Deputy secretary of state seeks authority to charge for data feeds, plans APIs for licensing and business records

Deputy Secretary of State Lauren Heather told the House Energy and Digital Infrastructure Committee that the Secretary of State’s Office is seeking explicit legislative authority to charge third parties for automated data feeds and to set a policy governing those charges.

Heather said the proposal is part of an Office of Professional Regulation (OPR) bill that would modify 3 VSA §118 to “give the Secretary of State the authority to collect and deposit into the Secretary of State services fund revenues generated from optional services,” including periodic sales of data by subscription or contract. “We are asking for authority to charge third party entities for data feeds,” she said.

Why it matters: several national associations and private firms now request regular, machine-readable extracts of Vermont’s licensing and business records. Heather said building and maintaining secure feeds is expensive, can require custom fields for different recipients, and carries long‑term maintenance costs. Allowing the office to recoup those costs by policy, she said, would let the state build application programming interfaces (APIs) that provide up‑to‑date data without manual bulk downloads.

The Secretary of State’s Office currently maintains five major public systems, Heather said: business services (including UCC filings), three elections systems, and the Office of Professional Regulation (licensing). The OPR now delivers secure file transfers (SFTP/FTPS) to five regular recipients (national physical therapy, accountancy and real estate boards, nursing data aggregators, and UVM), and the office plans APIs first for OPR and business services because those produce the most requests. Heather said recipients seek fields beyond what the public lookup pages expose — for example, education, exam results, basis of licensure, and discipline status — and that those fields already flow to national registries used by other states.

“We’ve interpreted it in the past as not having the authority to charge for that information,” Heather said. “That’s why we’re expressly asking the legislature for that authority so that we can create a policy.” She told committee members the office prefers a policy‑set fee rather than a fee fixed in statute because different recipients need different fields, formats, and update frequencies.

Heather described how recipients use the data: hospitals and health systems perform automated cross‑checks so staff with expired or disciplined licenses are not scheduled to work; national associations aggregate license data to build multi‑state registries; and title/finance sectors consume UCC bulk feeds. The office already provides a weekly bulk download for some business records, but an API would be “evergreen” and return the most current record at query time.

Heather outlined privacy and disclosure limits the office has applied internally: although public rosters can include email addresses under public records law, the office has withheld telephone numbers under a policy because they can be used to harass. She said S.48, the reproductive protections bill, contains a modification to the Public Records Act that would allow withholding telephone numbers and email addresses for licensees statewide; Heather said that change has moved well through the legislative process.

On security and agreements, Heather said the office already has written arrangements with the five OPR recipients and expects to include use‑limitations and security terms in any future data‑share policy. “I do think we should be able to ask how you’re going to use this data and have an agreement,” she said, noting that recipients who pay for a tailored API would be bound to those terms.

Heather told the committee the office does not build its systems in‑house; it works through contracted vendors and has planned APIs for some time, but the work is costly. She added the Vermont Records and Archives Administration participates early in system and contract planning to address retention and migration of digital records.

Next steps: Heather said the office intends to develop a stakeholder‑informed policy (not rulemaking) setting pricing and security requirements if the legislature grants the requested authority. No formal committee action or vote occurred during the hearing.