Vermont’s primary annual IT operations fund went from $1 million in the black three years ago to $25 million in the red last year, according to state officials.
“That’s why I’m here today,” said Adam Greshin, commissioner of the Vermont Department of Finance and Management, as he spoke with the House Energy and Digital Infrastructure Committee Tuesday about how this issue might be resolved.
The Communications and Information Technology Fund draws on a portion of each agency’s budget to pay for the state’s daily IT operating expenses, some improvements and cybersecurity. That work is generally done by the Agency for Digital Services, or ADS.
One problem Greshin has, he said, is that leadership is not quite sure what’s actually causing the fund’s deficit.
He has theories, to be sure, some of which he’s “reasonably certain” about.
For example, the Agency of Human Services sometimes relies on ADS for IT support on Medicaid-related services, but the human services agency can’t always bill Medicaid for the help, Greshin said, leaving ADS to foot the bill. He also has questions about whether current hourly billing amounts are high enough to cover the cost of human labor.
But the funding sources that support IT in Vermont’s state government are at once extremely complex — derived from many funding streams, through many kinds of billing — and quite difficult to delineate, Greshin said.
“It makes it very challenging to track what spending is going on where,” he said.
Greshin said work toward balancing the state’s IT budget begins with making problems easier to locate. He outlined a somewhat mazy set of billing reforms (Rep. Laura Sibilia, I-Dover requested several clarifications “for us mere mortals”) as well as a new request for general fund dollars. The Vermont Agency for Digital Services will ask lawmakers for just over $9 million in a new general fund budget line to cover expenses from projects like data management and artificial intelligence work, Greshin said.
— Theo Wells-Spackman
In the know
On Tuesday morning, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that the state’s Department of Health officially joined the World Health Organization’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, following the federal government’s formal withdrawal from the global health organization in January. California and Illinois did the same earlier this year. The network is a broader response team for identifying and responding to disease outbreaks.
It’s generated a lot of buzz, but joining the network independently is off the table for Vermont, Health Commissioner Rick Hildebrant told VTDigger. It’s something he said he has discussed with the state’s epidemiologists, who concluded “it doesn’t make a lot of sense for Vermont.”
There are resources required to join that Vermont just doesn’t have, plus, Hildebrant added, the main benefit of participation in the network is information about outbreaks, which the state already has access to. “We have regular email and phone calls with New York. If there is something we should know about, we would,” Hildebrant said.
— Olivia Gieger
When Ben Brickner joined the board of a Woodstock day care, it was facing a lawsuit, he told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. Even though volunteers for the organization did nothing wrong, the plaintiffs suing Rainbow Playschool named them in the civil lawsuit against the organization, Brickner said.
The lawsuit facing the organization has deterred other volunteers from joining the day care’s board and it led other board members to quit, he said.
“They will never serve on another nonprofit or local board again. Not for lack of commitment, but just because they fear the consequences,” Brickner said.
Dealing with the litigation for about five years has been emotionally burdensome for the organization and required some volunteers to hire their own attorneys, he said. He asked senators to support a bill introduced last year, S.151, that would allow unpaid volunteers for a nonprofit organization or a governmental entity to file a motion in court to strike the complaint.
The bill would allow a volunteer to be named in the lawsuit if they were accused of negligence or misconduct.
— Charlotte Oliver
On the Hill
U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., was among the members of Congress who Monday viewed unredacted files from the U.S. Justice Department’s cache of documents on infamous sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein.
A reporter from DropSite news asked Balint about the documents she viewed, to which she responded there were a “bunch of sick fucks” in files. Balint added that she only spent about a half hour reviewing the documents and planned to spend more time with them later.
For those interested in tracking the latest developments stemming from the millions of files the U.S. has released on Epstein, DropSite’s reporting is among the most comprehensive.
— Ethan Weinstein
‘Moral imperative’
“Now more than ever there’s a moral imperative to act to preserve these critical services for a population, people who are our neighbors, who are increasingly under pressure.”
That was the pitch Olivia Sharrow, executive director for Vermont’s Free and Referral Clinics, gave to the House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resiliency, and Forestry on Tuesday. She asked them to support a budget request of $500,000 to support Bridges to Health, a health care program serving immigrant and migrant workers in Vermont that her own clinic oversees.
Naomi Wolcott-MacCausland, program lead for Bridges to Health, started the initiative working on her parent’s Franklin County dairy farm 16 years ago, she told lawmakers.
Over the past three years, it’s supported over 1,000 farm workers on 170 farms in every Vermont county with only 10 staff. Vermont increasingly relies on immigrant labor, Wolcott-MacCausland said. Over half of the people they serve are no longer in agriculture but in the services and building trades.
— Austyn Gaffney
Correction: A previous version of this newsletter referred erroneously to the effects of the state’s IT budget reforms.
