 Hello, and welcome to Under the Dome from Town Meeting TV. My name's Bobby Lucia. Under the Dome is a program on Town Meeting TV covering Vermont legislature, and this year's session wrapped up back in June, so we've had a couple months now, and we have a chance now to speak with the leaders of the Vermont legislature to take a look at what was accomplished in the first half of the biennium and what's to come in 2024. So for today's program, we're joined by one half of the legislative leadership, President Pro Tempore of the Vermont Senate, Phil Bruth. Good to be here, Bobby. Yeah, thank you. We'll also have a program with Speaker Jill Kowinsky in the studio next week, but today we'll start off on the Senate side of things, so. Thank you so much, Senator. This was your first term as President Pro Tempore of the Senate, how'd it go? What was the transition like? So you served on the floor, and now you're in the leadership position. So what did you learn about the position, what's the job description like? Yeah, sure. I think you'd have to ask other people in the state house how I did, but I'll just say my experience was fantastic. I've always loved the Senate as an institution. The Pro Tempore has a really particular responsibility in terms of bringing things to the floor, making sure the votes are there for those things, and then moving them through not only the Senate, but the House and then past the Governor in the best case scenario. So at all points, committee, floor, House, Governor, a bill is under fire in one way or another, and it's the Pro Tempore's job to be running defense and offense simultaneously. Right, and so yeah, there are hundreds of bills that were introduced this year, and only a portion of them actually advanced, and so your office is kind of stewarding in a way those bills to decide which ones actually get hurt on the floor, is that correct? Yeah, I wouldn't underplay it all the role of the committee chair people. So a committee chair decides what's gonna get a hearing in their committee. I will sometimes bring a chair in and say it's crucial that we have hearings on this and this bill should move forward, but basically committee chairs make those decisions with the exception of maybe four or five bills that the caucus, in this case, Democrats and progressives all together decide our must pass bills, and then once we have those kind of top priorities, then they become my top priorities, and I make sure that they move through the process and don't get bogged down by silly things like missing a deadline or lacking a vote here or there. Okay, right, and so do you have a sense of how many bills were introduced versus how many actually were read and how many were kind of left up on the board this year? Yeah, so I would say hundreds of bills were introduced. With the House and the Senate together, I wanna say, I would guess maybe 600 bills. About 60 went to the governor, ultimately, and Phil Scott made his decision to veto a number of those, a relatively high number, I think eight or nine vetoes. We overrode six of those vetoes, which was historic, had never been done before that I know of. So I think that's a testament to the fact that voters have continued to press for certain things and those things happen to be, some of them things Phil Scott didn't wanna sign like the childcare bill. And so we passed the childcare bill over his veto and that's now law. We'll get to a couple more of those specific bills that you worked on this year, but I wanna also back up. So does your office also choose or somehow decide who is chairing what committee? Is that also? Not just my office. So Jill Kroinski has, in her own person, complete power to do that, which I envy. But in the Senate, it's called the Committee on Committees, believe it or not. And the Committee on Committees is composed of the pro tem myself, David Zuckerman, who's the lieutenant governor, and Dick Mazza from Colchester, and he's what's known as the third member of the Committee on Committees. Those are all elected positions, but once the three of us come together, we sit down with a little map of the open committee chairs and we hash it out and come up with a slate that we think is most effective. Right. And how did that go this year? I thought it went brilliantly. You know, I hate to give names because then I'll leave somebody out, but I will say that we had some new chairs and among those new chairs were Keisha Rahm, Ruth Hardy, they did fantastic work. And then chairs who have been around a long time, Jane Kitchell, Dick Sears, they always do yeoman work. And so I thought our chairs, the other money chair that I'll mention is Ann Cummings. It was a very smoothly functioning operation and those people are, you know, many of them operating with decades of knowledge about how to advance their bills. So that's all to the good. Right. And you mentioned Speaker Kwinsky. What does it look like for your office to be collaborating with the Speaker's office and making sure that the House and the Senate are on the same page as best you can be to collaborate and move those forward? Yeah, so Jill and I have a very solid, very positive relationship and we agree on many things and we work very smoothly on almost everything. But I would say that, you know, the Senate and the House are different chambers. They are meant to be contesting one another. That's part of the process. So there are certain moments where we can't agree and then there are extra procedures that we can use to reach agreement. Sometimes you never do. So I'll give you an example. And it's an example where nobody's right and nobody's wrong. So for years, the House wanted primary seat belt enforcement. In other words, they wanted a policeman who sees you're not wearing your seat belt to be able to stop you for that. Currently, you can't do that in Vermont. You have to be stopped for something else and then if they see you're not wearing your seat belt, they can add that. Makes sense and I think they're right that it would probably over a couple of years reduce the number of accidental deaths. On the other hand, in the Senate, the argument has always been that that sort of primary seat belt enforcement is used around the country in a systemically racist way to single out drivers of color and use the seat belt as an excuse to pull them over and harass them. And so Senator Tim Ash was always eloquent on this point that he didn't want to have primary seat belt enforcement for that reason because he felt it might wind up being used to single out drivers of color. So each side had a strong argument but at the end of the day couldn't agree and so we don't have a law in that area. Right, it's interesting that both bodies are representing ultimately the same larger constituency but can end up voting differently on a couple of issues like that. It just makes me, what are the, are there different priorities? Were there different priorities this year in the House and the Senate? I know there were a couple kind of bigger disagreements but what did that look like? How do you characterize the differences there and priorities? Yeah, so recreational cannabis was another area that the House and the Senate disagreed on traditionally. Took about five or six years for us to really reach agreement to get to where we are today. We had a disagreement over how much to do how quickly in terms of paid family leave and childcare. Both very expensive, very broad based programs that would require expansions of government as well as taxation. And so at the end of the day, the Senate's position was we can't do both. We'd like to work on childcare. As it turned out that's where the House and the Senate went and as I mentioned earlier, we managed to move that historic bill through the process. That doesn't mean we're not interested in paid family leave but typically in the Senate, that's been a lower priority than in the House. We'll see what happens this coming session. Yeah, so is that paid family medical leave is something that's on the top of the list for the coming session? I think in the House it's at the top of the list. We don't have a list in the Senate yet. We won't develop that priority list until November, December. Once we're back together, all the senators, 30 of us, we can begin to talk about what we think the priority should be. And then as we come into the session in January, that'll translate into which bills go to which committees and which come to the floor. Right, so you mentioned the childcare bill. I know there are a couple other pretty big bills that passed this year. You can talk about a couple of those bills that you're most proud of that were passed this year either with the governor's signature or without how they'll impact Vermonters. Let me just mention gun safety because that's a big issue for me. And this was an amazing year for a couple of reasons. Amazing because of what we were able to pass. So we passed a 72-hour waiting period to purchase a firearm in Vermont, which we've tried many times in the past. We, four or five years ago we passed a 24-hour waiting period that the governor vetoed. We couldn't override. This was the first year that we had the solid 20 votes to override a gubernatorial veto. For that reason, I believe, the governor decided to let our omnibus bill become law without his signature. But that included the 72-hour waiting period, safe storage of guns, and it expanded our red flag laws, our emergency risk protection order laws so that family members who feel threatened by a family member with a gun can initiate the process. And then if a judge determines that that person is an actual threat, those guns can be removed from the site. Now those things together, any one of them five years ago would have killed a bill. And so for that reason, they kept being held out, kept being held out. We decided to move them all together in one session and that was successful. Now, remaining in front of us is court review. The Supreme Court has made gun laws tougher to get through and tougher to have withstand constitutional scrutiny. The federal Supreme Court of the Vermont. Yeah, the Supreme Court of the United States. So we'll see where they go. They've accepted a case. So they've indicated they are gonna rule again on guns this coming session. And so I think it's smart to wait and see what that decision looks like before we try to advance something at the scale we did last year. Just to talk about a couple of those other bills that I know the clean heat standard was one that got a lot of attention. It's also a complicated bill. I remember we had Jared Duvall and Matt Coda in to talk a little bit about that bill. It must have been a fun conversation. It was a fun conversation. But as you can imagine, it got really into the weeds and trying to pull us out of the weeds was really difficult. I'm so curious how do you try to describe the impact of that bill on the typical rural Vermont or the typical Burlingtonian? How do you describe what that bill actually does? Well, there was a lot of misinformation about that bill. And without putting too fine a point on it, I'll say much of it was deliberate misinformation. The fossil fuels sector feels that it's in a fight for its life because the rest of society has correctly decided that we have to get off of fossil fuels because we are flooding, we are burning, we are at the mercy of our environment because we've made bad decisions in the past. So S5 was this year's comprehensive climate change legislation. I think of it as a way to create slowly, but surely a new business model for fossil fuel dealers. So what we ask them to do among other things are to help people move in the direction of more sustainable energy sources, help them get heat pumps, help them get other things that are better for the planet. And Vermont Gas and some other dealers made the decision to help out with that bill because they realized that's where the future lies. So Neil Underville was I think a very smart voice on that issue and he made exactly that point that the business model has changed, the industry needs to follow that change and that's what S5 is directed to do. So looking ahead to next year, the second half of the biennium, what's different about the second year in a biennium than the first? And you mentioned some of those things that you think will come up, what do you expect to be deliberated on in 2024? Well, a couple of basic things are different about the second year. So in the first year, when you adjourn, nothing dies, anything that didn't make it through the process is still alive on the wall. In the second year, when you adjourn, Sina DA final, that means every bill that's on the wall is now dead. So people get a lot more worked up about whether their bills are gonna live or die. Constituents, advocacy groups, special interests all get a lot more worked up. That coincides with the start of the election year and so put all those things together, there's I would say usually more drama in the second year and less achievement often because the lights are so bright on everything that's going on, expectations are so high, partisan considerations become more a thing because the election is moving to the fore. And for that reason, I think people are less inclined to swing for the fences in the second year. It gets a little more cautious. People don't wanna make big mistakes if they're gonna make a mistake. Right. And I just wanna backtrack to something. The House having such a strong support for a family and medical leave or family leave bill and then the Senate, if I remember correctly, not even having the votes for a simple majority or is the House had a super majority, is that correct? Well, I would say that it was a little hard to tell and in part it was because you had childcare on the table which was gonna be funded at the cost of about 125 million a year. And if we were gonna pony up that much money for childcare, there were some people who had childcare and not been on the table might have been in favor of paid family leave but given that the two of them, the price tags were so high, I think it was questionable whether we could have passed the bill but probably we could have but there was no way we could have overridden a gubernatorial veto and there would have absolutely been one because the governor has rolled out a voluntary plan that he's very protective of. So he made it clear in no uncertain terms that he would veto paid family and medical leave as conceived by the House. Right. Is there more of, I mean you mentioned kind of the considerations behind why the Senate was a little more reluctant to pass both big bills. The House was excited to pass both big bills. Do you, how do you characterize, is the Senate a more frugal body or is the why value one over the other in the Senate? Where is the House representing again the same groups of people are coming forward and with support for both? Yeah, I wish it was as easy as saying that one is more fiscally conservative than the other but it just doesn't work that way. It's absolutely issue by issue. So if we go back to recreational cannabis, that was something that the Senate got behind and strongly behind and sent over, I wanna say five or six times to the House and only to have it die. From that you might say well, the House is more socially conservative. They're leery about increasing drug use even if it's a recreational drug but I don't think that's true because there are other moments for instance in harm reduction where the House might be further to the left let's say or a little more left leaning in its thoughts about harm reduction when it comes to opiates than the Senate. So we switch identities all the time given whatever the particular issue is and as I say, the Senate has a history of support for paid family and medical leave but less so than the House I think. You mentioned sort of drama at the end of the session or that you anticipate in 2024. One issue that got a lot of attention towards the end of this session was the Motel Housing Program. So this was a program that was funded by federal COVID funding during the pandemic to house as many as over 3,000 people during the pandemic and that funding was set to expire this year which meant that the program was set to end and at the beginning of the session it seemed like the legislative leadership and the governor were not prioritizing extending this program and then at the end of the session there's this big push from advocates to keep some form of the program alive and when all was said and done some form of the program was kept alive about 2,100 people were allowed to stay in motels until April of next year. There's another cliff on the program and the state is now footing the bill and now that the federal funding is expired. So can you just kind of walk us, I think there's a really interesting example of the legislature, what informs the legislature's position maybe moving on something? You walk us through just what changed in that time that brought that issue up in priority towards the end and how it deal was actually. Sure. So I sit on the Appropriations Committee among others and in that committee we had testimony from AHS, the Human Services Agency, again and again that they were in favor of ending the program and that they were prepared to care for the people as they transitioned out of the program. So to the extent that we take testimony in appropriations it's not like a standard committee where you might have two weeks or a month of testimony on something in appropriations you have to move relatively quickly because everybody's bills are coming through your committee. So we did our due diligence in terms of talking a number of times with the agency about what they felt they had going on the ground that would support these folks. With that said, originally the administration wanted to close the program in March. The House went along with that. The Senate said let's wait till June 1st when the warm weather comes. So that carried the day. We wrote the budget that way and then when the budget had been passed we went out of session. We began to get briefings from AHS and the first briefing, which was about an hour was eye-opening for me and others. It began to seem to us that they did not have plans in place. They had in effect plans to get plans. So they had just a couple of days prior they had issued a call for proposals an RFP asking municipalities and others to come forward with ideas, concepts about how to care for these folks and other homeless folks. So we realized very quickly that they were not where they had thought they were. And that hearing was when? That was, I guess the beginning of June. So we adjourned middle of May and a couple of weeks later. So with that said, I don't attribute any bad intent or motive to AHS. It's a complicated job. I think they thought they had the resources in place. Clearly they didn't. So my office began to work with Emily Kornheiser from the house, Emily is as smart as they come. And I enjoyed very much working with her on that. And together we put together what's now Act 81 which extended the motel program out to April and calls for monthly joint fiscal committee hearings where we provide oversight of the administration's attempts to move this cohort out of the motel program into equivalent housing. Something that's not a congregate homeless shelter but an apartment or some other setting that is suitable for their condition. Right, and so there will be, there's a process in place to move to, at the end of April, make sure that these folks have housing. Is that? April's the drop dead date. So funding is there until we get back in session and then we'll add a little more. But we will... You'll add a little more, what do you mean? So in other words, we, on the fly, because we were out of session, we scrambled to find the money that we would need to get the motel program until we're back in session in January. Then we do what's called budget adjustment. And in budget adjustment, once we're up and running again, we will appropriate more money to the motel program to make it whole. Then I think the important thing is the agency is now engaged on a person to person basis with this cohort of, I think it's a little less than 2,000 now. Trying to place these folks, do they need something like assisted living? Do they need an apartment? There's a new apartment complex going up and opening, Champlain Housing Trust is opening in South Burlington. And there'll be apartments there for some of these folks because they have priority over others as we're trying to move them out of this program. So come April, it may be that there are no motel occupants left, in which case we would close out the program. If that's not the case, let's say there are still 400 people in the motels, then we will extend until we place all of those people individually. Do you see the motel, there was an episode of the podcast Brave Little State that came out a couple of days ago from Vermont Public that a question asker said, well, why doesn't the state just buy the motels to provide a permanent solution for, well, a permanent approach to a temporary solution for housing for these folks? Is that something that's on your radar, the Senate's radar at all? The answer is we have. We've bought 13 so far. The intent is to buy more. So we're using what's called the Oregon model where they did this, they purchased motels. Oregon, a much, much bigger state and more populous state has only done, I think, 19 motels. We've done 13, which per capita is more, but there's a weird dynamic in place which is the state is now paying 24 seven to fill those motels. So if you're the motel owner, you're making really good money at this point. So the price you might ask for your motel has gone up. So if the motel is valued at a million and the owner wants three million or four million, the state's not gonna pony up that money. So one of the things in Act 81 requires the state to renegotiate the amount we're paying per room and that's designed to save the state money but also to bring it down to a more realistic level, how much money these owners are making from the program and hopefully that changes their calculus so they're willing to sell more often in more places in the state. And you mentioned this a little bit, but it sounds like you sort of painted a vision for a housing solution for these folks that leans on existing infrastructure, that there might be rooms in the state that these folks can reach with help from AHS and others, it's, yeah, go ahead. If I gave that impression, that's only half. The other half is that over the last three years, since the pandemic, we've infused a half a billion dollars, 500 million plus in building permanent affordable housing. So you see it in the pit in Burlington where the mall used to be, there's affordable housing going up there. I mentioned the units coming online in South Burlington. Champlain Housing Trust and others are engaged every single day in taking the money we put forward, trying to remember what the final number was in this budget, but on the order of 150 million into housing and all with the idea of bringing it online within the next few years, so two, three years. So can we build our way out of the problem? No. Can we just use existing housing and get our way out of the problem? No, but the thought is if we're operating on all those fronts at once, it may take three or four years, but our hope is to get us to the point where people are not on the street because they can't find a house. If they are on the street, it would be other issues. I wanna move to a related question here which is about the overdose crisis that the state is facing. So at least in Burlington, I live in Burlington, you live in Burlington, there's been a lot of discourse about public safety as well as drug use. This summer, I mean, over the past few years, and I live on Elmwood Avenue and I've seen a huge increase in drug use on the streets, property theft. There's been an unprecedented amount of overdose deaths recorded, you know, as thus far this year. We put out an ask on our social media channels before this program to say, hey, we're talking with Senator Bruce. What do you want us to ask about? And the majority of those questions came in were about the overdose crisis. What is the state doing to address the overdose crisis? So how are you thinking about the state's approach to the overdose crisis, as well as the state's approach to public safety? Yeah. So first of all, I've lived in Burlington 30 years and I would say we've never been free of the problem of homelessness. It is a problem that goes up and down. Right now nationally, there's a homeless crisis, San Francisco, among other places, Portland, Oregon, places where the homeless crisis has overwhelmed municipal governments. Fortunately, we're not there, but we do need immediately more congregate shelters. So Burlington put forward a proposal that I supported to use the Cherry Street complex, which the state is considering selling. It's state-owned. But Burlington came forward and said, let us use that building. We will refashion it for overnight homeless folks and move them off the street. The state, for reasons I still don't understand, rejected that proposal. But I am still in talks with AHS about trying to get them to support it because rather than sell the Cherry Street complex to a company like dealer.com or some other great company that would turn it into a nice office building, it is state-owned. It is something that with some refurbishing could be used to help this crisis. So those efforts are ongoing. Public safety, I've had a couple of people this week reach out to me from the Old North End, frightened about conditions where their kids play, frightened about walking on the street, et cetera. That's something that is at a point that's probably among the worst since I've been here. There was a time in the 90s that I think was equivalent in terms of the concerns about public safety. But when you look at the opioid crisis and what we're doing and especially fentanyl and its role in deaths by overdose, I think the steps that we took last year are important, obviously not enough. But among other things, we were trying in several different ways to increase testing of the drugs that people are ingesting. So xylazine strips that would allow people to test for themselves what their drugs might or might not have in them. But we passed something a little more controversial which was a law that would allow people to bring their small bag of narcotics into a site, have it tested, given back to them and their free to leave. Now, obviously there were critics of that policy in the House and the Senate who said these drugs are illegal, if they bring them to the authorities, how can the authorities not arrest them? But the analogy that I made was we have folks in Vermont who are undocumented, who work on farms and they help us save the dairy industry by providing that labor. Sometimes they're called to go to court to testify on behalf of a friend or something like that. And what ICE and immigration were doing is they would wait for the person to finish testifying and then they would arrest them as they came out of court and deport them. And it made those folks afraid to go to court for any reason and that undermined our justice system. So we passed a law saying if you're gonna testify, you can't be stopped going to the courthouse and you can't be stopped leaving the courthouse. This is a very similar thing. You can't be arrested with those drugs going to get them tested or leaving the testing lab. But after you've left and you're elsewhere in the city they remain controlled substances and you can be arrested. And that was proposed but not passed? That was passed. That was passed. Okay, and in New York City, I know there's a safe injection site. I know there was discussion about that concept in the Senate, where did that end up? I think it's still, that is still a question of competing legalities, municipalities like Burlington. I believe Burlington has now satisfied itself that it won't be liable if it opens such a site. But there are concerns that if the state is running those sites and someone leaves and commits a crime or has a crash because they've ingested at a state sponsored site, there are public safety concerns attached to it. I would say that that has not reached consensus in the House or the Senate. And so we haven't really voted on it as such. But I expect in the next year or two that we'll come to the Senate floor. We've talked about a couple smaller approaches. I just want to back up and try to think big picture. I know it's a really hard question to answer, but do you see kind of a pathway? Like what's the overarching vision for getting out of the overdose crisis? It's the combination of some of these things. I mean, what do you foresee as being necessary? Investments and regulatory changes needed to actually get us out of this overdose crisis and support the people over drug users. I don't think anybody has the answer to that. I don't think any government, any advocacy organization, the opioid epidemic is, well, I mean, opiates have been around for thousands of years and they have plagued civilizations going back thousands of years. So the addictive power of those drugs is so intense and fentanyl is not the be-all and end-all. There are more powerful opiates coming online even stronger than fentanyl. So I think clearly economic desperation drives it. We are a society where income inequality is at historic levels. People have a difficult time buying a house, getting a college education, et cetera. So if I pull back to the largest extreme, it seems to me that the opioid epidemic capitalizes on the ways in which American society is systematically unequal. And the fact that we have eight or 10 multi-billionaires who control the vast majority of wealth in the country, to me that seems like part of the root cause rather than a parallel cause. Do you see the Vermont legislature having any leverage points to deal with the wealth inequality that you're talking about? Yeah, I mean, our approach, Democrats and progressives alike has been that if we're going to make society more affordable, and this is where we differ with the governor, the governor talks affordability constantly, but his vision of affordability is really preventing legislation that he thinks will make things worse, right? And that's the root of the conservative idea. But any active attempt to make things affordable by, in terms of childcare. Childcare, as we passed it, does two major things. It subsidizes parents so that they're only paying a much smaller percentage of their income, but it also increases the wages for the people who supply that kind of care. And by hitting both of those points, we're looking to make that instead of a system that depresses the people that are taking part in it, we're looking to make that a kind of hopeful system where people can get a slot for their kid. They can afford it, and the people who work there and love it can make a living. But that means that we have to have a dedicated funding source to pay for that. And that's where the governor parts ways with us because he would like to leave the system as it is. And his move actively toward affordability is to say the state can't raise DMV fees, which, you know, those fees pay for our roads. They pay for the services. And that's not where the affordability crisis is coming from. I wanna shift now to talk a little bit about the flooding from this summer. So it looks like over 4,000 homes have been damaged by flooding this year. Many small businesses are really struggling to open up their doors again and will probably have to close. We have to expect that flooding like this will happen again as the climate warms. How do you see the legislature approaching climate resilience, building climate resilience across the state so that we're more prepared for climate disasters like this one in the future? Yeah. So my first biennium, we had a tropical storm Irene. And it was regarded as a once in a hundred year event. And it was horrible. I mean, I was mucking out people's sellers with them. There were people who lost everything. The state did a lot to help out and we got smarter in some ways. So this flooding, you know, the floods of June or I'm sorry, July, it happened that I wound up in Barry in the basement of the old Barry labor house. And I was part of a team that was taking out all the dry well in the basement which had all been drenched and was turning to mold. And so I was down there with a group of 30 or so people and we were removing everything. And my job was in the bathroom and it was a learning experience for me about the worst place to find yourself after a flood. But I also saw something hopeful in that basement which was after Irene, they moved the electrical and the heating system out of the basement to the first floor in case there was another flood. And so we were working with drywall and that was bad but we weren't working with the electrical. We weren't working with heat. So in addition to Vermont Strong, we had gotten Vermont smart and started this kind of resiliency thinking 10 years ago. And in part, it helped us this time. Another example I'll give you. So once the flooding happened and it became clear that people who hadn't moved their furnaces out of the basement, people who hadn't moved whatever they were using to heat water in their homes out of the basement, a lot of that stuff was wrecked and they were gonna have to start from scratch. So what we worried about was that FEMA money and grant money from the state would be used to buy fossil fuel based systems for these new homes. And nobody was down with that. So we worked very quickly with the governor's office, the house efficiency Vermont to create a program to direct the money into grants so that people who lost their furnace, lost their hot water heater, lost their heat pumps can buy those more sustainable options with this grant money. And to me, that's an example of how the normal function of government, which is to move money to people in need, gets inflected by climate change. Right. There's so much devastation from this flooding as you saw firsthand. Do you see the resources, do you think the resources that are needed for the recovery are available and ready to, and I know they're being deployed in some cases, but do you see there being a need for additional resources for recovery or do you think that the resources are available and sufficient right now? I think if you talk to people on the ground, they'll say they haven't gotten the money they need. And that's a flat out way to put it. But for instance, the unemployment aid that was gonna go out to people who were temporarily unemployed because of the flood, none of that has gone out even as we speak. The business grants have started going out and that's a good thing. But I think in general, people would say they're gonna need more in the way of resources and especially that unemployment aid. The administration is now saying this coming week, they'll get those checks in the mail, but when you think about it, that's July to now, that's a long time for people who are not enjoying their normal wage. Right. I know we have just a couple of minutes left. I wanna transition over really quickly to the issue of language access, which is one that we pay attention closely to here at CCTV, which houses the Vermont Language Justice Project, which creates, produces informational videos. Which I've seen and those are great. Yeah, thank you. Those are providing life-saving information for folks in the community that have language access needs. The Office of Racial Equity released a report earlier this year with some recommendations about investing in language access. But there's still a huge need and we're kind of just sort of catching up in terms of translating documents on websites, but what we've found at least in the language justice project is there's a lot of the folks who can't, who have language access needs, also cannot read or write in their own language that they do speak, which is why videos are an effective way to reach them. So how is the legislature thinking about language access right now and has there been anything passed this year coming up next year that you see expanding language access? Yeah, so before we leave the flooding, I'll just say that Senator Keisha Rahm, the minute the flooding happened, she was on this issue in a very effective way in terms of making sure that people who had been affected by the flooding but who weren't English speakers were gonna be able to get life-saving information or even not life-saving, but quality of life-saving information, where to get help, where to get grants, et cetera. And so she worked with the administration to make sure that they were getting that spectrum of information out. The one other area I'll mention, because it comes to mind, we had a complaint a couple of years back that non-English speakers who were looking to become policemen were having trouble because they were having trouble studying for the exam and then taking the exam to become a policeman. And so that was one area where we worked on making sure that there was funding to go into that particular area, but it might be that we need some sort of standing government office to direct funding to these kind of needs. Right. Thank you so much, Senator, for your time today. I think we're all out of time, but really appreciate you coming in and chatting about this session and what's coming up next year, and yeah, thank you for being here. Good to talk to you, Polly. Excellent, and thank you so much for tuning in to Under the Dome from town meeting TV. We'll see you next time.