shortage of this there's a shortage and we hear about the flaws the lack of the lack of employees for certain things but sometimes a job is just a job and people may not whether it's brewery or distillery or any of the other jobs you talked about what makes a good job not only to you you're a business owner you're an entrepreneur but for the people who work for you what's a good job when I say we support good jobs in the state what am I talking about anymore yeah I think that without being a specific industry a good job is one that you want to spend your time doing you know the two things that we spend most of our time on is sleeping and working and then we only got a sliver of time left to actually the other things that we think of is what defines these are other pursuits and so work I think to be meaningful should be things that you believe in doing and people with whom you believe in doing those things and so I think what we've seen as an employer not only personally in my career about the years is the places that we're meaningful to work for the ones where you weren't constantly looking at your rocks waiting for the chance to get out of even we as employers have to remind ourselves and recommit often to our employees we're not going to text you at 11 p.m. we're not if we want to keep those divisions and give you the chance to have your time away but the ones that are meaningful are the ones where you're excited about what you're doing and what you're doing with and that involves the environment that the employer can build and a lot of those come back to these benefits and our role as legislators who like to say we need to have jobs, jobs what's I mean what's appealing to you is that this program is it's I mean again it could be taxes it could be zoning it could be yeah I mean without going to alcohol specific things that's specific to our industry in general for Vermont it's benefits like this it's specifically availability of childcare not only a method with which to pay for it but literally just availability the slots aren't even sufficient enough if you could afford it more slots and we need to figure out how to not help folks pay for it and it's health insurance health insurance is I mean we all know that's been a big issue in Vermont for a long time but that's one of the biggest ones for those of us who are small that we can't really offer a way to help folks other than just saying hey go be on the exchange and you'll get something better or cheaper on the exchange for where you are in your income bracket or at least whatever then we could offer that's a really disappointing answer to give to employees for recruiting you know the last one is one that I personally am just excited about which I think is much smaller but is retirement and I am involved on Treasurer Pierce's board for the Vermont Secure Retirement Board we're really excited to create that program I think you know I've tried to create a 401k a small business 401k at the previous employer where I was the number two I was the COL and CFO and I tried to didn't really accurately try at Stonecutter which started because I'd been to the process as someone who used to work in finance the costs in retirement plans for small businesses is so offensively high that either it's bleeding away any actual chance for your employees to save or the employer has to kick it more to cover that and that's just it's almost a usury where the financial firms try to charge a small business of 10 people or 20 people so you know those directions that we're all going in a statewide plan for a small business retirement plan statewide plan for a paid family leave hopefully some more progress a more compelling state to have to keep people and to have to be the kind of place where people are more likely to love their jobs in the first place because whether the job is chose to offer it or not they suddenly start having these things and you know how challenging is it when you just had a kid to still be working whether they wanted to give you the time off or not it's hard to go back to work right or even the other little things you know our approach and policy to a sick leave is just take it there's a number of days it doesn't take away from your vacation if you're sick don't come in the office and get everyone else sick let us know don't abuse the policy keep us posted if you can work from home or be available from home while you're home on the couch please do so don't let things languish let us know things you need covered but I think those approaches are really meaningful to employees you know the trust that comes along with that and the the logic of saying we don't want you to be here when you're sick and you're going to be half effective you're not going to want to be here it's going to make you resent your job and you're then also likely to get everyone else in the office sick that's just not something we should encourage and we don't want to give you time off to be away from that but it's time off we have to choose should I use this vacation or should I use it as sick time you know combined PTO it's often called we don't let that approach either because we don't want you to be hesitant to am I sick enough no I just kind of got a cold I'll just go and cough on everyone that's right to be places that offer that meaningful response to employees I think gives them a chance to really buy into what they're spending their time doing every day and that's what we all want both for more jobs for the jobs themselves to be more meaningful and for the employers to have employees who want to be there which therefore makes it easier for us to do what we're doing and hopefully for more employers to come and pay more time last question it's after 12 last question is very quickly do you pay more in healthcare insurance for your employees or property taxes? well we again we don't pay for health insurance for our employees and we don't directly pay the property taxes since we rent for our locations but it's passed through so way more than property taxes in this case indirectly because you're not paying for the insurance correct alright committee thank you