SmartTranscript of House Commerce - 2025-01-21 - 9:00AM

[Chair ]: Good morning, everyone. This is the Puma House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development. It is Tuesday, January twenty first twenty twenty five at nine zero two in the morning. So we're here to start our week off. We're here for UPM. And when the Konig is with us, she will kinda give us a broad overview of of UPM, what they do in workforce space, and and how we partnered with them in scholarships, even things like that, the Office of Engagement. I hope everyone had a good weekend. And Hey. Alright. So, Wendy, good morning. Thank you. Good morning. [Wendy Koenig ]: Thanks for having me. My name is Wendy Koenig. I'm the Executive Director of Government Relations for the University of Vermont. I've been with the University for seventeen years and before that I ran the Association of Vermont Independent Colleges, so I've got a pretty deep knowledge of higher education from all sides. I'm very proud to work at UVM and I've got just some some facts to share with you this morning, and then if you have questions at any time, please feel free [Chair ]: to interrupt me whenever you'd like. [Wendy Koenig ]: We like to say that UVM is number one in attracting and retaining talent in Vermont. Ninety five percent of our graduates are employed or continuing their education six months after they graduate from UVM. We put about eleven hundred people into the Vermont workforce every year, and, we're pretty proud of that statistic. We think of UVM as being a major economic engine for the state of Vermont. We employ about, four thousand five hundred faculty and staff at UVM, making us the second largest employer in the state. We, we compensate folks to the tune of four eleven million dollars every year. UVM achieves a lot of its economic engine status by the research that we do, within the university. We are currently receiving, close to two seventy million dollars in extramural research support every year, most of that from the federal government, but also some from private foundations as well. And our research spans everything from medical research within the Larner College of Medicine to supercomputing, to research in the arts and environment. So, it's sort of very broad in terms of what we're looking at. Our academic impact on the state of Vermont is about one point four billion dollars each year, and we have almost thirty eight thousand alumni that live and work in Vermont creating a brain game for our state. I think that chair Markup would like me to talk about some of the signature programs that we've worked on together in workforce. One of the things that we opened about six years ago at at UVM is Faubat, the UVM Office of Engagement. And one of the things that people, were were giving us, some constructive criticism about is that UVM is big and it can be hard for people who want to come and work with us to find a front door to the university. So we created the office of engagement, which is tasked with interacting with businesses, and nonprofits throughout the state to be a front door for the university to help take our research from the bench out into communities so people can access the research that we are working on. And after we opened the office of engagement, we also had the good fortune to receive a large federal grant to open up another piece of that, which is called the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships, which is a federally funded entity along with the Office of Engagement that focuses on giving out grants to rural communities to help, our our rural communities figure out things that they want to do. Sometimes that is, working with municipalities to figure out how to best, use government to serve people. Sometimes it's something like the Bridges to Health program where we have, folks serving, migrants, working on farms in rural communities that don't have access to health care. It can be lots of different kinds of projects. But that is a federally funded program that gives out about three million dollars a year to rural communities in Vermont through their grant program. This committee was integral in creating something called Green Mountain Jobs and Retention, which is a fund that the state has given to UVM to distribute to recent graduates. Anybody who goes to college in Vermont is eligible for those funds. And if you graduate from school in Vermont and you stay here to live and work, you get a five thousand dollar benefit over a two year period, which is you can use it for whatever you'd like. If you wanna use it to pay Ryan, if you wanna use it to pay your loans, it's just sort of an incentive to take a job in Vermont rather than go into somewhere like Boston or New York, where you could get a higher salary. It's a little bit of help to to get folks to stay in Vermont. Yes. [Speaker 2 ]: Is that any graduate or do they have to be somebody who's come to you to Vermont to go to UVM? Nope. You can [Wendy Koenig ]: graduate from any Vermont grad institution. So you could go to Middlebury and receive that benefit. You can, go to the you can go to VTSU. You can go to UVM, Champlain College. Anybody who graduates from a Vermont institution and then takes a job here is eligible for that money. [Speaker 2 ]: So even a Vermont native as opposed to somebody [Chair ]: that okay. Yep. The whole idea behind that behind that project was we've we, the state, we, the colleges have invested a lot of money in bringing and attracting people to those institutions, whether they're Vermonters or they're outside of Vermont. They've been here for four or five years, grown accustomed to the state. I think a lot of them have fallen in love with the with wherever they're going. They wanna stay in the state, but economics just weren't working Mhmm. To them when, you know, considering the debt that they have, and this was a way of trying to keep them here for another couple of years and set roots down. I I think, you know, once people set roots, it's hard to to move on and, so that that's an attempt, to do that. We'll hear more information we'll get more information as we, start talking about the budget to see how that program is doing and how many students, that we have helped and and maintained and kept here and see how how that whole thing is working. [Wendy Koenig ]: One thing that this committee has been really good at is asking us good questions and giving us some feedback. And so when we started that program, it was just for people who were receiving their undergraduate degrees, but we got a lot of feedback from folks in the community saying, listen, it would really help us if you would also, make this program available to people getting master's degrees, especially in nursing, we need nurses that are trained at a higher level. And so we opened it up and we really saw a lot of people take advantage of that when we did that. And we also made a little tweak to it where, if you if you start your own business rather than go to work for a company, then you're eligible for it too. So if you're creating an LLC or some sort of business that you wanna do yourself, you can also receive that funding. Any other questions about Green Mountain jobs and retention? Well, I will tell you, Representative Granning was talking to me when I walked in about good news. The good news that we've been working on for two years is getting, a tech hub for the state of Vermont. And UVM was sort of the lead writer of that application to the federal government, and we found out that we are the recipient Vermont is the recipient of the tech hub. And so in order to achieve that, you had to have a state who was willing to go in on an application, a research university, and some sort of business anchor, in this case, GlobalFoundries. And the Vermont tech hub is called the v GaN tech hub, and it is, all around gallium nitride, which is known as GaN technology for making microelectronics. So, instead of having just a silicone substrate to make chips, you have silicone with gallium nitride on the top. And the reason that's important is that it allows electricity to be conducted much, much more quickly and at lower temperatures. So for example, our cell phones, when we first got them, you would plug them in and they get hot. Now they don't do that anymore, and that's because of GAN. We see a lot of real potential from gap for gallium nitride for things like electric vehicles, for rapid charging of large things that need to keep the heat conduction down. And so there's there's some folks in Taiwan that are doing GaN technology, but in the US and elsewhere, there's it hasn't been taken advantage of. So we see this as a real opportunity for the state of Vermont to become a leader in this area. And so the grant is for almost twenty four million dollars UVM was UVM in the state of Vermont were designated for a tech hub, but we didn't get money in the first round of funding. We've we got this money in the second round. So we went out, on our own, and we also have some private funding because while we were waiting to get funded by the government, we wanted to make sure that this idea didn't die and we kept it going. So we have about almost four million dollars of funding from, some external sources to fund the characterization lab. And my colleague, Doctor. Perkin Brodsky, who's the VP of research, who was supposed to be here this morning but had an emergency come up, He'll come back and tell you more in-depth about all the things that will happen with the tech hub. But part of UVM's ask to the appropriations committee this year is a million dollars from the state to be matching funds for tech hub. And we're asking global foundries to also commit a million dollars to that effort. And the that two million dollars together would be used for startup companies from Vermonters to try to get into the gam space. It would be used as granting funds to help them write business plans and get their get their stuff started in in that arena. So that's one of the things that we're asking for. I'll also let doctor Dabrowski go into depth about, the bio incubator that he's starting, but he's partnered with BioLabs out of Boston to start a bioincubator at UVM. We've seen that places like, outside of San Francisco and Boston are kind of saturated with, with bio incubator type of, of things. And there's not enough lab space anymore for folks to continue to do that. And they want, other areas. And so this being only three hours away from Boston, we're gonna start a bio incubator at UVM and people will be able to come and have lab space there, wet lab space to do the things that they wanna work on, and it'll be much cheaper than doing it in Boston. So we think that that's really gonna be another way to start up economic development in the state, and Kirk can give you more detail on that. I think the last thing that is that is unrelated to workforce or economic development, but important is that to know about UVM at the moment is that we're in the middle of a presidential search. Our president, Suresh Garamela, left at the end of September to be the president of the University of Arizona. So we have doctor Patty Priblock as our interim president right now, but our board of trustees is conducting a search for our new president, and I think we're gonna probably hear an announcement about that beginning of February. And, representative Priestley, just for everybody's knowledge, is a trustee at the University of Vermont. So she has lots of insight into things we do if people have questions and and I'm not around to answer them. So, I I I think that's what I have for the moment. Happy to take any questions or, representative, Mark, if I've forgotten anything, you can remind me. [Chair ]: Could you just, touch on the university being a land grant, what that means? [Wendy Koenig ]: Sure. The university is is designated as a land grant. And in the 1860s, when that came about, it meant that every state gave a gift of land to a university to sort of that was sort of like the the beginnings of public higher education. Up until that point, higher education had been private and this was the government granting land. So people could start institutions and, and have public education for people. The, the land grant colleges and universities were supposed to serve, the students of their state to help develop, people that could go into the workforce that understood things like we think of it as sort of a and m, agriculture and mechanical, so ag and engineering programs. The sort of modern view of the land grant is anything that helps the state really realize its full potential. So for us, part of the land grant mission is having a call the only college of medicine in the state of Vermont. It's having strong nursing programs because we know that's a need it's education programs that put teachers into the state. On my little chart of cheat sheet here, I know that we have, thirty three percent of all the physicians in the state go through UVM's college of medicine. Those sorts of things. So the modern land grant mission is really to make sure that, we're doing research that helps Vermont and Vermonters and that we're educating people in the needs that Vermont has. So so that is important. One thing I I did forgot to say, about workforce is that, we recently I think it was about ten days ago, announced a partnership with the Vermont National Guard, where our, through our, excuse me, professional and continuing education unit, there are certificate programs that Guard members and their families can access for free. The state has given us, money to help them access that for free. And once they go through those programs, we're partnering with, about I think right now, it's about fifty employers in the state where anybody who completes that, those programs is not guaranteed a job, but they're guaranteed an interview with any of the, the employers that are participating. We're running that list. It's not just for members of the Guard, it's also for members of their family. So anybody who works in the Guard or any of their dependents is eligible for that program. That's part of the land grant mission too, to be honest. It's It's great. [Chair ]: And we, you know, we worked with the Guard trying to make sure that there's scholarships out there to provide to Guard members to try to actually attract retirees from from military service that joined the Vermont Guard and to come here and work and live in Vermont. And that this is just an extension of that and just to have more benefits, make this more attractive to entice those those retirees to Vermont. They come of course, they come with a lot of you know, they know how to get up in the morning. They know how to work together, and they're well trained. [Wendy Koenig ]: They're very good students also. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, one of the things I think we always hope at UVM is that if somebody will participate in a professional and continuing development program, that that maybe they'll wanna go further. And so, you know, if they're starting a certificate in PACE that's interesting to them, maybe they'll wanna matriculate into a degree program. And, the state's very good about offering scholarship dollars for that as are as is the federal government. So it's it's really affordable to do that. [Chair ]: There's strong relationship between UVM and VZAC. Yeah. Well, they work well together, you know, especially on the green mountain. [Wendy Koenig ]: Yeah. VZAC's been a a very important partner in green mountain jobs and retention. [Chair ]: Questions for Wendy? [Wendy Koenig ]: Yes. I don't know if you you know this off the top of your head, but [Herb Olsen ]: the for the VGN Mhmm. [Wendy Koenig ]: Where are there other states that got Got tech hubs? [Herb Olsen ]: Yeah. And then for that particular [Wendy Koenig ]: So there's so when the tech hub program started, there was four hundred different projects that applied, and thirty one of them were designated for tech hubs for not being one. And then twelve were funded, and then an additional twelve were just funded. Okay. But nobody else is doing GAM Okay. In the whole US, just us. [Chair ]: Okay. Yeah. Okay. [Herb Olsen ]: And are the are there also, like, private labs doing GAM? [Wendy Koenig ]: Just GlobalFoundries is the only one that's in the US working on GAM right now. [Herb Olsen ]: Okay. So this is breaking new ground. Is [Wendy Koenig ]: it? It absolutely is. Yep. [Chair ]: Thank you. [Wendy Koenig ]: Thank you. The only other the only other place that's really working on GaN with any sort of investment is Taiwan. Okay. [Chair ]: Yes. And I think I don't know if you remember a couple years ago, you GlobalFoundries had a layoff, and that was that layoff was in preparation for them switching over to GAM. And I think a lot of those people will if they're available, will be rehired again. Mhmm. But it's it's really interesting. You know, it's the only the only chipmaker in in the country that's doing BAM. And they are also designated by the defense department that's that's a I mean, it's a manufacturer for the defense department as well. [Wendy Koenig ]: Well, they got a huge federal award from the CHIPS and Science Act to to do this work. So, I mean, this just sets up Vermont for success between CHIPS and Science and the Tech Hub and everything that Double Founders is already doing. And we already see a bunch of other companies as partners. Logic is a huge partner for us. Marvell, I mean, there's a bunch of Vermont companies that are gonna be really integral in this space, but the hope is that then we develop, you know, a bunch more companies who wanna work in this space. And, if you're in Vermont, you get to access all of of this essentially for free. And if you're from out of state and you wanna get involved in GAN and start other companies, then you pay to play in this space. And so that's revenue for Vermont too. [Speaker 4 ]: Very happy to, have you come to the committee here. Herb Olsen, Bristol, Lincoln, Bunkton, and Starkville. And you've described, I think, a lot of, really important work in terms of the research, capabilities in UVM and what it means for economic development state. And a lot of those are kinda big picture kinda things. I wanna shout out to you folks around some of the maybe smaller kinds of projects, research projects that you do that are impactful, especially at the rural town level. And recently, some folks, you know, asked sorry. I can't remember the exact research group at UVM, but they helped to produce not original data collection, not or or original analysis, but they did a compilation of existing research on the impact the on the economic viability and social viability of school closure in terms of an elementary school on some of these rural towns, which which I think is just helpful, you know, to have when you have the discussion about, so how are we gonna save money in the education fund and stuff like that? It's good to have, you know, some research based understanding of, you know, all circumstances. So I I I definitely appreciate that. [Wendy Koenig ]: I appreciate you saying that. And that was something that flowed through the Institute for Rural Partnerships. And that's that's a great example of things that they're doing for municipalities throughout the state. Yeah. Those smaller research projects are really important. You know, something else just I mentioned is that we're working with the city of Burlington. I, I think all of us have heard that, you know, Burlington is challenged right now with substance use disorder, some homelessness issues. And UVM has a federally funded center called the center on rural addiction, where we do research on substance use disorder and ways to combat that. And so we're gonna, we are offering ourselves up in partnership to the city of Burlington to say, Hey, we're taking in tens of million dollars of dollars from federal government every year to study this and figure out how to help people, please take advantage of what we have. And, you know, there's a, there's a pilot project in Burlington, that is, an overdose prevention center that hasn't yet opened. And as a city, it's it's great that we can try that and see if it's helpful to people, but folks that work for the city don't really have the expertise to say what's best practice to open a center like that, but the Center on Rural Addiction does. So we will give them some best practice data to say, how can you do this to actually affect change and help people, in the best way? So I think that's a good partnership too. I think the last thing I'll say, if I may, is just that, I think UVM has long had a reputation as being Burlington's University, and we've worked really hard to show people that we're really here for all of Vermont and we really want to serve all of Vermont. So if there's ever anything that you would like to discuss with me, my door is always open. I'm in this building a lot, but the chair has my email and my cell phone number. If people have issues or problems, in in your region of the state, we'd love to help you. [Speaker 2 ]: Thank you. [Chair ]: I will say when when former president, Darren Miller, came, he, I think, has expanded that that course to make sure that all of Vermont knows that UVM is there for them. It's not just for our own different channel. Certainly, appreciate all you did for the university. [Wendy Koenig ]: Thank you. Me too. Thanks for having me today. It was nice to see all of you. [Chair ]: Thank you, Wanda. Thank you. [Wendy Koenig ]: Thank you. Shoot, John. [Chair ]: Well, I think that's that's fifth of the morning. We're on the floor at ten, and then we have caucuses lunch. Remember, we're going over to the pavilion. Be there for one o'clock, so you wanna head over there a little earlier. We're in room two seventy. It's we'll take stare it up for the next next floor. And we'll be with House and Senate Education Committees to have a have a discussion with the agency of education and with secretary Saunders on cradle to career, talking about how we're what they're envisioning to help the career centers, help students attain either college or or career tech education. Very important. So we'll be there for three o'clock. And then back here for three fifteen, we'll be hearing from the professionals of color. Wei Wei will be coming in to chat with us about what's going on there, how they're how they've been able to expand their operations as well. So very important. I expect us will be done around four o'clock. So with that, any questions from my colleague?

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SmartTranscript of House Commerce - 2025-01-21 - 9:00AM

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