This is Houseways Mains. It is September 15th and Tuesday. And we are meeting on H954, which is the miscellaneous tax bill. We've been over the bill in various forms many times. And in the last week or so, we've tentatively agreed to add some substantive changes to it. Abby is here this morning to walk us through those. My hope is that this morning we will vote on our proposed amendments and they're gonna be, because we have possession of the bill, these are gonna be concurring with an amendment. So that's the format. If we're successful in doing that, they'll go on notice, I don't know if they go on notice today or tomorrow, but I believe the plan is to have them up for action on Thursday and Friday, but we're gonna be as flexible as we can because that's the world we're in. Before we start, does anyone on the committee have any announcements or anything they wanna say or ask about other than good morning? All right, good. So Abby, why don't you get us started? And Robin, you guide this as much as you like. So in terms of making sure that the information gets out there. Okay. Great, good morning. Sorcha, there she goes. Thank you, Sorcha. Why don't we start with the actual language? If that's okay, I think that would be the most useful. There is a side-by-side that's available on the webpage, but I think that this is actually the quickest way to run through the changes. So this new draft 1.4 dated 9-11-2020 makes a few instances of amendment. Most of these, I believe almost all of these at this point, the committee has seen. Last week we went over this first instance if you could scroll down, Sorcha, thank you. This is moving the billing and collection of the property tax to the state. It is a change from what was passed in the house rather than requiring the Department of Taxes to submit an implementation plan. Instead, this is a study, a report studying potential approaches to transitioning the responsibility rather than saying, how is this going to happen? Tell us step-by-step. So it's also been pushed back to March 15th of 2021. In the second instance of amendment, this was seen last week. This reinserts the language that was passed by the house for the use tax safe harbor reporting. So this is identical language to what was voted out of the house before the bill went to the Senate. The Senate did remove this and put in a reporting requirement instead. So that's been removed and the house language has been reinserted. You can scroll down unless there are any questions. I don't see any. All right, the third instance of amendment is actually the meat of this concurrence with proposals of amendment. It removes a section that was added by the Senate to create a sales tax exemption for paper bags. That is removed in this language because it was already passed in the bill back in June. And this now inserts what colloquially is referred to as cloud tax. So it's imposing sales and use tax on vendor hosted pre-written computer software. So software as a service and it removes the existing session law exemption for pre-written computer software access remotely. It adds in a new definition, vendor hosted pre-written computer software which is based on a Rhode Island definition because that's a streamlined agreement state that already imposes tax on these services. So it's something that vendors are already used to collecting if they're selling in Rhode Island. I'm sorry, George has a question. George? Yeah, I'm sorry. My question was way back on the very first point that you made and that was pushing the report on the state collecting property taxes. Why are we pushing it back to March 15th of 2021? Why not getting it in January? So we would have time to act on it. If I may, I refer to Representative Shai. That was our discussion that she had indicated March 15th would be enough time to give the department time to write the report. And then that might, that is right around crossover. So it may not be actionable at that time but it would serve you for that question. Robin? I'm not sure I have a whole lot more to add. We had originally passed this back on May 22nd and the Senate took it out entirely and just wanted, I've been thinking about the cloud, not about this one, so I've got to go back. They didn't want anything. And so this was kind of a way of softening our position and moving a little bit closer to the Senate without. I understand making it a report rather than, making it a study rather than an implementation plan. I just sort of feel like it would be nice to have it get the information back at a point that we could actually do something with it in 2021. Right, so let's delay it a year but it's probably part of the biennium. If we had passed it in May or June, that's different than passing it at the end of September. So I think we were trying to give them a little bit more time to get themselves organized. So what about February 1st? Does that help? I think so. Yeah. I think that would give us time before crossover to do something with it. I don't know, Robert, if you think that's adequate time for them or not, but... I think it's a show of understanding. That would be fine. I would be fine with that. I would just say by March, they are so deep into stuff that they aren't going to be working on this report come March, you know, as we approach March. Right. My guess is they will have that written. If we ask them to write it, it'll get written before January. Just because of... And certainly before February 1st. Right. Because of tax kinds of issues. So anyway, is February 1st agreeable with people? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Great. All right. Robin, your hand is still up. Are you... I have a question on something. Yes, I did. Where did I have my question? Oh, I know what it was. Abby, on the pre-written software and using the Rhode Island definition, which I think is great and it ensures that we're not an outlier art. Is Rhode Island the only one near us that is using this definition? Is Rhode Island sort of one among many? Do we have a sense of that? Yes, let me pull up my research. Sorry, I don't know off the top of my head. I did back in January when Graham and I were presenting on this, we did look at all of the other states. So I'm just looking quickly over my list. I had focused primarily on full streamlined states. In terms of what's close by, not seeing other, sorry, I'm just looking for other New England states. Ohio is another streamlined state and they do tax this, but I'm not sure about their definition. I'd have to go back and check. Wash, I believe Washington state, it also had a very similar definition and they are also a streamlined state. But in terms of New England states, it looks like most of them are actually exempting this currently. Okay, and does New York state, is that the same with New York state also? Sorry, I'm just looking through. Oh, no, New York is not a streamlined state. It's not a full New York. They're definitely not streamlined, right? But they do tax it. Okay, that's correct. I just want to get a general sense. Thank you. Okay. Yep. Keep moving through. So in sections, so the third instance of amendment inserts for new sections. So there's the definition section. There are two sections imposing sales tax and then use tax on pre-written computer software. Scroll down. Thank you, Sorcia. And then section 10D repeals the existing session law, which was exempting pre-written software that's accessed remotely. So those are the four sections that would tax pre-written computer software. The next instance of amendment is more of a cleanup for what passed out of the Senate and is no longer relevant because of timing issues. So that's deleting the official state revenue estimate that was due in August that the deadline is passed. And it's also deleting a technical fix that will need to be dealt with next session, but it doesn't need to be dealt with here. The way the language was drafted, it doesn't do anything the way the Senate passed it at this point just because of the timing. In the fifth instance of amendment, this changes all of, or sorry, this removes the existing effective date and adds in the tax increment financing district sections that you saw with Becky Wasserman. So this is the language that you've already seen. It adds in section 29 and section 30 and it extends the dates for incurring debt. And there's the second section that deals with the Burlington Waterfront to have same thing that it is now dealt with in section 29 for the extension of the date and it strikes existing statute relating to an extension. So it's more cleanup in the second section. And this final section 31 is a new section but it's still the effective date. So it's just lining them up with how the bill is now drafted. It puts back in the use tax safe harbor effective date. It is still retroactive to January 1st of this year. It adds in the prewritten computer software effective date which would take place January 1st. So the first revenue would be received from those transactions on, I believe it's February 25th. So it's always a month later and then it keeps the other effective dates that were in the bill as passed the Senate. And I can walk through though. There's the universal service charge, the annual link up and some retroactive refunds for amending the statute of limitations for personal income tax. So that's the end of the amendments that have been discussed in committee. Again, this is drafted now as a committee bill because the bill was committed to ways and means. As a committee amendment. So it's, and I don't know how I happened to find it but I found my folder with all the other sections in the bill. Just to remind people that what we passed all these many of them very technical sections way back and the Senate, most of them. So this bill, once we concur with amendments has all those sections in it. We're not going to go over them again unless somebody on the committee wants Abby to do that. And if you do, we'll make time to do it. But I just want to remind everybody that I don't remember how many sections this bill has in all 30, 30 substantive sections. So there's lots of other pieces in it. I just, I tend to forget. So I just want people to remember that. Robin and then Pat. Thank you. Oh, so VSAC is not in here as an instance of amendment because we are keeping the language that the Senate did but it's a change from the House perspective from what we had in there. Exactly. So we're agreeing with their amendments and doing further amendments. Right, so I should probably be mentioning that particular Senate amendment or not. Oh yeah, and the House has never voted on it. Right. Yeah, right. Were there any other big ones from the Senate that I need to be sure? Probably, probably. But let me get to Pat's question first and then, yeah, Pat. So thank you. I got called away for a second so I think I might have missed it but in regards to the cloud tax. Yeah. Just a refresher, refresh my memory. Did we pass that out of our committee without that, correct? We were gonna, at that, on March 13th which was when we left the building, we were gonna put it in a property tax rate setting bill. So we had sort of tentatively agreed on it but we weren't gonna put it in the miscellaneous tax bill as it turned out during the June session, you know, when our pandemic won. We passed a property tax bill and we were focused entirely on making sure that those rates were set and didn't wanna add anything to it that might create issues. And so we didn't put the cloud in at that point. There was some discussion and committee about putting it in but we decided not to, yeah. So we didn't actually vote it out in either bill until now if we do it now. Okay. So we were ready to do it. So it did get, we did have quite a lot of testimony on it. Yeah, sorry to call. Yeah, so. I just, just so you know, I mean, I was opposed to that then and I did support this bill and I don't think I can with that in there. Only because I've, well, I disagree with it for one thing and I have some folks out here who are really opposed to it. Yeah, yeah. Okay, thank you. Yeah, and, you know, we're gonna do, as we do two votes, we're gonna vote on the package of amendments and then we're gonna vote on the bill as amended, which we'll have among other things the VSEC language in it and the TIF language in it. So this, or whatever, for whatever that means. So Robin, you asked about other issues. We can, I can ask Abby to go through those if the committee would like to listen to it. That's really a question for everybody on the committee. To some extent you need it for preparing for the caucus and for the floor, but I wanna be sure that the committee would like to all hear all that. I don't know if there's a lot or just. The big things, they took the state administration implementation plan out. They took the use text table out. They added the VSEC language in. Those are the three that I'm most aware of. And we've amended some of their amendments for the post. So unless there are others, but we already know about them, then ones that we haven't talked about. Abby, were there others that I haven't mentioned? Tampont text. Tampont text. That did not make its way into this bill now. The others are smaller changes like the sales and use tax exemption. There was, there were some changes added in for judiciary fees, but again, they're very small impacts. Those were the biggest changes that were added in. There is the change to the removing the interest rate for personal income tax. So removes or for underpayment of taxes, they removed the higher interest rate for underpayment compared to when the state is owing interest. So that's, that's another change. If you want me to run through all of the changes, I can go through the section by section. It's probably the easiest way to see it or side by side. I'm sorry. Is that something the committee would like to run through? I'm happy to do it. I just want to be sure people want to hear it and tell. And if not, I can chat with Abby later. So it's up to everybody else. Somebody on the committee would like to hear that. No, I have one head shake there. That's Scott. Well, it's posted. Is that right? The section by section. How many sections are in it? The side. There are 31 with the new affected dates because of the addition of the TIF language. Well, if somebody would like Abby to do it, then please speak up. And otherwise, we won't. We also need to do the fiscal note. So I want to give a chance for that. Any other questions for Abby? Graham, I know you're here. See you there. I'm on here. So I've set a fiscal note to Sorcia on this proposal of amendment. Sorry for the record. I'm Graham Campbell at work at the drink fiscal office and presenting a fiscal note on the house of proposal of amendment for H 954, the miscellaneous tax bill. And by and large, there are two revenue sections in this bill made a revenue section. The first section eight, which is the, the changing of the use tax, safe harbor table. We estimate in fiscal 21, this will reduce sales tax revenues by $775,000. And the majority of that revenue loss is just to change the table itself. And then about 20, 30,000 of it is the provision that sort of excludes those with AGI under 20,000 from using the table. The estimate this year, the estimate is based upon data from tax year 2019, which based upon information from the tax department has been a lower year for use tax collections than in the past. And we expect it to be a lower year for use tax collections, even though the data is not quite complete. And this is because we think that people are more aware of the fact that remote sales are being charged sales tax because of the way of hair decision. And also because vendors like Amazon and Walmart are collecting sales tax on their remote sales. So the more that people become aware of those, that situation, the less likely we are to collect use tax. So by changing the table in a time when people are becoming more aware of likely they don't always much use tax leads to a smaller revenue loss than what would otherwise have occurred. Set $775,000 and then the other, then that's the sales tax and therefore it affects the education fund. And then the second revenue piece here is the addition of the repeal, the Session Law Exemption Force vendor hosted pre-written software. And because of the effective date in January, 2021, we estimate that it'll raise $2.7 million in 21, $7.6 million in 22. And then growing all the way up to nine and a half million in just about 24. So as I've said in this community before, this sort of highlights the fast growth of this type of software. And that is what we see in the data every single year. And so we anticipate that this is going to grow pretty swiftly. And because it's a sales tax, it will benefit the state's education fund. There are two other minor potential fiscal things in this bill, the first is in section six. And this is the increasing property tax hearing officers per dean. We project that would have minimal fiscal impact of about $30,000 or less. That's a general fund expense. And then finally, I put a note here on section 29, which is the TIF language. We don't expect immediate fiscal impact on the education fund from this, but as was discussed in committee to the extent that the delay in debt incurring leads to a delay in the projects, it could lead for a municipality of less time to collect tax increment on any projects that are built. And so to the extent that that puts pressure on the municipality, it is possible that down the road, a delay in debt and a delay in projects might have a fiscal impact. But we need a term, no impact of the education fund of this provision. So with that, I can take any questions although those committees chewed on a lot of these proposals. Let me see if there's any questions. I'll give people a minute here. Joey. I just wanted, Sam mentioned that he was gonna have an amendment on VSEC, but we didn't do anything with that, did we? Or did he offer any amendment on that? No, I just sent him a text. He's not here because he's sick, but he and I had exchanged texts last night and this morning, and I think he had decided not to offer it. VSEC had some concerns about sort of tying their hands. No, I was hoping that it was not gonna be included. So I'm pleased that he's not offering it. Thank you. And I just sent him a note asking him, is it okay if I say that he's not offering it? And I haven't heard back, but that's what he had told me last night was that he wasn't going to. So the language exists, I think Abby wrote it and I think it went to everybody, but he wasn't gonna put it out there. I think the message got through to VSEC that we would like this money used for particularly at-risk kids or first-time college student, whatever the various groups are. I think they understand that, but I think it's so tentative about whether they actually do this and what the profits are gonna be that they'd like to keep some flexibility. And Tom Little's available if we wanted to hear from him, but I said I didn't think we needed to. Okay, with everybody. Bill, can't feel. Yeah, Jenna, we had a note today from Tom Little. Right. He talked about reporting back to us or keeping us up to date. Yeah, which they come in pretty much every year for something and so we'll have a chance to ask about this. I didn't prepare language on their reporting in partly because we can ask for the report anyway and if they don't go into this, there won't be anything to report about. So anyway, we couldn't add language. It didn't seem important to me to do it. I felt fine just relying on our relationship with them. Are there any other questions that are out there? Is somebody ready to make a motion on these amendments? Happy to move it if nobody else wants to. Okay, so this would be the package of amendments. Is that right? That's the motion. Yes. And is there a second to that? Second. Okay. So it's been moved and seconded that the Ways and Means Committee amend our proposed amendments to the bill as Abby went over with us. And this is this eight page document with, I don't know, looking to see how many amendments there are, a number of them. Madam Chair. Yes. May I just inquire whether the committee wanted to change the reporting date to February 1st? Yeah, forever. All right. So that includes the February 1st reporting. It does. It is now draft 1.5 with today's date. Perfect. Okay. So it's been moved and seconded that we approve draft 1.5 with the changed effective date. Thank you. Is there any discussion? Give people a minute here, George. I would just say that I had understood the Senate proposal amendment included the tamp on tax. And I have to say that I'm rather disappointed that it is not in here. I'm, you know, having a little trouble with the whole thing with it not being in there. It didn't get in this version. I think it had a little bit of discussion in the Senate, but it's not in there. Bill. I'm going to be voting no on the package because of the cloud. Okay. Any other comments that people want to make? Okay, Robin, you, I'll call the roll and remind people we'll have two votes. We'll have a vote on the package of amendments. Then we'll have a vote on the bill because we have a position on the bill. You know that. This is on the amendments. Right. Okay. So I will start. Representative Anthony. Yes. Representative Beck. Yes. Representative Brennan. No. Representative Donovan. Yes. Representative Kornheiser. Yes. Representative Maslund. Yes. Representative Shy is yes. Representative Till. Yes. Representative Young is absent. Representative Canfield. No. Representative Ansel. Yes. Okay. So that looks like eight to one. Okay. Now I made a motion on the bill. Moved. Okay. Moved by Jim Maslund. Second. Second. Leader. Discussion. All right, just writing down. Social will be happy. Okay. So we're voting the bill out. Representative Anthony. Yes. Representative Beck. I had asked three. Representative Brennan. No. Representative Donovan. Yes. Representative Kornheiser. Yes. Representative Maslund. Yes. Representative Shy is yes. Representative Till. Yes. Representative Young is absent. Representative Canfield. Yes. And Representative Ansel. Yes. So that looks like nine one one. Right. Yep. Okay. Robin, I'm asking you to report it. Thank you, everybody. And yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if we have a few amendments on the floor. This is a miscellaneous tax bill. So I don't think our work is done, but that's okay. Being interesting. So I'm trying to remember who Abby is at you who has the language on the education finance. Yes, I do. And I haven't, if you want to refresh your screen, you'll be able to see the document on the committee page. Excellent. Okay. Socia, would you mind pulling that up or do you want me to share my screen? So Madam Chair, would you like me to summarize the language? Yeah, that'd be great. Okay. The way it's currently drafted, it doesn't have any lead in language. I can draft it as a committee proposal, a committee bill. This deals with the fiscal year 22 property tax rate letter that the commissioner of taxes issued on every December 1st. And it addresses any projected education fund deficit for the current fiscal year 21. This language was seen not the first subsection, but part of this language was seen in your joint meeting with House Education last week. So what's been added here is the first subsection A that has the findings and the purpose to give it more context. The first sentence explains that there is this December 1st letter under Vermont statute that requires the commissioner to calculate and recommend property tax rates for the upcoming fiscal year. And within the calculation for making that recommendation, the commissioner has to take into account any projected current year deficit as well as the requirement under statute to keep the stabilization reserve at 5%. The Act 122 that the general assembly passed back in June expressed a somewhat contrary intent, which was to address any projected ed fund deficit by using federal funds and this list of actions to reduce the burden that's placed on schools, school districts to impact the tax rates through their budgeting process. So this makes it very clear what the intention of Act 122 and this new language is. It's really to not withstand current statute where the commissioner's recommending rates that would otherwise use the stabilization reserve and have to address the deficit through tax rates. So that's the first subsection A. So if you scroll down and switch a little bit further, the second page sets out subsection B, which was seen last week and it requires the commissioner of taxes in making the recommendations for the December 1st letter for fiscal year 22 to disregard a projected deficit for fiscal year 21. And to assume that the stabilization reserve is maintained at its rate that is currently, the current rate or amount at or before omitting or issuing the December 1st letter. So it's to not withstandings of current law and how the commissioners issuing tax rates for the upcoming year. I can take questions. I hope that wasn't too confusing. I will admit that I don't understand that language. So I'm hoping that somebody who's reporting this does, I couldn't possibly explain that. The part I don't understand is the language about maintaining the stabilization reserve. But as long as other people understand it, Scott, you understand it. George, you understand it. No. I'm trying to take a close look at it right now and I can't seem to find it anywhere in the documents. Mark, do you want to explain it to us again or Abby? Yeah, I would like to jump in it because I think there's a little bit of inconsistency here and I want to make sure the committee's intent is being reflected in the language. Yeah, well, maybe that's why I don't understand it. Okay, so in Act 122, you list several ways of addressing any projected deficit in the education fund. And in that language, number three option there is to draw down the stabilization reserve. And I'm not sure you want to do that because the deficit that we're carrying on the education fund outlook right now is $66.4 million, but that includes a full stabilization reserve, okay? So if the stabilization reserve were drawn down, then the deficit in the education fund is only $28 million. So what I'm concerned about is the administration could say, okay, we're not going to include that $28 million deficit in the FY22 property tax rates, but you would then be going at FY22 with an empty stabilization reserve, which would then require them to bring that up by $38 million on the property tax. So I'm thinking you're trying to prohibit both things.  So I'm not sure drafting-wise how to address that. I think that the language works, but there is that inconsistency between 122 and what you're proposing here. And it may work, but if we're having trouble understanding it here a month from now, two months from now, who knows what people are gonna say it means. Can I show you in the balance sheet? Because I think it'll make it clear to people if we can just look at the bottom line of the balance sheet. So I said, do you have it available? Because I have it on my screen. I could pop up, if you don't. I just made you a co-host. I don't have the balance sheet. Matt, do you want to jump in or do you want to wait for him to explain that? Well, I just need to read the rest of it a little more closely, I think, but I'm just wondering is everything after line nine just confusing the whole subject? If we just had the first nine lines in there, doesn't that do the trick? Nine lines, no. I mean, you have to, the commissioner shall what? Well, I'm just looking at this, I'm looking at this draft 1.4. What page are you on? Page one. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm on page two. Okay, sorry. And I'm on page one and I'm reading through line nine where it ends 16 BSA, 40, 26, at 5%. Do we need anything after that? Yeah. So that was partly my suggestion to put in the reference to app 122. I'm not wed to it, but I was wanting to, I guess what I was thinking is that we passed a law app 122, which laid out those seven strategies and that what, the way I was thinking about it is that the changes that we're trying to make in the December 1st letter are in some ways trying to incorporate the thinking in 122 so that we don't end up in a situation where we pass a law at 122 and then we leave an effective statute that sort of seems to counter it or disregard it. So maybe it would be right. I may have complicated it by adding that in. Yeah, I guess all you always thought of it is that we have this statutory language that drives the December 1 tax letter and we hold the administration to that with this clarification that they have to do it at 5%. And then all of those other things that included the reserve fund and all those other mechanisms, that's for the legislature after the tax letter comes out. However, we don't wanna let the administration use those seven mechanisms to monkey around it with the tax letter. The tax letter comes out, it is what it is. And then we have those seven mechanisms at our disposal working with the treasurer, maybe others to deal with the aftermath of the December 1 tax letter. I think the hope here was to not create a panic with the December 1 letter was to sort of get ahead of that. But maybe we're making things worse. George and then Robin. Yeah, Scott, you're not talking about stopping after line nine of page one. Yes, yes. Well, that just tells, I mean, that says he needs to include to cover in his letter. He needs to include the deficit enough to cover the deficit. That's exactly the opposite of what we want. Well, it must calculate tax rates in an amount sufficient to cover any projected fiscal year 2021 deficit. That's exactly what we're trying to avoid in the first line nine knot. But if, okay, I see your point there, George, but if we, I mean, we're giving that it's going to be up to the tax commissioner to decide how to deal with that deficit. And that's what we're trying to avoid, right? Well, this says if you do took just the first nine lines, it says he needs to include the, to calculate the tax rates at an amount sufficient to cover the projected deficit from 2021. I mean, nine, nine. The first nine lines tells him to do exactly what we don't want. That's just to your point. Oh, yeah, I see. I missed that number. Yeah, I see your point. That section actually restates current law. Yeah, exactly. And the current law is the problem, right? Right. Robin, you've been trying to get in. Okay, that was the part that I was going to say is that if that's all we're going to do, we don't need this bill because it's already current law. So that was my comment, thanks. So we're back to this conundrum where we're saying sort of inconsistent things. Am I concerned? I don't mind that so much, but I mind the fact that we're saying them in ways that nobody will understand. Right. Be consistent, be clear. I think that the language as it's drafted works, but maybe we could clean it up and make it a little bit easier to explain. I mean, it's a problem. I don't know how to get around because there's the interaction between the Stabilization Reserve and the deficit. And to try to nail them both down requires both of those subsections. So this is probably a bad idea, but so what we want is we want the December 1st letter to be written without taking into account the projected deficit and this question without taking into account the stabilization reserve. Is that basically what we're saying? What I'm saying is that the administration could read that language now and say that the deficit is actually 28 million, not 66 million dollars. And that's because they would have drawn the Stabilization Reserve down in 21. And that means going forward into 22, you'd have an empty Stabilization Reserve and a small deficit. So the portion of it that would have to be replaced in the Stabilization Reserve is 38 million dollars on the property tax. So in order to avoid that, the language says that regardless of how you interpret that deficit, it's going to be 64 million dollars that you're not going to raise on the property tax. Whether you call it a Stabilization Reserve or a deficit, we've got it covered so that you can't use any of that money. You can't add any of that money to the property tax bill. And I agree it's confusing. I've been acting over it because it's awkwardly laid out in the bill, I think, unavoidably because of this interaction between deficit and reserve, Stabilization Reserve. I mean, at the end of the day, we want them to do a property tax rate letter that reflects student count spending. Non-property tax revenues, non-property tax revenues, all those kinds of things. And we're trying to get there and that's tough. Let's see, Peter, Robin, George, Scott. There you go. Peter, Robin. Maybe it's naive. I don't, why can't you, in session law, that is just for this round, say something like notwithstanding the VSA obligation that statute places on the secretary, that it's the decision of the legislator branch that a letter should reflect no deficit. It should be predicated on the no carrying of deficit and a full reserve fund. And just let it go with that. Isn't that, can't you just do it directly? I think that's what this does. Okay. But like you said, it's so complicated. I'm not sure people will get hung up on the words. Yeah, Robin. I think I'm going in a similar kind of direction as Peter did, but just thinking about the first nine lines instead of restating what we do. Which nine? The first one, first line, nines that Scott had referred to, whether we just do something that instead of saying that, that they must calculate the tax excluding, without consideration of the deficit and while maintaining the stabilization reserve. I'm still, I'm not a lawyer either, but I'm just trying to get it shorter if there's some way to make it one or two paragraphs instead of the lengthy thing that it is, whether we could do something in that, within that top section. I like all that first page stuff. Because if you read it, you'd actually know what it meant. But that was because I asked to have it go in there. So it doesn't mean it's right. George, Scott, and Jim. Yeah, I was going the same way. I mean, I also like that first page stuff there. So people kind of understand the playing field that we're on before we make changes. So that, you know, I don't have any problems with that first paragraph being there. But then I think, you know, then we need to go on to just simply not withstand that and saying that, say that they should not consider the deficit when they're setting the rates, nor should they utilize money from the reserves when they calculate the rates. Scott, Jim, Emily. Yeah, so after having a chance to read through this in detail, I mean, I would feel comfortable explaining this to somebody on the floor. I think I could boil it down and it's something that was understandable. But as I look at, you know, the first nine lines I think are fine. And I think section B and subset section one and two are fine. It's those lines in between that I think it's, what it is is that there's, there's something. Oops, sorry. There's something here. That is my big bell. That'll teach you to argue with me. Yeah, I think what's confusing here is that in A, it starts off telling the commissioner what they must, the commissioner must do. And then it goes into this, you know, lengthy like justification for why, and then it goes back to, you know, with some action that has to occur. And I think that's what kind of for a reader, a casual reader just trying to get through this the first time it kind of, it kind of messes it up. Jen, Emily, and George. Yeah, generally I think I like Peter's approach, approach as modified by George. We've got two issues I think. One is getting the language so that it works. And the other one is so people can understand it. And there is a benefit I think to having the notwithstanding language that George suggested so that it makes it clear what we intend to do because it'll be wonderful for Scott to explain it on the floor so that people in the chamber understand it. But then, you know, several weeks from now down the road, we wanna be able to explain it in plain English to people out there. So that's where I am at this point. That's where the point works. Yeah, am I worried? Yep, Emily. I am not concerned about the lay of public reading this because I don't think they generally bother with that. I am concerned about the administration creating intention where they wanted it and not where we want it. And so what Mark explained, it seems to me like a little extra on that just that very final paragraph starting on line 12 to be clearer about what we mean by the stabilization reserve would make sense. But I've seen Abby try to jump in a few times and I wonder if she has any ideas. I don't know if Abby can raise her hand. Yes, she can. Abby. Sure, I think that everyone is making points that I was struggling with while trying to draft it and put it together. And I tried to, I think you've all laid it out as you're reading through it again just to lay out what current law says, what the commissioner has to do already, what Act 122 was saying, and then what this language, that's kind of the first subsection when I was walking through. But parts of it could be removed. The whole first subsection is really just setting the context. The second subsection on page two, subsection B does what is being discussed as this is what we really need to be making clear is the directive from the General Assembly. I just want to point out that what may be confusing about B2 on the second page is that it's whatever the Civilization Reserve amount is at the time of making the December 1st letter. And I can maybe rework the wording there so that it's neither the 5% nor a full drawdown. Yeah. So that's what it currently says. I just wanted to. There's no middle ground in it. Yeah, go back to why we're doing this in the first place. We're trying to let school boards know that we don't want to see a December 1st letter that says there's going to be a 20 cent property tax increase. That's really what we're trying to do here. And we want school boards to be reassured that we're paying attention to that and that it's not our intention to have a 20 cent property tax increase this year any more than we did for the coming fiscal year, any more than we did for the current fiscal year. And we also want to be sure having communicated that to the school boards that we've set in place a process for this December 1st letter to reflect that intention that that's really what we're trying to accomplish. So I think it's important that we do something. I'm content to have it written any way the committee accomplishes those goals. So I don't want to lose sight of those goals. I don't want to get so tied up in the words that we lose sight of what it is we're trying to do here. Mark, you're trying to jump in. Yeah, I just want to say it seems like there's two issues. One issue is the difficulty of explaining this on the floor. And the other issue is how would the administration interpret this language? It seems on the second point, would it be possible to ask the tax department how they would read this? Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna. I mean, that would clarify at least you'd know that your intent is going to be followed to the issue about explaining it on the floor. I don't know exactly how many people pay really close, close attention to what's in there. But anyways, so the second part of the problem maybe dealt with just by talking to somebody over in tax. Yeah, right, that's a great idea. And I don't know whether we, they haven't seen the language Abby or they've seen it only if they've bothered to look. Yeah, so Sorsha, could you send it to Craig Bolio? Yes, I will. So I don't know whether we'll be able to do that this morning. But the other thing is that it's helpful for us to all be talking about what it's, how we read it because that will help whoever reports it be able to explain it and sort of anticipate what some of the issues are. Other suggestions or ideas? That's, Scott, do you wanna see a redraft along the lines of what you were talking about? I'd like to see a redraft based on the conversation between Abby and Craig, I think is more important right now. That sounds fine. I wasn't my plan to vote this out today. I would like, I think to finish with it tomorrow if we can. And so we'll communicate with tax. I also wanna be sure that superintendents and school boards, they've seen it. I wanna give them a chance to testify on it as well. So we'll do that tomorrow. Anything else? Sounds like we have a plan. Thank you, Mark, good idea. And I think I'll see everybody on the floor at 10. And Robin, if you need assistance as you do the caucus of the whole, we'll be there right behind you. I'm counting on it, thanks. Good, okay, thank you everybody. We'll see you tomorrow. We'll vote tomorrow, we will meet tomorrow because we didn't finish, we need more work on this. Okay.


Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit, brought to you by Accenture. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. I'm Rebecca Knight, your host. We are here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. We have two guests for this segment. We have Mike Moore, Senior Principal Accenture Research and Chris Wegman, Managing Director Accenture AWS Business Group. Thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE and you for returning to theCUBE. Thanks for having me back, it's good to be back. So Mike, I want to start with you and talk about your recent research, which is entitled Discover Where the Value's Hiding, How to Unlock the Value of Your Innovation Investments. I like it, because it just makes me think that innovation's just hiding somewhere in the corner, maybe underneath this desk. So talk a little bit about why companies can't find the innovation and sort of how they're failing at this. We'll get to the rays of hope later, but let's talk a little bit about what the problem is as you see it. Well, it certainly seems to be hiding for a lot of companies. Based on the research that we did, we found that over the course of the past five years, large incumbent companies like our own, and then also startups that spent a combined 3.2 trillion dollars on innovation, which is obviously a huge sum. But when we looked at the rate of return on that investment for incumbent companies, we found it was actually declining by 27% over the course of that five year period. So there's a clear disconnect there in terms of what companies are doing. So why are companies, why are so many companies not good at this? Well, we asked 840 executives from around the world exactly that question. And what we found is that for the vast majority of them who had been increasing their investments in innovation, they weren't seeing a great return. And what we found is that many of them were focused on incremental innovation, just small tweaks and adjustments to their products and services. But that's really not enough to get new customers in this day and age. But there was some reason for optimism. So around about 14% of our respondents said that actually they were translating their investments in innovation into accelerated growth. They were outperforming their peers in terms of profitability, in terms of their market cut growth. And they actually expected to continue over the course of the next four to five years. So I want to talk about that 14% that rarefied group, but I want to bring you into the conversation, Chris. And just talk a little bit about the relationship between Accenture and AWS and how you approach innovation and how you help clients think about their innovation and driving ingenuity and creativity in their businesses. So Accenture and AWS have been partners for over 12 years. Even before the first AWS service hit the market, Accenture was starting to use it in our labs at that point and looking at how we could leverage S3 to really innovate on. And we've carried that tradition on for a while now. And a couple of years ago, we sat down and really looked at what our enterprise customers were struggling with as they moved to the cloud. And at that point, innovation wasn't quite the topic yet. It was really how do we use cloud to get better returns on our investment, better TCOs, things like that. And now we've seen that turn as AWS has created more and more capabilities and solutions and offerings, our customers are really want to figure out how they innovate, right? They go and ask AWS, how do you innovate, right? And that's their number one, one of their biggest EBCs is how do they innovate? So we looked at it and said, that's great. How do we take that to the next level? How do we fix these failures that are happening? And what we've seen is most customers are in this stop and go innovation traffic, is like I like to call it, right? And there's people that are whizzing by them, the 14% are whizzing by them in the fast lane. So the question is, how do you get them out of that stop and go traffic into that fast lane and take, there's no lack of ideas. They have tons of ideas on how they can innovate, how they can use drones, how they can use all this stuff. The ideas are out there, but taking those and turning those into operationalized assets that are continuously working, continuously growing, continuously maturing is where they struggle. And the question, I mean, when companies would ask you how do you innovate? I mean, it is this question, but as you're implying, it sounds as though it's a very, you have to have some discipline around it. There has to be real processes around the innovation.  No, that's great, you can do the creative people and they come up with the great ideas and there's no lack of those. But then you've got to operationalize those and go through the discipline to take those, pick which ones are going to drive value, invest in those, operationalize those and take them from a proof of concept or a pilot or whatever you want to call it and actually turn it into something that gets you used every day and produced them. And that's what we've been focusing on with AWS is how do you get out of that, take what's out of that ideation stage, operationalize it using the full set of AWS services and then how do you continue to run that and prove it going forward? So Mike, the 14%, what are they doing? What makes them different? Well, I think there's lots of things that stand out that there were really three things that came out of the research. So firstly, that group of companies is outcome-led. As you were just saying, they're not just relying on the myth of the genius in the garage tinkering away, but they're putting a real set of processes around the innovation activities that they're pursuing and then they're linking those activities to clear operational and financial metrics. And then secondly, they're disruption-minded. So unlike the other companies that aren't performing well, they're really focused on investing in disruptive technologies that have the potential to create entirely new markets. And then finally, they're change-orientated. So they're not just using innovation to develop new products and services, but they're also using it to drive more fundamental change across their organizations. And one of the principal changes that they're making is that they're becoming what we call network-powered. So they're not just relying on their own internal innovation, but they're drawing on a wider ecosystem of partners like AWS to be like supercharged at the rate at which they innovate. So those are the characteristics. What are you seeing on the ground? Do you have any, can you give us some specific examples of how they're taking those characteristics and what they're actually doing? Yeah, so I think you see companies set up and grow these innovation pods. So what we've seen customers do is expanding those beyond just one pod, right? So not just focusing on one part of their organization to do this, bringing that into a central location, creating a hub of pods and capabilities using everything, AWS services, using DevOps, doing all the cool stuff that's out there, right? But operationalizing that and getting to that center of excellence where they're actually seeing it end to end and they're not just jumping from one problem to the next. And once that graduates out, they have an organization waiting to take that on and continuing that journey while the next set comes in. So it's this process, it's this ongoing, kind of chain of different problems coming in, being solved and graduating out the other end. Is this a technology issue or is it a culture issue? It's the technology's there. I don't see it as a technology issue. I see it as a cultural issue, a change issue, a organizational issue, a resource issue, right? You got to find the talent that does that. You got to have the operational discipline to lead this stuff and you got to go through that change. And we were seeing, I think, a lot of our customers struggle with that and they want to learn how Accenture's done it. They want to learn how AWS has done it because obviously they've been very successful at it. And in terms of the cultural, the change management challenges that you're talking about, those are harder to overcome. I mean, so do you have any best practices from your own experiences with it? Yeah, so we've obviously, Accenture's been in this game for a long time, whether it's innovation or whether we called it solution integration, whatever you called it, change was always a big part of that. So a lot of those same change principles that we've used for 20, 30 years still apply here. We see you need very top down ownership and sponsorship. So from the very top down, whether that's the CEO, the CDO, the CIO, whoever it is, they have to be 100% behind this. And have to be the cheerleaders. They have to be the people that are gonna go get on stage at re-invent or other conferences and be that, this is how we're going, so you need that lead. And then you need very strong leadership underneath it that have gone through the journey before. This isn't the first time they've done it. They know where the potholes are in that road. They know what the signs are when they're going down the wrong way and how to get out of that. So you got to have those two key levels of experience. And to bring the others on board with them. Absolutely, and they have to be the visionaries, they have to be the people guiding them through that. And if you've got those people, if they're very strong willed, very luminaries, those people will follow them. And they'll follow them through that journey. And then they also have got to go sell that to the rest of the organization, right? Because it's a change for the rest of the organization. The business is now much more engaged in that process. They're not just sending the requirements over the fence. They're very much engaged. They've got to understand and go through that agile transformation and understand when they're getting capabilities, what those capabilities are. So they need to go through that new operational paradigm that we're running in. So finally, we're talking about innovation and then in particular AWS and Accenture, almost as the use cases here. How would you describe the innovation engine at AWS Accenture in terms of the report that you've just published?  The high growth engine of Amazon and obviously a huge growth engine for Accenture too. So how would you characterize it, Mike? Well, I think if we look at the three factors I was talking about before being outcome-led, being disruption-minded and being change-oriented, then the relationship between Accenture and AWS really exhibits all of those three things. So in terms of being outcome-led, Accenture has always been an organization that's laser-focused on delivering results, delivering high performance, delivering value for our clients, and so is AWS. And in terms of being disruption-minded, we're innovating on the cloud using AWS to bring genuinely new and groundbreaking products and services to our clients. And one of my favorite ones of those that we worked on in the UK is our partnership with AWS and Age UK, which is a charity that helps the elderly and we're developing products and services for the elderly that helps them feel more connected to our family. And that's really opening up a brand new market. And then finally, in terms of being change-orientated, while it's a relationship that really personifies being network-powered and bringing the power to bear of multiple organizations that we can develop great products and services for our clients. Great. Well, Mike, Chris, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a really fun conversation. Thanks for having us. Thanks. I'm Rebecca Knight. We will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit.


Hey everybody, this is Brian. Welcome to the 124th Qt tutorial with C++ and GUI programming. We're going to name this one MyMapped. And if you haven't guessed, we're going to be going over the QtConcurrentMapped function. So we're going to make a QDialog project here. And pretty much the same as before. I'm kind of trying to follow kind of the same flow here, so it's pretty easy to follow along. Once you've seen one, you kind of know what to expect with the others. We're just going to make two list boxes here. And then we are going to add in our static function here. Now the difference between mapped and mapped is very subtle, but very powerful. So map just modifies, oh I can't even spell string. Q string, all right, pay attention. Anyways, map simply changes an existing collection, or I should say an existing sequence. Whereas mapped, plural, what we're covering today makes a new one. So Q string, item, and then we're just going to refactor that. And if you've been following along, you know exactly what to expect. We're going to have some function that's going to be called in a different thread. And we're going to have the button which actually does the actual work. So let's make this happen here. We're just going to say item.append, and we'll say for giggles, bottles of beer on the wall. You ever hear that song, 99 bottles of beer on the wall? Well, basically that's what we're doing here. All right, so we're going to go UI, list widget, and we're going to say clear, and UI, list widget 2. We're going to just clear that out, so we clear out any previous garbage. Q string items before. Should be Q string, Q string list, my bad, sorry. It is Christmas Eve here, and I want to crank out a couple of these videos before I go wrap presents, because I really don't like wrapping presents. I like buying the presents, I just don't like wrapping them. We're just going to keep this simple if I can type. I had actually a pretty long day at work, that's partly why I'm scatterbrained. While I don't hate my job, I definitely don't like my job, if you know what I mean. All right, so we're going to just update the user interface and list widget. We're going to call the add items, and we're just going to add that string list in there. Now we're going to actually create a new string list. Call it, you guessed it, items after. Did we add Q concurrent in there? We'll run into problems if we don't do that. And then let's add our include here. That'll make life a little bit easier when we go to compile this thing. And we're going to do blocking mapped with the plural. Now remember this slight difference is actually quite profound. Mapped will actually generate a new sequence. So we need the input sequence, which is items before, and we need the function pointer to what we're pointing this to, which in our case is make changes. And then just to prove that we actually did do something, we're going to update the UI with the items after. There we go. Pretty simple, pretty easy to understand tutorial. We're just going to clear out the list widgets. We're going to make a string list, and then we're going to call the Q concurrent blocking mapped with our items before, our string list, and we're going to point it to the make changes function, which is just going to take each item as it maps, go to append bottles of beer on the wall to it, and then we're going to display that in the second list widget. There we go. Whew, what a mouthful. I feel like I'm kind of rushing through this. Program ended unexpectedly. What have I done wrong here? Oh, derp. We totally forgot to return from our map here. That would probably be helpful. That's actually the whole point of mapping is to actually modify the function. All right, let's give it a good rebuild. That's what's happening when you rush. Don't ever rush. All right, so there we go. Now our little function actually works. So this is the before and this is after it's been mapped. The difference, once again, is the mapped plural will create a new list instead of modify your existing list. That's all for this, albeit simple tutorial. Please visit my website, voidromes.com for the source code for this and other tutorials. It is Christmas time, so if you're feeling generous, feel free to donate, but it's definitely not necessary.


All right, so continuing on our spark theme next up is Nicholas and Alejandro Who actually will be taking us through a cage match between spark and hive so take it away guys Yes, but you also need to take for the recording All right. First of all, thank you very much for attending this lightning talk. I'm Alejandro Montero master student The Barcelona super competing center and in the last couple of months We've been working with big bench to compare the performance of different big data engines Specifically, we're focusing on hyphen spark So big bench is an specification based benchmark with an open source implementation and recently it's been proposed to be the first Big data benchmark on the world and that's because right now. It's the only one that Covers all measure big data Characteristics and as you may know it. They are the volume a variety and velocity Some very quick characteristics of big bench. It's an extension of tcpds that adds some new SQL queries and Use cases such as machine learning natural language processing some others It can support multiple implementations engines and table formats for hyphen It can also execute multiple parallel and streams at the same time in the same cluster And it can define different scale factors. We used scale factor of 100, which is approximately 100 gigs in table size So big bench what it's doing. It's emulating Store that it's selling items both physically and and be a web page and for that reason it Provides this these data structure First we have the structure data, which is the one we're used to easily indexed and recoverable and We add two more which is the weblock which contains a click streams of every user that it's navigating through the web page and The reviews of the users that actually have bought an item and want to make a review So for the workload itself, there's 30 queries divided in four kind of use cases 14 pure purequail queries which retrieve information from the structure section Then we have four queries of map reduce Pre-processing of the data before selecting it seven natural language processing queries and five machine learning queries So don't be overwhelmed by this. This is the software stack of the implementation. We've been using Very fast starting from the bottom to top all files are physically stored in the in how to distribute it file system But as we're running queries, we need to have a middleware A metastore to store the logical tables And on top of that we need that SQL engine that is receiving the queries from Big Bench It's parsing them and it's retrieving the information from the metastore once we have The location of the of the of the files we want to recover We can use one of these three engines one of the execution engines to actually retrieve the physical information from each DFS The engines can be classic map reduce tests, which maybe you don't know about it It's a hack on top of my produce to click create a direct a secret graph to reduce latencies and improve overall performance of Mappers and reducers and spark engine And for the machine learning queries We also need a new application to perform the the learning techniques and we can use two applications Mahout, which is based on map reduce or spark ML eep a custom built spark ML eep library So of course John is the one that's managing all the containers for every single application in here So we've been smart all permutations of the engines you see in in this slide But we still have a few work in progress things We have some results for hype to but the they are quite odd So we're still working on that and also for spark to it was compatible with Mahout But the custom library was not binary compatible with spark to so major code refractories needed and we hope to get results pretty soon Hardware wise we're using an HD inside platform as a service cluster Model D D4 B3 with four working notes Featuring a high-can intelligence CPU with eight cores 28 gigs of RAM And the HDFS is completely remote For the software stack a GI is relying on hot on works that a platform 2.5 We've noticed that both map reduce and tests are really well tuned So we decided not to change a bit of the configuration what we did notice though is that spark was recently added and The configuration is quite strange It's only using one executor per working node and that executor has three out of eight cores available in the machine So for the results we decided to Divide it in use cases Starting for pure cool as expected map reduces the slowest one on the group followed by the fastest one Which is spark to which is very close to the other engines spark one and high tests We wanted to see a little bit more what was happening inside a pure cool query So this is a trace of the CPU behavior of one of the queries for a 12 to be correct consists What we can see here is that test it's reaching 100% of the CPU usage which indicates the CPU bounded And also in this case you don't you cannot see the numbers because of resizing reasons Well, it's a lot faster than both the other engines This is finishing in 100 seconds sparks is finishing in 200 seconds and spark two in 160 Moving on we see that spark one spark two both are reaching at top of 30% of CPU usage Sorry, you cannot see the y-axis And most interestingly we can see that spark a spark one has a lot of I await for some reason and Spark dude deals with that. It doesn't show any more. I await and It ends lot faster in this case Also, it is using only 30% of the of the CPU and that may be because of the software configuration I just talked about you For very fast for the second use case custom reducers to pre-process the data before selecting it We see that high tests is the fastest one here followed by spark two and very close to spark one My produce again is this lowest one moving on Natural language processing here tests once again. It's the winner by a long shot in this case Followed by spark to spark one really close to spark two and my produce is really really slow And finally for the machine learning sections We can see two interesting things here First of all is that changing one execution engine for the other doesn't bring us any real difference in performance But what does give us a difference in performance is changing the application that actually performs a machine learning and changing from my out in any of the of the engines to spark MLLip give us a two times improvement in performance As I said before unfortunately, we were not able to test spark two with Spark MLLip, but we're hoping to see two times improvement and well as in the other cases and And finally for the aggregated results for the four use cases What we can see is that for the whole group the fastest one here is test plus a spark MLLip Second in line is a spark one with spark MLLip followed by spark two but plus my out We're hoping to see spark two plus spark MLLip to be a lot faster when we have results But right now it's on the third position and map reduces this lowest one on the on the group So just to finish some conclusions we can gather from from these results first off High plus test is improving SQL performance by a long shot by Overmap reduce it's slightly faster than spark one, but it's a slightly slower than spark two and We have to make clear something in that point in this point Is that the implementation spark of the queries? I mean the implementation spark is using it the same as the hive one So they are using the same the very same as SQL queries and in this implementation these queries are very optimized for hive So maybe tweaking for spark may give us a different results Second concussion we gather from these studies that spark MLLip is way faster than mahog we encourage you to use it instead of it and Finally the best production company at the moment is using a patch a test for the SQL sections of your queries And if you need to do machine learning techniques stick with MLLip, which is the fastest one So before finishing I encourage you to assist tomorrow to presentation my colleague Niko is doing using for using a Non-volatim memory to improve performance of H base Hadoop and all this stuff quite interesting building you at 12 o'clock, so encourage you to attend and That would be all. Thank you very much. We've had any question All right, well, thank you so much. Thank you


Hi, welcome to Inside 1331. We're at 1331 Cherokee, which is Denver Police Department headquarters. And this is a new show where we're going to ask tough questions, questions that you might not hear the answers to anywhere else. We're going to take experts from within the police department and ask them really difficult questions about pressing issues that other people have been asking. And today, we're lucky enough to have with us Commander Megan Dodge, who's in charge of the... Operation Support Division. Operational Support. But what you're here to talk about with me today is body cameras. It's been a hot topic. Anybody who's been paying any attention knows that this has actually been an international story. And Chief White was on the news in China, in Japan, in Switzerland, as well as a lot of local and national TV shows. So you're fully aware of all that. As I like to say, now have the most famous eye in law enforcement in America. Okay, you ready for the tough questions? Sure. Should body cameras be turned on all the time? No. Okay, why? There are multiple reasons. First is the fact that not every contact with the public should be recorded. I think that we have done a good job with developing a trust with our community. Sometimes cameras can have the negative effect of that. Can you give me an example? For instance, if somebody were to wave down an officer to tell them, hey, there's a trouble house in my neighborhood. I'd like you to go take a look at it and, you know, there seems to be suspicious activity, et cetera, et cetera. Those are things that people haven't called in on. They've waved somebody down. They've tried to talk to them about it on an off-the-record kind of avenue. So those are some balancing of privacy versus public good. And you and I actually have talked about this. I had a really interesting conversation with you and our internal affairs commander. And I was thinking about, I think you know this, I used to walk through Civic Center Park every single day. And there was a, and I'd talked to a lot of the folks there and they'd come up and talk about their problems and try to get some help and, you know, police stuff. And I remember this gal, and she was probably in her early 20s. And it took about six to eight months before she trusted me enough, but she pulled me aside one day into the park. And she proceeded to tell me a story about how her kids had been taken away from her by social services and some of the struggles she was having and how hard it was for her to get an ID and she needed some drug and alcohol treatment.  And I would have not had the opportunity to help somebody. We have a large variety of contacts with people that the public never realizes we have. They only envision a traffic stop or a call. An enforcement action of types. So, you know, within our policy we've also given some leeway to officers. For instance, if a victim of a sex assault wishes to not be recorded at that time, we're going to abide by those wishes if it's feasible, if it's safe for everybody involved. We would never want technology to inhibit the ability for us to do the right thing by the public. What would you say to people who say, well, that's just your excuse to get away with bad stuff? Well, currently we don't have anything on and we have a very good department with our officers. So, the fact of having the video only adds a layer of comfort to some individuals as well as legitimacy to others. And I think that's interesting. I mean, one of the points that I came up with, and this is kind of a statement, not really a question, is that this is the greatest advancement in transparency in my 25 years in law enforcement. And yet there just seems to be this, I think, small group of people who absolutely now are attacking our use of body cameras because it just seems like they either don't like us or don't trust us. Well, in addition to the things we just talked about, the amount of cost for storage of all that data that really has little to no use, as well as the privacy concerns. We're trying to weigh privacy. And when you say no use, so you and I talked about this. Driving. What's the point of me recording me driving around or me having lunch? Yeah. Or writing a report. There's many times. I mean, and our officers deserve a level of privacy as well. I mean, I would think that no one would argue the fact that officers should be recorded using the restroom or making a private phone call on their lunch break. Those are times when our officers still should, we trust our officers. This is just one more level of having the public trust as well. I think you bring up a good point and officers are humans too. And they have, you know, wives and girlfriends and husbands and kids and doctors. I talked to my doctor today if you can't tell I have a cold. I shouldn't have to record that conversation for anybody to come review. Exactly. So let me ask you this. So what is the policy as it stands today? When does an officer have to record? Well, our policy, it's all encompassing. The majority of citizen contacts the officer will record. And when you say that, what about the situation in the park? Right. With rare exception, for instance, if, again, there is that discretion, if an officer believes that having the camera on will actually inhibit them from doing their job, they're given the option to turn it off after they've made an announcement on the camera to say, I'm now turning off my camera. And why? And why? So there's a recording. Absolutely. Okay, great. People say that it's not effective to allow officers discretion. You think it's... We have a lot of discretion in law enforcement in general. So, again, we do trust our officers. So this is just one more layer to gain further trust from our community with what our officers are doing. Okay. How about accountability? What's in place? Let's just say that I am a rogue officer and I want to do something inappropriate and I turn off my camera. What is the department put into place to deal with a situation like that? We are beginning spot checking of data usage. So, for instance, if an officer is... If the norm is this and we find officers who are down here, we're going to go and make sure that they understand the policy, make sure that there aren't just various reasons as to why they wouldn't have had it on if they did a shift in the hospital. That's not going to be on. There are some areas where there would be explanations for that. If it comes up in an internal affairs case as well, then those are items where we take a look and see is this a pattern of behavior or is it a failure to understand the equipment? Is it a failure to understand the policy? We are given a great opportunity with a six-month pilot to iron out some of the things that officers are seeing in the field with their equipment as well as the policy. Let me ask you the hard question. That's what this show is about. What about somebody who is playing games? What about somebody who is doing the wrong thing and they're trying to avoid being detected on camera? Under that scenario that you're giving me, the small piece is whether or not they have their camera on, because if you have an officer doing that, the camera is the least of our worries. It's the actions that are happening, which is why they don't want them to be recorded. As you told me in another conversation, we have mechanisms in place to deal with that. Absolutely. Then you would. Is there any oversight outside the police department? During the complaint intake, any time that there is a complaint where there is video on-office or video, that's included with the case file. The Office of the Independent Monitor will have access to all that video in order to view the actions of the officer, whether it falls within, without a policy, and as well as does it give merit to the complaint or refute the complaint? I think another thing people forget is that internal affairs cases, once they're complete, are available to the public. So that video would also be available. Could very well be. As evidence of the case, depending on some other things we're going to get into. Exactly. But in general, you would say, if it's purely misconduct, absolutely. Okay. Yeah. Another issue that comes up a lot is how long video is held. And what I mean by that is, how long do we store that data? Right. And in my reading, I see that there's usually different levels depending on what the video is for. So if I am running after a bank robber and it becomes evidence in a case, that gets held for a different amount of time than if I'm just driving around and I accidentally hit the button. Correct. What's our policy? So anything that's not associated with the case. A criminal case. A criminal case is an internal affairs case because those would be maintained within internal affairs. Okay. Those do not go away either. Everything that's involved with the case is held based upon the retention laws that that particular retention schedule. Like any other evidence. Absolutely. Like any other evidence. Anything that is not, so just a conversation with somebody that I'm not sure is going to turn out well, that something seems hinky and I turn it on. Those would be held 365 days. If it's not in line with having a case, then they're deleted at that point. And that's a long time. It is a very long time. There's an agency in Colorado that does seven days. Yes. And it seemed like the average was between 30 and 60. Right. We understand that complaints can come forth at a later time. So we wanted to make sure that we maintained that for any internal affairs cases, as well as sometimes you have things that you're not readily sure of what you have on scene, and then they come in later. And it was in fact a case. But that's really a big commitment on this department's part. Absolutely. Wouldn't you say? What is the cost?  Why doesn't the department do that? Why is it so expensive? Right. This technology is different, for instance. It's a technology that is specifically made for law enforcement. So yes, you could very quickly go get a camera pin and put it in your uniform and record things. However, a couple of things that make that where it's not viable in law enforcement. Number one, that video can be altered. So there would be, yes, there are forensics that can be done to prove that it wasn't. However, if we had to do that on every case, that cost alone could be astronomical as well. In addition, what we have, all of that video is watermarked. So it's watermarked. Yes, it's watermarked and recorded, so admissible into court. So that's the difference between the two of those, as well as if you had a personal recording device, there's some manipulation that has to take place in order to get that off the device. So in order to limit the overtime cost and make it... Which is very expensive. It is very expensive. You don't want to pay 700 officers for an hour every day to download video. Yes. Okay. So the program is $1.5 million for the first year in 2015. That cost includes 800 cameras, as well as storage. And what's the camera cost? Roughly $1,000, and it depends on the manufacturer. So is the storage by camera or is it just as a whole? We buy a certain amount of storage. It's a certain amount of storage. Okay. It's out there. Yes, I don't know. Is this in a... No, is this in a server? Do we keep it? The cost of having a server is pretty expensive. So the way that this technology works is a cloud-based server. So somebody else has got our data. Somebody else has... Well, they're holding our data for us. They do not have access to our data. So they are the ones who are managing the server, et cetera. Okay. So I want to touch on something. You just said access to our data. That's another thing that comes up quite a bit. Who can access this video? Can the officer delete it? No. Can the officer edit it? No.  No. So who can get it? Who can watch it? How does that work? So currently under the pilot, what we have limited it to is the detectives who obviously need it for their cases. They have access. Internal Affairs has access. The CRO office, the Conduct Review Office has access to it. Some people who don't know what that is, Conduct Review is the people who make a determination about guilt or innocence on a complaint. Correct. Okay. So they have that as well as my office of the civilians as well as a few of our detectives who have access to help with that. And that's read-only access. That's correct. Who can delete it? Chief of Police. Okay. So it's pretty limited. It is limited. Can anyone edit it? No. It's impossible. There's no way. And that was going back to what we were talking about before. What makes this different than say a camera pen is the fact that there is no manipulation. You dock the camera as well as the battery piece as soon as it's docked, the docking station grabs all the data that the officer has taken during their shift and it uploads it into the cloud. Okay. So there's nothing that is done at that point. So that should alleviate some people's concerns about us trying to edit out some thing that we don't care for. There's just no ability to do that. You also told me that there's an audit trail. Can you explain what that is? Yeah. So for every recording that hits the cloud, what is available to us within the software that the manufacturer has is the ability to see who has accessed, how many times they have accessed, meaning watched. Have they shared it with anyone? Where did it go to? How many times did they do that? All of those things, any time you click on it, there is an audit trail that shows who accessed it, how they accessed it, where they accessed it, all of those things. Have you in the pilot program watched that? Have you seen that happen? Oh, absolutely. You've seen the audit trails? Yes. Yes. This isn't like IRS emails that disappear? No. Okay. It is definitely not. All right. Should anyone in the public be able to come in at any time and say, I want to watch this video? I know that the cops were at my neighbor's house yesterday. I've had a fight with them for long years. I even have a lawsuit in small claims court, and I want to see that video. I think it supports what we've been saying for a long time. So we recognize that people knowing that there's video there is going to want to look at it. However, as a department, we try to balance between transparency and privacy. So there are considerations that go into effect that make it where showing video to the general public is ill-advisable without it being vetted first. So a lot of people, when they first hear your answer, they think, oh, this is just a great way to hide. This is the cops trying to hide bad behavior. Can you give me an example of why we wouldn't want to show video that may appear, by the way, to anybody other than a few people, totally benign and... Right. There's a multitude of things that we specifically looked at, juveniles, for instance. And the law is very specific about what you can do with juveniles. Yes. So juveniles can't be released through us, so that's something we have to be concerned about. Sex assault victims is another thing that we need to be concerned about.  Absolutely. The fact that we, in law enforcement, go into people's private homes. And so when we're in somebody's private home and we're recording the interaction, it may be mundane to everyone else. However, that's your private place. If you've called officers there, that should be held secure. There's pieces of that, I think the example I gave you yesterday is a domestic violence victim, or stalking incident where somebody could falsely call officers in, we go check out, make sure everything's good, and then that person would be able to go see someone. So we've really become a party to a stalking situation. Absolutely. So those are things. So let me throw another one at you. I'm stopped on the highway and I don't think the officer did the right thing and I want to see the video. Or I want to see the video to see if it really showed me going through a red light. Right. So the way that we currently do any type of weighing is through Harris versus the Denver Post. Which is a case. It's a case law. It's a case law about open records in Colorado. Absolutely. So we have an attorney that takes a look at each of those requests for records that we have to say whether or not it should or shouldn't be released and why it should or shouldn't be released. So it might get released. Absolutely. That's what you're saying. There's no blanket that no this will not be released. Right. Okay, but there are some we won't, right? Somebody's house. Correct. Children. Sex cell victims. We've used this fairly similarly with our Halo program. Did you run? Right. Could you just tell people what that is? Yeah. So it's the big bulbs that you see all over mounted on the city. What they are are cameras that allow us to make sure that we help with the prevention and prosecution of crime. We use that video surveillance to make it into evidence for various crimes that detectives need and provide safety to the citizens. But the difference between the Halo and the body cameras is Halo is not privy to private residences. Or sound. And sound. So there is a difference between the two of these technologies. I think another thing you hit on that's really important to emphasize is that the police get called when something's wrong, usually the worst day of your life. Right. And should that always be available to everyone to see. Right. And really we do that right now even with Halo camera at Civic Center Park, right? We wouldn't necessarily just release that video unless there was a strong public need. Right. Absolutely. What would you say to people who say, well, why do you get to determine the strong public need? I don't. It would be the attorney who takes a look at it based upon the law. Yes. Okay. So there really is no blanket. There's just some hard rules on the legal areas. Right. Okay. There are some people who are concerned about the software, facial identification, facial recognition. Is that part of the pilot program for body cameras or Halo? No. Not even something that is part of the software that this- I mean people have talked to us about it but it's certainly not something we're doing. Yeah, I know. They don't have to worry about facial recognition software at this point. Do we have a policy in Denver that says officers have to tell someone they're being recorded? No, we don't. We are not a two-party state. Right. We're a single consent state. Correct. Which is the law you're talking about. Right. Which means for the viewers that in Colorado you can record someone else without their permission as long as one person in the recording knows they're being recorded. Correct. But should we? Should we tell people what's your thought about that? Where are we at with that? Why do we do what we do? Right. So obviously we're not covertly recording anyone. Because there's a visible camera. It's either on your collar or on glasses. So there's nothing covert about that. People know that there's a camera on this officer. There has been times that other agencies have seen and we have stressed this in the training that if you believe that it will help diffuse a situation, let the person know you're being recorded. So there's nothing that says an officer can't do that. Absolutely not. We just don't require it. Right. There also could be times when telling somebody that it's actively being recorded could actually incite it. So we give that piece of judgment up to the officer to know the tone and the totality of the call that they're on. So I guess another way to say that is we want them to have the discretion to manage that situation based on their training and experience. Not the technology managing the situation. And not force the camera to change the dynamic. Correct. Okay. So this is another big issue when it comes to body cameras and one of the questions, and this is a lot of times the officers themselves that are asking these questions. Do we have random checks to see how an officer is treating people? No. No. We don't have that obviously during the pilot. We don't have that. What we do have in place is, for instance, if an officer comes up on a PAS review. Which is an early warning system that we have to try to identify behavior from an officer before it gets to the point where we're reading about him in the newspaper. Right. So if an officer comes up with a PAS review, then that gives the sergeant, lieutenant, commander the ability to take a look and do spot checks on the work that the officer's in. And the intention is to what? The intention is to make sure that we catch any concerning behavior prior to it becoming an issue. Okay. If I get a contract with a bar outside of my normal shift, we call that off-duty. That's the term we use. And I'm paid by the bar to basically be present and enforce Denver's laws while I'm at the bar. Right. Is that a fair representation? Yes. And a lot of those situations, the reason the officers get paid is because it's a more volatile spot. It can be. A nightclub or, you know, a lot of alcohol, things like that. So there are a lot of incidents off-duty. What are we doing about body cameras off-duty? So right now during the pilot, we are not using them for off-duty. Obviously, this is not a technology that's department-wide. So to give some employers the benefit without others, what we felt was probably not the best way to utilize the tech space. Do you see this coming where everybody will have these off-duty? We don't really know at this point. That's something we're going to look at. Yeah. Something that needs to be looked at. Is it fair to say that would be really expensive? It would be very expensive. And when I say very expensive, what are we talking? Well, it depends. If we're holding any of that information for at least 365 days, that can add up very quickly releasing that space on that server. So then the question becomes... Like the hundreds of thousands of dollars, right? It could. It absolutely, absolutely could. And I'm not saying that to say we shouldn't do it. I'm just saying you can't just make that decision. But many questions have to be asked as to who encouraged that cost and how we manage that and... Is it worth it? Exactly. Right? It's also a cost balance. It could be. It might be. I mean, it's not something we have said no to. Yes. You and I also had a discussion. I think a lot of the public doesn't necessarily think about this. You might be driving down the street. In fact, I know all police officers I know, at least in Denver, have had this happen.  He just takes off or he takes off running right at you or some just totally abnormal behavior that now you have to deal with. So that in those kind of situations, we talk a lot about officer safety. And the first thing that goes through your mind as a cop is what? Go take care of it. I got to take care of it. Yes. How does officer safety come into play with the body cameras? Obviously, we have taken great stride within the policy to make sure that officers can get used to almost on every situation, at least at the beginning, activating that camera. So, like any new habit that you're trying to learn, it first, it becomes more of a conscious thought versus what we would like to call muscle memory. But is it fair to say that you don't expect officers to put their safety in there to make sure that they're turning this on? No, absolutely not. And so some of the training that we have had, for instance, if there was a scenario that you're just driving back to the station, getting ready to end your day and a fight happens right in front of you, spills out into the street, we want you to go take care of that. So, it would be idea if you hit the button and went out and handled the situation at hand. However, the benefit of this equipment is if an officer doesn't and just jumps in there to handle what they need to do, because we also, because of the safety of the public, we don't want them fiddling with technology without taking care of what it is that they're truly hired to do. So, there is a 30-second buffer within this equipment that as soon as you hit the record button, even after the situation's over, if the officer has the wherewithal to remember to hit that button, the 30 seconds prior will be recorded as well, video only. So, that's kind of passively recording all the time. Absolutely. After every 31 seconds, it drops off and starts in recycles. Yes. Okay. What if somebody's going to talk to a victim of crime, any crime, and they've got the body camera on? Do they have to have consent of the person before they take a video statement? No, they don't. Obviously, we've asked the officers to use their best discretion of it. In no way would we ever want technology, again, to inhibit our job, which is investigating and preventing crime. So, if it any... We don't want to jeopardize cases. We don't. For the sake of having video. Okay. Are officers required to document incidents where they did use video? Like in other words, maybe I didn't like the video very much and I'm hoping it just flies into the radar. Am I supposed to tell somebody that I did video? Was that documented somewhere? Yeah. Every piece of video that an officer records in the field, they need to tag it with the CAD number that is associated with that call or with that incident. Yes. So, there's a number that comes... So, there's an incident number for everything an officer does. So, every time an officer activates that video, it should be tagged with that incident number, whether or not there was a case, arrest, paperwork, anything. So, the system is designed to document that it was used. Absolutely. If you tag it, it doesn't keep it from being within the system. So, even if an officer were to forget to tag it with the case number, the date, time and officer badge number is stamped on every single piece of video. All right. So, one of the last issues that's brought up a lot, are officers able to make copies of their own videos and then use them for things or put it on their Facebook page, things like that? No. No. Absolutely not. Again, it's not the property of the officers. It's the property of the department and citizens in so much as an officer can't decide to photocopy it, video it and then subsequently put it on a Facebook page. So, we have that within the policy. We also have that within, you know, on crime scenes, et cetera. There's no place for any of that. Otherwise, it wouldn't be vetted under the way that we already have in place for citizens to make requests of that footage. So, you've been kind of married to this project now for at least six months, been taking up a majority of your time and you've been to public meetings, you've heard what people are saying, you've watched it in action. What's your take on this? What do you think? Our body camera's really a good move forward. Is this more positive, more negative? What's your take? So, my take on this is that we are still in the infancy, I believe, of this technology. And you mean Denver or the world? Yeah. This is something, even according to Taser, this is at the innovation stage of technology. They haven't reached market saturation even. So, this is very new. There's quite a few things for all law enforcement to learn on policies, procedures, case law, et cetera. The, I believe that it is a positive thing and it's something that's going to have to continue to grow. Being on the forefront of any innovation, we have to be willing to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes. And that was our purpose and intent behind having a six-month pilot that Chief White made sure that we did before we rolled out across the city. We wanted to take our lessons learned in a six-month pilot within District 6 and learn from that, make changes, find out what works, what doesn't work and then end up with the best product for Denver. But if you were the chief, would you do this? Is this the right thing to do? I think it is. I think it is a way to add to the trust our community, the majority of our community already has. And it just adds another layer for officers to do their job and prove that what they're doing is the right thing to do. And those that aren't, it gives us an ability to hold them accountable. I want to thank Commander Dodge for coming in and being the first person to really sit in that hot seat and answer questions. If you have any questions or areas of the law or what we do that you would really like us to dig in deeper and ask some tough questions of, there's an email address at the bottom of your screen. I would encourage you to email us and let us know what questions you would like us to ask because we want to do this and we think it provides a great service to the people of Denver. So thank you very much.


A lot of it is through education, making sure that you've got top-notch learning institutions drawing and building this success. Part of it is building the ecosystems for America, just visiting the Atlantic Cancer Research Institute over in Moncton and seeing the kinds of jobs, kind of innovative research going on there in an extraordinary hub. It's the biggest gene sequencing hub in the east of Montreal. I'll take that out of the facts. It's a real pride here. When you draw in, it helps like that where exciting world-class things are happening as they can and should happen everywhere. There is some real potential to grow and develop stronger communities. So it's coming. It is something we're working on actively, the way we continue to draw in people from around the world and build our communities across the country and not just concentrate them in the large urban areas is a key part of Canada's success. That's where so many of our policies in this last budget have been leading up to it. Our focus on making sure we're investing in the right ways in empowering smaller communities in even rural areas to make sure that Canadian success goes from coast to coast to coast. One of the big things that we've been talking a lot about in this budget was just earlier this week being focused on affordability to make sure that people who are going through tough times right now get that support, including the big grocery rebate. Being focused on health, dental care and health care investments that are going to make a huge difference in people's lives.