Vermont’s secretary of digital services, Shawn Nailor, is retiring after nine months in the role and a cumulative 35 years in public service, the Governor’s Office announced Thursday.
Nailor was officially appointed to the top post at the agency in January, after having served as interim secretary since September 2022. The Agency of Digital Services is relatively young in Vermont’s history: Republican Gov. Phil Scott issued an executive order to create it in January of 2017 — his first month in the governor’s office — with the goal of consolidating information technology functions across state government. It officially came into existence that April.
Nailor, 55, has been with the agency nearly since its beginning. He was named its deputy secretary in August 2017, and served in that position until September of 2022, when former Secretary John Quinn — one of Scott’s longest serving cabinet members — stepped down from the role to take a job in the private sector.
“New Agencies are not created often in Vermont, and to be able to play a role in this transformational effort has been rewarding, to say the least, and I hope that my contributions will ensure Vermonters are better supported through technology for years to come,” Nailor said in a written statement Thursday.
Reached by phone Thursday afternoon, Nailor told VTDigger that the timing of his retirement was a personal decision. When he accepted the governor’s offer for the role in January, Nailor said retirement was on his mind, but “nothing was concrete.”
To celebrate the conclusion of his career, Nailor plans to spend 10 weeks out west with his wife this summer “to get some time together that we haven’t had in a while,” hiking and fly-fishing in South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.
Asked about what he considered to be a highlight of his time with the agency, Nailor pointed to its role in the state’s Covid-19 pandemic response — with the caveat that, “I never wish we could have experienced the pandemic. It would have been a lot better if it never happened. But it was also on some level rewarding to be part of this administration that responded to it so successfully.”
“If central IT didn’t exist, if ADS didn’t exist, I’m not sure we would have been able to help out places like the Department of Labor deal with the backlog, or help the Department of Health stand up systems to be able to register for tests and then later register for vaccines,” Nailor said.
“By being centralized, we were able to relatively smoothly move our entire state workforce remote in just a matter of days… and we were able to do it and not have services suffer as a result of it to Vermonters at a time when pretty much the only ones providing services to Vermonters was government,” he added.
Prior to his time with the Agency of Digital Services, Nailor worked for decades with Vermont’s Agency of Transportation, beginning his career there as an engineer and transitioning into IT work, Geographic Information Systems (also known as GIS) and crisis response mapping during and in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Irene. He rose to the position of IT director with the Agency of Transportation before the creation of and his appointment to the Agency of Digital Services in 2017.
In Thursday’s press release, Scott commended Nailor’s decades-long commitment to public service, saying, “Vermonters are better off because of his work and contributions to state government.”
“His experience and work ethic proved valuable as we established the new Agency of Digital Services, and as we faced unforeseen challenges brought by the pandemic, which increased our reliance on digital solutions,” Scott said.
Nailor’s final day as secretary will be June 30, at which point, Deputy Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes will take the reins as interim secretary. Reilly-Hughes first joined the agency in January, when Nailor was promoted to secretary. Prior to joining the state government, Reilly-Hughes worked in the private sector for 20 years.
